It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't used an e-reader, but e-paper screens just look more natural, they also don't require a backlight so they can be easier on the eyes. Combined with a matt display, you can comfortably use them in direct sunlight without having to faff about with brightness or finding shade.

Also e-readers have way less distractions than a phone.

I think the decreasing fondness of Windows can mostly be blamed on Microsoft forcing their internet services on users; with the need for Microsoft accounts being the most recent & damning of the bunch.

You had gadgets in Vista & 7, but they could easily be disabled. 8 had live tiles for things like the news (effortlessly removable) and introduced the Microsoft Store (which increasingly needs an account). 8.1 added Bing Search to the start menu (requires Regedit to remove nowadays), 10 added news & current events to the start menu, and in 11 they want us to register Microsoft accounts to use the OS.

It's ridiculous how much control we've lost over Windows so that Microsoft can tell shareholders more people are doing Bing searches and signing up for Microsoft accounts than ever before.

FYI, Microsoft Store doesn't need an account. You can install apps without being signed in to the Store.

Source: I work on the Microsoft Store.

Microsoft store try's to dark pattern you to think you need to log in though. Or at least it did.

It no longer does.

How? When? Every time I tried to use it I was prompted to log in to a Microsoft account.

If it is in fact possible then you’ve done an excellent job hiding it.

Yeah but it really looks like you need to, are they still showing the login modal dialog that you have to close before it installs?

Microsoft lost me, longtime windows user, when they started fucking with the start menu. I play a lot of games, and was willing to tolerate a lot of abuse to avoid the hassle of changing platforms, but they literally injected MSN tabloid news article results and aware like candy crush above the local applications I was clearly trying to open.

There are definitely concerning trends with the direction of macOS development, but I still maintain a Windows 11 PC in a closet that just runs steam to play games and holy shit it makes Tacoma feel like the pinnacle of UI design and consistency.

And things like the Copilot app that can't be uninstalled and send regular alerts to the user.

Yep, the continued moving of the goalposts for how much internet integration is required was really why I bailed on it.

That is putting it kindly mind you, it has become increasingly user hostile software. Distrusting you, the owner of the computer and software, whilst also exploiting your information and usage telemetry, hoovering up private files into the cloud, pushing their online services into every crevice. MSPaint connects to the internet now, like back it off just a little bit you greedy sods. Can't a man draw some pixels in peace?

> Was it worth it?

I can only give anecdotes, but the majority of the support I saw for leaving the EU wasn't rooted in hard economics – there were claims about doing our own free trade deals and having an extra £350 Million being spent on the NHS instead, but that was about it. A lot of support centred around how our culture & history ought to be perceived, limiting migration, and not having faith/trust in the EU and our Governments.

Again anecdotes, but the most common reprieve I hear from Leave supporters is that leaving would've been great if not for 1) the years of political deadlock 2) Johnson's deal being naff. For most of us life hasn't improved since leaving (the pandemic right after didn't help); and after the promises about the sunlit uplands if we left, I don't think anything short of a miracle would make it feel like it was worth it.

I think the only people who feel like it was worth it were those who voted Leave through a culture/prestiege lens and put the fact that we left above everything else.

>> A lot of support centred around how our culture & history ought to be perceived, limiting migration

In reality they voted to replace immigration from EU with immigration from other countries. I guess it is better for UK culture to have more Asian people instead of European.

The guy who voted Brexit because he was fine with German and Polish immigrants who came to the U.K. and worked but he didn’t want Iraqi and Syrian refugees told me everything I needed to know about democracy.

Please point out the non-democracy where all citizens have enlightened views on race and culture.

It was more about how he voted against his expressed wishes.

He was ok with eu immigration but not non eu immigration, so he voted for less eu immigration.

I have close friends from a TF2 community server that's been dead for over a decade now, but I can't think of anyone I've met via random matchmaking since.

Game servers are the perfect digital third space, it starts off with random players but as you log in each night, you see more and more familiar faces pop up and before you know it you're all regulars popping in to chat while playing a few rounds, learning more about your new friends and praying to god that you've got the godlike Finnish sniper player on your team.

By comparison, modern matchmaking-lead multiplayer feels gentrified and - for lack of a better term - soulless. You're blindly shuffled between random players each game, and there's no way to properly build a connection with players or a community out of it. There's a vacuous and temporary nature to it all that just feels cold.

Edit: also the fact that things like skins & sprays - player controlled ways of expressing themselves - have been neatly packaged by gamedevs and sold back to players at a premium. It feels completely antithetical to the player-led nature of what such games used to be.

Codemasters being the company who made the Game Genie AND the best racing games out there is a square I've never been able to circle. It feels a tad unreal for me.

One of those studios that's always had massive talent, although I'm increasingly concerned about their future as EA tightens their grip on them.

Seems like a repeat of what happened in January with the Pixel 4a's battery. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42865619

So disappointing. The 6a was even supposed to have software support for another two years. Are all Pixel batteries this bad?

Rats maps! If your mutliplayer game had a map editor, you'd be sure there'd be one of those massive house maps available.

I'm not one for external services piggybacked onto other software, but the ability to quickly send something to my Kobo has been a godsend.

edit: I had no idea Mozilla actually bought Pocket. Mental that they're willing to shut it down

Most anti-cheats will immediately kick/ban someone from a game if it detects certain applications or hooks. Good for removing cheaters, but that gives cheat devs immediate feedback that something in their cheat has triggered it – they'll modify the cheat, try again, then see if it's detected or not.

VAC is designed around obscurity. When it detects a cheat it flags the account, and then an indeterminate amount of time later it/Valve bans all the flagged accounts. It makes it much harder for cheat devs to figure out what exactly flagged VAC, but the lack of an immediate ban means that normal players are still putting up with cheaters day in day out.

Another caveat is that VAC only bans you from the game engine. So you could get VAC banned from Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source, yet still be free to hack on Counter-Strike 2.

Also considering how many of Valve's titles are free, there's no wonder why hacks are so prolific in their games.

I'll always be amazed at how Skype went from being top dog in 2010 to not even being considered a choice in 2020. How did Microsoft drop the ball so hard that when the Pandemic rolled around everyone decided to use the then-unheard of Zoom instead?

Taking a general public lens here. For vidya, Teamspeak/Mumble provided better quality & latency but Skype remained king for its ease of ad-hoc calls until Discord blew it out of the water.

Skype was built on p2p for 2000s internet. It was great technology at the time, but completely wrong choice for 2010s with smartphones and huge chat groups.

If we went back in time the only way to truly save skype would be to basically make discord and gradually replace skype with it, keeping the userbase. This would be way harder than just making discord because migration is harder that writing from scratch and getting that migration approved in a corporate setting is insanely hard.