Gonna be real honest here, I would have taken that in a heartbeat. It’s an open source project, I could disappear with my money and the project could be continued from a different fork without ads. The only thing you’re really sacrificing is your reputation and with enough money I don’t care.
and with enough money I don’t care.
Most people are like you.
Which is precisely why humanity will be just another of many dead end evolutionary cul-de-sacs in Earth’s natural history.
I’ve come to peace with that, but this is a nice microcosm of the core reason. We can do better, we know better, but at the end of the day, almost all of us will just take the animalistic dopamine rush of winning.
Live together or die alone. We choose the second one like breathing.
If most humans were like Kempf (we’re not), we’d actually have a chance.
I don’t think this hypothetical is about winning so much as never having to worry about your needs being met again. The calculus changes completely for a lot of people (not optimistic enough to say most) if that’s not part of the equation.
Right, but at cost to others, and attempting to minimize the cost to others trying to rationalize it. That’s the point. Call it winning, call it succeeding, call it whatever you like, its me over us. The idea of accepting your benefit at the loss of numerous others tears people en masse down. Maybe another branch would become as popular, maybe not, but such choices are presented frequently in our civilization, and the choice is usually to take the win at other’s expense.
Regardless, we are what we are and on a long enough time scale what we are will destroy us. That’s not as sad to me as all the other creatures we’ll take with us, but even we won’t be able to sterilize all terran life, so the Earth will recover from us. Life will go on after we successfully fuck ourselves trying to fuck one another. I find solace in that.
That is a very western, independent cultural paradigm you have there. Western culture and values are not shared by everyone in the west let alone all humanity.
Only a few of us have strong narcissistic and anti-social personality traits, but they are vocal and usually end up in positions of power.
I would argue the vast majority of humanity throughout history is more selfless and willing to sacrifice and work towards a goal than you give us credit for. Look at the big picture and think about how much innovation has come from a place not driven by profit potential but for THE potential to go further.
When I look at the world and to the East, I see just as many people in suits lording over people slaving for very little. I see Asian factory owners and managers getting bonuses for inflicting draconian conditions on their factory workers to the point of suicides. I see eastern governments sending their citizens to brainwashing camps to make governing them a little easier. I see the rare society that does find homeostasis with its environment being decimated by societies of people with a selfish interest in the land they sit on time and time again. Taiwan isn’t at war with anyone, but China wants their shit because they want their shit. No cowboys or rugged individuals required.
Okay but why would we all take the money? Because we want to be rich? Or because we need to be rich in order to live a comfortable life?
Because it makes us feel safe, and it makes us feel like we’ll be happy.
I have a Master’s in Psychology, and I will always remember the disheartening feeling when I learned the most prevalent and accepted theory of what defines human happiness. Know what it is?
Comparison to others.
Very literally, the person in the tribe with the biggest mud hut is probably happier than you in your Chevrolet when your neighbor pulls up in a Cadillac.
Yes, we really are that small as a rule.
Because everyone thinks they need to live lavishly.
Everyone thinks they need a mansion or twelve cars to be happy.
If everyone would be content with simply living a modest life we could exist harmoniously with the environment.
But nope gotta have that big house with all that empty land for aesthetics so fuck everyone else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is what happens when you let an arbitrary system of resource management based on strife and competition govern your society top-down.
Making everyone compete for resources against one another in an abstract version of Hunger Games is not going to lead to good results.
If you decree a global law that says that everyone is to compete against one another in a zero sum game for resources, in perpetuity, and that law remains in full effect for generations upon generations, people will go insane. The algorithm programs us as well as we program it- “amass, forever” is not a great command to issue just in general with no other conditions or parameters, especially without a goal state. You don’t just “program”, you create a program that is to achieve some result.
If the only game in the world was soccer, and everyone in the world had to play, at all times, at the risk of dying if they don’t, they will start conceptualizing their whole reality around soccer, and soccer will at some point supersede reality- it will become reality.
I like to ask people- “in a thousand years, if humanity is still around, do you think we will still be living under a capitalist system?”. By far the most common response is more or less yes, and furrowed eyebrows. I find that most people are incapable of entertaining even the thought of an alternative. Not because they’re stupid or ignorant, but because the thought would never occur to them, like if one were asking a fish to imagine a replacement for water, it’s just beyond the scope of imagination bordering on the purely metaphysical.
Almost the best of both worlds right?
Creator gets a huge payout, well deserved. Users install VLC, see ads, exit, search web for “VLC ads”, see the fork, re-install having wasted 2-3 minutes total. Eventually “VLC Origin” is the only one anybody talks about.
Those who can stomach ads don’t bother finding the ad-free version, and still use great software. Even the advertisers win.
(This assumes no abusive telemetry / spyware.)
Who needs a reputation when you have money ! I’d do the same , hopefully he is atleast not broke.
I moved away from VLC because of the somewhat boring UI. Then I used potplayer, then I discovered MPV - which is awesome because it’s so performant you can easily customize it.
But I think VLC helped pioneer the library that allows decoding and playing videos without the mess that were video codec drivers on desktop.
If I try to play 3 random videos in VLC, they all three will play perfectly. If I try those same three on anything else, at least one of them will be buggy in some way.
Yes you can argue there could be encoding problems in the video file of that buggy one, but somehow VLC just always works. Shit’s unbelievably good, so I won’t be switching.
I remember the first time I encountered the Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) media type which ultimately lead me to downloading VLC as it was the only player that could handle it at the time
Sadly i recently learned VLC doesn’t just always work.
About a year ago i had an issue with playing FLAC files on VLC, where there would be short periods of no audio. I had recently made some upgrades to my audio hardware, so i was looking at my new hardware/cables/config… but in the end i realized it always happened at the same point in the same files, so a software issue was more likely:
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/27696
Nice quote from this issue: VLC is broken since months Use their nightly version, it has a nice new interface too, and no bugs. I don’t get how they can keep a huge breaking bug like this in vlc from MONTHS.
And neither can i… until a year ago VLC was for me the pinnacle of “it just works”. Now after them leaving a bug causing audio playback issues into their stable version for months, they broke my trust in them… they’re probably still the best option out there, but now i’ll just say probably, not for sure, and there is room for improvement…
And if it were some obscure format, sure, but FLAC? …
but in the end i realized it always happened at the same point in the same files, so a software issue was more likely
Isn’t the logical conclusion here there’s an issue with the FLAC files instead of the player?
Well… I’d point you to this very nice blog post to help rationalize why it can take a long time.
Not a 4K movie.
edit: the only reason I switched from VLC to potplayer was because VLC couldn’t play my 2160p videos
Hmm I’ve definitely played many 4k videos in VLC. Don’t remember having any issues.
How many porn videos do you need to watch simultaneously?
spoiler
(for me it’s 4 but I might have to go up to 9)
MPC-HC and MPV both rock, but VLC will always stay on all my machines because any time I have a problem with a video file, VLC opens that shit no issue.
As of right now VLC also doesn’t properly support Wayland, but MPV does. It’s a great piece of software!
Agree on the sentiment about VLC though, having an open source project demonstrate what is possible and stand the test of time definitely paves the way for future work and improvements.
I still have PTSD from those codec-install-infested-times… God bless VLC and it’s Author / Creator!
Still mpv’s gpu-next video output driver is based on VLC’s libplacebo.
VLC is really slow to integrate their own development efforts though, VLC media player 4.0 has been in beta for years…
Dude should try adding some ads to the program to generate some income to spend on more dev time…
Why does the UI matter for a video player? It’s not like you’re looking at it when the video is playing. How odd. I’ve been using VLC for years, I like that it doesn’t change. It just cracks on and plays the video, which is what you want in a video player. Isn’t it?
It’s the Tunnock’s Teacake of apps.
I moved away from VLC because compared to MPC-HC, VLC was super slow. If only MPC-HC could come to Linux, that would be amazing.
MPC comes with those inexplicable keybindings, and it’s a hassle setting them, as far as I remember. Or it lacked some deal breaking customization option for me, some stuff is essential.
I got it mostly set up how I was used to. I’d be curious what you are missing?
I paid $ as a donation for VLC. For the decades of use I’ve gotten out of it I felt I had to. Same for a couple other useful apps that have been free for a long time or very useful. I wasn’t able to afford much in years past, but now I can chip in. Hope this helps these devs keep the stuff free, nothing much worse than seeing a beloved FOSS close doors on users and demand fees.
Lol they made the VLC logo a real thing.
Seriously the best player. I’ve installed it on literally every personal computer I owned. I should make a donation.
