And yeah, it did used to be a lot more common. And before that, it was a medical term.

It's the euphemism treadmill in action.

You need to sleep.

According to Wikipedia, John Riccitiello was CEO from 2014 to 2023. So I think your facts are off, unless Unity was planning layoffs and fee changes nine years in advance.

Instead, note that Unity went public in 2020. I expect Riccitiello was pushed by the board to improve profitability, then left with a golden parachute for being the scapegoat.

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company's efforts on Mac.

Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode.... Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

I don't disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author's key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn't investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn't too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve's attention. So who is being "anti-consumer" in this example, Valve or Apple?

Forcing people to give up their language and culture can be considered cultural genocide. Cultural genocide is not included in the UN Genocide Convention, so the definition of cultural genocide is not universally agreed upon. But the UN Genocide Convention does include "Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" in its definition of genocide, and Russia is not shy about their relocation and adoption programs, so we can pretty definitively say that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.

Also worth noting this article is nearly five years old. Rust's first stable release was nearly nine years ago, so its (stable) age has more than doubled since then. I expect Rust would look a lot more mature if the article was written today.

From the article:

The researchers have so far been unable to determine precisely how Krasue gets installed.

So no one knows yet. But I feel that the existence of malware in the wild is newsworthy, even if we don't know how it got there. Regardless, you and I probably don't have to worry about it unless you're a Thai telecom.

one of the Kens asks to be on the Supreme Court, and Barbie says not until a woman in the real world gets that level of power.

I'm afraid your memory is a bit off. A Ken asks for a supreme court seat, President Barbie says "maybe one of the lower circuits", and shortly thereafter the narrator says something like "maybe one day the Kens will enjoy all the rights that women do in the real world". The movie certainly did not erase Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O'Connor.

Fairphone is well supported by open-source Android distributions like Lineage and /e/OS. Not all Android is involved with Google.

Here is their reasoning, basically summarized as "it's easier to get everything for games into a new language than bolting it onto an existing language". I also recall seeing a blog post where they said their initial implementation of GDScrip took fewer lines of code than embedding Lua did.

Note Godot does officially support C# and C++, and there is unofficial support for other languages too. But they commonly recommend GDScript for beginners.

From a quick search, a MATLAB student license is $50 (USD, probably), which is less than most textbooks but still not nothing. Whether piracy is justified or not, I just want to point out that this is how they get you. Microsoft gives cheap Office licenses to schools and Adobe turns a blind eye to amateur piracy of Photoshop because they know that getting you comfortable with their software early means you're more likely to pay to keep using it professionally later. I don't know if MathWorks had a hand in the MATLAB requirement (I would bet it was just a prof who wants to stick with what they know), but good on you for trying to push for alternatives and testing against Octave.

Funny coincidence: Fairphone has a blog post titled exactly that. And they say the same thing on their shop page. You're going to replace your phone eventually, but Fairphone is the only phone company I know trying to stretch that out.