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I enjoyed a lot of the game objectives… Automating the farm, going to the bottom of the mine and the desert thing, completing the community center, courting a spouse etc.
A lot of the grindy bits weren’t as fun, such as missing some season-specific cutscene or event and not having the exact right item, the feeling of needing to speed grow certain crops at the beginning of each season, etc.
Overall it was a chill and positive experience. The music is awesome, character interactions not too laborious. This game plays great on SteamDeck and with proper settings it sips battery. For a long flight, I would pair this title with stuff like Animal Well, Dead Cells, and Cave Blazers.
Just look at the number of normies who use Apple, Samsung, or vanilla Pixels as their daily driver. Unless you have a degoogled Android, all the major flagship devices are essentially surveillance and advertising powerhouses. People have embraced the willful ignorance part of this bargain. They think they need whatever proprietary garbage is offered by Apple, to the point that even their own privacy is too ethereal a concept to regret mortgaging it away in the tradeoff.
I know Google Fiber generation 1 setups were Fiber to the home (to a “Fiber Jack”) with a provided router that had 1 gigabit Ethernet port and a coax/MoCA output. Then each TV receiver box got its connectivity via MoCA from the router (most of the customer homes were already set up for cable to any area there was a TV) and put out 100mb ethernet from each of those endpoints (these also doubled as Wifi APs).
What I’ve never heard of is an ISP offering a MoCA coax to your house and you having only a MoCA receiver. Supposedly the max distance between MoCA devices is about 300 feet.
Seems more likely the person asking the question actually just has a cable modem and could put their own router downstream of it if they wanted?
Seems OK with BT in the sense they do not throttle traffic etc. Using basic prevention measures like private trackers and port randomization will get you far here. If you are using public torrent sites I would probably use a seedbox or torrent friendly VPS host… Then your ISP will only see SSH traffic from your machine to the box.
Depending on the country, you may be in the same legal status if you just buy a physical copy and then download a copy of the same edition. (Caveat - I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.)
Google won a case on appeal in 2015 concerning their book scanning and digitization project. The result of that case, in the US at least, is that you are protected in scanning a book you own for fair use and other legal purposes and can even give a copy to a friend (for purposes of education and other fair use) but if you mass distribute that copy then you may run afoul of copyright law.
Apart from the warrantless video surveillance it is even more insidious than that. Read up on Amazon Sidewalk. Amazon is trying to grow its Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh network. The exact details of how it works are of course proprietary and black box. But what we do know is it can amount to a side network that isn’t transparent to the actual owner of the device, nor can you manage or block any of the traffic at your router (its a discrete network). You can opt your devices out manually, which I would recommend doing if you actually use any Ring or Echo products.
The truth is there is little in terms of a use case that directly benefits the user.
Look at the MKBHD review of the new iPhone and he summarizes it pretty accurately when talking about all their super fancy backend bullshit going into the photo software to result in “slightly better pictures” and he wasn’t even 100% sure about that part.
Apples Neural Engine delivered marginal value to the phones actual user and meanwhile the tech company harnessed that power mostly to do client-side scanning. They claimed to have ceased that effort but once again, blackbox proprietary software, so it isn’t transparent to the user.
My contention is that at this point the big tech companies are developing features to benefit their business model, not deliver features to the users. The marketing and surveillance state grows, because that is the real business that these companies are in. Most of the AI gains we hear about benefit them directly but not us.
Now that they’ve shown their proof of concept works and they can falsely imprison people on bogus charges and use them as bargaining chips to free their actual criminals, they will be doing this a lot more.