Almost every cloud based device I’ve ever owned ended up either putting an increasing number of basic features that were originally free behind a subscription paywall or simply turned itself into a brick when it stopped being supported.

This is ironically what I loved about Subnautica. The game does not hold your hand throughout. You don’t have a map, you don’t mindlessly follow waypoints, you are not being given a guided tour through the story like some ride at Disneyland. You have to learn to navigate the area yourself, memorize landmarks, and figure out what you have to do yourself with the clues around you. It is a bit of a whiplash at first when you are so used to being babysitted and guided throughout a game but I’ve found it to be the unbelievably rewarding once the “click” happens. You can absolutely miss important (and dope AF) events if you miss the timings that the game gives you. You are treated like an adult by the game. You really get the feeling of being a lone explorer, planning and going on expeditions to gather what you need whether it is resources or blueprints and it will all be you.

The risk-reward situation of exploring increasingly complex and disorienting ship fragments, slowly cutting through blocked doors with a laser while seeing your oxygen levels dwindle and hoping you can find your way back out in time were absolutely fantastic to me. The way the gameplay and the way you travel through the world entirely changes the moment you unlock the PRAWN suit, and one again with the Cyclops are absolutely amazing.

I wish this game clicked with everyone the way it did for me. It is easily my top 5 best single player experiences ever and I only wish I could forget it so I could discover everything again. But The Outer Wilds never clicked for me like that so I can understand why some people might not like it.

I’m so glad I kept my car and weathered through this shitty phase of car manufacturing.

If only there was hope for weathering through the data collection, subscription-based features and the death of sedans though…

They removed the star system a long time ago. They removed the down votes again a few years back.

They want their algorithm to be the only thing that decides whether you watch a video or not.

Let me fill in for them then: “We CoUlDn’T PoSsIbLy pReDiCt ThAt tHiS wAs GoInG tO hApPeN!”

That’s the usual typical Corporate bad faith answer to whenever a serious consequence that everyone could see coming but they kept ignoring finally happens.

Corporations must generate growth to please their investors no matter what. If the CEO doesn’t do it the board members will replace him with someone who will.

Microsoft cannot significantly generate growth by increasing their user base by making a more attractive product anymore. They have maxed out their share of the market. So they must pursue other ways to generate “growth”, like data mining their customers to generate an additional source of income.

In this kind of situation you will see all sorts undesirable behaviors emerge from corporations like that, like lowering the quality of their products or cutting down on their workforce to “reduce cost” event though they are already turning a profit.

We will see this shit happen over and over again until we come up with a solution to this “infinite growth” problem.

I remember when it happened. Back then we were concerned about how Microsoft was pushing Internet Explorer as a browser on its platform. And then we just gave up on enforcing Antitrust laws let them do whatever they want along with the rest of big tech. Since then they’ve been doing so much worse than that.

You can blame lobbying for that.

Brazenly forcing anti-consumer features like this is an obvious sign of monopoly and abuse of their dominating position on the market. They should have been broken up a long time ago along with all the other big tech companies who have been pulling this sort of crap.

Scout.

Thrive at becoming the most annoying thing on the map to the enemy team.

I’ve seen this movie before. They will make it enabled by default and make it difficult to disable. Then a few years later someone will figure out that this data that was supposed to be “private and encrypted” was being sent out to Microsoft, who will get a slap on the wrist, half assedly apologize and immediately move on to even more anti consumer ways to squeeze more income out of its users for “growth”.

I right click them and then in the drop down menu that appears I click “block element…”

Just deleted my Reddit account. I haven’t used it in over a year now anyway. I was waiting for something like this to make a statement.

And that the “increased community engagement” isn’t mainly comments of people complaining about being tricked into clicking on an ad.

I noticed that those who were pushing anti BLM, and then anti-mask/anti-vaccine memes suddenly started pushing pro-Russia content the moment Russia invaded Ukraine. They’ve been around stirring the pot and creating polarizing content to cause disarray for years. And judging by the state of US politics, it has been working.

I’ve caught myself being excited about buying a ladder once. I’m officially old.

“I’m going to make the world a better place… For me.”

-Dr. Steel

And whenever you want to search for information about something the result page gets flooded with AI generated garbage pages with misleading titles and that provide bullshit information.

That article is also so obviously biased and manipulative. To pretend to be balanced while controlling the narrative in their favor, they have a short section where they mention some lesser downsides while downplaying them and completely failing to even acknowledge the main concerns that people’s basic rights for privacy would be violated by such a change.

And then they dangle the carrot of a better credit score in front of their readers should they accept to have their rights eroded further. What kind of dystopian bullshit is this?