The GPU of the series S is simply a lot worse, socutting quality by a bit won’t cut it. I also suspect that since they always quote the split screen as problem, it might be about the number of textures to be loaded in when the game is kind of running twice, not the quality.

Personally I don’t mind, but I find it problematic mostly because not everyone can be around dogs, be it because of allergies or past experiences.

A quick search doesn’t find it in either the Canada or United States versions, for example. I wonder if that’s due to better consumer protection laws in some jurisdictions than others.

Now that I think about it, it might not even be consumer protection but instead a GDPR issue. I’m in Europe. Users becoming inactive can actually force companies to delete their data. Ubisoft might not have any other choice than to completely delete inactive users and of course they’ll do what is best for them, not for the inactive users.

They indeed just “license” the games to us:

The Services and Content are licensed to you, not sold. This means we grant you a personal, limited, non-transferable and revocable right and license to use the Services and access the Content, for your entertainment, non-commercial use, subject to your compliance with these Terms.

For termination, it’s not any reason but a lot of reasons, including the here discussed:

for any other reason in relation to your actions in or outside of the Services; upon notification, where your Account has been inactive for more than six months.

The first one opens a lot of options for them to find a reason. None of those would trigger any reimbursement, though.

Consequences of the Termination/Suspension of an Account.

You cannot use the Services and Content anymore.
In the event of termination of your Account or of Service(s) associated with your Account, no credit (such as for unused Services, unused subscription period, unused points or Ubisoft Virtual Currency) will be credited to you or converted into cash or any other form of reimbursement.

Source

I didn’t want to say that Twitters execution of it is perfect, it’s just why Elon comes up with all these seemingly insane ideas. He has a huge userbase that won’t leave, he had advertisers who he thought wouldn’t want to leave and now he’s trying to squeeze. The problem is that he obviously didn’t have his grasp as tightly around the advertisers as he thought, which is why step 3 of Enshittitication entirely fails, at least from what is known to us. The idea is to keep everyone kind of hostage while you squeeze and while it seems to work with a huge chunk of the userbase, a bigger portion of the advertisers simply move on.

Putting a name on a century-old concept isn’t the worst idea because now we can easily refer to it when it happens once again. And yes, the old age of that problem is why I consider it a bit of a rabit-hole. It’s not just something Twitter does now or that tech companies do now because they copy from each other. It’s a quite old concept you’ll hear about again and again and can read up on quite a bit, if you really are interested into more than the basic concept or why companies keep trying even though the outcome does not always see positive (from an outside, users perspective).

Look up enshittitication, it’s an interesting rabbit hole.

Basically, the idea is that there is a path companies go along where they first please users to build a user base, once you are bound to a platform and don’t want to leave (because “everyone” is there) they instead start to shift towards pleasing advertisers until they also feel trapped (because “everyone” advertises there). The final move is trying to squeeze as much as possible out of all these trapped people and companies. It’s not just social media, although this of course makes it most obvious at least for a trapped user base. But this also applies for any other big thing that “evryone” uses.

He is no longer CEO, not that it actually makes a difference.

It’s not perceived as sad because it’s just something most people have no desire to do. Flags just aren’t a super common decoration you see outside of store advertisements and official government buildings. “I should install a flag pole on my property” is already a rare thought in most places and a lot of people then rather put a flag about something that is special to them on there. In line with that thought, being German in Germany obviously isn’t that special, so it’s usually not your choice of “displaying something that is special to me” unless you have a right-wing mindset. You’ll more often see football teams, maybe music bands and the more rare political issue here and there, like “stop nuclear power plants”.

Why would they normally run into 6000+ subs going private? I’m sure they tested that their code can generally handle some (usually smaller) subs going private, but the number and size of the subs going dark isn’t a normal scenario and I doubt anyone would have assumed such a successful and coordinated protest involving some of the biggest subs would even be possible a few months ago.

I studied Biology and Computer Science, have a PhD in Neuroscience and now work in an Engineering department for medical devices, where I am still in contact with Academia through students working for us in different capacities. My main occupation is Software Tester, though. :)

I don’t disagree. The topics are a bit hit or miss and yes, my newest free ebook from them is from 2020, so all contents should be taken with a grain of salt. I did manage to grab some on C++, Machine Learning and different Pentesting tools, so not everything is completely obscure but as you said, usually they do not choose their most recent books. I see it more as a nice free resource on some topics in the books as of course not everything will be entirely out of date. It’s also not necessarily worse than buying their 2023 books today and using them for the next 3 years… That’s just a general problem with tech books, at least these outdated books are free.

I just bought Frogsong. Very cute game, I only played for around 2 hours so far but I like it. :)

Fair point, I changed it. :)

Eh, most people here would probably also laugh at a human pastor spewing such platitudes.

But yes, I’m sure such an event would draw more spectators than faithful people, who knight actually be repulsed by replacing a pastor with a machine. Hell, I left church almost two decades ago and would consider joining in to see an AI holding a service.

I’d say for a secure password in a manager, it’s not really harmful.
Someone who uses a manager and secure passwords will usually be aware of the “generate me a new unique, secure password” feature, so they will generate a new one and simply paste that into the page. They might be inclined to just add the bad practice “-01” although it honestly doesn’t make a unique, secure password worse unless the unencrypted password was somehow leaked. The delay in emergency situations mentioned in the post might still happen, although the harm there will depend on the exact situation and likely usually fall into the “annoying delay” category.

I absolutely agree that forced password changes need to die simply because a majority of users still tries to remember passwords and is therefore prone to bad practices, but for someone with a password manager and unique passwords it’s more unnecessary and annoying than actively harmful.