Why the hell would they add the DRM after release when the game is already cracked before the DRM was added? I can never understand this logic.

5000 per day?! That's insane. I feel like I get bombarded with notifications, so I checked how many I got today. Exactly 69.

Forza Horizon 4 did this but worse. It would be an unskippable 2 minute video ad ignoring your volume settings. It only played 5 times in my 45 hours of gameplay but it was so damn unacceptable that it's reminding me to give that game a negative review.

Forza Horizon 5 does not do this. Get that game or something else instead.

Almost anything Google. I have an Android because I hate the restrictions of iOS, but forcing me to sell my location to Google if I want to know where I am (even in an open source app because location is a system thing).

That's 149KW (200hp) on that tiny car? That sounds like a hoot to drive

How is this even legal? So now suddenly every chromium extension has to go through a play store style review? How is Google entitled to do this on their competitor's browsers?

Kuusi palaa

Guess which meaning this one is. Hint: Look at my username

I have a crazy idea for Epic. Instead of paying a fortune for exclusives, leverage the lower 12% cut and have game publishers sell for less (so that the publisher makes the same amount on Steam and Epic)

In my opinion, no. At least not under the reins of Google.

Android 11 added scoped storage, severely limiting file access from apps, although app developers have found ways to work with it.

Android 12 did a lot of UI redesigning, including the horrible Internet toggle and it just seemed like there is way too much whitespace.

Android 13 did something right: Made you confirm if you want notifications from apps. IDK why it took this long for such a basic feature even iOS had for forever.

Android 14... Nothing really useful, but they are limiting sideloading of old apps that tend to be super efficient on storage, memory, and CPU. It's a defeat in the ongoing war between Google and sideloading. They also are trying to force the volume down when it's too high for too long, even when it's paired with a Bluetooth device at low volume, another braindead move with possibly good intentions but terrible execution.

With other OEMs (Samsung, BBK, Xiaomi, etc), they still sometimes add useful stuff, but I have a Motorola, so I don't have much of an opinion on the extra stuff.

Google is saving their actually innovative and useful features for the Pixel line of phones. Many of these features are really software that Google arbitrarily locks to the Pixel.

And many of the Google stuff has just been getting worse and worse, they've been getting more and more pushy on me when I do something they don't like (disable location, for example). Google likes the idea of trying to make Android more like iOS and restrict user freedom. This is why Android market share is declining in the US: If you want iOS, buy an iPhone.

Bug reports and error logs. Helps support the development of the software without it feeling like my data is sold for money unnecessarily.

I have the 2022 version of this phone, and it's great value for money in the USA. Adequate performance, lots of internal storage, headphone jack, MicroSD slot, and good battery life. I didn't buy it for the (crappy) stylus, I bought it for the good value for money.

The 2023 version most notably updates the SoC from SD695 to SD6g1, which is about 15-20% faster and more efficient. It also adds stereo speakers, which is nice. It seems like everything else is only a marginal change or the same from last year.

It is currently overhyped and so much of it just seems to be copying the same 3 generative AI tools into as many places as possible. This won't work out because it is expensive to run the AI models. I can't believe nobody talks about this cost.

Where AI shines is when something new is done with it, or there is a significant improvement in some way to an existing model (more powerful or runs on lower end chips, for example).

Biggest offenders: MS teams on desktop. And even more so Epic Games store. Just ridiculously slow and laggy even on strong (Ryzen 9 5900HX, 32GB RAM, NVMe gen3 SSD) hardware. They almost take more time to open than Windows 11 (which is also slower thsn it should be). Buggy too.

Software that got much slower with a recent update:

1. Steam. Seriously, it takes almost as much time to open ever since the last UI change as the Epic Games Store. At least it's smooth once it's opened, but I seriously want an alternative to launch my steam games.

2. Firefox, specifically to open PDFs. There's now a 5-second delay when opening any PDF, even a tiny one. It's really frustrating honestly. It takes 90% of the time to open a 1 page PDF than to open a 10 page PDF.

3. Windows file explorer. On battery on my gaming laptop, there's a 1-2 second delay when I click anything on this app. Constantly seeing "working on it". The Windows 10 file explorer was much faster. And the search is atrocious, use Everything by VoidTools instead.

4. Some third party map apps on my Android phone used for public transportation start becoming really unresponsive after 10 seconds. It freezes my entire phone. This did not happen a couple months ago, and it really would've made getting around the city much harder if it wasn't for the motorcycle I recently bought.

The increasing tech-ification of (all) cars played a role in reducing how much I want a car. Now I'm yearning for the simplicity and visceral feel of a motorcycle, and I will give in to these temptations soon.

I get this feeling, but with iOS. Oh, I want to save a picture I found on the internet and message it. It's incredibly unintuitive to me and I feel like a grandma, even though on any other platform it would be easy.

My 2nd monitor. It's some 24" curved 165Hz 1080p monitor that I bought from a guy at my university for $105. While not the best for gaming (noticable ghosting), it's been incredibly helpful for work as it gets more complicated in university. The extra screen real estate lets me fit so much more without needing to alt tab or click on another window.

I think it should be a flat number of years like 20 years, giving the author plenty of time to exclusively control his IP and then afterwards they can still profit because they can still make things from the same IP and sell them to people knowing that they were the founder of the IP.

I feel like the death of the author clause gives a perverse incentive to murder the author so that their IP becomes public domain sooner.

This is my biggest concern about video games when I become a parent. My parents were far more concerned about "violence," but I'd rather have a 10yo child play doom than candy crush. One might initially look more dangerous to the untrained eye, but looks can be deceiving.

This is the true reason why I don't have YouTube premium. This is quite an awful experience for a supposedly premium subscription. Why pay for premium if the experience is better using free methods?

Please corporations, treat paying subscribers well.

This is a good feature if and only if there is an official way to turn it off. I do like that it might actually give you info on how loud it is, although I'm not sure how well that'll work. This can't possibly work as intended on all sound outputs, as some get much louder than others.

The thing that did it for me was the updated privacy policy scandal about how they could now store all the contents of voice recordings. Now they know exactly where I live, how much I make, everything. Never paying for Nitro again, and my activity there plummeted.

Kdenlive (my video editor, already donate them $40/yr)

Krita (image editing program I occasionally use)

Linux Lite (my first distro)

Lemmy (obvious)

uBlock origin (obvious)

Internet archive (to preserve what we had)

EFF (to fight against corporations trying to bend the laws in their favor)

Some Apps I've used from F-droid

On storage, the markup is about 2000%.

And on RAM if we compare to DDR5 (not totally fair because of how Apple's unified memory works), it's about 800% marked up.

That means Microsoft 365 is an acid. Because avoiding acids is how you stay basic.

Quit work and take lighter loads in school.

Buy a nice house in Maine right on the water.

Buy a supercar, and all the motorcycles I could ever want.

Go on crazy adventures like an Appalachian trail thru-hike.

All this would be less than 10% of my yearly income. The other 90% would go to charity, helping the homeless and bolstering free and open source software.

Stop forcing updates on the lower level stuff that forces people to spend billions on maintaining code. This way, we could return to a world where you can just buy software and use it for years without some update borking it.

Also outlawing financially motivated (i.e. greedy) retroactive ToS changes.

Googology. The "study" of ridiculously large numbers. It's a rabbit hole of recursion and mathematics that starts with stuff like googolplex (10^10^100) and never really ends.

I definitely left. I still occasionally lurk on Reddit but I never post or vote anymore. Real shame, because I really want to share my Factorio Bob's+Angels (much harder and more complicated mod of Factorio) victory on r/factorio, but I won't because of Spez's actions.

1. Perhaps 2024 will be the year of the girlfriend

2. Making money over the summer and upgrading to a faster motorcycle

I didn't get this pop-up before I upgraded to Android 13, and I have a Motorola phone that runs close to stock Android. So that's why I thought this was a Google thing.

Mostly the ad removal options or pro versions of some apps.

I hate the dumbed down battling system. Why can't CP be a function of level and stats found in a regular pokemon game instead of one number to rule them all, and have the battles be like the mainline games?

With how locked down mobile is compared to desktop I think it's a good thing to start with mobile

I'm planning to live life a little and buy a motorcycle soon. I've always wanted to drive a motorcycle so this keeps me motivated.

Most of the time, I view piracy as a last resort. I'll try to legally obtain it, but there are circumstances when I do sail the seas:

1. Textbooks. This is a all around greedy industry preying on poor college students like me that barely pays the actual authors. They don't deserve my money, and I don't have much of it anyways.

2. Video games/books I already own. I already paid for it, so it's justifies to me.

3. Old video games that don't have a real platform that I emulate. I understand that I shouldn't pirate a 2021 video game, but a 2001 video game that I can't legally buy on PC/phone is a different matter.

4. Aforementioned skimming through books. I might buy it after doing that.

5. Music. Why? Half the stuff I listen to isn't even on Spotify or other streaming platforms. Additionally, I can manage my own library, listen offline without having to follow the whims of a streaming app, and even change the pitch and speed of the music!

14

I see absolutely insane numbers on Google docs, 10000+ blocked. My total per year is now over 5 million. A lot more intense than a few years ago, where it took multiple years to reach 3 million.

Most of the time, it's not the ads that bother me. Instead, it's the sale of my personal info, autoplaying videos, and possible risk of malware that bothers me if I turn my ad-blocker off. I've tried several times to find a "fair" ad-blocker.

Forza Horizon 5. I like to just drive around the map for a while, and maybe do a race or two, until I inevitably get bored after an hour or so. Repeat every week.

(until I bought a real life motorcycle to scratch that itch, and no, I'm not racing or being dangerous on my motorcycle)

FX File Explorer. Super fast, feature-rich, and customizable, free with no ads and tracking.