Unlikely to be normal, but I have been doing it at a couple of places I park at this year, since I'm there for a while, have to park in the sun and the places are semi-enclosed (ie, it is fenced so random people not walking around but not secure compound level). Also, my car is 17yrs old, I got it for free and don't keep valuable items inside. I prefer leaving the window open to coming back to 38degC inside. No aircon.
People love pointing out the Streisand effect as though we’re still in the same social media dynamic that we were 30 or 15 years ago. Wake the fuck up.
Banning the app is 100% certainly going to reduce it all’s usage. The fact that you somehow think you could have the opposite effect is a sign that your head is buried so deep in the sand and you have no idea what the current state of the world is.
The authoritarians are winning and their censorship and propaganda has been exceptionally effective. Clinging to idealistic slogans and denying reality is a great way to accomplish nothing
Did banning it cause it to get adopted even faster in India than it otherwise would have? That seems like the salient point to me for the Indian government’s calculus. I don’t have a particularly good feel for Indian society but my prior is that this kind of official friction puts a pretty low hard cap on how popular an app can get. If the realistic ambition was only ever to reach a small circle of activists and nerds then sure, this event probably helped the app reach those people faster.
People can be surprisingly resourceful when they feel like they have a need to do so.
In tech circles, we talk a lot about friction and user experience, and those matter enormously, but they're not the be-all-end-all. We have OSS developers underestimating friction on one hand, and tech companies overestimating it on the other.
Even if something requires you to be tech-savvy to set up, people will still do it if the need is dire enough, because everybody "knows a guy". Console modchips in the 2000s are my go-to example. They were devilishly complex to set up, often requiring proficiency with a soldering iron, with stakes for failure being very high (breaking the console you just spend all your savings buying), yet everybody and their mom had one. All you needed was a friend with such a chip, who could tell you who the "guy" in your town is.
I dont have data for any country, but if anything banning it from github gave it visibility (I personally learnt of it because of that). I don't think that banning it from github hurts its distribution really because I do not expect github to be the channel it gets popularised through as opposed to social media, in which case where the source code is hosted does not really matter. If it gets banned from the app stores, though, it will be a different issue that will definitely hurt.
I never even heard of the app until I saw the news it was getting banned, so I installed it out of curiosity - and I'm keeping it installed because I like the idea of it. I presume I'm not alone in this. They're basically giving it free publicity by attempting to ban it.
We both know systems are more complex than # of downloads. In this case, the ban was a sign of weakness the establishment of the government and Github and definitely their control was weakened, which is the opposite of their goal of maintaining control, so it did not have the desired effect.
Likely faster than it would've otherwise but not likely as fast as it needs to to succeed. Similar to when Twitter got bought out and then Musk banned people who linked their Mastodon. It certainly helped Mastodon in the short term but likely hurt it in the long term
It pushed it to a place with no search-ability and significantly less users. It worked to effectively suppress the project. I say that as someone who uses Radicle and likes the project (I am hoping node search comes soon).
The Streisand effect only works for things people are interested in to begin with. People love embarrassing photos about celebrities so it works great on those. "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture." Oops, you've already lost everyone.
Also it works if you can still actually install it. If they ban it from the app store in ios, there is no practical way people can install it on iphones. But if it is just github, it does not really create much of an issue (people found another hosting platform).
These things you’re posing as design questions are already solved 1 million times over. If you don’t want to design something new, just use Git semantics. These are not excuses for inaction. Python package management has been a horrifying embarrassment for 15 years and there’s no excuse for the amount it’s been neglected as every other ecosystem has shown better ways.
If it weren’t for AI, Python would have died as a language ecosystem due to their perpetual neglect of this area. The python community clearly had no ability to solve this problem themselves. I got sick and left and started using better tools.
It’s only now that they’re the cornerstone of the world economy that other people are coming in and cleaning up their messes for them. It’s pitiful. Python failed and needed to be saved from itself.
Valve ships almost nothing, and the engineering quality is mediocre. Their game design is good, but subsidized by a unique early mover monopoly market owner position.
There is almost nothing that can be generalized, and people who hold up their organization as an example to strive for are utterly clueless
Well, while I do agree it is an early mover (I believe Steam is not the first to do online game platform, but it should indeed be the first one to use a CDN for the solution), I'm sorry that you have Ubisoft Connect, EA Origin, Epic Games Store, itch.io, GOG, Humble Bundle.
So you do have a choice. That renders the statement of it being a monopoly impossible. It's simply because every other platforms sucks.
In other words, it's like Nvidia. You choose Nvidia because AMD and Intel sucks, not because you don't have a choice.
tl;dw: it is a voxel ray marching plus flood fill with Mie scattering. I'd like to point this out that is not only a really good game design, but it also requires ingenious engineering quality. I tried to improve upon it by adding octrees (or in other word, making it sparse voxel octree) but it doesn't seems to add much.
Oh and plus their new bomb shock wave system. I tried to reverse engineer it with vector field, but I couldn't come up with the ODE equations to recreate it. I believe it has to be some kind of field, because in a high energy explosion, it scatter through air into fluid-like structure and hence we can use some aerodynamics for simluation
Steam predates all those platforms by years. The only platforms that I can think of predating it are long dead and didn’t have the same concept of ownership (gamespy, gamestorm, AOL, heat.net, etc). Indeed, part of why those platforms struggle or failed is exactly steams early mover advantage.
Eight years before Origin.
Six years for Ubisoft’s.
Fifteen for Epic Games Store.
Ten years for itch.io.
Five years for GOG.
Seven years for humble bundle (though their early offerings were literally steam keys).
At least 50% of the time I see these warnings, the application is attempting to access something I wouldn’t have expected to access. I’m very happy to have the option to say “no” in those cases, so I can either validate that it’s legitimate or delete the sloppy software before it messes things up.
It might be a lazy model, I imagine Apple could’ve done something better if they still gave a damn about desktop, but I’ll take this over nothing. It actively provides value to me.
Maybe Apple could have done better, but I’m not sure how. There is an option to ask for access to a given folder only (if the dev does its job right) in addition to either full access or not. At some point there has to be some kind of trust to be given.
Is this some kind of attempt to make the other side look better by making the worst argument you can?