I mostly avoid major world news now for the most part. I prefer to read hobby-specific news and local news, such as my municipality.

Forgive me for the pessimism, but I sincerely doubt that they honour any opt-outs. Meta has shown time and time again that they’d rather just pay fines as business expenses instead of abiding by law(s).

This. Numerous industries in the US make use of forced prison labour.

Goddamn, I wish we could act like our own independent country for once instead of just puppeting whatever the US does.

Appeasing shareholders and investors.

Microsoft has so many spinning plates up in the air right now and they have no idea how to handle them all. Eventually they’re all going to come crashing down and smash on the floor and it’s not going to be pretty.

Most of the beloved Arkane team had left long before the closure.

When the money stops flowing.

I do not have hope that this developer will make another good game let alone one that respects the TES IP or in any way lives up to expectations.

Still about $20 short of what the minimum living wage is for my city. Fantastic.

Which is exactly why they want people wearing smartwatches to sleep.

I don’t know if this is hilarious or pathetically sad. AI has become the current “must have” craze in the tech world and it’s baffling watching every company try and find a way to shoehorn some form of it into their products and then try and justify its existence.

Cerence Chat Pro from technology partner Cerence Inc. is the foundation of the new function, which offers a uniquely intelligent, *automotive-grade *ChatGPT integration.

Why the hell would I want this?

Cool. I’ll just piss along the exterior wall of your building then or on the fence at the back of your parking lot.

Pretty much.

The title made me think they were responding to users that needed customer support, but no. This:

Meanwhile, when another user lamented the amount of loading screens, the support team replied imploring the reviewer to “consider the amount of data for the expansive gameplay that is procedurally generated to load flawlessly in under three seconds”.

is just pathetic. This is nothing more than low-effort damage control. Which, funnily enough, is rather fitting for Starfield in general. It’s not a terrible game but it absolutely fell flat on its face on its biggest selling points. Procedural exploration will always have drawbacks but No Man’s Sky absolutely smashes Starfield in this department and it came out nearly 8 years ago and made by a team a fraction of the size. And I don’t expect Bethesda to put in the same effort as Hello did and make Starfield live up to its promises

This gets asked every time Tumblr is mentioned online. It’s still around and has a large, thriving userbase. It’s one of the last slices of old-school internet that exists today and, because of that, is very resistant to modern monetisation tactics and enshittification which makes shareholders cry in their sleep.

I flew last year. Each checked-in bag was $50 before tax and it took over an hour before the baggage carousel even started to spin. Everyone who had carry-on bags were $50 richer and could leave the airport immediately.

That’s why. The checked-in baggage process is expensive, miserable, and frustrating. Even worse if they lose your bag which is becoming increasingly common.

They’re cheap. That’s as far as some people think about it.

I feel like

Yes. Especially when it’s only like 2 or 3 years after first release. It’s just double dipping at that point.

I feel for those who have had Twitter be such a part of their income but the writing is on the wall for the platform and it’s time to start looking for alternatives. Xitter is going to be circling the drain soon if it isn’t already and there is nothing Muskrat will do to correct that.

Gotta double-dip for more profit.

This is a taste of what you can achieve when regulatory bodies actually have the guts to stand up to megacorps.

I have absolutely zero confidence that Apple will allow this to exist once they get enough wind of it.

This. Twitter is now under ownership and control of a spoiled fascist richboy and this is absolutely 100% transparently clear. This is how the platform is now and it is not going to change. Twitter as we knew it is gone. It’s dead and not coming back. Move the hell on, people, please. Stop supporting this absolutely wretched waste of oxygen.

Our grocery situation across the entire country has needed federal intervention for quite some time now. It’s not going to happen, though.

• The option to skip puzzles and not get punished for it.
• Independent difficulty options for things like exploration, combat, crafting, etc. Whatever the game has.

I stopped playing ESO years ago after around 10,000 hours of playtime. It’s nice (or perhaps unsurprising) to hear that they still haven’t addressed how badly they messed up the story structure and pacing. Rather than have the expansions be an accessory to the main story and tutorial - they acted as replacements. A game design choice I’m 99.9% sure was made by management and not by any actual dev team. It was a confusing, convoluted mess with only a few expansions but I can’t imagine how bad it is now with even more.

I cannot trust any publication that “reviews” a product like this without taking at least a little time to go over the legitimately harmful business practices against the customer.

People with lots of money want even more money. Less employees means less money that has to be paid out which means more money in the short term. Makes line go up for a while. Makes suits happy.

Technically not free if you have to have a paid sub in order to access them. In that case it’s a paid trial with the opportunity to pay even more. Which sounds even worse for Spotify.

15 hours/month is… pretty awful. An avid reader (or listener, in this case) will chew through that in no time at all. Another thing that concerns me is payouts. Spotify is notorious for having atrocious payouts to creators. I wonder how this carries over to their audiobook offerings.

Yup. Have family who work in BC’s medical field and this is becoming increasingly common. Can’t afford treatment? No? Have you considered dying instead? MAID is not the problem, though; not entirely at least. Our medical infrastructure and the offices that govern it are rotten to the core. We have amazing medical staff doing their absolute best while trying to work within a system that is being actively sabotaged from above.

I think we’re starting to see the beginning of YouTube’s end. The algorithm is actively choking the life out of the platform, they’re forcing viewers to pay fees that seem to keep getting bigger and bigger, and they’re making life miserable for creators while also paying them less and less.

Once another platform comes along that ticks enough boxes to satisfy people then YouTube will be absolutely screwed. The only reason we all use that wretched site is because there is no viable alternative. More and more creators are moving to premium platforms like Nebula that offer better deals for viewers and creators alike. I’m likely to jump ship myself once more people I watch also join up.

Order them to do it instead of politely asking them to stop. This is a no-brainer and something almost every single Canadian would support.

You can hit the big round turn-based button in bottom right of your HUD to activate turn mode at any time, even outside combat. This effectively pauses the game. The game even makes a sound effect of a clock slowing down and stopping.

Enshittification marches ever onward

I played through Spider-Man 1 with the puzzles enabled for a few hours before turning that crap off. I’m very glad they gave the option to do so because they are annoying and tedious at best and downright frustrating at worst. They absolutely grenade the pacing and flow of the gameplay. There are numerous puzzle games out there I could play if I wanted puzzles; I don’t want half-assed, janky, pace-destroying puzzles in my action games.

I find it works great for navigation and the map quality is so much better than Google Maps. My only complaints are that it lacks extra features such as business information, reviews, etc. It’s better than it used to be but they still use things like Yelp (ugh) at least in my area.

Back when I worked in a grocery store one of my regular tasks was processing unsalable product. There is… a lot that gets thrown away. And from what I hear it is much worse in other parts of the world.