There are a lot of small issues with the integrated apps, the most recent one being the search in Apple Music failing if I type in more than one word. Another issue I’ve experienced that if I plug my USB sound card in I will have to restart any app that is capable of audio playback or they will play the audio too slowly. This bug wasn’t there before 14.6 so I don’t think it’s an issue with my hardware.

In all fairness I’ve had some other bugs that have subseqently been fixed, but it has sometimes taken years and it’s frustrating when the whole mantra used to be “it just works”. Then again, maybe it never “just worked” and I’ve just forgotten about how buggy and bad it was in the past.

This is what I get for using Apple products for many years. The qualirty of my brain has gotten worse.

I hope they spend the entire week detailing all the bugs in macOS they intend to fix. It feel like the stability and overall qualirt has gotten real bad over the years.

I’ve played 5 of the Layton games and I agree that the crossover game is the best one!

Well, yeah. Isn’t the whole point of these foolish office mandates to get people to quit? That way they can reduce their workforce without the cost and negative press of another round of layoffs.

Unsolicited or not, this is good avice. Thank you!

To be honest with you, the algorithm is pretty good. I’m a pretty active user of “not interested” and “don’t recommend this channel” so the algorithm generally shows me stuff I already like or things I may be interested in.

What I find frustrating is that there are so many extra UI blocks shoved in between regular videos. Featured current events, rentable movies, playable games, and the fucking shorts I don’t give a shit about. Since I mainly watch on mobile I also can’t just remove those sections and even when I dismiss them, YouTube decides to shove them in my face again and again.

I just want to be left alone to watch my nerdy stuff :(

Based on what the YouTube frontpage looks like when I’m not logged in I can guarantee that I will have zero interest in anything that gets hyped up on a leaderboard. But YouTube will of course malform its UI so it can constantly shove it into my face like it does with shorts.

If you want something with a small footprint I would personally go for Rust, but anything that compiles to a static binary is going to be better than something that needs a dedicated runtime.

Python is what I use for small one-time scripts and utility stuff that doesn’t need to run long, but it may be worse than Java…

Great article! Ubisoft seem to be really good at making worlds that are immense and magnificent and yet utterly boring to be in.

That’s a very astute observation and it made me wonder if piracy was partly to blame for the death of the B-tier game (at least on PC). In my younger pre-Steam days me and my friends would pirate 9/10 of the games we played (if not more). Games like CoD/Fifa/Sims would get enough sales from regular folks, but who the heck was going to take a chance on something like Will Rock or Scrapland? I would often check out games at my local store and then go home to torrent them, meaning they lost out on sales from the kinds of weirdos who the games were made for.

I watch a stupid amount of YouTube so I pay for YouTube Premium. I wish that meant I could have premium features like disabling shorts, disabling those annoying themed sections that keep popping up (right now it’s the olympic games), a search function that actually searches for what I want instead of shoving more suggested videos in my face, and changing every “not now” button into “don’t ever ask again”.

Despite the fact that I’m a voracious consumer of YoutTube videos and a long-time paying customer, I have to accept that I am not the target audience. They want passive users who endlessly watch whatever gets put in front of them so that they never leave the app. If there was a respectful alternative that worked well with iOS and AppleTV I’d gladly pay for that instead.

I’ve been a macOS user for over a decade and I am never going back to Windows. That being said, Apple does have iCloud (their version of OneDrive) which is tightly integrated into the OS and they’re not shy about asking you to pay for more storage. They also want you to log in with an Apple ID when you first start your computer and I don’t know how easy it is to use a local account.

It’s not the same as Windows in terms of aggressive ads and upsells, but Apple aren’t innocent in wanting more of your money. If you want true freedom you have to pay with your time and energy and run Linux.

I’ve been a fan of Dragon Age since Origins and this game looks like another step towards the kind of simplified gameplay that every game has made. It’s disappointing that the series has gone from an RPG to a generic 3rd person action adventure game, but given the gradual evolution of the other games it’s not really surprising.

kind of game Bioware has forgotten how to make.

Such a nice way to sum it up. You would think that the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 would show publishers that there is a (large) market for actual RPGs, but that’s maybe too much to hope for.

When you mentioned it I remembered that of course there is a setting for this… but when I went to check it just says “Updates disabled by your organisation” In this case it’s a work laptop that has a bunch of “security” things installed on it which prevent me from doing things like …installing applications I need to do my job. Not sure how Firefox is able to update when it’s been explicitly disabled, but I will at least change this setting on my personal computer.

I may have misworded it a bit. The tabs themselves get restored, but the state of the tabs (being logged in to a site, for example) isn’t always retained. In all fairness this is perhaps due to my privacy settings, but I’d prefer it if Firefox didn’t force me to restart.

I’m on macOS.

I remember feeling liberated when streaming became big. Dealing with potential fake files, low quality, or having something stuck on 95% with no seeders was something I wasn’t going to miss when I ditched piracy for Netflix… then the streaming wars began and here I come crawling back.

I also pay for Kagi and I’m super happy with that decision. I do wish they’d stop putting so much AI cruft into their search engine, but at least I can disable it.