then you need to buy 6x more alcohol, which is clearly not worth it

true here in germany

Just think of all the incredible engagement players will feel as they gamble their latest limited edition skin away which they bought with their mom’s credit card or their first independent wages.

But hey, at least the slot machine has all your favorite characters and also streamers who have sold their soul. Market research shows that people with dysfunctional impulse control are much more easily exploited that way.

Life can be cruel.

phones are already very full and dense, and a headphone jack is a very large component. plus, the Bluetooth is simply part of the small SoC, it’s a microscopic size. That doesn’t mean I prefer Bluetooth, but it makes some sense.

as someone has been fiddling with dongles for years, it’s not that bad, and you can just permanently connect your headphones to your dongle. the apple dongle is excellent and beyond enough for iems and a lot of headphones. I personally have one dongle + iems for my phone and another dongle + headphones for my PC, and that setup works really well for me. You might want to consider it. Otherwise, those big beefy Bluetooth headphones might be semi-repairable, and there are of course also Fairphone Bluetooth earbuds that are apparently fairly repairable (though I know nothing about those). At least you can replace the batteries and the ear tips or pads, and that’s usually enough to last you a decade with these things.

A lot of people get cancer already and ice also already melts all the time so I don’t see why this is so special

national socialism, democratic people’s republic of korea…

yes but what if a company has the ability to create billions of close friends who can recommend sponsored products to you? why would it care about whether you want that or not?

also bard was a way better name for google’s LLM. it has its origins in an isaac asimov story about a robot who is programmed to tell random stories.

can confirm (germany), it’s gotten better but in my childhood there was literally just a cig vending machine outside my block, like 30-40m away from a playground

absolutely

in OLED screens the colors wear out over time at different rates, so you may be correct

we need a bioengineering company that genetically modifies us so our sweat smells pleasant. I would give at least $3 to change my sweat into the smell of fresh spring rain on a grassy field, maybe with some lemony tones in the background.

but then how would you move money from down here to up there?

that story didn’t actually happened the way those headlines said it did. the AI was a genuine LLM, but the company also had human contractors that could custom build features for you.

way before WW2 vs. right after WW2

why reinvent the wheel?

You can obviously block cookies locally in the browser, but what you can also do for those “consent” popups that ask you to decide which of the 1300 data brokers you want your data to be sold to is to use https://consentomatic.au.dk/ which automatically declines all of them. It works on a lot of websites, and I don’t see consent popups anymore. Of course there are also adblock lists for your adblocker of choice, but they never get rid of all of it sadly. If you have an android phone then a Firefox fork with unlocked extensions will be able to install it as well (for example Fennec). Presumably also a chromium based browser with unlocked extensions, but I can’t verify that. On iOS there’s the Orion browser by Kagi which allows you to install extensions for both Firefox and Chrome, but again I can’t speak to the actual effectiveness there.

EDIT: forgot but obviously safari also. duh.

i meant other types of captchas as well, but yes, cloudflare is fairly configurable. I also know other captchas can be more aggressive. And of course captchas can also block or harass “high privacy” configuration browsers and clients, and there’s also the strategy of infinite delay, where a captcha is never quite sure you’re really a human, so you have to work through 12 phases of it only to have to do the exact same thing again the next time you’re on the site. Recaptcha V3 with its “automatic” background captcha is also in a surprising amount of places you’d never know about unless you’re infected with some kind of The-Mainstream-Internet-Hates-You disease. Captchas discriminating against poor countries isn’t some big secret though, as far as I’m aware it’s fairly well known.

they also often prevent legitimate traffic from poorer countries, and aggressively so

if you do it you legally have to buy one cheese wheel at the cheese auction there