This is the most stable beta I’ve used, and I’ve used every x.0 beta since iOS 10.

I think it was iOS 11’s beta that had the prompt to update iOS every time you unlocked the phone. That was fun. So was waiting 1-2 weeks for them to fix it. And honestly that’s about as bad as it gets.

Pro Max (16) so I’m not worried about battery life. It is worse with the beta, but that’s to be expected.

Liquid Ass is gorgeous and I love it, but I’m not going to stop calling it Liquid Ass. It’s funny and I saw the YouTube thumbnail.

So… they let you uninstall it? Or are we talking about spyware not made by Meta?

Because the way I understand it, Meta has been hacking iPhones ever since the App Tracking Protection thing came about. Mostly via the in-app browser. Point is, Tim Cook said Meta can continue to track you, they just have to get your permission first, and even if you said no, they still found a way to do it anyway. Therefore, are Meta products not spyware?

(So are Google products. On iPhone, you block ads system-wide with a DNS filter. Same as you do on an unrooted Android phone, since you don’t have access to the HOSTS file — rooted users are just using AdAway or something like it to update HOSTS. Anyway, Google apps use Google DNS, which they say makes them faster, but it also has the convenient upshot (to them) of going around your ad blocking, and forcing ads on a user who has explicitly configured their device to block them.)

Maybe.

I grew up reading Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and John Saul. I now think horror movies are kind of silly. I like the Scream series because they’re smarter. They’re good slashers but you have the whodunit aspect as well.

I can’t speak for everyone though. And maybe it’s not so bad to be scared of horror? Like, isn’t that part of the fun?

Never got into horror games though. The problem I have with that is, being that it’s a game, either you have the agency to peek behind the curtain, or you don’t. With a movie, you only see what they want you to see. I never actually played horror games, as such, but there were a couple scary moments in games I have played, like Fallout 3 with the Dunwich Building. It’s a random building toward the southwest corner of the map that is not connected to any main or side quests. (I think one of the DLCs had a tie in to it, though.) When you go in, you find that you can’t leave the way you came in, and as you traverse the building looking for another way out, you see flashbacks that are handled like jump scares. It’s really not that scary, but the first time through might be. There’s a similar area in Fallout 4 (Dunwich Borers, so, same company) and you experience some of the same stuff.

Take out the “half your age plus” and you might be onto something.

They’re all boosting each others’ craziness so none of them drop the dreaded list that exposes all of them, and/or the people they owe favors to.

Not really. Most people don’t care about privacy, or their personal data being sold to the highest bidder. People still use Facebook, too.

Final Fantasy 7 on PS2. They published the intro movie re-imagined using the PS2’s capabilities. Later they laughed it off and said it was just a tech demo. Later beyond that they said they felt they should not capitalise on FF7 by remaking it until they could release a newer FF game they were proud of enough to not need FF7 to support the company (newer FF games should do that on their own). The FF7 remake was later broken into 3 parts (2 have released so far) for the PS4 and PS5, with an Xbox release on the way.

As for the Amiga (mentioned by OP), that computer was more capable than the IBM/clones and Apple computers of its day. Bill Gates (Microsoft cofounder) once said you need 8MB of RAM for multitasking, but the Amiga did it with 256K (and also with 512KB if you had the memory expander), though some argued Amiga did not do true multitasking. The Amiga was in the 1980s what the Mac is today, a computer for artists and creators.

Also, obligatory Half-Life 3. The issue there is, Valve decided it was more profitable to sell other people’s games and make money off the backs of others rather than develop their own games. At this point I don’t even want HL3. HL2 built such strong momentum, and it spawned two expansions that were mostly good. And then of course Portal, and arguably, The Stanley Parable (game that started as a HL2 mod). I don’t think a HL3 based on how games are now would be as popular as some people think. And if it were based more on HL2 gameplay, I don’t think it would sell very well today. Same reason we don’t have Deus Ex anymore. The Deus Ex formula got pretty diluted with the latest entry, Mankind Divided, and that was almost 10 years ago? Now if you want the Deus Ex gameplay, you kinda have to go for something like Cyberpunk. DX elements plus some GTA stuff.

People voted for this with their wallets.

As an iPhone guy, I know we already have it like that, and our keyboard has always sucked (and none of the third party keyboards help, they all suck compared to Gboard on Android), but while we dread the day that Apple becomes a data broker like Google… that day is not here yet.

Depends on your age to a certain extent. Older men tend to value monogamy more, but we’re also older and looking for a sure thing (if we don’t have it already). Chasing tail, bedding a different young lady every night, sounds fun, but when you need someone to take care of you, it doesn’t really make sense as opposed to a long-term relationship.

If you’re younger though, you got your whole life ahead of you… just be safe. And try to avoid the crazy ones. They deserve love too, but they also take a lot of patience.

Is that the first game? Yes, it was great. But the publisher was scummy AF and broke the game up into four parts. Now, granted, each part came with an anime DVD which gave you some of the back story/real world issues around the back story, so they did try to make it worth it. But still, it should have been one game.

That’s true. Where I was, I didn’t have access to a physical one, but could have Googled it. Google often sources Dictionary.com which includes a thesaurus, but also gives AI answers.

That said, the AI gives several choices, so it’s not choosing anything. Still, point taken.

I read about this earlier on Ars Technica. I was expecting a paywalled link. Was not expecting to find a mention of “No Longer Human.” Ars didn’t mention that. Or the chat logs. It was a long article but didn’t go into the same depth.

So, I’ve read “No Longer Human.” A more recent translation is called “A Shameful Life” and that’s a bit more apt, I think, but doesn’t have the same ring. It’s about a guy who feels less and less like a person, like what he does and feels doesn’t matter. It’s a wild book, about a double suicide, and the author later killed himself much the same way. There have been several adaptations — none of them very good. None of them quite captured the book. I wonder if it’s just unfilmable. Anyway, it’s a shame that it’s being referenced here, because it’s good literature worth considering, and I hate to see it maligned in much the same way as the Doom game was following the Columbine massacre. Relevant or not (guns in that case, suicide in this case), it’s a shame art gets associated with tragedy simply by association.

Perhaps the same could be said of AI technology, and it has been. But certainly AI needs better safeguards. According to Ars, when the guy started asking about suicide, ChatGPT said it could not help him — unless he specified he was talking about fictional characters. So he did that (Ars constantly refers to it as a “jailbreak”) for a while, and then I guess (and they guess as well) that ChatGPT just assumed that context and stopped requiring him to specify that.

Yeah, so Musk’s argument is that even though OpenAI’s product ChatGPT has more downloads, Apple should consider letting X’s Grok take the top spot because… reasons, I guess? Grok is still listed despite its antisemitic and other disgusting actions. It might be #2 (yeah it’s definitely shit, right?), it might be #5, but it’s still on the list, and it’s still available. Musk is just mad that Apple is not featuring it.

Meanwhile, Fortnite is the top downloaded free iOS game. It sits on top of the charts. Thusly, Apple has buried the chart and they refuse to feature Fortnite, instead choosing to feature Roblox and PUBG instead. It’s petty and silly, but the rankings do show which one has more downloads. That’s it. It’s not even about quality or anything.

I tend to agree with Epic (Fortnite) over Apple, but in regards to X, I’m with Apple. I may be slightly biased in that I don’t like Musk/X, but I’m with Apple strictly on the merits here. I don’t need biases to influence my reasoning here.

Yeah, I think it was meant to. Maybe the origins are same/similar.

Fun trivia: Isekai is a Japanese genre that means “trapped in another world.” Sword Art Online made it popular but it wasn’t the first, even in Japan. The idea of being trapped in a video game goes at least back to Tron in the 1980s. SAO was itself a revamp/remake of an older anime called .hack//SIGN — not officially, but it shared way too many details with that decade-older show. (The books were written around the time it was airing, but the show would have been green-lit almost a decade later, knowing there was a very similar show already out. And the same people worked on it, made the music, made the games, so yeah, similar DNA in both.) But the first isekai may have actually been Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Isekai has western origins, Japan just gave it a simple name. And now it seems like there are dozens of isekai (word is the same singularly and plurally) coming out every year, and most of them suck. But isekai is everywhere. Stephen King has written isekai — The Dark Tower, The Talisman, 11/22/63, Fairy Tale, and probably more.

Yeah, I know about Telegram’s limitations. Been using it for ages, just to chat with my wife since she uses Android and I’m on an iPhone, and I don’t do social media. It was the best way for us to message back and forth and we haven’t moved off of it.

I have Matrix, Signal, and Session as well. Nobody chats me up on them but I keep them as options because why not? My phone has 512GB. Most is music and video. Apps are nothing to me.

Try it and see?

If it’s the soda I’m thinking of, it’s sickeningly sweet, with something like 130% of your recommended sugar intake in a 20 ounce bottle — roughly 600mL to those outside the US.

These days I can’t drink soda (or anything carbonated, like champagne and beer) but I believe I have had Fanta Strawberry before. I know it was one strawberry brand.

But honestly, what olden days? The only strawberry soda I remember from back in “my” day (the 80s and early 90s) was Safeway Select. We didn’t have Fanta back then where I was. I remember Sunkist and maybe one other brand had orange and grape soda, but only Safeway had strawberry soda IIRC. And it wasn’t nearly as sweet!

“Woman”? Probably. “Human female”? Most likely.

Girls figure out from a much earlier age, on average, that most guys are comfortable knowing, that vibrations in that area feel good. So even without thinking about sex or pursuing orgasm, they will seek out things they can straddle that move in a way that feels good. One of those things, if you’re around enough girls or a girl long enough you learn but maybe wish ya didn’t.

How do you mean “where is it going?”

The most recent iteration of “derpy” I’ve heard was in the Kpop Demon Hunters fandom. That’s what fans call the tiger-spirit-thing. I don’t know what its real name is, or if it has one, and I’ve seen the movie three times. At this point I don’t care, its name is Derpy.

If you’re not familiar, it’s a tiger spirit (apparently this is a thing in Korean folklore) and it appears to one of the demon hunter girls, and after initially appearing scary, it knocks over a planter, and proceeds to try to right the planter before proceeding. After several failed attempts, the girl intervenes and sets the planter right… only for the tiger to knock it over again and again attempt to right it. (It’s not a scary scene. Everyone loves the tiger.)

Also worth noting: the people they’re scamming don’t know a Galaxy from an iPhone, let alone a Galaxy from one photoshopped with a gold back and T1 on it.

I don’t think they care, either. If they know it’s a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and they’re being charged double for one but it has a Trump case and they think buying it will fund violence against dark skinned/LGBTQ+ people, they’re not really being scammed. They’re putting their money where their mouth is.

IANAP but it seems like it would be trivial for a client app to do. Look at the combined vote weight (e.g. -8 + 4 = -4) and if it’s below user inputted threshold, don’t display it.

That said, Lemmy isn’t Reddit. When I see a post with a negative score, I can sometimes see why it’s not popular, but it’s seldom straight up garbage, and I can still vote accordingly. Never used the feature on Reddit because I’ve been brigaded by entire communities for acknowledging that their favorite show’s latest season exists (it’s not Game of Thrones, but similar energy), and I don’t think people should have the right to censor others; I believe each person should have the right to choose what they see.

There isn’t a phone. They’re just photoshopping other phones into photoshops of gold cases.

There isn’t a phone. All there is, is a grift.