MudMan

I swear I have no idea why they let him talk. He doesn’t even own the company, surely someone at 2K could just go… you know… shush.

I don’t even think the BL4 thing is that bad, on the face of it. There is really no need to make it worse.

“We have been made aware of some performance issues in certain systems in our new release, we’ll be looking into performance improvements in future patches”. It’s not that hard. At this point just copy/paste whatever the other thousand UE5 games said, go fix the wonky precompilation boot step and stop digging a hole.

Hell, it’s even easier than that, because they have actually pretty much put that out. All he really needed to do was shut up about it.

Having a single color rendition of your logo is good practice anyway (you can’t always print stuff in full color and it has all sorts of UX and branding uses). I can’t imagine of all the compliance requirements for apps going into the svg for your icon and making it black and white is the dealbreaker.

Plus in practice the Android apps that refuse to comply are Amazon, my banking apps and believe it or not my phone manufacturer’s first party apps (and I believe Facebook, but I don’t have that installed, so I’m not sure).

I say eff that. Work within the OS requirements for customization. I don’t care if it’s Linux, Android, Windows or whatever else. Let me set up my device the way I want it.

So turn that off. It’s always optional for users, this is about developers complying with the system-wide option.

I do turn on themed icons and it’s so annoying to have one random one in the middle that refuses to listen that I now bundle my apps into folders based on whether they comply with icon theming or not.

Well, I’m still waiting for Twitter to “need a replacement”. It seems to be doing just about fine on its new normal. Ditto for any of the other Meta places, which have only consistently grown over time. Yes, Facebook, too.

To be clear, I don’t particularly mean too little, too late for me. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook or any of those platforms, Bluesky and Fedi aside. And again, I was not on board with the Masto quote tweet thing. I did stop using it frequently, but not for that reason.

I mean too little, too late to make an impact of any kind. Masto has been stuck where it is for a while, and so has Bluesky. I don’t think either are going back to growing anytime soon, but if either does it probably won’t be because Masto added quotes. I’m fairly comfy talking to the same dozen people out here like I’m in a 90s IRC channel, but ultimately it’d be nice if the gross places didn’t keep driving the global conversation forever. And on that front… yeah, too little, too late.

That was a shockingly long turnaround for these, considering. I’ve come and gone from Mastodon like three times since this was an argument and at least twice since they said they would do this.

Oh, well. I originally thought this was a bad call, and I did hate the old Twitter snippy bullshit this enabled, but Bluesky sorta proved to me this was a cultural issue more than a feature set issue. And while we’re at it, while I don’t particularly like the implementation of Bluesky’s custom subject feeds I’m fairly convinced that some alternative to chronological-only feeds would be beneficial. This seems like too little, too late, honestly.

I’d argue I’m doing the opposite.

I was turning this stuff off when my Google and Samsung phones kept suggesting that they could do searches based on the content of my phone screen or my camera feed. It’s only “normalization” in that it’s… you know, actually normal and widespread. I don’t think people are too alarmed now, I think they weren’t alarmed enough when the first wave of “smart assistants” started doing this like a decade ago.

Right, so when you said “forced it on everyone” you meant “the feature existing at all even if it’s optional or disabled”.

See, I don’t have a problem with the latter, that’s legitimate. But you implied the former, and the former is false.

Now, I don’t like the feature and I absolutely turned it off the moment it (finally) got patched into my supported PCs. But it’s worth noting that similar features are present on Android phones (from all the way back on Google Assistant to the upcoming Magic Cue), Apple phones (via Visual Intelligence and Siri) and other PC and phone manufacturers. I recommend turning them all off, but with the caveats you original omitted this isn’t a Windows-specific thing, it’s a pretty widespread fad.

Of course the reason people are latching on to the MS version is their initial implementation was hot garbage and entirely unaware of its own context, so now it’s a meme, particularly in tech-savvy, Linux-friendly circles. The biggest lesson we’ve all learned is that Microsoft is bad at PR and marketing, which I feel we already knew.

I mean, I’d rather not. I definitely take a number of steps to limit that. Same as I take steps to prevent that from Google on my phone or from both of them and others on my Linux devices.

What I don’t do is make up stuff to be paranoid about in case the very real privacy concerns you already have to pay attention to aren’t scary enough to make me feel superior online.

I’m so exhausted of social media nonsense latching onto meme crap to push preconceived narratives and flipping over to ignoring reality altogether the moment any facts at all don’t fit their dumb little package of memes.

You know what, I hope it’s not actually off and anybody with the trivial means to check what their Windows PC is sending to the mothership notices so we can get the EU to GDPR the crap out of them and build some nice hospital somewhere with the fine money.

In the meantime, go do conspiracy theories over on Twitter. There’s plenty of real stuff to be mad about at Microsoft without having to make shit up.

I swear to Torvalds, if the amount of old ladies using Linux because their Fedi relatives installed it on their laptops is accurate we are in the middle of an major demographic crisis.

Yes, that’s toggleable on settings and set to off by default. Do remember to turn off Click-to-Do, though, if nothing else it’s annoying to trigger it by accident. I also remapped the copilot button back to being right mouse click.

I mean, they’re pretty useless features and I wish they had spent more time working on better stuff, but… you know, I turned it off.

They did what now? I have no Copilot features turned on in my PCs, and I actually have a certified Copilot+ laptop.

Microsoft has given users fair warning, and said that users can get a year of updates for free but eventually the company will have to face facts and extended support beyond October.

We can’t recall a time where Microsoft has done such a thing but these are extenuating circumstances given that most users just aren’t budging.

WTF is this guy talking about? Far as I can tell this is the Win7 playbook all over again. Looking it up, this was the timeline:

Jan. 13, 2015: Microsoft ended Mainstream Support for Windows 7.

Sept. 6, 2018: Microsoft announced the ESUs for Windows 7. The ESU program is a paid service that provides critical security updates for legacy products for up to three years after Extended Support ends.

August 2019: Microsoft announced a year of free ESUs, but only for select users, including customers with an Enterprise Agreement or Enterprise Agreement Subscription with active Windows 10 Enterprise E5, Microsoft 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5 Security subscriptions. This was limited to only Government E5 stock keeping units.

Jan. 14, 2020: Microsoft ended Extended Support for Windows 7.

Jan. 10, 2023: The ESUs reached their end of life on the first Patch Tuesday of 2023.

That’s almost a decade of post-end of support updates. If anything, MS confirmed ESU before trying to shut down home user patches this time, so it looks less like terrified backpedalling. And as the linked article itself admits, the data they’re reporting on shows a significant number of users still on Win7. The article waves it away as just “too many”, but the original report says 8.5%.

Because, as it turns out, the kind of people using Kapersky antivirus software and the number of people who would not upgrade from a 16 year old OS that has lost support half a dozen times over the past half a decade show significant overlap. In the Steam survey right now Win 7 is only 0.07%, for reference.

While we’re at it Win 11 is 60% vs 35% for Win 10. For all the headlines when Steam shows Linux growth you don’t often hear over here that Win 11 went up by 0.5% and Windows overall went up by 0.36%, although it’s worth noting that Windows has been pretty stable between 94 and 96% since the survey started.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep reality checking it: the Win 10 end of support process has been wildly overhyped, particularly among Linux-friendly circles. It is not meaningfully different to moves out of other “good” versions of Windows and it’s not a catastrophic crisis point for MS, for better and worse. They’ll keep support up for the people who need it for as long as they’re willing to pay and most legacy home users won’t even know their old Win10 is unsupported because it’ll just keep happily chugging along with all the same malware it already has until something breaks and they have to buy a new laptop with a preinstalled Win11 or 12 or whatever.

The most the Win10 death hype is doing to hurt MS is create a flurry of social media posts that can convince tech savvy, Linux-curious users who were previously held back by lack of gaming support to give user friendly distros a try.

The vast majority of people to be read as “a tiny fraction of players”. It’s just probably the players more likely to be part of the online community around the game or to play it consistently this long after release. I wouldn’t be surprised if only a very, very small percentage of the twenty thousand people playing the game right now ever had installed any mods at all.

While I don’t have hard data on this, I can tell you I’ve played the game since the Flash days and certainly never modded it for this reason or even considered it. Wiki page open onthe side just in case? Sure. Mods? Nope.

Intuitive perception on this stuff gets weird.

This isn’t particularly new, they’ve been calling it a genocide for a while now and taken several previous actions.

I’m not sure what the EU finger pointing means, though. Them following suit or the opposite? I don’t think they’ll have much to say either way.

Well, you do need to hire someone, get them set up with access to the text database and then you need to implement the updated lines in-game and test and then bug fix anything that breaks anything, presumably. And then make the patch, submit it and have it go live, although for China presumably that’d be Steam-specific and have no actual first party approval process?

The headline is either confusing or a touch clickbaity. It’s mixed for Chinese language reviews specifically. The overall (and the English reviews, too) are at Very Positive.

But hey, fair, they messed up with the localization and apparently some bits of the launch. It’s gonna get you on the user reviews.

When were those days again?

I whined about the FF7 localization for years. Eventually met one of the guys in charge for separate reasons and whined at him about it. We were both quite old by then.

Some local games media in the late 90s and early 2000s here had a policy that no localization or bad localization would knock 1 to 2 points off the review score automatically, regardless of how good or bad the rest of the game was.

Hah. That’s a fun time capsule. They’re whining about 1.4 million per episode, which just seems so quaint now. the figures going around are 6 mill per episode in season 1 of Stranger Things and 30 mill per episode in season four. Even adjusted for inflation Quantum Leap wouldn’t know what to do with that much money.

Survivorship bias is a hell of a drug.

On the plus side, it makes fishing for the TONS of shows that never got past a couple airings surprisingly entertaining.

Crap was so ruthless seasons weren’t fully ordered, written or filmed by the time they were on the air because shows would get cancelled overnight, so they were fully ramped up and working without knowing if they’d end the season they were doing at the time. Between that and how much cheaper everything was it’s no wonder no film actors would be caught dead in a TV show until prestige television broke out of that mold.