man, the whole elon musk/twitter situation seems less & less real the more it plays out

saw this earlier from an old twitter tab, thought my browser had been hijacked with some extension. what an amateurish logo, looks like what a tiny business puts up on their wordpress when they have no designers & are only making a logo because they have to, definitely not what i’d expect from one of the biggest social media sites in the world. elon has been fixated on the whole x thing for literal decades now & that’s the best logo he came up with?

i thought i was the only one who knew about this game lol, i agree it’s a very good game & a lot more polished than 2048

thanks for letting me know!

you’d be surprised, I’ve heard from other reddit users that entire discord servers, wikis, & other communities would first start from reddit group chats so apparently there were a lot super involved in it. one of the big community partnered discord servers I was in told me the only reason they were on discord at first was because reddit chat made it hard to search old messages

yeah, its getting a little worrying how they’re just buying the game market now, especially when you remember how horrible gates & ballmer era microsoft was with anticompetition

same here, the optimist (& diablo fan) in me is hoping that microsoft/xbox will make them a good enough company to where i feel comfortable giving them my money again, but the cynical part of my mind is just telling me that they’ll probably just go “welp, kotick’s gone, diablo 4 on game pass everyone!” then go “hands off” & just ignore the company aside from uploading their games to gamepass & funding them, like they did with arkane. hope i’m wrong though

man, what a shitty move. i had some chats that i wanted to keep in case i needed them in the future but forgot to back up :(

good fandom sites are the ugliest & most bloated sites i’ve ever seen & used, & the only site that i’ve seen use 25-50% of the CPU (a wiki page with a lot of videos &/or gallery pages will do this every single time) while ublock is actively blocking ads. like, wtf

yeah the new blood in the internal microsoft teams love rust now, some of the windows team guys have been consistently talking about an internal shift towards rust on twitter since last year. the rust win32k drivers & userspace libraries actually dropped in rs_prerelease back in may, but for whatever reason the kernel wouldn’t actually use the new rust codepaths even if you loaded & enabled them

Is setting up such a system unfeasible?

yes. not only would such a policy be messy to implement & partially unenforcable on the current internet for various reasons (look at what’s happening with porn site here in the usa, where some states are literally trying to add a real id system & it’s failing) it’d also be a law that hurts us well-meaning people (specifically, marginalized sections of populations that have a reason to take privacy seriously, such as lgbt people in non-gay friendly locations, for example) moreso than trolls. our privacy is already eroded enough imo, so if a real id system were to come out i’d just quit using the internet. & i’m sure a large chunk of the internet would do the same.

you assume that such a system would stop all death threats & racist/sexist comments & make the internet a safe place but… why would it? bad people are shameless. if a real id system catches on, but moderation doesn’t change, it’s more likely that these people will just put up their real names & continue doing what they’re doing. there are a lot of people who are already not ashamed whatsoever of having those comments attached to their identity right now, i mean look at how many <real name>s are on twitter & facebook & all that willingly posting hateful comments with their real name today.

look i get what you’re going for in spirit & why you want this system to be a thing. but the reason so much toxicity is on modern social media in the first place is simply because companies allow it, either by not spending enough on their moderation staff or, in cases like reddit, just by turning a blind eye to it. so, why not just be direct? why not regulate the companies rather than the consumers? imo a law that requires tech companies to take a zero-tolerance policy to hate speech & scams, as well as to actually spend enough on their moderation staff to allow that, would be much cleaner, safer & effective than a real id system

same, back ~2015-2018 i was hangouts’ biggest fan. now i avoid most google platforms in general aside from gmail, android & youtube. i can’t trust anything else to stay around anymore, & even when they do keep an app alive they end up just endlessly shuffling them around like this for no reason

eh, i don’t think it’s fair to discount a youtube frontend for having a bug, especially not a frontend as new as this one. projects at this early a stage always have issues, & youtube frontends have to deal with the added bonus of google randomly rate-limiting & consistently trying to break them. youtube frontends are always going to have issues & need constant updates by nature, there’s not much any of them can do about it

google’s messaging strategy has gotten so bad that they now have to remind consumers which of the apps are made for them. i myself had no clue that the google chat app in the play store was targeted towards consumers, i just assumed that the app was google workspaces only considering they always push rcs & that the play store description doesn’t go two sentences without talking about enterprise & google workspaces.

it’s kinda wild when you consider that they had a 17 year headstart on this & still somehow lost the messaging app/site race multiple times

in my experience being a part of both communities, there isn’t a wearos piracy scene at all. i’ve seen a few shared watchfaces here & there since wearos (well, then android wear) launched, but i can count on my fingers how many times that’s happened. definitely not enough to count as a scene or community imo.

to your first point of getting a watch to replace a phone though, as someone who’s owned multiple wearos watches (both stock & oneui) & tried to use the watch as the primary device multiple times i’d recommend against it atm. even on the best wearos watches (the gw4/5 atm) the experience as a primary device is just, not there yet. while samsung did a lot for wearos, watch apps are still clunky & still omit even the most basic features, the worst offenders imo being the stock wearos/google apps (google clock still doesn’t even let you set an alarm name, tone or snooze time).

this all applies of course when there even is a watch app, a lot of android apps either simply don’t make one or ended up abandoning theirs years ago - even apps you’d expect to naturally have one like first party apps (gmail & google calendar were JUST announced after a decade of wearos being alive) or messaging apps. essentially, software-wise on a galaxy watch everything aside from built-in oneui apps & the few best wearos apps will just frustrate you & make you pull out your phone. on a stock wearos watch… lol.

an even bigger issue than software though, is hardware. while i don’t have an lte watch, from what i’ve heard from people that do use their watches without their phones near regularly, watches still run terribly without piggybacking off the phone for everything, & using lte & disconnecting from the phone pretty much instantly causes heat, lag & battery usage to double. i’ve experienced a bit of this myself by turning my phone off & trying to do basic tasks like listening to music, texting & talking to assistant. though i (obviously) didn’t get the heat & battery drain that comes with an lte connection, the whole experience just becomes kinda laggy & choppy when the companion app isn’t connected

this especially makes you feel idiotic when you spend a long ass time finding & fixing a simple bug resulting from a typo then realize that it would’ve been caught immediately if you just wrote tests like you said you would 3 days ago

if the rumors are true & microsoft is planning to make windows 365 the de-facto way to purchase windows in the future like with office, it’ll be the dumbest move they’ve ever made & proof some new leadership is probably needed at some level. individual apps are one thing but no one wants something as critical & expansive as the os to just be a glorified rdp session, nor do they want it to be dependant on a subscription. i’ve told some of my non techie friends about this (all lifelong windows users) & they all said it’d be the one thing that makes them go to something else.

yeah, i’d contact steam if it’s really bothering you but otherwise just wait. steam support is one of the chillest cs teams i’ve ever dealt with so you shouldn’t have any problem either way. also keep in mind a few popular games are on sale atm so they might just be processing some more than usual

I thought this would be an automated process.

not entirely. while steam does auto approve refunds for games that are both owned less than 14 days & played less than 2 hours (not sure if this part is automated or if they train staff to just glance at the playtime & click refund in their ticket system), they still have a refund department to vet & process refunds that fall outside of that category. they’ll send you an email if what you’re refunding doesn’t fit the criteria for automatic approval:

Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any title that is requested within 14 days of purchase and has been played for less than 2 hours (this includes online, offline and shared library playtime). Even if you fall outside of the refund rules we’ve described, you can submit a request and we’ll take a look at it.

if you played the game for over 2 hours, even if it’s just by one minute, your request is gonna be in limbo for a while until a support team member gets to it. i’ve had it happen a few times over the years & in my experience it takes anywhere from like 1 or 2 days to as many as 5, depending on how busy it is (steam sales seem to slow them down). i’ve also heard from some on the steam community that even when a refund is auto approved it can sometimes still get stuck in the system for a few days.