Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.

A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.

I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn’t tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.

I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files…it was not a good time.

For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn’t pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone’s battery, they didn’t shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that were definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.

Just use smplayer as the frontend for mpv and you’re all set.

Had a similar experience, but it was a video of a guy who got run over by a truck, or in more accurate terms…smushed into its radiator. There was not a lot left that could be recognized as a normal human body, but he was still alive and crying for help.

I’ll also never forget that, fucking traumatizing thing. I believe the Nokia phone camera quality which was usual back then made it even worse, because there were missing details you couldn’t see, only imagine.

That was the first thing I learned when training for that job. They really drilled that into all of us.

I see more people in my profession (programming) doing the four-day work week, but we’re still in an extreme minority. Outside of this field, it’s even worse. The liberal and conservative parties are actively pushing against it. Almost every day there’s an article where some rich CEO whines about young people being lazy. Added to that: Our aging population and a general lack of workers paired with aggressive anti-immigration politics - they also don’t help this cause.

So yeah, more people are doing it (especially in IT), which makes me hopeful. But I still don’t see it getting rolled out in a big fashion anytime soon, unfortunately. Especially because salary levels in Germany are already very low and not everyone can afford the loss of pay switching to a four-day work week.

I just know I’ll never go back. The amount of energy I gained by just having a day more to myself per week is extraordinary.

Yes, but it’s actually an “It’s Thursday!” feeling.

The four day work week is amazing.

I wonder how The Unknown will fit into this.

The nightmare PS2 dirty disc screen

To be fair, PS2’s are so damn rock-solid new generations can experience this for many years to come. They just gotta get one.

There’s a curated list of no-bullshit mobile games which are real fun, without any microtransactions: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/

Mobile Gaming can be fun. :)

Bring back Asbestos!

Well I got incredibly lucky so I have a firstname@lastname.de address. Why would I ever give that up? 🥰

It’s quite frightening to see how fast these AI models have improved during the last few years. You can still spot errors in the videos, but how long will it take until you can’t do that anymore?

It sounds terrifying to not know what’s real or not anymore. And also, these videos will put a lot of people out of jobs, especially in the creative industry. Who needs someone following a car with a drone anymore, when you can just generate that footage on the fly?

Even current German events are replicating the rise of Nazi Germany. But many people are too blind to see…

German finance minister noises intensify

What the article doesn’t mention (or I haven’t seen it when I skimmed through it):

• This is only a pilot project for half a year, after that it’s probably back to the grind, unless the company decides otherwise
• Only 45 companies are testing it and around half of them are very small (10-49 employees). So this is not the big thing this article is suggesting.
• Craftsmanship and industry only make up for 6% of the companies doing this test. The biggest labour shortage is currently in these areas, so this is a slap in the face to young workers, because it implies that companies in these areas still don’t care about better working conditions, like they’ve done for the past few decades.

At least they’re doing one thing right this time: They reduced the amount of hours to 80%. So if you’ve worked 40 hours a week before, you’re now doing only 32 hours. This is a real four-day-workweek, which honestly surprised me. Mostly, companies try to just shove the same amount of work into four days, which is really stressful.

Source

From personal experience, most companies are not adopting the four-day-workweek out of principle, especially when older people are running them. I have the privilege of a 32h week with Fridays off, but I’m also working at a very young and very small company. It’s not the norm and we still have a long way to go.

What also doesn’t help is that major conservative parties, our finance minister and bosses of big companies and banks are openly against it. When you go into mainstream media, there’s a new article almost every day telling young people to start sweating because they’re “ruining our economy”.

That won’t go away that easily.

PHP is pretty cool if you know what you’re doing and use its modern, object-oriented features. It’s also very easy to write horrendous spaghetti code with it, which is what most people sadly do and give it a bad rap.

For some reason I thought the Safari engine was proprietary, but you’re right, you totally can.

However, you need to have the specific Webkit version on your system that’s also used on the iOS release where the bug is present. Which can be a real pain to manage and I imagine compiling this engine will take quite a while.

Still better than buying unnecessary, overpriced hardware, though! I will for sure check this out soon.

only WebKit is truly optimized and safe for iPhone users

So that’s why it interprets certain standards differently than all other engines. Must be the security. The amount of rendering errors I have to debug just for iOS is annoying. Especially, since you need a MacBook AND an iPhone to debug this bad engine properly, so either me or my employer needs to buy into their ecosystem.

Exactly. “Apple is forced to allow” would be a much more legit headline.

But it’s easier to go to the big media outlets and tell the workers “We have to be prepared to work harder and harder again” and “You also have to sweat”, like the bosses of the biggest German bank, Bosch and our finance minister did.

(source)

I believe the liberals are really afraid of a wave of people realizing that working less for the same amount of money is an option. When the train drivers get their 35 hour work week without any pay cuts, there will be more people also taking a liking to that idea. Worst nightmare of the upper class.