Thalestr

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.

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.

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.

Well, most people already use Chrome.

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.

• 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.

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.

Honestly? As I get older and as the tech industry chokes itself to death in pursuit of infinite profit, I find myself doing more and more things away from the computer or the internet at the very least. Spending time outside doing stuff, exercising, reading books, partaking in art or other creative pursuits, having pets, etc. I have really dialed back my social media involvement and I hardly ever use my phone now.

The internet is absolute garbage now. It’s a completely unregulated trash fire that is only getting hotter as more gasoline gets dumped on it. The internet I grew up with, the internet of seemingly endless possibility and unfathomable amounts of information, is long gone. Search results (from any engine) are all SEO trash, websites are just AI-generated garbage covered in ads, and every app or service is a subscription that promises to suck even more money out of my bank account for basic services. Not to mention that all of the above will also monitor every single bit of my activity and sell it to third party buyers. If tech is just going to exist to be an ad-delivery platform then I can do without it. People did for decades, centuries, and we can too.

This bubble is going to pop eventually. It not might be today or tomorrow, but it is going to happen. This is not sustainable.