i want to emigrate to Equestria!!! 🥺

the fact that i was paywalled trying to read this pretty much says all one needs to know about where such a sentiment could be coming from. HMMMMMMMM

not reliable, even if it should be. i've seen updates replace the file in a way that clears the read-only flag. same with other clever tricks like making it a symlink.

putting aside the ethics of DRM in general (ew) and that this developer has already made a fortune on a mod virtually unequaled... my biggest problem with this kind of thing is that bugs happen. "mines" implies that the goal will be to do something malicious to pirates. so what happens when there's a bug in the detection code, or in the auth server, or when you didn't test it on some specific quirky hardware-software combo, or when a cosmic ray strikes the RAM stick and flips the wrong bit?

a paying customer gets fucked -- or a lot of them do. all for the petty greed of someone who can't envision the obvious fact that the actual pirates will just fuzz your bomb logic and patch it out within two days.

i see this as an absolute win.

"hey guys, I'm having a problem with my Linux install that doesn't seem very common--"

"YOU'RE STUPID AND I HATE YOU"

this is EXACTLY why Linux gurus have a bad rep. remember the human, for goodness' sake. don't act like you've never run into a strange problem in your entire computing life that required digging deep into some 2003 forum post to solve.

you may be interested in the open-source "Home Assistant". it's a free home automation hub thingy that supports practically every brand and protocol out there, including Shelly. if you're technical enough to set it up, free yourself from proprietary apps!

this is absolutely justified. my company switched from Slack (which we all largely enjoyed using) to the bundled Teams (which causes problems all day every day for everyone) solely because they were already paying for Office and Teams was free.

on the other hand, i can't imagine how much money we're losing from the lost productivity...