Additionally: While spez’s reasoning isn’t sound on the matter, it IS true, that user generated content is highly valuable to AI firms. With ChatGPT out the door, we shouldn’t expect anything to be written after a date a few years back to be written by a human. But this means these data sources aren’t “clear” from generating a feedback loop: If every conversation is potentially three chat bots in a trenchcoat the fourth chat bot learning from that could be of a reduced quality. Therefore every AI firm (of which Facebook is regrettably one) needs to think about how to farm user generated content. I don’t think Zuck wants to be in the cloud business of hosting instances, at least not primarily. On the one hand he is a reliable business partner for regimes all around the world and “moderating” federated instances is a way to keep this business, on the other hand this will help Facebook to gain access to user generated conversation, and more important: potentially block competitor’s access in the future.
It helps mitigate that risk to a degree, yes, but why take the risk at all? There aren’t any really good alternatives out there, that I know of, and the official dock does it’s job just fine.
I wouldn’t word it that strongly, but I totally get what you mean. While I love the core gameplay loop and world much, much more than botw (I was one of the very few heretics who were just lukewarm on botw, instead of seeing it as game of the millennium; while I really love totk and get why people are raving about it), I feel like Nintendo did just one virtual currency too many. Needing to collect and exchange like three or four different zonai stuff to upgrade the battery and buying building materials and fabricating premades. While still needing the shrines and korok seeds, to upgrade health and stamina, collectible currency like the poes and obviously rubies, feel like a very imbalanced in game economy, which in turn makes the grind so bad, it’s unbearable sometimes. Even though each currency in and of itself is fairly easy to grind in my opinion, just not everything at once. At the same time totk gives the illusion of a fairly creative game, where grinding isn’t even warranted. Just let me build stuff!
I am a diehard Apple fanboy and don’t see any viable alternative for any of their main product lines. But their multi monitor performance is comically bad: I have Thunderbolt docks and two monitors work fine through that from a technical perspective. Though dragging windows between monitors is not seamless and macOS even rubs it in your face with some quirky UI hints when you are “leaving” one monitor and enter another like it’s the 90s. Icons and real life data in the menu bar have had scaling issues for a decade now on the screen you are not currently active on with a window (but can still see in real life, because eyes). There is an old desktop wallpaper saved somewhere from when I first connected the monitors that stays on the second one (the first monitor has my normal wallpaper). I know I can change this independently, but why?! When opening monitor settings you can adjust things like refresh rate or color profile independently, which is nice, but each window for adjustments opens on the screen it is adjusting. Apple’s whole multi monitor experience feels clunky and dated and hasn’t been getting any improvements for years, which tells me, nobody at Apple uses multiple screens.
I have very mixed opinions about PWAs. Philosophically I love them (remember the Ubuntu phone? That would have been my iOS alternative!). But in practice most aren’t done very well and feel like a browser bookmark that has been opened from the home screen. But wefwef feels outright native, totally impressive!
I had been using Feedly as well, as my GReader replacement. But they put a lot of features behind an arbitrary paywall with a few quite high. I understand people need to feed their families, but Reeder had the better value proposition for me (especially since I am already paying for iCloud storage).
Mlem is Great! But what really surprised me is wefwef, hands down the best PWA I’ve ever seen
Seriously, Elon is speedrunning the destruction of twitter
I actually don’t think this has anything to do with standing up for their users but is a simple cost/benefit analysis: building compromised E2E-communication that is still reasonably secure against bad actors is much more difficult (if not impossible) than building robust E2E-communication. Apple just doesn’t want to lose business users over headlines like „iOS messaging used by Chinese spies to steal US trade secrets“, while headlines about how difficult it is for government agencies to unlock iPhones probably drive sales. Nothing morally or ethical here, only profits.
I find it so comical, that is Nintendo fans are saying something so logical and uncontroversial, yet say it with a lot of doubt, since Nintendo could very well fuck us over for no gain at all.
Getting good Apollo vibes, like this a lot!
What makes the switch genius level of engineering is the Switch System Software microkernel architecture. When the switch plays a game, it doesn’t have bloated tasks running in the background to render some ads in some shop app you probably won’t visit while playing, but only plays the game. This approach is totally mandatory to get anything to run on the switch’s ancient hardware, but it is also so beautiful and rare to see today from a technical point of view. Where Xbox and PlayStation are directly derived from a multi-purpose desktop PC, the switch is more closely related with consoles and handhelds of the past.
Therefore a lot of flashy UI elements pulling information from the Internet or animating with some “expensive” (in a performance sense) effects aren’t really feasible, since these would hog up system resources the switch doesn’t have to spare and isn’t even designed to be able to spare. I hope when Nintendo updates the switch they keep this philosophy alive and this would very probably lead to another clean UI.