Optimization? Did you mean to write monopolistic, anti-competitive, and unethical practices?

Because if there’s one thing Nvidia knows how to do, it’s to play dirty.

Tidal doesn’t even have anything over Spotify.
Their version of Spotify Connect barely works at the best of times, on my AV I couldn’t get it to work at all.

And Qobuz… isn’t even available in a bunch of countries.

For me, the only real alternative is piracy and setting up my own streaming.
But I’m too lazy for that, so with Spotify at least the artists get paid something, and I can be reasonably certain that whatever I want to listen to will actually be available.

Also, Bandcamp was sold a while ago and fired half their staff, so not sure about ethics here.

Yeah, I remember, now we still have Windows being vulnerable, but in addition we also have untested changes pushed automatically to paying customers.

Forced updates are great!

Sure looks like a paywall to me, except you get a choice of a currency you can pay with.

Simple auth was honestly one of the upsides for me.

Plex claims to have an offline mode, but I could never got it to work, for some reason.
And I got pissed off one too many times when my Internet went down and I couldn’t watch anything from the NAS a few meters away…

What’s better, exactly?

I switched years ago from Plex to Jellyfin, and while the UI wasn’t quite as nice, everything else is better.
And I don’t have to pay to use HW transcoding on my own hardware…

$3 ink from a bodega

That’s actually a fair price for 3rd party replacement.
I used to work at a computer shop, and people only ever bought the cheapest available cartridges.
We also used to do printer repair, do you know how many printers had to come in because of shitty ink?
The answer is zero.

And anyway, in your example the printer manufacturer has no business tracking your ink usage, whether it’s by spying on you and phoning home, or recording this info in the printer’s memory.

That’s a very charitable way of looking at DRM.

Company’s PR dept saying “we didn’t do it” is not proof of anything.

If they’re not blocking 3rd party cartridges, why even implement DRM?
Do they have so much extra money that they’re developing features they’re not planning to use just because they’re bored?

That’s an optimistic view.

But really, that’s just Google being Google.
Even years before the “AI” hype their Assistant kept suddenly losing features that worked perfectly fine before.

Thanks for the link.

Looks like not really closed-source, but not fully open as the previous printers were.
And the reasoning is the usual, other companies stealing their designs. :/

What is that even supposed to mean?

Aren’t you confusing them with Bambu?

Their slicer is based on Prusa’s exactly because Prusa isn’t doing closed source.

This sounds like FUD. Do you have a source for that?

Before that, they claimed they were simply too insignificant to even be eligible for VAT.

How is this FUD when you just said they admitted to it?

Exemptions vary by country, but often they only apply to small businesses.
Often there’s no right to any exemptions anyway if your company isn’t headquartered in the country (and Kagi is from USA).

Either way you only have to pay VAT on transactions made after you go over the limit, while Kagi admitted they have to settle unpaid taxes.
This situation can only happen if they didn’t pay the taxes they already legally owed.

See: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3592-march-19th-2024-introducing-sales-taxes

Kagi will have to retroactively pay for all sales tax/VAT that we did not collect in the last almost two years. We have chosen to absorb this on behalf of our customers.

They tried to make themselves look like the good guys, while in reality they just paid back their overdue taxes they were required to collect all this time.

Not knowing the tax rules is not an excuse.
If they wanna do business internationally they can afford to hire an accountant.

Information on this is extremely intransparent however, so this might be wrong.

It’s not “extremely intransparent”, it’s just a little complicated.
And accountants are really cheap for small businesses.

I also liked the part where they decided they don’t need to pay the VAT.

I thought coups are generally illegal and involve a military action.

This just looks like a legally elected politician doing exactly what he promised.
It may not be good things, but none of that was unexpected.

It’s not like physical media makes any difference anyway these days.

Actual disk often gets just a glorified installer, and even if it includes the entire game you’re likely to have to activate it online anyway.

The “own your games” ship has sailed long ago, unless you only buy no-DRM and your own backups.