AtomicPurple

What happened with Channel Awesome? I know some shit went down, but I hadn't followed them in years when I first heard about it, so I never really got all the details.

Unironically, yes. Multiple studies dating back years have found a link between high intelligence and various mental health issues.
There was one particular paper I read about a decade ago, where researchers surveyed a bunch of collage students to find demographic trends based on their preferred operating system. From what I recall, the demographics of Windows users were not too far off from those of the university as whole, and Mac users were similar, aside from women being significantly over-represented. Linux users on the other hand, were almost all men, and nearly every mental health issue imaginable was over-represented by a huge margin.

I have a somewhat large share on Soulseek. It's fun to occasionally go through the chat rooms and ban all the blatant racists and homophobes.

I'm surprised that Gran Turismo was number one is 2005. I remember Star Wars Battlefront II being the hot new game everyone was playing at the time, and Star Wars being huge in general due to Episode III releasing that year. Just the fact that a PS2 exclusive driving sim, beat out a multi-platform Star Wars game that was one of the most hyped releases at the time is insane to me.

If Linus and his wife own 100% (or nearly 100%) of LMG, does it matter who invested in Framework? Especially when he has so much creative control?

At that point, just refer to the second half of my original replay. Though, if the investment is just a small part of something like an index fund, I'd say that concerns of bias probably aren't warranted.

Hard to say. Linus has always made it sound like his investment in Framework is a personal one, not one made by LMG. If that's the case, then I think any potential issues could be largely sidestepped by just having someone else do all the laptop reviews.

If that's not the case and LMG is directly involved with Framework, then it gets a bit tricky. To their credit, they've done a good job of disclosing the Framework investment whenever the company is brought up, but I don't watch most of LTT's review content, so I'm not sure if it's being mentioned in the context of other laptop reviews. If not, it needs to be.
The whole point of having that kind of disclosure though is so people know that the information being presented is potentially biased. At a certain point, it's on the audience to take that bias into account and cross reference other sources before making any purchasing decisions. I'm not sure there's anything LMG can really do to alleviate the perceived conflict of interest, unless they just stop reviewing laptops altogether. Whether or not it's ethical to continue reviewing laptops in that context, even with a full disclosure, is a question I don't have a good answer to.

Yeah, everything else was bad, but I think ultimately forgivable if they can tighten up their testing and QA process going forward. The Billet Labs thing is on a whole other level though. Like, how do you even fuck up that bad as a professional organization?

There's gamecopyworld for game cracks, I'm not sure about general software though.

Completely agree. This post is an incredible example of of "Yes, and... ", but I would never want to see it anywhere near actual improv due to the racism.

It's been alive and well for quite some time now. I've been using it since 2018.

I think people pay for streaming services, which is what I assumed was meant by the original post.

I see several people have already mentioned Soulseek, the one other place I'd recommend is rutracker. You have to sign up, and it's in Russian, but it's probably the easiest place to grab entire discographies, and you can occasionally find things there that aren't on Soulseek.

Of course if you're really serious about music piracy, getting into the private tracker scene is the only way to go. redacted.ch specifically, is probably the most comprehensive music archive on the Internet right now.

Edit: I just realized no one has mentioned stream rippers yet. If what you want is on a steaming service like Deezer or Qobuz, and hasn't been shared elsewhere, there are tools to download it directly from the streaming service in full quality. Getting these set up can get a bit technical, and they often require a premium account, but there are Discord and Telegram bots that act as a fronted for these tools running on a server somewhere, which is the easiest way to use them.