The GPU of the series S is simply a lot worse, socutting quality by a bit won’t cut it. I also suspect that since they always quote the split screen as problem, it might be about the number of textures to be loaded in when the game is kind of running twice, not the quality.

Personally I don’t mind, but I find it problematic mostly because not everyone can be around dogs, be it because of allergies or past experiences.

A quick search doesn’t find it in either the Canada or United States versions, for example. I wonder if that’s due to better consumer protection laws in some jurisdictions than others.

Now that I think about it, it might not even be consumer protection but instead a GDPR issue. I’m in Europe. Users becoming inactive can actually force companies to delete their data. Ubisoft might not have any other choice than to completely delete inactive users and of course they’ll do what is best for them, not for the inactive users.

They indeed just “license” the games to us:

The Services and Content are licensed to you, not sold. This means we grant you a personal, limited, non-transferable and revocable right and license to use the Services and access the Content, for your entertainment, non-commercial use, subject to your compliance with these Terms.

For termination, it’s not any reason but a lot of reasons, including the here discussed:

for any other reason in relation to your actions in or outside of the Services; upon notification, where your Account has been inactive for more than six months.

The first one opens a lot of options for them to find a reason. None of those would trigger any reimbursement, though.

Consequences of the Termination/Suspension of an Account.

You cannot use the Services and Content anymore.
In the event of termination of your Account or of Service(s) associated with your Account, no credit (such as for unused Services, unused subscription period, unused points or Ubisoft Virtual Currency) will be credited to you or converted into cash or any other form of reimbursement.

Source

I didn’t want to say that Twitters execution of it is perfect, it’s just why Elon comes up with all these seemingly insane ideas. He has a huge userbase that won’t leave, he had advertisers who he thought wouldn’t want to leave and now he’s trying to squeeze. The problem is that he obviously didn’t have his grasp as tightly around the advertisers as he thought, which is why step 3 of Enshittitication entirely fails, at least from what is known to us. The idea is to keep everyone kind of hostage while you squeeze and while it seems to work with a huge chunk of the userbase, a bigger portion of the advertisers simply move on.

Putting a name on a century-old concept isn’t the worst idea because now we can easily refer to it when it happens once again. And yes, the old age of that problem is why I consider it a bit of a rabit-hole. It’s not just something Twitter does now or that tech companies do now because they copy from each other. It’s a quite old concept you’ll hear about again and again and can read up on quite a bit, if you really are interested into more than the basic concept or why companies keep trying even though the outcome does not always see positive (from an outside, users perspective).

Look up enshittitication, it’s an interesting rabbit hole.

Basically, the idea is that there is a path companies go along where they first please users to build a user base, once you are bound to a platform and don’t want to leave (because “everyone” is there) they instead start to shift towards pleasing advertisers until they also feel trapped (because “everyone” advertises there). The final move is trying to squeeze as much as possible out of all these trapped people and companies. It’s not just social media, although this of course makes it most obvious at least for a trapped user base. But this also applies for any other big thing that “evryone” uses.

This story gives me some Junji Ito vibes. shudders

I’m not really surprised, I’d actually assume that sexy John Oliver and the other protests created a lot of additional traffic. People post like crazy and a lot of people want to see that, especially since it got some coverage on news sites. Add to that the big majority of people who do not care (remember that 80% of traffic was still reached) plus some who may have been sympathetic enough to join the two day protest but don’t care enough to continue to stay away. It’s really not surprising that we’re back to normal numbers.

Thankfully this isn’t the only impact people currently still make, so this isn’t over. The real question now will be how else it might change Reddit.

Your Hand must be tiny D:

Cool pics, thanks for sharing!

That though process won’t even cross their mind. More like “See? The reopened communities are very active and actually generate MORE clicks now. We were right to force them open!”. Only if the new direction would produce less clicks or advertisers are bothered by it (“I wanted to advertise my camera in r/pics but the new direction makes it unprofitable”) they might look into where that “sabotage” is coming from and care about it.

Ah, yes, they don’t allow it because it muddles their data. Never forget that whatever rewards they give you aren’t free, you sell your data to them for that reward. They want to know which age group or gender buys which products how often, so card sharing messes with their data because suddenly all the “young lady” purchases are on the card of an old man or whatever. It’s actually not a huge problem if it happens once because they anyways need hundreds if not thousands of data points to learn anything from it (because they look at “average” purchases), but the cleaner the data set the easier it gets.

There were already trials where shops could predict if you are pregnant based on your purchases. How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did This card data is pure gold (if enough people participate), which is why stores love starting their own program to collect or join a big card provider who will share that data with them.

It’s not perceived as sad because it’s just something most people have no desire to do. Flags just aren’t a super common decoration you see outside of store advertisements and official government buildings. “I should install a flag pole on my property” is already a rare thought in most places and a lot of people then rather put a flag about something that is special to them on there. In line with that thought, being German in Germany obviously isn’t that special, so it’s usually not your choice of “displaying something that is special to me” unless you have a right-wing mindset. You’ll more often see football teams, maybe music bands and the more rare political issue here and there, like “stop nuclear power plants”.

Why would they normally run into 6000+ subs going private? I’m sure they tested that their code can generally handle some (usually smaller) subs going private, but the number and size of the subs going dark isn’t a normal scenario and I doubt anyone would have assumed such a successful and coordinated protest involving some of the biggest subs would even be possible a few months ago.

I don’t disagree. The topics are a bit hit or miss and yes, my newest free ebook from them is from 2020, so all contents should be taken with a grain of salt. I did manage to grab some on C++, Machine Learning and different Pentesting tools, so not everything is completely obscure but as you said, usually they do not choose their most recent books. I see it more as a nice free resource on some topics in the books as of course not everything will be entirely out of date. It’s also not necessarily worse than buying their 2023 books today and using them for the next 3 years… That’s just a general problem with tech books, at least these outdated books are free.

I just bought Frogsong. Very cute game, I only played for around 2 hours so far but I like it. :)

Fair point, I changed it. :)

There already are patients that have implants for years, such as Nathan Copeland with Blackrock Microsystems implants. Here’s a video to explain more about the process.

Progress is in my opinion disappointingly slow, considering development started decades ago. We still need daily calibration for such a task. Current implants already can last years, but it’s still not easy to “switch them out”. In fact, the current procedure is that you get one set of implants and if they need to be removed (after about 5 years) you can not renew them. Most BCI work is done in monkeys and other mammals for a good reason. It’s great that we have some human trials although I personally feel that most of them come too early and are more about the publicity than actually benefitting research at this point in time. The most reassuring thing out of human trials for me was hearing how they perceive having an implant. There’s no constant pain or whatever involved, which is reassuring for other mammals.

And without wanting to bring Elon too much into the discussion: Implants without an open wound are definitely the future, although other companies also have their own take on that available for years.

Eh, most people here would probably also laugh at a human pastor spewing such platitudes.

But yes, I’m sure such an event would draw more spectators than faithful people, who knight actually be repulsed by replacing a pastor with a machine. Hell, I left church almost two decades ago and would consider joining in to see an AI holding a service.

When writing my PhD thesis I not only used the full latin name of the monkey species I studied, I even added the citation for the original, first description of it. It’s something that should be standard, because when a species gets renamed you otherwise might not longer know what older texts are referred to, but entirely fell out of fashion in many disciplines. My PI actually marked the citation with “What is this?” and when I explained he said it’s pretty old school but if I want, I can leave it…

I’d probably write both, but if I had to choose, latin, as it makes it more clear. And I’m not even thinking about “global”, some common names are different in different regions of the same country, where the same name can describe two different species.