Spyke

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privacy

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Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser

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That's how they do it. They send their "proposal" and immediately implement it in Chrome (with work on that being started long before "proposal" is made public obviously). Then they start using it on their own websites (with compatibility for now) and start propaganda campaign to push webdevs to use it too (which they do of course). Then they start complaining that other browsers' developers are slow to implement this new "standard" (at this stage they won't call it a "proposal" anymore) and are "stifling development of the web" or being actively malicious because they are jealous of Chrome or something. Then compatibility mode on their websites is first subtly broken so that users once again will witness how Chrome is superior browser and then removed outright. Boom, we have a new web standard!

games

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Alan Wake 2's PC requirements may leave AMD RX 5000-series and Nvidia GTX 10-series users high and dry

I don't mind them raising minimum requirements if they actually use features of newer hardware (cough unlike Windows 11 cough), but requiring upscaling is never a good sign. It's just a cost-cutting strategy that allows them to spend even less money on optimization work while reallocating that money to marketing budget or exec bonuses or whatever, at the cost of visual fidelity. It doesn't benefit customers in any way, quite the opposite.

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*Permanently Deleted*

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Microsoft fights very hard to keep governments across the planet use Windows and other Microsoft products (it's very lucrative market because of corruption and the fact that government regulations on what their employees must use are slow to change once established). And they have very close relationship with USA government specifically.

games

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Starfield gets low-spec PC mod for those gaming on potatoes

Potatoes? You mean PCs with < $1000 GPUs?
I'm not touching Starfield until I can play it at 1440p 60 fps with decent graphics (yes, actual 1440p, not "720p upscaled to 1440p" bullshit. Neither that nor 30 fps are acceptable to me).

If Bethesda can't be bothered to fix performance and I will need to wait years until I decide to upgrade so be it - I have plenty of great games in my "to play" list. By that time the will also be lots of mods to choose from to make Starfield worth it.

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Coming back to a side quest you missed

In modern games it's more like finding 100 "Speak to X" entries in your journal and then futilely trying to remember what the fuck you are supposed to talk to them about because you acquired these quests 50 hours ago (often without any interaction from the player) and the game refuses to tell you. Bonus points when it's actually a delivery stage for a fetch quest and when you find this NPC they just say "thanks bro for helping me out" and that's it (last few BioWare games are especially guilty of that). And you have no idea what the hell did you do because it was so long ago.

firefox

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Firefox 121.0.1 released

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I had been led to believe that one of Wayland’s strength was solving the correct window coordinates save-and-restore problem. Does someone know what happened here?

It's literally the opposite. Windows aren't allowed to position themselves on Wayland (because it's unsafe or something). Window state save restoration must implemented by the compositor itself. Not sure about GNOME, but KDE doesn't have that.

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Most of My Instagram Ads Are for Drugs, Stolen Credit Cards, Hacked Accounts, Counterfeit Money, and Weapons

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They are personalised by the "bucket" that data collection companies like Google or Facebook placed you into based on profiling. Browsing and search history is only one of the factors that is taken into account when you are profiled, there are myriad more ways to collect data about you.
And then what ads you see is determined by what advertisers think your "bucket" wants. If you are male in your 20s living in rural USA and advertisers think that males in their 20s living in rural USA are interested in guns, then that's what you will see - even if you never clicked on gun ad or searched for guns on Google.

games

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Starfield gets low-spec PC mod for those gaming on potatoes

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It's shitty code bound. Sometimes no matter how powerful your hardware is, software will perform poorly because it just doesn't scale. Writing complex software like game so that it can fully utilize current hardware AND actually run faster with better CPU/GPU can become very difficult once a certain complexity threshold is reached. It's easy enough to do for a small linear game even if it has exceptional graphics, but an open world sandbox game like ones that Bethesda makes is a completely different story.

That doesn't mean that it's impossible of course - Bethesda absolutely should have made a better job, but it's by no means an easy task.

android

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OnePlus is working on an interesting way to use all that RAM on your phone

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This happens on most Android phones, including my Google Pixel with 8gb of RAM. I noticed that it starts doing this when battery drops below 50%. Which is weird because it surely takes more resources (and thus drains more battery) to cold start an app every time instead of just keeping it in memory (provided that app doesn't do anything nefarious in background which is easy to detect). There is plenty of RAM for that.