I never spent a single cent at their store and probably never will, but since Epic is so keen on burning money I am happy to help them with that.
Turning Stardew Valley into Cruelty Squad one mod at a time.
You can just buy them for one year and keep using the perpetual fallback license. Also, they can fuck right off with their planet incinerating automatic plagiarism chat bots.
Yes, my Fairphone 4 was supposed to get monthly security updates until summer 2024 but in my experience they where always late, sometimes by more than a month. They now also missed the Q1 2025 deadline for the promised upgrade to Android 14.
Most of their IDEs you can use for free for non-commercial purposes and even if you need to buy them; when you compare software development to any other profession our tools are incredibly cheap. You can get all the Jetbrains IDEs for less than 300€. Compare that to a HDL simulator or a 3D CAD application like Autodesk. These easily cost several thousand euros each year.
Imagine how successful their store could have been if they had put all that money into improving the launcher and not antagonizing large parts of their customer base instead.
This still fundamentally suffers from the oracle problem like all blockchains solutions. You can always attack these blockchain solutions at the point where they need to interact with the real world. In this case the camera is the "oracle" and nothing prevents someone from attacking the proposed camera and leveraging it to certify some modified footage. The blockchain doesn't add anything a public database and digitally signed footage wouldn't also achieve.
I experimented with it a bit but I just can't take Blazor seriously with its huge bundle sizes and interpreted IL. With AOT you can skip the interpreter and compile directly to wasm, but then the bundle size grows even bigger. I have pretty much given up on Blazor and the fact that Microsoft isn't using it for any of their products should be a clear signal to stay far away.
I am reminded of The Jaunt where animals and humans can survive teleportation only while unconscious.
Incredible, the last two months absolutely crushed on the first day of December and all it took was a single desktop notification. This is just the paypal donations as well. You can take a look at the data for yourself here.
The Adobe stock photos link says its generated.