cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5555641 > [archive.org](https://web.archive.org/web/20230918130151/https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-reportedly-told-dev-planned-parenthood-and-childrens-hospital-are-not-not-valid-charities) > > >Developers of indie puzzle game Orgynizer have claimed that Unity said organisations like Planned Parenthood are "not valid charities" and are instead "political groups." > > > >In a blog post, the EU-based developer LizardFactory said the plans to charge developers up to $0.20 per install if they reach certain thresholds would cost them "around 30% of the funds we have gathered and already sent to charity." > > > >As Unity clarified the runtime fee will not apply to charity games, LizardFactory reached out to the company to clarify their game would be exempt from the plan. > > > >However, Unity reportedly said their partners were not "valid charities" and were viewed as "political groups." > > > >Profits made from the game go directly to non-profit organisation Planned Parenthood and C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, Michigan. > > > >"We did this to raise money for a good cause, not to line the coffers of greedy scumbags," the developers wrote in a blog post. "We have been solid Unity fanboys for over ten years, but the trust is scattered all over the floor." > > > >The developers are considering a move to open-source game engine Godot, "but we will have to recode our entire game because we refuse to give you a dime," they wrote. "This is a mafia-style shakedown, nothing more, nothing less." > > > >Today, Unity responded to the ongoing backlash and apologised, acknowledging the "confusion and angst" surrounding the runtime fee policy. > > > >The company has promised that changes to the policy will be shared in "a couple of days."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5340114 > [ghostarchive](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/k63Rn) > Original Discussion^[https://lemmy.world/post/5057297] > > >San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.

[ghostarchive](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/k63Rn) Original Discussion^[https://lemmy.world/post/5057297] >San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.

[ghostarchive.org](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/7XNnJ) :::spoiler Summary and Key Moments Courtesy of [Kagi Universal Summarizer](https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html): >Elon Musk acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal finalized in October 2022. The excerpt describes Musk's initial reluctance to join Twitter's board, followed by his decision to pursue a full takeover as a way to fulfill his long-held vision of an "everything app." Musk had to negotiate with Twitter's CEO and board, and also secure financing from investors like Larry Ellison. The closing of the deal allowed Musk to immediately fire Twitter's top executives, which he viewed as justified due to concerns about user metrics. Throughout the process, Musk's enthusiasm for the platform fluctuated alongside his concerns about content moderation and the company's challenges. - Musk started buying shares of Twitter in January 2022 after deciding he wanted to "push his chips back on the table" following Tesla's success. - Musk saw Twitter as a way to fulfill his original vision for X.com, which he wanted to be an "everything app" for financial and social uses. - Musk grew concerned about the "woke mind virus" and felt Twitter suppressed anti-establishment voices. - Musk agreed to join Twitter's board but later decided he couldn't fix the company that way and made an offer to buy it outright. - Musk had to find outside investors like Larry Ellison to help finance the $44 billion deal. - Revelations of problems at Twitter led Musk to try to renegotiate the deal price or back out, but he eventually went through with the original terms. - Musk was surprised by Twitter's lax and "coddling" culture when he took over. - Musk fired Twitter's top executives like CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after closing the deal. - Musk saw an opportunity to fire executives "for cause" and prevent their stock options from vesting. - Musk aims to fulfill his long-held vision of creating an "everything app" by overhauling Twitter. ::: :::spoiler Full Article Text >In April 2022, things were going surprisingly well for Elon Musk. Tesla >stock had risen 15-fold in five years, making it worth more than the next nine auto companies combined. SpaceX in the first quarter of 2022 launched twice as much mass into orbit as all other companies and countries combined. Its Starlink satellites had just succeeded in creating a privately owned internet, providing connectivity to 500,000 subscribers in 40 countries, including Ukraine. > >It promised to be a glorious year, if only Musk could leave well enough alone. But that was not in his nature. > >Shivon Zilis, who manages Neuralink (Musk’s company working on implantable brain-computer interfaces) and is the mother of two of his children, noticed that by early April he had the itchiness of a video-game addict who has triumphed but couldn’t unplug. “You don’t have to be in a state of war at all times,” she told him that month. “Or is it that you find greater comfort when you’re in periods of war?” > >“It’s part of my default settings,” he replied. As he put it to me, “I guess I’ve always wanted to push my chips back on the table or play the next level of the game.” > >This period of unnerving success coincided, fatefully, with a moment when he had exercised some expiring stock options that left him with about $10 billion in cash. “I didn’t want to just leave it in the bank,” he says, “so I asked myself what product I liked, and that was an easy question. It was Twitter.” That January, he had confidentially told his personal business manager, Jared Birchall, to start buying shares. > >The way that Musk blustered into buying Twitter and renaming it X was a harbinger of the way he now runs it: impulsively and irreverently. It is an addictive playground for him. It has many of the attributes of a school yard, including taunting and bullying. But in the case of Twitter, the clever kids win followers; they don’t get pushed down the steps and beaten, like Musk was as a kid. Owning it would allow him to become king of the school yard. > >More than two decades earlier he had started a company called X.com, which he wanted to make into an “everything app” that would handle all of a person’s financial transactions and social connections. When it merged with a payment service co-founded by Peter Thiel called PayPal >, Musk fought furiously to keep X.com as the name of the combined company. His new colleagues resisted. PayPal had become a trusted brand name, with a friendly chirpiness similar to that of Twitter, whereas the name X.com conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company. Musk was ousted, and he remains unwavering to this day. “If you want to just be a niche player, PayPal is a better name,” he says. “But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name.” > >By the time he started buying its shares, Musk saw Twitter, whose name he likewise felt was too niche and precious, as a way to fulfill his original concept. “Twitter could become what X.com should have been,” he told me that April, “and we can help save free speech in the process.” > >By then, a new ingredient had been added to this cauldron: Musk’s swelling concern with the dangers of what he called the “woke mind virus” that he believed was infecting America. “Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” he told me gravely. > >Musk’s anti-woke sentiments were partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child, Jenna, then 16, to transition. “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” she texted the wife of Elon’s brother. “Don’t tell my dad.” When Musk found out, he was generally sanguine, but then Jenna became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” he says. The rift pained him more than anything in his life since the infant death of his firstborn child Nevada. “I’ve made many overtures,” he says, “but she doesn’t want to spend time with me.” > >He blamed it partly on the ideology he felt that Jenna imbibed at Crossroads, the progressive school she attended in Los Angeles. Twitter, he felt, had become infected by a similar mindset that suppressed right-wing and anti-establishment voices. > >One night after it became public that he was buying Twitter stock, Musk called Parag Agrawal, the software engineer who had taken over from Jack Dorsey as Twitter’s CEO. They decided to meet secretly for dinner on March 31, along with Twitter’s board chair Bret Taylor. > >Musk found Agrawal to be likable. “He’s a really nice guy,” he says. But that was the problem. If you ask Musk what traits a CEO needs, he would not include being a really nice guy. One of his maxims is that managers should not aim to be liked. “What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon,” he said after that meeting, “and Parag is not that.” > >Musk hadn’t yet thought about taking over Twitter himself. At their meeting, Agrawal invited him to join Twitter’s board, and he agreed. For a brief couple of days, it looked as if there would be peace in the valley. > >Luke Nosek and Ken Howery, Musk’s close friends and fellow PayPal cofounders, paced around the mezzanine workspace of the Tesla factory and headquarters in Austin, Texas, on the afternoon of April 6, the day after the announcement that he was joining the Twitter board. They were wary. “It’s probably a recipe for trouble,” Musk merrily conceded as he sat down at a conference table overlooking the assembly lines. “It’s very clear that the inmates are running the asylum,” he said of Twitter’s workers. > >He repeated his simple view that it would be good for democracy if Twitter stopped trying to restrict what users could say. Despite sharing Musk’s libertarian views on free speech, Howery pushed back gently. “Should it be like a telephone system, where the words that go in one end come out exactly the same on the other end?” he asked. “Or do you think this is more like a system that is governing the discourse of the world, and maybe there should be some intelligence put into the algorithm that prioritizes and deprioritizes things?” > >“Yeah, it’s a thorny question,” Musk answered. “There’s an ability to say something, and then there is also the issue of to what degree it’s promoted or amplified.” Perhaps the formula for promoting tweets should be more open. “It could be an open-source algorithm placed on GitHub so people can sift through it.” > >Musk then threw out a few other ideas. “What if we charged people a small amount, like two dollars a month, to be verified?” he asked. Getting a user’s credit card, he said, would eliminate bots, provide a new revenue stream and facilitate his goal of turning Twitter into a payments platform, like he had envisioned for X.com, where people could send money, hand out tips and pay for stories, music and videos. Because Howery and Nosek had been with Musk at PayPal, they liked the idea. “It could fulfill my original vision for X.com and PayPal,” Musk said with a gleeful laugh. > >His brother Kimbal told him over lunch the next day that it would be better to start a new social-media platform based on the blockchain. Musk was intrigued and got into giddy mode. Perhaps, he said half-jokingly, it could have a payment system using Dogecoin, the semi-serious cryptocurrency whose development he had been quietly funding. After lunch, he sent Kimbal a few texts fleshing out the idea for “a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages like Twitter.” > >He then flew to Larry Ellison’s Hawaiian island, Lanai. He had planned the trip as a quiet rendezvous with one of the women he was occasionally dating, the Australian actress Natasha Bassett. But instead of using it as a relaxed mini-vacation, he spent his four days there figuring out what to do about Twitter. > >He stayed awake most of his first night stewing about the problems Twitter faced. When he looked at a list of users who had the most followers, they were no longer very active. So at 3:32 a.m. Hawaii time, he posted a tweet: “Most of these ‘top’ accounts tweet rarely and post very little content. Is Twitter dying?” > >About 90 minutes later, Twitter CEO Agrawal sent Musk a text message: “You are free to tweet ‘Is twitter dying?’ or anything else about Twitter, but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context.” It was a restrained text, carefully worded to avoid implying that Musk no longer had the right to disparage the company. > >When Musk got the text, it was just after 5 a.m. in Hawaii, but he was still going strong. He shot back a scathing reply: “What did you get done this week?” It was the ultimate Musk put-down. > >Then he texted back a fateful three-shot volley: “I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.” > >Agrawal was shocked. “Can we talk?” he asked plaintively. > >Within three minutes, Taylor, the Twitter board chair, texted Musk with a similar plea to talk. “Do you have five minutes so I can understand the context?” he asked Musk. > >“Fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won’t work,” Musk answered. “Drastic action is needed.” > >Musk says that it became clear to him when he got to Hawaii that he would not be able to fix Twitter or turn it into X.com by going on the board: “I decided I didn’t want to be co-opted and be some sort of quisling on the board.” There was one other factor. Musk was in a manic mood, and he was acting impetuously. > >As was often the case, his ideas fluctuated wildly with his mood swings. Even as he was barreling toward buying Twitter, he was texting with Kimbal about their idea of starting a new social-media company. “I think a new social-media company is needed that is based on the blockchain and includes payments,” he wrote. > >But by later that afternoon—Saturday, April 9—he had embraced the idea of buying Twitter. “It already has a base of users,” he told me. “You need that booster to launch X.com.” He sent a text to Birchall. “This is real,” he assured him. “There is no way to fix the company as a 9% shareholder.” > >Musk then flew to Vancouver to meet his on-and-off girlfriend Claire Boucher, the performance artist known as Grimes. She had been pushing him to go there so that she could introduce their son X (yes, X) to her parents and aging grandparents. But when it came time to drive to see her parents, she decided to leave Musk back in the hotel. “I could tell that he was in stress mode,” she says. > >Indeed he was. Late that afternoon, Musk texted Taylor his official decision. “After several days of deliberation—this is obviously a matter of serious gravity—I have decided to move forward with taking Twitter private,” he said. > >That night, after Grimes returned to their hotel, he unwound by immersing himself in a new video game, “Elden Ring,” which he had downloaded onto his laptop. Elaborately rendered with cryptic clues and strange plot twists, it requires intense focus, especially when it comes to calculating when to attack. He spent a lot of time in the game’s most dangerous regions, a fiery-red hellscape known as Caelid. “Instead of sleeping,” Grimes said, “he played until 5:30 in the morning.” > >Moments after he finished, he sent out a tweet: “I made an offer.” > >Musk then set about finding outside investors who would help him finance the purchase. He asked Kimbal, who declined. He was more successful with Larry Ellison. “Yes, of course,” Ellison had answered when Musk asked earlier in the week if he was interested in investing in the deal. > >“Roughly what dollar size?” Musk asked. “Not holding you to anything, but the deal is oversubscribed, so I have to reduce or kick out some participants.” > >“A billion,” said Ellison, “or whatever you recommend.” > >Ellison had not tweeted in a decade. In fact, he could not remember his Twitter password, so Musk had to personally get it reset for him. But Ellison believed that Twitter was important. “It’s a real-time news service, and there’s nothing really like it,” he told me. “If you agree it’s important for a democracy, then I thought it was worth making an investment in it.” > >One person who was eager to be in the deal was Sam Bankman-Fried, the soon-to-be-disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Musk’s Morgan Stanley >banker urged him to call Bankman-Fried, saying that he “would do the engineering for social media blockchain integration” and put $5 billion in the deal. > >Despite having kicked around with Kimbal the idea of building a social network on the blockchain, Musk felt that this approach would be too sluggish to support fast-paced Twitter postings. So he had no desire to meet with Bankman-Fried. When his banker persisted by reiterating that Bankman-Fried “could do $5bn,” Musk responded with a “dislike” button. “Blockchain Twitter isn’t possible, as the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer to peer network.” He said he might at some point meet with Bankman-Fried, “so long as I don’t have to have a laborious blockchain debate.” > >Bankman-Fried then texted Musk directly to say he was “really excited about what you’ll do with TWTR.” He said he had $100 million of Twitter stock that he’d like to “roll,” meaning that his Twitter stock would be converted into a stake in the new company once Musk took it private. “Sorry, who is sending this message?” Musk texted back. When Bankman-Fried apologized and introduced himself, Musk replied curtly, “You’re welcome to roll.” > >That led Bankman-Fried to call Musk in May. “My bullshit detector went off like red alert on a Geiger counter,” Musk says. Bankman-Fried began talking rapidly, all about himself. “He was talking like he was on speed or Adderall, a mile a minute,” Musk says. “I thought he was supposed to be asking me questions about the deal, but he kept telling me the things he was doing. And I was thinking, ‘Dude, calm down.’” The feeling was mutual; Bankman-Fried thought Musk seemed nuts. The call lasted a half hour, and Bankman-Fried ended up neither investing nor rolling over his Twitter stock. > >Musk successfully put together his financing, and the Twitter board accepted his plan at the end of April. Instead of celebrating that night, Musk flew down to his Starbase rocket-launch site in south Texas. There he participated in the regular nightly meeting on redesigning the Raptor engine and, for more than an hour, wrestled with how to deal with unexplained methane leaks they were experiencing. The Twitter news was the burning topic around the world, but the SpaceX engineers knew he liked to stay focused on the task at hand, and no one mentioned it. Then he met Kimbal at a roadside cafe in Brownsville that featured local musicians. They stayed there until 2 a.m., sitting at a table right in front of the bandstand, just listening to the music. > >In the months between the deal agreement and the official closing, Musk’s moods fluctuated wildly. “I am very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!” he texted me at 3:30 one morning. “And, hopefully, helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so.” > >A few days later, he was more somber. “I will need to live at Twitter HQ. This is a super tough situation. Really bumming me out :( Sleep is difficult.” He was having doubts about taking on such a messy challenge. “I’ve got a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew,” he admitted in a long talk with me one night. “I think I just need to think about Twitter less. Even this conversation right now is not time well spent.” > >Revelations from a whistle-blower and others had inflamed his conviction that Twitter had been lying about the number of actual users and that his original offer of $44 billion was too much. He wanted a better deal. Throughout September, he was on the phone with his lawyers three or four times a day. Sometimes he was in an aggressive mood and insisted that they could beat the lawsuit that Twitter had filed in Delaware seeking to force him to go through with his first offer. “They are shitting bricks about the dumpster fire they’re in,” he said of the Twitter board. “I cannot believe that the judge will railroad the deal through. It would not pass muster with the public.” > >His lawyers finally convinced him that he would lose the case if they took it to trial. It was best just to close the deal on the original terms. By that point Musk had even regained some of his enthusiasm about taking over the company. “Arguably, I should just pay full price, because these people running Twitter are such blockheads and idiots,” he told me in late September. “The potential is so great. There are so many things I could fix.” He agreed to an official closing of the deal in October. > >Musk scheduled a visit to Twitter in San Francisco for Wednesday, Oct. 26, to poke around and prepare for the official closing of the deal, which was scheduled for that Friday. He seemed amazed as he wandered around the headquarters, which was in a 10-story Art Deco former merchandise mart built in 1937. It had been renovated in a tech-hip style with coffee bars, yoga studio, fitness room and game arcades. The cavernous ninth-floor cafe served free meals ranging from artisanal hamburgers to vegan salads. The signs on the restrooms said “Gender diversity is welcome here,” and as Musk poked through cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter-branded merchandise, he found T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Stay woke,” which he waved around as an example of the mindset that he believed had infected the company. > >Between Twitterland and the Muskverse there was a radical divergence in outlook. Twitter prided itself on being a friendly place where coddling was considered a virtue. “We were definitely very high-empathy, very caring about inclusion and diversity; everyone needs to feel safe here,” says Leslie Berland, who was chief marketing and people officer until she was fired by Musk. The company had instituted a permanent work-from-home option and allowed a mental “day of rest” each month. One of the commonly used buzzwords at the company was “psychological safety.” Care was taken not to cause discomfort. > >Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase “psychological safety.” It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was “hardcore.” Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, work-life balance and days of “mental rest” were not his thing. > >He became amused and then repulsed by how Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo was plastered everywhere. He is not a chirpy person; he relishes dark and stormy drama rather than chipper and light chattiness. “All these damn birds have to go,” he told a lieutenant. > >The closing of the Twitter deal had been scheduled for that Friday. An orderly transition had been scripted for the opening of the stock market that morning. The money would transfer, the stock would be delisted, and Musk would be in control. That would permit Agrawal and his top Twitter deputies to collect severance and have their stock options vest. > >But Musk decided that he did not want that. On the afternoon before the scheduled close he methodically planned a jiu-jitsu maneuver: He would force a fast close that night. If his lawyers and bankers timed everything right, he could fire Agrawal and other top Twitter executives “for cause” before their stock options could vest. > >It was audacious, even ruthless. But it was justified in Musk’s mind because of his conviction that Twitter’s management had misled him. “There’s a 200-million differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning,” he told me late Thursday afternoon in the war room as the plan unfolded. > >At 4:12 p.m. Pacific time, once they had confirmation that the money had transferred, Musk pulled the trigger to close the deal. At precisely that moment, his assistant delivered letters of dismissal to Agrawal and his top three officers. Six minutes later, Musk’s top security officer came down to the second-floor conference room to say that all had been “exited” from the building and their access to email cut off. > >The instant email cutoff was part of the plan. Agrawal had his letter of resignation, citing the change of control, ready to send. But when his Twitter email was cut off, it took him a few minutes to get the document into a Gmail message. By that point, he had already been fired by Musk. > >“He tried to resign,” Musk said. > >“But we beat him,” his gunslinging lawyer Alex Spiro replied. :::

[archive.org](https://web.archive.org/web/20230906215721/https://element.io/blog/element-x-android-preview/) >Psst… don’t tell anyone, but: Android development on Element X has now caught up with iOS and we’ve released an early edition of Element X in the Google Play Store. > >Since we published our first release of Element X for iOS on the App Store in July, we’ve been swamped with Android users asking how to get involved too; and so now we’re officially making Element X goodness available on both platforms. > >As a reminder, Element X is the fastest Matrix client ever - up to 6000x faster than any other Matrix client; and aims to be not just the best Matrix client, but the best messaging app in the world; better than Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage and other mainstream messaging apps. > >In particular, Element X provides instant launch, instant sync and instant login (once your account is warmed up). It also has a far cleaner - more intuitive - interface, making it quicker and delightful to use. Under the hood, we’ve rewritten the engine of the app in Rust, giving spectacular performance and sharing reliability between both iOS & Android. > > > >Now, today’s release isn’t finished yet; it focuses on messaging rather than collaboration use cases (so no filters, threads or spaces), encryption UI isn’t finished, and account registration and management isn’t hooked up yet. However, it’s still very usable as a daily driver for experienced users, and so this is intended as a preview to let more early adopters play with the app as soon as possible (and see how well it performs in the wild!). Meanwhile we’ll be following up with a much broader release once account management is in place in a few weeks. > >To use Element X you need a homeserver with sliding sync support (e.g. matrix.org). Support in Element Cloud is coming shortly, and much much more - watch this space! Please let us know how you get on at #element-x-android, and please submit feedback from within the app if you hit any bugs.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/4763702 > [ghostarchive.org](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/rp7Mo) > >The Federal Trade Commission is likely to sue Amazon.com Inc. later this month, capping a four-year antitrust investigation into the company, people familiar with the matter said Tuesday. > > > >The antitrust suit is expected to target the online retail giant’s popular marketplace, where third-party merchants, who now account for more than half of the company’s online sales, pay a commission on each sale, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing the potential suit. Merchants have complained that Amazon unfairly ties access to its marketplace with its logistics service. > > > >The long-expected complaint will be the fourth the agency has filed this year targeting Amazon, stepping up pressure by the Biden administration, which has focused on antitrust and competition as a keystone of its economic policy. FTC Chair Lina Khan, Biden’s pick to lead the agency, has long had the online commerce giant in her sights, writing a seminal paper as a law student about how to rethink the antitrust laws in connection with its online platform. > > > >Top company executives met with the FTC’s three commissioners in mid-August to discuss the suit, though no settlement was discussed, according to the people. > > > >The FTC, which has both antitrust and consumer protection mandates, has been investigating Amazon for potential anticompetitive conduct over several aspects of its business, including its marketplace, Prime subscription service and cloud computing. > > > >In May, the agency sued the e-commerce giant in two separate cases for failing to delete data about children collected by its Alexa speakers and illegally spying on users of its Ring doorbells and cameras. Amazon said it disagreed with the FTC’s allegations, but agreed to pay $30.8 million to resolve the cases. > > > >One month later, the FTC again sued Amazon in a consumer protection case, alleging the company duped consumers into signing up for Prime membership and deliberately made it hard to cancel. Amazon denies the allegations and that suit is ongoing. > > > >The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that the new suit is expected this month.

[Context](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc)[^piped^](https://piped.video/FGW3TPytTjc)^-^[^invidious^](https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc)^-^[^lemmy^](https://beehaw.org/post/7146382) > There won't be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I've already said, and I've done so privately.\ > To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.\ > To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.\ > Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.\ > With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...\ > I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.\ > Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.\ > Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).\ > With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.\ > We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.\ > Thanks for reading this.^[https://linustechtips.com/topic/1526180-gamers-nexus-alleges-lmg-has-insufficient-ethics-and-integrity/page/16/#comment-16078641; [archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20230815031007/https://linustechtips.com/topic/1526180-gamers-nexus-alleges-lmg-has-insufficient-ethics-and-integrity/page/16/)] Check LinusTech's profile for further discussion and comments he's had.^[https://linustechtips.com/profile/3-linustech/; [archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20230815042629/https://linustechtips.com/profile/3-linustech/)]

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/719121 > This blog post by Ploum, who was part of the original XMPP efforts long ago, describes how Google killed one great federated service, which shows why the Fediverse must not give Meta the chance

> Thousands of Reddit communities [are still dark](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762103/reddit-protest-api-changes-indefinite) in protest of the API changes that are forcing some third-party developers to shut down their apps. It’s a startling change for many members of the Reddit community, but it’s one that Reddit CEO Steve Huffman tells The Verge that he’s fine with making. Those third-party apps, in his eyes, aren’t adding much value to the platform. > “So the vast majority of the uses of the API — not [third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit] — the other 98 percent of them, make tools, bots, enhancements to Reddit. That’s what the API is for,” Huffman says. “It was never designed to support third-party apps.” According to Huffman, he “let it exist,” and “I should take the blame for that because I was the guy arguing for that for a long time.” > Huffman now takes issue with the third-party apps that are building a business on top of his own. “I didn’t know — and this is my fault — the extent that they were profiting off of our API. That these were not charities.” > I asked him if he felt that Apollo, rif for Reddit, and Sync, which all plan to shut down as a result of the pricing changes, don’t add value to Reddit. “Not as much as they take,” he says. “No way.” > I also asked if Huffman truly believes that the blackouts haven’t impacted his decision-making around the API pricing changes at all. “In this case? That’s true,” says Huffman. “That’s our business decision, and we’re not undoing that business decision.” > We’ll have more from our interview with Huffman soon. > While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that; more than 80 percent of the top 5,000 communities by daily active users are now open, according to [a fact sheet shared by the company on Thursday](https://www.redditinc.com/blog/https-www.redditinc.com-apifacts). In the fact sheet, Reddit writes that there are more than 100,000 “active communities,” that the company sees 57 million “daily active uniques,” and that there are more than 50,000 daily active moderators. > Reddit users have been in revolt after Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig revealed [at the end of May](https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/31/23743993/reddit-apollo-client-api-cost) that he’d be on the hook for $20 million per year under Reddit’s new terms. At the height of the protests last week, more than [8,000 subreddits](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759634/8472-subreddits-have-gone-dark) had gone dark, and even though the protests were only supposed to last from June 12th to June 14th, [many have extended their blackouts](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762103/reddit-protest-api-changes-indefinite). > There are some cases focused around accessibility where [Reddit has made exceptions](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-accessibility-apps-api-pricing-changes) to allow apps to continue operating. “The ones that actually are doing good for our users — RedReader, Dystopia, Luna — like actually adding real value at their own cost? We’ve exempted,” Huffman says. “We’ll carry that cost.”

## For comparison [Facebook's evaluation](https://privacy.commonsense.org/evaluation/Facebook)\ [Tiktok's](https://privacy.commonsense.org/evaluation/TikTok---Real-Short-Videos)\ [Snapchat's](https://privacy.commonsense.org/evaluation/Snapchat)\ [Instagram](https://privacy.commonsense.org/evaluation/instagram) # Evaluation contents for Reddit: Score: 52% Warning\ [Methodology](https://privacy.commonsense.org/resource/privacy-ratings) > **Overview** > Reddit is a popular platform that enables users to post, ask questions, and discuss anything. The terms provide that information posted by users is generally publicly accessible by anyone, even those without a Reddit account. The Privacy Policy clearly discloses the categories of personal information collected, including email addresses, IP addresses, and cookie information. While the Privacy Policy states that Reddit shares personal information with third parties, it does not state what information is shared. The terms clearly state that personalized advertisements are displayed to Reddit’s users. The Privacy Policy fails to address whether third parties are required to provide the same level of security protections as Reddit when processing and storing users’ personal information. The terms state that no one under the age of 13 is allowed to use Reddit’s services. > Reddit can be accessed through its website, and is available for download at the iOS App Store, and the Google Play Store. The Privacy Policy and User Agreement used for this evaluation can be found on Reddit’s website, iOS App Store, and the Google Play Store. Additionally, other policies used for this evaluation include: Content Policy. This evaluation only considers policies that have been made publicly available prior to an individual using the application or service. > **Safety** > The terms provide that “much of the information on the Services is public and accessible to everyone, even without an account. By using the Services, you are directing us to share this information publicly and freely.” While, the terms further state that Reddit has no obligation to screen, edit, or monitor user content, the User Agreements allows “Moderators” to voluntarily monitor user posts of specific groups. Likewise, Reddit provides the Moderator Guidelines for Healthy Communities as a recommended list of objectives to follow as a Moderator. The terms do not clearly state whether users can control how their personal information is displayed to others. Privacy > The Privacy Policy discloses that Reddit collects personal information including names, email addresses, IP addresses, and location. Furthermore, the Privacy Policy states that Reddit automatically collects usage and behavioral activity. The terms do not clearly indicate whether the company limits the collection to only information that is specifically required for Reddit’s Services. The Privacy Policy includes a clear section disclosing the personal information collected by third parties, including information collected by Embedded Third Party content, Advertisers and Potential Advertisers, and Linked services. The Privacy Policy fails to disclose what personal information is shared with third parties but states that Reddit does not sell personal information to third parties. The Privacy Policy clearly indicates Reddit’s purpose for sharing users’ personal information with third parties. The Privacy Policy discloses that third party cookies may use information collected from cookies to build a profile of users’ interests and deliver advertising to the user on other sites. > The Privacy Policy states that a user can manage and control certain choices with regard to third party advertising and analytics, and further discloses that the user can generally opt out of receiving personalized advertisements from certain third-party advertisers and ad networks. > Security > The Privacy Policy provides that Reddit implements reasonable security measures to protect users’ confidentiality. The Privacy Policy provides users a method for enabling two-factor authentication. The Privacy Policy fails to address whether Reddit encrypts all user data while in storage. The terms state that before Reddit processes a privacy rights request concerning a users’ personal information, that Reddit must verify the request with access to the users’ Reddit account or to a verified email address associated with the Reddit Account. > **Compliance** > The terms state that the users can create and upload content to Reddit. The Privacy Policy provides that users may designate an authorized agent to exercise privacy rights on behalf of the user. The Privacy Policy provides users with the privacy rights of: accessing and changing personal information, delete personal information, and delete the user’s account. The Privacy Policy does not address whether users can download or export their personal information. While the terms state that no one under the age of 13 may use Reddit’s services, the terms fail to provide whether Reddit knows it collects information from children under the age of 13, or whether Reddit deletes personal information from children under the age of 13 if collected without parental consent.

I know it sends notification of the report, reason, post, w/e to mods, but is it to just community mods, or also *your* instance mods and/or the community's instance mods and/or the reported person's instances mods?

>Twitter, Reddit and Discord are simultaneously going to shit - because enshittification is what happens when suddenly money isn't free any more and borrowing carries an interest rate > The fediverse is not very well connected suburbs, good for what it is but doesn't do the same job > bsky is gonna do its own fediverse (with beer and shitcoins) and it's fun right now as a single instance with good users, but the staff are the sort of barely-crypto-reactionary free speech warriors who will never block the nazi instances > [youth pastor voice] you know, there's someone else who talked about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall > EDIT: to clarify: Discord is ticking along for now, but they hired some ex-Facebook execs, employees are in revolt and the org is hollowing out. hence (a) bad decisions (b) glitching https://archive.is/fI3hq

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/625644 > Personally use this tool on a daily basis. YMMV wrt the frontends provided, but I use it as my daily driver to help me evade Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube's tracking of everything I do.

Personally use this tool on a daily basis. YMMV wrt the frontends provided, but I use it as my daily driver to help me evade Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube's tracking of everything I do.

I don't want to come off as preachy, and I love the waves of new users. I'm just concerned about the stability of the Lemmy userbase if the highest commented posts stay "I'm leaving reddit" and "things reddit did" type threads. This is something I also need to work on aha, but it's really important to be active in topics and activities you're interested in outside being a (potentially former) redditor. Happy lemming, friends!