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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Something like Bottles could work, but since the installer portion of recent Adobe apps is broken, there would be no way of creating a useful installer.

I hope, support for these apps will improve in the future, as wine gets better. Just a few years ago, running Photoshop was a much bigger PITA, which is why I stuck with Windows for so long.

You’re in luck, I just had this problem today and got it solved! :) Also on Fedora (38) with an Intel UHD 620. Proof:

First I got Photoshop 2020 from m0nkrus, because that’s a patched version without the online activation. I installed it with qemu on a virtualized Windows 11 to get all of the files (because the installer depends on an unimplemented mshtml function and is just a white, unuseable window in wine).

Then I prepared a custom wineprefix with all of the neccessary files: WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-adobe winetricks -q allfonts fontsmooth=rgb gdiplus atmlib vcrun2008 vcrun2010 vcrun2012 vcrun2013 vcrun2022 msxml3 msxml6

I copied all of the files in the C:/Program Files/Adobe and C:/Program Files/Common/Adobe directories into the same directories in ~/.wine-adobe/drive_c.

That’s enough, you can now run Photoshop with a command like this: WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-adobe wine ~/.wine-adobe/drive_c/Program\ Files/Adobe/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 2020/Photoshop.exe or create a nice looking app shortcut with wine-create-shortcut.

Some things to note: The “new” file open dialogue doesn’t work, you have to disable it in settings. Otherwise, nothing will happen when trying to create a new file.

Adobe Illustrator 2021 also works fine, but you need to build your own variant of wine with a patched gdi32.dll. The most annoying part was getting all of the -devel.i686 packages in Fedora, which took a lot of googling around. Haven’t documented the full list while doing it, sadly.

Man, I spent 15 bucks to watch it at the movie theatre. Why is the rent option more expensive than that? Even with the popcorn and drink I stayed below that.

There’s been an app for that for ages: DroidCamX.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dev47apps.droidcamx

watchsomuch.to works pretty well for me. Their filtering options can certainly be improved, but they have most of the 4K TV series content I need.

Switched to Chrome a few years back when Firefox killed XUL and bundled too much bloatware.

Now I’ve switched back to Firefox because it’s good again and Google is doing too many evil things lately (Web Integrity).

When people run out of money to pay for a billion subscriptions, companies will have to think hard about their business model. I don’t think the current trend can last forever.

Look at the fragmentation of streaming services. Piracy is on the rise again because of it.

Look for “romcenter markdown edition 2023” and you might find stuff that’s not on Vimm’s vault, like the XBLA games. :)

https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts

Installing TempleOS in da club

a “Made for Apple” type of cable

That is absolutely ridiculous, but not surprising at all.

One of the good things coming out of the EU.

I still wonder if Apple will do a split between EU iPhones and the rest of the world, though. Lightning accessories make money.

Add to that, any streaming content that is not available in the original language. Here in Germany, a lot of older movies are only available to stream with the terrible German dub. I’m not paying for that so I’m not paying at all.

Instagram went from a friend feed to “Hey you saw a girl with big boobs this one time, here are 100 other girls with big boobs” very quickly.

That and the insane amount of ads made me quit it.

Users of the chronological feeds engaged less with the platforms

Because there is no endless content. You will eventually reach the end of your feed, close your browser and go to bed, sleeping well and staying healthy.

But of course Meta prefers you doomscrolling through the entire night and feeling like shit afterwards. Just one more ad bro…

But that’s mostly because Outlook is still holding us back. Come on, Microsoft, please let it die in peace already.

The one time he landed his time machine in the middle of some spectators: “Don’t worry, we’re doing a low-budget science fiction series”

I still remember that to this day. It’s a great series, they let it end when it was still awesome and didn’t drag it out any longer.

A good quality version of the “VR.5” tv series from 1995. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR.5

It’s a TV show about virtual reality and has peak 90’s aesthetic. They shot the scenes in "virtual reality"on black and white film and colorized them manually afterwards to create a very distinct and vibrant look. That must’ve been so much hard work.

Sadly, there is only a 240p VHS rip with extremely terrible quality out there. I’ve always wanted to watch the whole thing, but it’s too degraded to enjoy like this.

Very similar situation here. Around 2017/2018 I had Netflix and Prime Video. I was able to watch 95% of the content I wanted to watch and only had to download some obscure 90’s SciFi series they didn’t have.

But the industry had to fuck it up and create too many platforms. We have Netflix, Prime, Disney+, HBO, Paramount Plus, Apple TV+ and many more. I am not subscribing to your service because one or two titles might interest me. It’s way too much cost for a lot less value I had in 2018.

I even wanted to make an exception for Apple TV+ because their series are absolutely amazing. But they force you to buy an expensive Apple device to watch the content in 4K on the Safari Browser. Go fuck yourself, Apple. It’s not even a technical issue, because they play the trailers in 4K but then switch to 480p with a terrible bitrate.

Don’t go to the big media outlets and start crying that piracy is too damn high if you make it more inconvenient to watch your programs legally than just downloading an MKV file from somewhere.

Liftoff is awesome, I just couldn’t find it when searching the name on the Play Store. Opening this link worked: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.liftoffapp.liftoff