I don’t know about the latter half of your statement, but my main reason for its use is pretty simply just that there’s more music available, and it doesn’t take all the time it normally would to get invited to a good music tracker. If anything, specialized Torrent trackers that could offer the same volume of music are a much bigger pain go deal with.

Yeah, I don’t think this one is a priority for the IDF boss.

Soulseek is a P2P file sharing system centered around music in particular. It’s pretty direct. Unlike a torrent where you’ll have multiple seeds for a single source, you’re connecting directly to other individuals for the content. It generally operates under the expectation that you’re also sharing something, and some users may opt not to allow downloads to people who do not also allow downloads from themselves. The downside to this system is you may need to wait for that person to come online before you can start a download, while with a torrent, other seeders can fill that gap.

It’s survived as a pretty big platform for music hoarders to source hard to find material, but it’s so dead simple to use and it has a quick and reliable search. Nothing secretive about it, it’s basically just another P2P network that has more in common with Napster than the Pirate Bay

Can I introduce you to soulseek? I promise it’s going to serve way better than torrents for that kind of stuff.

I like CDs, but I guess I can’t really call myself a kid anynore though, being in my mid twenties. I typically use Spotify for discovery/casual listening but but an album on CD or digitally through Bandcamp when the option is presented to me. I went out of my way to buy a 25 disc CD changer.

Vinyl have definitely become way more popular for physical music purchases, but I like the smaller footprint of a CD.

I do think the vast majority of people use Youtube Music, Spotify or a similar service though. It’s inexpensive, has family plans and optical media players just aren’t common anymore.

Well I thank you for your contribution regardless. Roku is all I’ve got, so it helps to have people like you annoyed enough, and knowledgable enough to contribute.

It occurs to me I’ve literally never tried to play my music library through Roku. I usually just cast to a speaker with my phone. Is it part of the main branch?

What are you, an apostle? Lol. This issue affects Windows, but it’s not a Windows issue. It’s wholly on CrowdStrike for a malformed driver update. This could happen to Linux just as easily given how CS operates. I like Linux too, but this isn’t the battle.

Imo, plugins should have separate config files, with uniform, consistent formatting. Separating them ensures that plugins never modify primary configuration details, they can be updated independently, or deprecated without affecting future functionality. It also means you can take regular and reliable backups of each config.

Depending on the developer, and the scale of their game, these things can also be incredible cheap to produce too. If your gameplay/monetary loop is something designed to arbitrarily force a player to wait to accomplish something or otherwise spend money, then you can drastically reduce the amount of content that needs to be added as long as you have an adequate base.

Even if you spend money, loot box mechanics and randomized stats can push players to continue to spend because while they got an item, they didn’t get the perfect item. Base builders, team combat titles and character based games are very, very effective at this.

For developers like the one behind Evony, they can be a lot cheaper because that game, and a hundreds like it have existed all the way back as far as farmville and earlier. They just got better at the monetization loop over time.

Similarly, if you’re born at the tail end of Millenial/start of Gen Z, then you still grew up with a collage of 90s and 00s culture and inconography, offsetting the definitions the groups typically gain over time. Some Gen Z grew up into adolescence without really feeling the advent of the modern internet or social media. The end of that range never knew a world without it.

Generations are useful statistical groupings, but don’t represent individual experiences or influences, leading to disparity or outliers that feel excluded from their “peers” so to speak. I’d say I probably share more experiences with Gen Z, but a lot of the cultural aspects of my childhood are closely linked to later Millenial ones. There’s a gradient, not a cutoff.

Absolutely. Android devices are dirt cheap, and ubiquitous in most of the world. It’s an obvious choice for many based on that alone. There’s also lots of families that aren’t in Apple’s ecosystem.

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As far as I’m aware, Samsung or Amazon are the only other real app “marketplaces”. Most developers using Fdroid otherwise rely on donations or patreon for active development, depending on the nature of the app

When people refer to a particular piece of development aoftware as closed or open source, they are referring to the license/availability of that software’s code. You can use proprietary software to produce open source code, which is the case with Android Studio. The code that makes up Android Studio is not open source, but your own work made within it can be.

In general, “open source” is a broad term that just means “can I see the code that made this?”. There are differing degrees of open source software as well. The MIT license, for example, opens up code to some modification/re-use but protects some libraries. Something like a BSD or GPL license is far less restrictive, usually allowing free modification and use of the code. Android Studio falls under the Apache license, one of the more restrictive licenses that still applies copyright, and may employ proprietary libraries that cannot be modified or copied for use. Again, this ultimately isn’t likely to affect your own work or projects, but it does mean there’s less transparency about the tools you are using to make it.

I apologise if this is overwhelming, but the distinction is important, and I think that as a beginner it makes sense to start with where there is the most documentation and ease of entry. Once done, it’s definitely easier to move towards projects that more closely align with FOSS philosophies.

Android Studio is just the work environment for code and app development. You could continue on to publish all your code/work as an open source application through whichever means you choose during or after the fact.

Imo that’s fine. It’s also still the best tool for learning since it’s the most widely supported one, and contains the greatest amount of documentation for working with android development. It costs nothing to use, and doesn’t lock you into any kind of ecosystem you can’t later migrate from.

Android Studio is the primary toolkit for developing native android apps. If you have no background in programming, there are some more visual tools like Budibase (open source) or Softr (closed source), but you are likely to run into difficulty getting them to apply logic the way you’d like.

If you’re a tinkerer, then honestly I’d look into learning more about Android Studio and Kotlin, the language most used these days for app development on Android.

Iirc support for Classic Teams was dropped in March (or earlier). New Teams is generally less buggy in my experience anyways, and I haven’t yet found functionality its lacking. Not sure why you’re still presented with the option to drop back, as I don’t believe I’ve seen that toggle in a while

Streaming infrastructure is expensive, and all these smaller networks that decided to spin up their own didn’t seem to realise that. Prices go up, ad tiers get added because none of them are actually making any money. It’s just quarter after quarter of loss even with substantial revenue due to the fact that producing content, hosting and then scaling globally to make it available to a wide variety of geographic locations just isn’t cost effective. Even Amazon, the lord of cloud compute itself, hasn’t been able to maintain this.

So in this case, competition limits the only way they make money: people subscribing. Greedy bastards.