Let's go through your arguments then, shall we? First, you agree with some of my points, so I'll only counter where your points differ:

While Amazon does host third-party sellers, your declaration that this facilitates small business overlooks the predatory nature of the platform's ecosystem. Amazon is both a referee and player, making it a clear conflict of interest. During 2020, Amazon systematically used non-public data from third-party sellers to identify successful products and then launch competing Amazon Basics versions to undercut them. Additionally, Amazon takes advantage of algorithmic bias when promoting marketplace items prioritising products with higher profit margins for Amazon even if they are more expensive or lower quality than third-party alternatives. Often sellers that try to sell outside Amazon's ecosystem are penalised.

The existence of other competitors does not disprove the abuse of market dominance - It merely indicates the market is large enough to sustain a few giants. However Amazon is the largest of these with the greatest marketshare, and is still the one to focus attention on. Amazon has successfully driven out competition in niche markets. The book industry (for instance) is nearly monopolised by Amazon. forcing independent bookstores to close or struggle immensely.

Before Amazon there were thousands of independent online retailers. Now the market is heavily consolidated, thanks to Amazon's damaging influence. The presence of Temu and Ali Express does not negate the fact that the biggest player, Amazon, has used its logistics network and capital reserves to engage in predatory pricing (selling below cost) to crush competitors. Only to raise the prices later, once dominance is secured.

Your contention that supporting local business requires dropping globalist capitalism, i.e. some things need global scale: This is a false dichotomy. One can advocate for fair labour practices, ethical tax contributions, and consumer protection without rejecting globalisation or efficiency of scale. The issue is not globalisation itself, but the unregulated concentration of power that allows a single entity to dictate terms globally.

Your argument relies on a "straw man" fallacy, i.e. that criticising Amazon equates to wanting to abolish all global trade. The reality is that Amazon's specific business practices - data exploitation, predatory pricing, and anti-competitive behaviour - These all harm the small businesses and consumers. Amazon is a monopoly that uses its size to stifle market diversity.

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Meanwhile Amazon is one of those horrible companies ruining society. They treat their workforce like slaves. They move their profits to offshore tax havens to avoid paying corporation tax in the countries where they operate (so the country loses out). They abuse their market dominance to drive competitors out of business, they damage small businesses. After they have killed off competition, they increase the price of their own replacement products, so the consumer loses out. They don't have good product vetting on their store pages, with lots of unsafe devices being sold. Like Google, they harvest massive amounts of consumer data, impacting people's privacy.

I urge people to move away from buying things on Amazon. Potentially use Amazon to find a product, but then buy it from a local store instead.

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Funnily enough, I'm tempted by this bundle - not especially for the headliners - but for the other titles.

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There are new crafting and repairing Quality of Life enhancements too.

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You can fit a small local model in 500MB, although naturally its accuracy will suffer.

For me, I only want to run models using my own choices of software. For instance, I would not be happy with Ubuntu or some corporation pushing some agentic features alongside the LLM. The agentic side is where A.I. gets into mischief - It exposes security holes, e.g. prompt attacks which can affect backend systems.

Also, agentic features enable Big Tech corporations (Microsoft, Google, OpenAI) to conceal telemetry and other self-serving capabilities (backdoors, etc). Naturally, any built-in agentic capabilities would be the first place hackers will be aiming to exploit.

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Otp's get phished just as easily as passwords nowadays. Their only advantage is that they can protect against a simple "(educated) guess the password" attack.

Phishing refers to an attacker contacting the victim to trick them into clicking a dodgy link or opening a malware attachment inside a message. Presuming that a victim is successfully phished, i.e. malware is installed, and password credentials are exfiltrated - There is still a massive gap between successful phishing and circumventing the OTP.

To circumvent OTP, you'd also need to steal the OTP key. Often people use OTP from their smartphone, and they scan their computer screens (once) to retrieve the key. The attacker would need access to the phone (to get that key).

As such, the attacker would instead need to implement a man-in-the-middle website masquerading as the victim's Epic store, e.g. by poisoning their DNS. The attacker would have to get the victim to login to the fake site, and during login, steal the OTP values in real time as the victim types it in. That is a lot more work and difficult to succeed than merely stealing email and password, and then scripting automated bulk logins of thousands of user accounts.

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Picked it up. I like Tower Defence games (and I haven't succumbed to American spellings, heh).

My own favourite TD game is "Tower Dominion" which isn't in this collection, and I highly recommend it. Tower Dominion is somewhat roguelike / procedurally-generated so you can keep on playing fresh levels forever.

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Quoting: AndrewDon't fucking use Epic, I had all sorts of games and skins and shit on Epic and there games. But I got hacked and there not FUCKING HELP! I lost everything, Stick with steam at least they will help. Linux will run Steam, Please stay away from Epic!

I feel your pain, but at the same time Epic practically forces you to use OTP (two-factor authentication) to login so I'm curious how you managed to get 'hacked' with this 2FA in place?

Also, hacking generally occurs because the user's PC is compromised, e.g. a Remote Access Trojan stealing your session login cookies, or like the recent CPU-Z exploit - Stealing Chrome Browser credentials after a person has installed malware-infected software.

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Another comment about Age Attestation Laws - Fighting Back:

It is clear that Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) has been lobbying politicians in numerous U.S. States to require Age Attestation be inserted into Operating Systems. Meta are doing this in a very sneaky way so that most people are unaware that it is coming from them. Meta wants to "pass the buck" onto the Operating Systems to perform Age Attestation of OS Users, rather than have to pay fines for any children found using their social media platforms.

So, this is Meta's fault. And Meta should be punished. And what more fitting way to punish Meta than to do this:

1) Call them out. Shout from the rooftops, blaming Meta for this. Make other people aware.

2) Leave Meta platforms. Stop using WhatsApp, stop using Instagram, stop using Facebook. Delete your Accounts. Hit them where it hurts - In their pockets. Tell Meta you are leaving because of their lobbying and the impact it is causing to society.

3) For good measure, delete your browser cookies. Use Adblocking technology like uBlock Origin and Ghostery. Make it *harder* for these data mining companies to collect data about you. If you don't use their products (e.g. Facebook) then they are less able to target you for adverts.

4) Switch over to using Mastodon, Signal and other privacy software (instead of Facebook and WhatsApp). Get your friends and family to switch too.

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Here are some ideas from me on this issue:

Decentralisation - A country can't block an OS or App Store if it is properly decentralised. No one is legally responsible for such OS, because no single country is controlling it. (This goes in hand with anonymising the developers who maintain it.)

Geo-positional license terms - Any state or country which regulates age attestation laws gets hit with a 'you can't use this software legally in this place' license agreement. No need to put in age-attestation controls if people in a specific location aren't permitted to use the software.

Lobbying in the reverse direction - It is generally known that Meta is responsible for lobbying these new age laws in US States, such as California. The people (you and me) need to contact their local politicians and argue against these laws. We need to have a massive onslaught of messages going to politicians making them very aware that this is major overreach and the public won't put up with it.

Software Ownership License Terms - Adjust the licensing terms within the software that make it that the installer of the software becomes the Owner / Responsible Party for age regulation of the software (and make no changes to the software itself). It becomes the responsibility of the 'owner' (user) of the software to follow the letter of the law (adding in age attestation verification APIs). This basically criminalises all users, and makes it very hard to attack the OS itself.

I'm sure there are other ways to proceed. One way forward is to go back to putting the onus on social media platforms to identify child users. After all, Meta is responsible for "passing the buck" onto OSes and App Stores by lobbying politicians so that they can avoid big fines.

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