This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.

I’m using qwant as my default now. It does well for most searches, but for map related things I still use google.

The task manager in win 8 wouldn’t stay/come on top if there was a frozen program. This would make the new task manager unusable to kill the problem program. And then the half-assed solution of preemptively enabling always on top did not even work reliably. A pretty fundamental issue, which for me far outweighed whatever improvements that new task manager contained.

Pretty much this. If you buy decent stuff and take care of it, then there’s now less of an expiration date than ever before in my experience.

Computers 20+ years ago were really old after 5 years, but nowadays you can put an SSD into a PC from 10 years ago and it will be more than good enough for most people’s usage. And if it doesn’t have enough memory for the current windows 10 bloat, then Linux is an option, but imo it’s better to just add extra ram so that the user can just stay with a familiar os.

Likewise tablets and smartphones, buy decent specs, don’t use cheap chargers and don’t drop them too often and they just seem too last. And if they do slow down, then a factory reset is easy+fast and can bring them to life again. In my family an almost 10y old Shield K1 still works smoothly for daily online media consumption. A cheap Samsung and Microsoft surface from the same era are now giving a horrible experience though, but those 2 were always shit in comparison to the shield.

No, I wasn’t, my phone is still completely stock. I use a custom launcher which could slow it down, but no issues there either. The processor just works smoothly in all my use cases and I blame all my connection issues on my network provider (they suck and I have no way of knowing of it’s 100% of the time their fault, or only 90%, so I just blame them for every connection issue).

How is the CPU choice and official software support related? Genuine question, I don’t follow smartphone tech news, I just look up stuff whenever I or someone in my family needs a new phone.

The comment I was replying to said that this Fairphone was going to be sluggish because of the CPU choice, with which I disagreed because I’m basically using an older CPU from that CPU family without issues, so I know that it doesn’t have to be sluggish. Not in a Fairphone though, but in a Motorola edge, so the software will indeed be different.

I’m typing this from a smartphone with Snapdragon 765g, a basically older version of the 778g. The 778g is better in every way compared to the many years older 765g and my phone does not feel sluggish in any way for my use cases: messaging, phone calls, video calls, media consumption, but no gaming. For me the 778g would be the perfect chip (like the 765g was): a perfect compromise between battery life, capabilities and price.

Paradox DLC policy is why I don’t play Paradox games anymore.

If I were to only play 1 game ever, then the DLC system might be ok, it’s basically a subscription system. But since I’d only play a campaign every other year or so, I’m not going to fork out that much money for 1 campaign. And it’s way too annoying to play some game with obvious parts missing + in game ads, so now Paradox gets no more money from me.

To add: Twitter under Musk also complies with all government censorship requests since Musk took over. News on Twitter has been hugely influential in the past in protests in authoritarian states, but that’s clearly a thing of the past now.

Full compliance with government censorship was 83% in may last year, up from the 50% it was before Musk.

And partial + full compliance was at 98.8%, up from 92% before Musk. And the remaining 1.2% were not denied, just status unknown, so it’s basically 100%.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk

I wonder what the current numbers are and how the full/partial takedowns are geographically distributed. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if partial compliance was limited to some western countries and it’s full compliance everywhere else.

Elon Musk, the self declared “free speech absolutist”, what a shithead.