Ferk

Boycotting is an expected/intended tool in capitalism. It's part of the "free market" philosophy, the regulatory "invisible hand". The reason you can boycott a company is because the economy is based on a capitalist free market.

If boycotts were actually a good and successful method for the society to regulate the wealthy, then there would be no issue with capitalism. So that's not how you "end" capitalism, that's just how you make it work.

The issue is, precisely, that boycotts do not work (and thus, capitalism does not really work). Particularly when entire industries are controlled by private de-facto monopolies. If they worked you would not need social-democratic laws to force companies into compliance in many ethical aspects.

What you are advocating is not an alternative to capitalism (like communism or socialism), but a more ethical/educated capitalism that works at controlling the wealthy, just like many proponents of capitalism expected it would.

I use EURkey, which is basically a superset of the US layout extended to support symbols from several European languages.

"Capitalism" just means that the industry (or specifically, "means of production") can be privately owned.

The whole idea of Lemmy is allowing smaller groups / individuals to own smaller instances, so we don't depend on big corporations.

So the way I understand it, it's more of a big vs small thing, not really a "private" vs "governmental/social" ownership thing.

Sure, Lemmy gives freedom for people so, even governments, can make their own public instances.. but this all still relies on capitalism, since individual instances can still owned by (smaller?) private groups that can compete amongst each other for users, so you basically are competing as if you were just another company in a capitalist system controlled by offer/demand and reliant on what the average consumer goes after.

This would be the equivalent of asking people to purchase ethically sourced goods and drive the market with their purchase decisions (which is actually what a capitalist system expects) as opposed to actually making laws that forbid companies from selling unethical products. That means we are not ignoring capitalism, but rather participating on it, and just asking consumers to choose ethically when they go buy a product. That's just an attempt at ethical/educated capitalism, but still capitalism.

Developing a crippled port that is limited/restricted by design due to Apple policies would not really help Mozilla’s/Firefox’s reputation anyway. Apple fanbois will complain ether way.

If those fanbois want a Firefox app on Apple systems, it's Apple the one they should complain to.

At least it's just a "considering"...

I remember back when they scrapped the multiplayer promises they made for Cyberpunk 2077 there was also word about them preparing some separate standalone multiplayer game for the future instead. To me this "considering" is more of an indication that the new game won't be multiplayer focused (if it has multiplayer at all), rather than a promise of anything.

And that was just the warm up.
850k concurrent players and rising right now...

Yes... how is "reducing exclamation marks" a good thing when you do it by adding a ' (not to be confused with , ´,‘or’` ..which are all different characters).

Does this rely on the assumption that everyone uses a US QWERTY keyboard where ! happens to be slightly more inconvenient than typing '?

I'm not convinced that the gacha model works for every demographic. And even if it did, I'm sure it's much harder to be successful selling that kind of crap as an independent studio with no prior experience doing that. Maybe exploiting the D&D / Forgotten Realms franchise would have helped.. but after the OGL fiasco (which is a good example of how profit was affected negatively when D&D fans cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions on the wake of new plans for monetization by WOTC) I'm not really convinced the game would have made as much money as they can with this different focus.

Reputation also affects profits. And long term, I'm convinced Larian approach will prove to be more profitable than it would have been had they chosen to enter the wide and unforgiving world of competing RPG gacha games by introducing "yet another one" in a market that is increasingly tight, and with a public that is getting more and more tired of it.

Yeah, Diablo Immortal / 4 or probably even Fallout 76 made money with those tactics... but I don't believe those profits are gonna last that long, or reach an overall total as high as could have been when you think long term. They have managed to get a lot of people to stop caring about those franchises, so I'd argue they are actually burning down their golden goose just for a short big burst of cash, instead of actually maximizing the profit they could have made from the goose had they been taking care of it while steadily producing golden eggs people actually wanna buy...

Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you'll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products... without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.

Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I'd argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.

Even if they did hallucinate answers, it wouldn't be the first game that relies on the "unreliable narrator" trope.

They aren't saying that the email/number is part of the message. What the are saying is that they are able to decrypt the logs in order to identify the senders .

It could be they cross-reference matching some internal ids / tokens / physical addresses of the devices together with all the data the Chinese government already has (or can obtain) ...or it could be a bluff.. who knows... there's not enough information, and what we know is probably distorted.