I'm just waiting for some FOSS purist to find fault in this.

I don't know if this is a US thing. I have no large expectations of HR, but I'm also part of a union and like most places my company has signed a collective union agreement. If there's a conflict the union will represent you as well. The HR people at my company seem completely OK though, I have dealings with them due to my role.

The answers in this thread are all over, but it's towards this direction I'm leaning

I think it's been proven that Google doesn't listen in to your conversations. While there are a lot of real privacy issues, the microphone theory is just conspiracy fear-mongering

I'd wager he means something like the fediverse, reddit, various microblogging sites. There are plenty sharing experiences working for Google, Apple and what not.

lol

Awesome. Sounds like you made the same journey. Right now it feels like I might ditch the dual boot too in a near future.

I use Proton for Steam games. You can enable it in Steam settings, just run it via Steam afterwards. For games purchased via GOG, I use Heroic Launcher which uses a variant of Wine.

I saw a comment expressing this ruling is only applicable to e-books where there already exists an e-book from the publisher, and that it won't affect media preservation or books that have been scanned (e.g., old textbooks) and that do not have an e-book. Is this true? If so, it's not all bad.

This isn't possible. You can only see people who viewed your stories.

It's generally really hard if you have no experience. But if you're willing to pay, maybe. Check this out: https://hitchwiki.org/en/Hitchhiking_a_boat

And wasn't that what we were promised by capitalism? That we could own our land, our homes and our lives. But even that, they're turning back on, except for the privileged few. Back to feudalism it is.

Chick-fil-a starting a streaming service sounds like the worst idea ever.

For sure. And Libreoffice doesn't constantly try to make you save your documents in OneDrive...

This is an interesting point as well. Before, if you weren't happy with an update or whatnot, you could just keep running the older version. But nowadays that's impossible in many cases.

I see your point. But as someone else mentioned, there are many programs, apps and what not that shouldn't require a subscription just by looking at how the software or hardware is set up.

Absolutely. I constantly revisit the services I subscribe to, but to be honest, I still keep some streaming services on a constant subscription even though my viewing patterns differ from month to month. In that case I'm just too lazy, and it's not a huge hit to my disposable income. I pay for it to be available when I want to use them. I think this might be the case for many others, and coupled with not having a budget and/or financial sense, this can definitely add up for many. I also think many people just forget what services they are subscribed too, and barely even watch their bank account/credit card slip and what's being withdrawn.

I don't know what it is with the fediverse, but I feel like in every thread and with every joke, there's always a highly upvoted comment that just completely misses the mark and treats the joke seriously, or just plainly misunderstands it.

I've never found a use for any of this. I only utilise a calendar. How complicated are your people's lives?

Luckily the only "AI" we have are LLMs which seem to have hit their peak, and probably will start corrupting itself with its own training data now that they've scoured the web clean.