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Mastodon is great if you want a social media site that’ll have people shout at you for not putting a Content Warning on a post about you eating a ham sandwich.
Mastodon is great if you want a social media site that’ll have people shout at you for not putting a Content Warning on a post about you eating a ham sandwich.
I guess that advertising has been around for 100s of years. For the vast majority of history it’s been something people accept - nobody could avoid posters on the street, adverts in store windows and later it was adverts on the radio, in the cinema, then ads on TV… It’s only incredibly recently that people have had even the possibility of blocking ads, and even then it’s only a small subset of online adverts that can be blocked. Most ads (TV, radio, billboards, print…) are just as unavoidable and unblockqble as before.
Which basically means advertising has been part of people’s lives since the day all of us were born. Mostly folks just accept it, like we accept we have to spent 2 minutes every single morning brushing our teeth even though we wish there was a better way.
It’s just one of those tradeoffs. You can avoid that 2min every day but your life would be massively inconvenienced as a result (people would avoid you and you’d be in pain every day), and you can avoid ads by not using the internet, but life is inconvenienced as a result.
Facebook are an advertising platform. They only offer a paid tier because they now legally have to. They don’t really want you to take the paid tier, they want you to explicitly opt in to the ad-supported ‘free’ one. - because by specifically agreeing to "I want the free Facebook with ads’ option it means you’re actively choosing to be served ads, which is what all the recent lawsuits have been about - users giving explicit consent to be targeted for advertising.
Or alternatively not taking the mobile operators side - being able to charge £10000 data costs to stream a couple of football matches worth of data shouldn’t be allowed.
In what possible way does that price come anywhere close to the costs of the providers in servicing that data?
Everything should be pirated, never use any Google or Microsoft service, use an email server you’ve built yourself, only get your social media access through obscure Mastodon servers, write your code in assembly language, only eat food you’ve caught or grown yourself, avoid the rental market by just building a hut in the woods.
Ah interesting option, thanks! I’ve occasionally watched a few speedruns of it but I didn’t realise there’s whole first time playthroughs.
That’s not really a problem with the game, but with your expectations. If I watch the film Alien expecting a comedy but it’s actually a horror I wouldn’t complain the film is overrated and not funny.
A shame, but that’s cool. Not every game works for everyone. I can’t stand the Dark Souls games and it seems I’m in a minority on that one.
Outer Wilds is so good. A perfect game for Switch. And the DLC included too, which was also superb.
Pity they can’t release a way to erase the game from my memory so I can play it afresh. Half the point of the game (and DLC) is just figuring out what the game is. Because I already know what to do I’d just complete it in about 10 minutes so it’s sadly not worth me picking it up again.
But anyone who hasn’t played it, please give it a go. It’s just wonderful.
An hour of grinding - that they will also sell you powerups to help you skip that grind.
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Snowrunner. A great combination of both chilled-out & stressful, driving massive diesel trucks at 5mph through woods and rivers delivering logs or girders.
The fact there’s no big story and almost zero dialog, just assignments and map markers mean it’s a superb ‘podcast’ game - something you can put it on while you listen to some podcasts / audiobooks.
Not that the game is boring or just a distraction. It’s incredibly satisfying finding the best way to navigate through a horrendous woodland or swamp and get all your cargo through safely.
Plus, it has some of the best landscape physics out there. Rushing water really feels accurate. Mud paths get distorted so that it’s harder to get through on your way back than before you churned it all up.
A great game. 100s of hours I’ve sunk into that thing.
Jonathan Blow can fit an awful lot of antivax, conspiracy theories and transphobic ranting into a 15hr commentary.
The last election was in 2006. 17 years ago. The median age of people there is only 20. Most of those people didn’t vote for anyone, let alone Hamas. And even those that did vote, Hamas got less than 50% of the vote.
Also, nice use of ableist slurs there. Is that really appropriate?
But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.
Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.
It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.
Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
But people advertise with Google precisely because they know the ads will be targeted at relevent people. If Google just sell loads of ad slots that just show to random users then that’s just a waste of money. If I’m selling motorbike helmets I don’t want to waste my money having Google show those ads to 60 year old men who only travel by bus or golfers or people who use wheelchairs.
Google won’t just sell loads of ads here, they’ll totally change their business model to something closer to the targetting approach.
Lens has been one of the most impressive bits of Google tech for years, but it still flies under the radar. I guess they’re just going to label it ‘AI’ now to get people to pay attention to it.
I thought PS5 / XBOX versions were delayed to 2024, no?
Thanks, but I can’t install into a Roku, which is the main TV I’d be using.
Honestly, I’m so jaded with this government that I just assume anything they announce is either just a disraction away from whatever ghastly thing they’re really doing or it’s some culturewar bait to stir up trouble.