Pikachu is meant to be a mouse though, kinda not very fitting.

The UK government decided in 2022 not to amend the Gambling Act 2005 to include loot boxes, saying no evidence showed a “causative link” to harms.

Since when has that been something that stopped the UK government from trying to regulate technology and curtail its citizens’ digital freedoms?

2006: user generated content is a revolution! We are now exchanging information and ideas directly with each other without needing information gatekeepers like traditional media or paid advertisers or anything like that! The future is gonna be a utopia where the powerful will be challenged at every turn!

2026: a significant percentage of “user generated content” is generated either by AI or people who are being paid to do so for commercial or political reasons… I suppose those are “users” too…

why, humanity, why??? ;____;

Yes, but not mainline Pokémon games.

Never in my life have I been as excited about a video game release as I was in 2004 for Pokémon FRLG.

Now I haven’t touched them in a long time and have no idea why anyone might be excited about games we already know everything about. But then again there are children out there who are the same age as I was in 2004 and they might never have played FRLG on the GBA.

TBF these are games that were originally released with separate cartridges for each language, so this isn’t an especially surprising thing.

I honestly do not understand why anyone would ever for any reason submit AI-generated code to any FOSS project.

What’s the motivation behind that kind of behavior? What do people get out of it?

What would you replace the taskbar with?

In GTA 5, get on a train, get a wanted level, try to keep the wanted level for an entire round-trip around the map, then try to escape the wanted level, all while staying on the train and surviving.

(it’s been a few years since I tried this and don’t remember if those were the exact rules, but they were something like this)

It reminds me more of the AWS outage last month.

It’s probably not half of the Internet, but the fact that it’s so many very visible sites should be a warning sign to everyone that the Internet is nowadays too reliant on a few points of failure (which can cause other problems, e.g. censorship).

When I read things like this, I struggle to understand the economic logic behind it.

How much money does Microsoft really expect to get from more people using Edge instead of Chrome? I mean, both of them are provided free of charge anyway. Does the control over the default search engine or the advertising technology or something like that really bring them more money than these “rewards” cost?

I don’t think there’s much difference. Any standard USB gamepad should work equally fine. I find the Xbox layout more comfortable than the PlayStation one, but this may be different for different people.

everything is fucking videos now

did you know that the more inappropriate the place you put the word “fucking” in is, the more seriously people will take your comments? :D

In Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, the NPC who asks “where are you from” and we get the options “yes” and “no”.

(He has not heard of yes town, nor does he believe we don’t come from anywhere at all.)

When I regularly played Need for Speed: Most Wanted (the old one from the 2000s), I often intentionally didn’t escape the cops at low wanted levels in order to get to higher wanted levels. Not sure this counts because it’s basically what you have to do if you want to have fun in this game…

Recently I’ve been playing a lot of EA FC 25, and when I’m already clearly winning (or losing), I usually commit a lot of fouls just because I can.

Parties choose whom to nominate as ministers.

I’m not a voter in Denmark and not familiar with Danish politics; this kind of thing would certainly cause me to vote for a different party.

apparently nominally a member of a social-democratic party

When I was younger, I believed that social-democratic parties were better than conservative ones on matters of civil liberties. I stand corrected on that.

Switzerland has a comparable number of guns as we do, and the last mass shooting they had was 23 years ago

so does he believe that Swiss people do not play video games, or what

Yeah I mean why would you let young people have fun or anything like that? If they are constantly bored, they will certainly be happier. Or something…

I don’t see any indication that it’s the games’ developers that are doing this.

Last one must have been GTA 4 (I’ve meanwhile bought this on Steam so I can play it without) or Crazy Taxi (came with a cereal box in my childhood).

This has been a thing since at least 2010 when it happened to WikiLeaks.

see also: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech

Unciv, not Uniciv. For search result purposes do you want to fix that typo?

And was mocked where it was first posted too I’m pretty sure.

The article missed that SuperTuxKart has a mode that is somewhat similar to Rocket League.

“openly licensed” material is still copyrighted though

Also: copying is not theft, stealing a thing leaves one less left, copying it makes one thing more, that’s what copying’s for… 🎶 🎵

at least actually post it to [email protected] if you leave a comment like that…

works for me

How old is “old” for this purpose?

It does? Rich people or companies they own might want to produce things that infringe on patents too; not obvious that this has anything to do with “rich people” one way or the other.

I think you can even do it in Organic Maps itself? In OsmAnd definitely.

OpenStreetMap data is exactly as good as volunteers made it.

I participated in a discussion similar to this recently here on the German-language community: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/28281369/15510510

Topics that were raised there by various people, some by me (read the full discussion if you can read German):

• an “algorithm” is really just a way of manipulating data, it’s meaningless to say you are banning “algorithms” because all software is based on “algorithms”, even reverse-chronological sorting of things you’re subscribed to is an algorithm
• algorithms are mainly intended to keep people on the platform for as long as possible (but I raised the issue that I actually found old web forums more engaging than today’s Facebook)
• how do you define “an algorithm” legally? I suggested a definition based on transparency and objectivity, others raised the issue that this would mean that misinformation could be easily manipulated to be shown at the top, and that if you require “transparency”, the platforms will just disclose how their algorithms work instead of abolishing them

One important aspect that nobody raised in that discussion is that moderation is different from censorship.

yes, gemeinnützig = serving the public benefit (literally approximately: gemein = common, nützig = useful, i.e. useful to the common good)

GmbH is just the (almost literal) translation of LLC.

wat

gGmbH = gemeinnützige Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung = limited liability company serving the public benefit

At least on mine, there’s an “About” link on the bottom left side on the web interface, click that and scroll to the bottom where you’ll get a list of blocked servers, then just uncollapse that and ctrl+f for “threads.net”.