Microsoft would absolutely love it if people had zero computer literacy and had to ask an AI for help to perform even the most rudimentary of tasks.

Because then the AI becomes indispensable.

The idea there should be some definitive, canonical domain for the Fediverse is somewhat at odds with the core tenents of the Fediverse itself - decentralisation, and no single point of ownership or control. And on that basis, we absolutely should not care about a particular domain, or assign any level of ‘specialness’ to it.

I understand your worry - that some ‘bad actor’ could buy the domain and do something anti-Fediverse with it and mislead the public, but my response would be to simply not worry. The strength of the Fediverse is that we are diverse and unbothered by whatever nonsense some centralised platform is trying to pull. We don’t have a profit motive. We don’t care.

People who want to find the real Fediverse will absolutely still find us, all on their own, regardless of who owns some random domain :)

I agree that it’s a huge fuck up, my comment wasn’t in defence of the post office, just a related story :)

Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn’t us to come do it) because that’s the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.

I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it’s amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.

Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.

This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.

We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively “dual running” that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!

It’s a mess.

I like this a lot.

I don’t have any physical accessibility needs (unless you count my low skill level, git gud scrub) but accessibility options are something I really appreciate seeing in games.

I love being able to adjuat how I experience the game to match my needs, and making this visible and searchable on the store is only going to encourage more games to include good accessibility features :)

They are pursuing “realism” but the pursuit of realism also means that you must sacrifice strong artistic style, because style is - by very definition - deviation from realism.

My friend likes Terraria, and I like Minecraft.

This is because he enjoys gameplay where there is technical progression and objectives. Things to ‘do’ and reasons to get stronger.

I enjoy gameplay where the objectives are mostly just goals I set for myself, and I have freedom for creative expression.

In Minecraft I can spend forever working on aesthetic builds or complex redstone contraptions, whereas once my friend has exhausted all the progression in the game he finds it boring.

Conversely, although Terraria does allow for building and furnishing nice bases/homes, the 2D nature is limiting for me vs 3D and can’t satisfy my desire to build, so I’m not into it.

I meant no offence to your balls :) The whole photo is like that. Could just be your camera, or your lighting.

This photo has so little colour it’s almost monochrome.

In 2025, things staying the same as they are rather than getting worse counts as a ‘big win’ :|

Well that would be weird because

1. Andor is not for children

2. Andor is the least star-wars-like Star Wars

3. Andor is actually good

This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.

When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of “content” right in people’s faces where they don’t have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.

From Netflix’s perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s a failure which they will optimise away.

The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.

I remember reading a story a while back about someone who owned a legit CS version with a proper serial and activation.

They had to change computer, and in doing so had to reactivate Photoshop, but it wasn’t working. They contacted Adobe support and explained the situation but support basically told him nope, not a chance, we aren’t helping you. You need to subscribe to new Photoshop.

So Adobe accepted that yes, he bought a perpetual licence for Photoshop and that yes, the reason it isn’t working is the online activation, but they still refused to help.

Scumbags.

I also own a macbook in addition to my desktop.

It’s currently running macos, but I very much hope Asahi development continues, because that’s very much my desire for the final destination of the machine.

For a long time I was happy with Apple’s commitment to being a mainstream OS that was privacy-centric but recent shenanigans have me starting to doubt.

It’s both. Linux mostly just works, but when it breaks, it breaks in a way which is sometimes difficult for the average person to recover from.

I’ve had a couple of times in the past where something has gone horribly, outrageously wrong, and I decided to just reinstall and start again from fresh, because that was way less time investment than fixing what broke.

Nowadays I’m using Timeshift backups, and I think that’s a positive move.

Exactly this.

I’m a software dev and also a Linux user, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend my precious time messing around with the OS trying to solve problems.

I see the operating system as a tool I use to accomplish the things I actually want to do, which is writing my code for my projects, just the same as I see a car as a tool to get me from point A to point B.

If Linux was complicated to set up, or always broken, or requiring constant work then I wouldn’t use it, no more than I’d tolerate a car which is broken down and in the shop every other week. But fortunately, Linux is none of those things.

Modern Linux mostly “just works”, and it’s really counterproductive to talk about Linux like it’s hard or you need to be a deeply invested techie to use it.

It’s common, and especially so on devices that don’t have batteries which are intended to be user-removable - which is pretty much all new phones.

Unlike laptops, many phones simply won’t turn on without a battery connected.

Centralisation makes things easy.

If it takes more than 1 minute to onboard to a new service, and especially if you have to overcome any learning barrier (such as what ‘instances’ are and how to choose one) then the vast majority of people will immediately throw that option out and won’t even consider it.

People like bluesky specifically because it gives them something almost identical to what they had before.

Exactly! What sort of logic are they even trying to apply there? Basically saying “We put a lot of time into our tech demo, and it came out better than expected, so we’re going to charge for it!”

That’s just crazy.

The whole principle is that the intro experience is supposed to be free. It exists to get people pumped about the cool new thing they just bought and excited to play with it.

I guess Nintendo decided that - since you already bought the console - they don’t especially care if you are pumped or not. They already got your money.