Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.

A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.

I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn’t tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.

I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files…it was not a good time.

For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn’t pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone’s battery, they didn’t shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that were definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.

That was the first thing I learned when training for that job. They really drilled that into all of us.

I see more people in my profession (programming) doing the four-day work week, but we’re still in an extreme minority. Outside of this field, it’s even worse. The liberal and conservative parties are actively pushing against it. Almost every day there’s an article where some rich CEO whines about young people being lazy. Added to that: Our aging population and a general lack of workers paired with aggressive anti-immigration politics - they also don’t help this cause.

So yeah, more people are doing it (especially in IT), which makes me hopeful. But I still don’t see it getting rolled out in a big fashion anytime soon, unfortunately. Especially because salary levels in Germany are already very low and not everyone can afford the loss of pay switching to a four-day work week.

I just know I’ll never go back. The amount of energy I gained by just having a day more to myself per week is extraordinary.

Yes, but it’s actually an “It’s Thursday!” feeling.

The four day work week is amazing.

The nightmare PS2 dirty disc screen

To be fair, PS2’s are so damn rock-solid new generations can experience this for many years to come. They just gotta get one.

There’s a curated list of no-bullshit mobile games which are real fun, without any microtransactions: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/

Mobile Gaming can be fun. :)

Bring back Asbestos!

It’s quite frightening to see how fast these AI models have improved during the last few years. You can still spot errors in the videos, but how long will it take until you can’t do that anymore?

It sounds terrifying to not know what’s real or not anymore. And also, these videos will put a lot of people out of jobs, especially in the creative industry. Who needs someone following a car with a drone anymore, when you can just generate that footage on the fly?

I used an Exynos S8 up to December of last year and it’s still blazingly fast. And the consensus on xdaforums seems to be that the Qualcomm variant from the US is terrible. :) Weird, but maybe I’m wrong and I just got used to a slow device. I mean, I had a Sony Xperia XA2 before and that thing was so slow, everything else felt like The Flash. :D

It’s the good one. As far as I know, Exynos phones are much faster than the Snapdragon variants. Custom ROMs like LineageOS are only available for Exynos phones, so those are the only ones still getting updates.

The S8 is pretty nice, but only the Exynos variant. I hated the glass back, though. Shattered mine two times, one time the phone just fell 30 centimeters out of bed. Gorilla Glass only in the front was a deliberate decision by these bastards.

Yeah unfortunately that Custom ROM scene is dying out

I feel like recent Android has gotten good enough for me that I don’t really need custom ROMs anymore. As long as I can still root the stock ROM and install AdAway, I’m fine.

It’s gotten so hard to find authentic, useful results that people have started adding the word “Reddit” to search terms

I have definitely done that multiple times.

Tentatively called “Alexa Plus,” the paid version of Alexa is intended to offer more conversational and personalized AI technology, said one of the documents obtained by Business Insider.

But the quality of the new Alexa’s answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found.

Do they really expect people will pay for a large language model making up results on-the-fly?

“If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble,” one of the people told BI.

I will not shed a tear when Alexa gets shut off, to be honest.

I am just now seeing this. The problem has finally been fixed :) It was indeed a federation bug with 0.19.1.

ApocalypticArt can live again!

Bring back the Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro!

Optical sensors makes it very hard to fail, it basically lasts forever. Can’t have that in this day and age anymore, poor companies need to sell new crap every year.

Nice Rick&Morty copypasta you got there.

It doesn’t have to be a flagship. Just make sure the phone has a decent amount of RAM. There are even modern phones that come with Android Go and 2GB of RAM that are not futureproof and absolute crap.

I tend to look for phones that are supported by LineageOS so I know there will be community updates.

BearMcCreary used a Hurdy Gurdy to make the music for the TV show “Black Sails”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utLXgOnIwdo

Might give you an idea how hard this instrument is to master.

vogons.org - we’re all stuck in the 90’s, tinkering with old computers.