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.

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.

That seems to be standard practice, in my case they unbanned me instantly as soon as I added a telephone number.

Gotta collect that sweet, sweet user data.

My Thinkpad T400 from 2010 has 8GB of RAM. This was wild back then. But this was 13 years ago. Stop milking your customers by putting insane margins on memory and storage, Apple.

It’s an extreme monopoly here in Germany, too. But the EU will force them to be interoperable with other messengers soon, which will hopefully break that monopoly.

Ah, so that’s probably only needed when you use the rename app feature? Because it complained about microG missing after launching the YT app with the default patch selection so I had to use the mount installation method, which requires root (I think).

Good to know!

The day that happens I can hopefully uninstall this thing already. Most of my friends use it, they’re really big here in Europe. Pretty hard to move to another app.

If you’re on a rooted Android, ReVanced is a great option. It patches the YT app to behave like Premium, removes a lot of annoyances and integrates SponsorBlock and the Dislike API.

Ah, the good old Word 97 key…

Am I the only one that regularly used “search phrase site:reddit.com” on Google? It makes the search engine so much better.

Really bad idea to get rid of this feature.

It’s gotten really worse over the last year or so. They try to be overly “intelligent” by suggesting search phrases you didn’t even input, watering down the results.

I’m a web developer and when I google for “string”, I don’t want to get results for “yarn” to put in a fake extreme example. Rewording my search phrases is one of the worst features they ever introduced. I know what I’m looking for and I don’t need assistance with that.

Google even started ignoring operators sometimes. Back in the good old days you were able to put a word into quotations to tell the engine it must be included in the results. Now when I do this it only mostly works but when they run out of results they just go back to the default behaviour of including everything that might loosely fit the search phrase.

It feels like Google is afraid to show you no results, as if that was a crime or something.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Bing works so much better for me when I look up specific error messages etc.

What a guy!