Khrux

Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.

When a medium’s shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.

It’s not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don’t miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it’s particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it’s false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.

Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that’s admirable.

I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.

And sometimes just super plain ones. I remember getting my favourite Skyrim potion texture mod from there specifically.

That’s the real thing I wasn’t ready to admit until you said it. I don’t want a screwdriver because it’s less impressive to see. People will look at me and make the mistake of thinking they couldn’t do it, but when it felt like LEGO, people were more likely to be interested.

I’d really really like a phone with cameras that are flush with the back of the case, and don’t care whatsoever how thin my phone is once it’s under 1cm.

It feels like the entire ethos of smartphone design (led by apple) had sleek minimal design as it’s guiding light, but keeps adding exceptions. As much as I enjoy a versatile, bulky laptop and photography camera, I really enjoy the style of a smartphone being a piece of glass in my pocket.

I’d have preferred a click lock of sorts, because in the cases I’m wanting to swap my battery, I’m probably on the move with no access to power / charging, such as hiking, coach rides, camping etc.

Currently I’m pretty happy with a portable charger but I’d much rather have one or two fully charged batteries, both for the speed of getting back to full charge and reducing the speed of battery degradation.

I’m already a big fan of having a minimalist daily carry, I have my phones with my bank cards on it, my house keys and maybe my camera or water bottle, and that’s all. If be happy to shove a few spare batteries in a little case when I know I’ll be out the house for some time, but a screwdriver is something I’d prefer to not have to carry every day.

I’m actually quite fond of a large screen, but it’s not enough of a selling point for me to not go for this as my next phone. I have large enough hands that I don’t struggle with reach on a large phone, so the main drawback is the additional battery power. But the fairphone has a swappable battery anyway, so that issue is more or less nullified.

My pet peeve is the front camera, I cannot wrap my head around the lunacy of having a large dead spot on the front of the phone, to the point I’d rather have a phone with no front facing camera than a big dead spot. People throw out screens for less.

Fairphone is almost the ideal phone for me, except this, and although I can probably remove the camera module, I can’t swap the screen for one without the dead patch.

Also worth addressing that people are using large language models exactly because the ad driven web was enshitified enough that people clambered for this new option.

There will be at least one LLM that’s good for web searching and doesn’t give in to advertising, and in the meantime, we’ll just need to keep jumping ship whenever one becomes awful, as we did with the old web.

I have a surprisingly forgiving opinion on AI. There are many cases that I think it’s purpose is stupid or defeats the point but it has the potential to cause such a large break to employability and capitalism in general that it has it’s upsides.

People are right to take issue with the fact that it is causing people to lose their jobs or be unemployable by no fault of their own, but underlying that issue is the fact that society shouldn’t function on the employment being necessary (which I am aware is an opinion).

Even in its absurd energy and water usage, this is largely an issue with how we currently get our energy and water. Having our technocrats suddenly more invested in new and better forms of energy, even just for powering AI has the potential to be a path to better clean energy options.

AI is fundamentally a neutral tool, but as much as it may be sued for evil, it may accelerate flawed economic and environmental systems to a breaking point where a redesign of those structures will be required, which could be the greatest opportunity to implement better structures that we’ve had since the industrial revolution.

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It it to wait 30 mins then do it every 10, and pop it in startup, those were the days.

The other was Free_Cupholder.EXE. I miss disk drives for this reason more than for actual use.

This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.

If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.

But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.

To be fair, modern AI voices sound pretty real. Making it artificial would have been a tell in it’s own right.

Microsoft will definitely have the power to bulldoze all other things named copilot, like Facebook did to meta. I’m still not over AI being a lame word now. I miss the time when it felt sci-fi and not like a corporate buzzword.

The most common cheat is probably gaining money or experience, but there have always been pretty extensive mod menus for GTA Online with tools from invincibility to making your vehicles rainbow, to randomly causing other players to explode or setting hundreds of muggers on them.

In 2015ish, I used to cheat, other than getting rich, all I was interested in doing was making an indestructible chrome bus with smoke trails that I’d drive around picking up players in, to teleport us all to North Yankton and back like a tour guide.

I loathe their lootbox system but I’d say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I’d put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.

I don’t think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.

I agree that no games are uncrackable in theory, but to my understanding (from about two years to two months ago at least), there were only two people able to crack new denuvo games due to how intensely complex the task is. One of those people only cracks football games and the other is EMPRESS, who from what I’ve seen glancing into the scene, is one crazy lady.

Although modern denuvo may technically be crackable, but while it’s so difficult that only a handful of people have the skill to do it and takes hundreds of hours of work per game, for all intents and purposes, it may as well be uncrackable.

The game I always think of checking out is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, just to find it hasn’t been cracked.

I know assassin’s creed is a bit of a crap franchise but I have a love / hate relationship with the game and think mirage looks made for me. Every few months since release I’ve looked up it’s crack status and not just has it not been cracked but generally the comments around it are that it’s from the new era of uncrackable games.

I don’t play many AAA games but I’m forever gutted that the fight to make them able to be pirated is a losing battle. I want to pay for my indie games but on occasion I look online at the crack status of AAA games from oecen 2-3 years ago and they’re still not playable.

It creates a weird dichotomy where people who pirate or at least don’t buy expensive games don’t take part in the mainstream gaming conversation at all, which is totally different from the rest of pirated media.

I don’t want to throw the word enshitiffication around, especially when I’m not sure if I can spell it, but the platforms that people jump ship to when that happens are probably especially vulnerable to people jumping ship again.

I can’t imagine Mozilla effectively marketing Firefox as anything but the bullshit free browser, and when they lose that, people will just move to the next actual bullshit free option.