Anyone who’s played an online game in the past 30+ years knows that nothing is secure on a client machine. You have to rotate offsets and encryption keys constantly, and even then you buy yourself a few days at the most. You’d think google would have actual good engineers, what are they paying all that money for?

The amount of anxiety I have when asking a question there is insane. And I have 6k+ rep. They weren’t wrong, I do know the site well. I have used it a lot. But like, of me, an experienced user, is afraid to ask a question that’s messed up.

Yup that’s practically the same problem I had. I posted maybe one question over the past 15 years. I got crapped on by one of their power users for not doing something properly and I never posted or asked a question again. I don’t even remember what account I originally used, either.

This is sort of why I like ChatGPT, I don’t get harassed for asking something incredibly stupid, and the crappy answers are about as bad as the “marked as duplicate” nonsense that gets me nowhere anyways. Why bother trying to interface with those communities ever again? IT in general already tilts heavily towards salty misanthropes, I’ll pass on that.

I remember going to the vmware communities looking for help almost 20 years ago and some smug person was really upset that I didn’t use the right wording when I was starting out. He spent something like 2 whole days worth of posting. It was a chore to divine what he was saying while stumbling through his weird rant/lecture about proper terminology. I eventually called him out on it and never went back.

So long story short, communities and companies who don’t nip this kind of behavior in the bud and heavily moderate the assholes almost universally turn into the next expertsexchange community. Stack Overflow kind of leaned heavily into enshitification because of this, they eventually just stopped caring about what was being put on their forums, maintaining high content quality, and getting rid of argumentative power-users. Ironically reddit was a much nicer community and usually you’d find an answer or get help without the attitude, especially in the IT space.

Like @Lockely@pawb.social mentions, they did intend to clean house by dropping the board with a buyout.

I, personally, am not too bothered by the consolidation of game studios. There are plenty of AAA game developers and indie devs are filling other niches (and sometimes become AAA themselves). It’s a different industry from something like making cars with high production costs and huge barriers to entry.

It’s less the focus on consolidation and more getting out the very problematic leadership from Activision (Bobby and his crew). Not that Microsoft is a bastion of progressive thought or leadership, but it’s suspected they would be much less likely to have covered up things like the Cosby room, suicide due to harassment, or the theft of breast milk. Activision’s leadership has some deep seated problems with sexism in general.

You’ve convinced me to check them out… it looks promising.

I wonder if I can link proton to the android contacts list somehow.

Also not something I’m looking forward to. I wish it were feasible to run your own.

Not many have good calendar and contact list integration, especially if you’re using an android smart phone.

Look out yahoo mail, here I come.

What’s old is new again, I guess.