I remember a study that had Duolingo as the most egregious data collector by far on people’s phone

That controller is the lynchpin for making a mini PC my future home theater center. I care for it more than the steam machine

One thing is that I email and receive emails from almost no one that uses an encrypted service on their end so I have nearly zero expectations when it comes to email. Regardless, as long as it’s encrypted so they have been demonstrated in court to not being able to provide the content of my emails and you can pay with some crypto, then I consider it good enough. Other thing is that regardless of what country you live in, a service outside of the country you live in. Preferably even countries that have the least if not just about no significant information sharing treaties. Maybe hostile to the country I live in is best. I have no concerns about law enforcement in other countries. My concern is the authority that I live under practically every day of the year regardless of their behavior in the present

Other types of services I have higher expectations for privacy like cloud storage and VPNs

I’d absolutely use crypto if it was more available in anything I’d want to pay for. So far it’s mostly just VPNs and donations

At the size of transactions they’d be doing, it’d probably be worth it to set a high fee so that it gets picked up and processed faster. Should still be peanuts compared to the value of cargo these tankers are carrying

Friend one day added me to his family plan because they had one space open. I’m still in the habit of always going to youtube in ways I can ad-block but am always pleasantly surprised when I go in the normal youtube app and I have no ads. I’ll pay for the service though

I’m hoping by the time googles Android goes to shit, GrapheneOS is readily available on more phones or PostmarketOS. Same with Linux with KDE Plasma Bigscreen running on a minipc rather than using an android TV box

Like others, desktop I’m using Firefox with ublock origin. Android phone, Firefox with ublock origin. Android TV, SmartTube. Ad blockers have always outpaced Google in my experience though I use youtube maybe like twice a week and I don’t randomly browse reccomendations. Just there for specific stuff

For the most part no. Exceptions being like if some high budget game came out built with Godot, that’d be something I’d consider as a showcase for open source game engines. Same with other lesser known ones like Bevy or O3DE. Once any becomes fairly common, the novelty for me wears off like 2D games made in Godot. It was the same for me and Blender Open Movies ~15 years ago

This is one of those things that after a few years, is going to become a heavyweight feature that every other storefront should have been working to have but for some reason haven’t started yet like Steam Input or WINE/Proton/Linux integration. I imagine in the near future retro-handhelds mostly abandoning Android for Linux and basing their specs and marketing around some analytics done on Steam games and the crowd-sourced game performance data. PS4 is in its 13th year. Blink and next thing you know you’ll be seeing cheap mini handhelds advertising playing vintage PS4 era video games on your bought from AliExpress PSP sized retro gaming handheld. It’ll be advertised like 98% of games released before 2020 have been found to run well on hardware as powerful as this gaming device (*according to Steam user data)

Sony doesn’t even release that many games anymore. Games take half a decade plus to make and I’ve lost interest in Sony’s superhero movies with interactive elements

They’re propaganda laws. Internet censorship laws. Palestinian genocide started trending on social media and suddenly all the countries out in the west wanted to start banning/controlling social media. Plus the earlier push to ban TikTok by Facebook to try to ladder pull the market from competitors

To me twitter started off as like how the facebook timeline used to be, people posted inane stuff about their day. The place for people to overshare. It was the evolution of early 2000s personal blogs now told in a daily stream of single sentence posts.

Then it became celebrity gossip and it continued to be that until celebrities got on and it became the text version of Instagram. As in it was a major advertising portal. Then the scammers/wellness/influencers came in (just like Instagram) and it became where people tried to get people on financial multi level marketing schemes and special pink salt that removes negative ions from your surroundings (that’s still advertising). Around that time Trump was a hot take artist on Twitter and managed to parlay that to the White House (he really worked the media well in 2015/2016 - Twitter was the ultimate guerilla advertising platform then). To that event, whatever good discourse was going on on Twitter was deep in obscurity by like 2012. It had been a culture warzone well before Musk bought it

Everything becoming a punchline, I associate that with twitter. Like no delays joking about sex trafficking and Diddy became a joke day one of his arrest. Joking like that became mainstream on twitter a long time ago

Definitely feels like it’s snowballing. From barely moving for like a decade after 2012 to really pumping after the Steam Deck came out. Hoping hardware shortages can be resolved well enough for the Steam Machine to hit. It’s the perfect form factor to me for my living room to finally make couch multiplayer comfortable for me and guests

You should get the first Dragon Age game too. It’s nice that the console version has perfect gamepad support that the PC version lacks. White Knight Chronicles is a love it or hate game. I wouldn’t play that soon as a judgement on JRPG games if you haven’t played much of those. Same with FFXIII and the Star Ocean game there being love it or hate it games. Of what you have, I’d play Eternal Sonata. That’s a gem that sorely needs a PC release. I feel like that one is universally loved by those that play it. If you like Eternal Sonata, I’d then pick up Tales of Vesperia. There’s the Infamous games. Yakuza Dead Souls has yet to be released on any other platform

It shouldn’t be hard by 2030 I imagine; particularly if you primarily or exclusively use open source software. The RVA23 chips announced I usually see people comment them as having synthetic benchmark scores at about the Apple M1 level. I regularly use a laptop with a Skylake dual core in it and a Raspberry Pi 5 run off a microsd rather than a m.2 NVME hat. With that in mind, if RISC-V designs don’t get any better than that in the next 4 years, they’ll still be better than hardware that I will still be using. I still use a Raspberry Pi 3. At work every now and then I’ll throw a gitlab runner on a 10 year old desktop to have another thing building when things are busy

There are RISC-V developer boards today with PCI-E slots that you can throw in pretty much any AMD graphics card. The big distributions Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat - they all support risc-v. felix86 is equivalent to box64 and FEX for x86 to ARM:

https://felix86.com/felix86-26-04/

Software support is solid already today. It’s hardware availability for the announced RVA23 designs that’s not mature yet. 4 more years and I imagine in most cases the experience of Linux on RISC-V hardware not being much different than on ARM or x86 hardware

PS6 is going to be so boutique when that comes out. PS5’s cross gen period with the PS6 is going to be even longer than the PS4s with the PS5

I have not. Maybe I’ll check that one out

That makes sense after some thought on it because of how long games are in production. Like 5-8 years of a main studio of like 300+ people. Like if it’s plain 100k salary per person a year at 300 people, $30 million in payroll a year. Add overhead like insurance, taxes, benefits. AAA games have support studios they contract out to. Think like the credits having 1000+ names in it. Getting to 300 million for a US/Canada AAA game sounds unsurprising considering how many years games cook now

They just need to keep getting smaller, cheaper, and continue improving the display/optics. Quest 3 was lighter but not light enough. I think the Steam Frame is listed as lighter. Thing is they’re both neither super high res nor do they have incredible OLED/micro-LED displays. The upcoming Pico headset that was announced would certainly be too expensive and probably still not light enough. Someday though