Short of suing me for it (after finding out who I am and making sure I own the games), how would they do that for non-DRM games whose installer lives on my hard drive and that I can install whenever I want, wherever I want?

Is the “everything is a rental and you use it on sufferance until we say so” bullshit so ingrained now that people are no longer able to conceive of other ways for things to work?

More than one group of custodians, ideally with conflicting interests, watching one another? Essentially some system of checks and balances?

Sadly, this was a thing even before the web, let alone social media. There’s always been people for whom the vacations didn’t even “happen” unless they get to go on incessantly about them when they come back, ideally subjecting you to two hours of photos that mean very little to you. They derive little enjoyment from actually being there, they take it from showing it others…

For some people life is not worth living without external validation. Sad.

1643 day streak here, and it still looks like it’s going to die on me any second now. I guess it was just an icon change (but… why?!)

At this stage, apart from my medication, I worry the most about my devices and chargers. Everything else, from toiletries to clothes I can buy if it turns out I forgot it and really need it. That lowered my stress with packing significantly (and I am not forgetting more things because of it).

Alan Dix’s book (aptly named “Human Computer Interaction”) is quite good, even if somewhat old by now. HCI is an actual academic discipline with, yes, tons of theoretical and empirical results that govern what a good UI should be. Many of which are indeed grounded in psychology, others in physiology, etc (what we call Human Factors). There is a whole special interest group of the ACM just about it: SIGCHI.

Do not confuse this with fashion/trends/taste. These change, resulting in widely different possible flavors of UI over the years. But the underlying principles are the same.

Another thing to remember is that the fact that Apple, Google, or someone else implemented an UI in a certain way doesn’t mean they are following best practices and guidelines. Novelty sells, even if at the end of the day it does a worse job of things…

Edit: added link to SIGCHI

This is actually a thing. When learning calligraphy, it was one of the exercises we did. If you have good enough control of your hand and pen, then all strokes should be the same length, slanted the same way, and separated by the same spacing. When you manage this apparent “unreadable” thing, it means you nailed it!

The example below comes from this site (not mine)

I wish that would work. My Epson was always on and the ink kept drying. After it clogged the print head once too many times and I could not fix that in less than 10min, I just gave up on the piece of crap. I now go to a print shop to print what I need which, admittedly, nowadays is just a couple of times a year.

Nice try, Guybrush!

Neat! I’ve always been a fan of roguelikes!

#Rogule 2024-3-25 🧝 4xp ⛩ 93 👣 streak: 1 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜ ⚔ 🐺🐗🧛 🌰🌰 🍄

https://rogule.com

Still, El Niño happens cyclically every few years, and this dataset spans decades. There are no other years in there similar to 2023….

This takes many forms. A recurrent one is for the take place right out of college (or while still in it!), taking advantage of the naïveté of those just entering the job market, and often as a precondition to access any kind of paid job some months later. The employer gets free qualified labor, the intern eat lots of ramen… families put up with it as a natural extension of paying for college, for a few more months… it’s exploitation pure and simple.

A “joke” I’ve heard several times over the years (not recently, though) summarizes the level of assholery that’s going on (warning: some may find this offensive)

I guess someone should come up with an idea for config.sys next!

One more, then!

I’m in the same boat. Will be replacing my 12 Pro, which will go to my wife, hers to my kid. We get about 10 years out of each phone, by using them like this. The improvements I get for upgrading only after three years are very significant!

Your body, as a warm-blooded animal, tries to keep a constant temperature (around 98°F or 37°C). Thing is, the body is constantly producing more heat (your metabolism at work…) and needs to get rid of the excess. If the air around you is at the same temperature as you are, it is very hard for heat exchange to take place (for you to get cooler as the air gets hotter) and, thus, you overheat a bit and feel warm.

This is why wind makes you feel cooler: it moves the heated air away from your body and brings in new, cooler air, making the exchange more efficient. Evaporation takes heat away as well, hence we sweat to col ourselves down.

I wasn’t arguing for Firefox or FOSS. It just seems to me that if your selling point is trust and privacy (at least it is what I see people citing as Brave’s Big Thing), you should be as transparent and irreproachable in that regard as possible. Having said this, of course, good features can be enough for the trade-off to be worth it (this is true of pretty much every piece of software out there, Chrome included), depending t each user finds more important.

Finally. Every time I go on a trip and pack a USB-C charger for my iPad, my laptop, my headphones, and have to bring an additional lightning one just for my phone drives me (slightly) crazy.

That you can is besides the point. You shouldn’t need to. If the first thing I need to think about after installing it is “well, let’s see what garbage is in here that I need to turn off”, then any trust I would have for it has already gone out the window. Especially important odor a browser where that is kind of the main differentiating aspect.

That’s fine: I wasn’t young back then either 😛