The original games are so old that it is quite messy to get them to run on PC these days and the remake changed the gameplay quite substantially. So this remaster is quite welcome and probably a lot cheaper to produce than a full 2 and 3 remake.

As for Anniversary, the story there is a bit weird, as Anniversary and Legend are basically completely independent games that have nothing much to do with each other other than the engine. Legend is a reboot and Anniversary is a remake. It’s only with Underworld that the the story of those two get wrangled together into a trilogy. Only the first game is taken into account there, all the other sequels of the original game are ignored.

Brave has their own index as well. And if you want Google results in not-enshittified, try Kagi.

That aside, the biggest frustrating in the search space is the complete lack of innovation. All those search engines and their alternatives do the same thing and look the same. There haven’t been new features or new sources of information in about a decade. The whole space has been extremely stagnant.

The only new thing we got recently was ChatGPT, but as search engine replacement it really doesn’t cut it right now, it can enter Wikipedia-style general knowledge question ok’ish, but completely falls apart on anything even mildly obscure (e.g. summaries of lesser known movies are completely wrong). I hope that something good comes from all the AI development, but BingChat so far is a really lack luster and ham-fisted attempt at integrating search with AI, often performing much worse than plain ChatGPT instead of better.

You have plenty of literature that can act as ground truth. This is not a terribly hard problem to solve, it just requires actually focusing on it. Which so far simply hasn’t been done. ChatGPT is just the first “look, this can generate text”. It was never meant to do anything useful by itself or stick to the truth. That all still has to be developed. ChatGPT simply demonstrates that LLM can process natural language really well. It’s the first step in this, not the last.

It’s not about identifying AI or even spam, but about extracting useful information. Are the claims made in a source backed by other sources? Do they violate information from trusted sources? That’s all stuff that an AI can reason about and then discard the source as junk or condense it down to the useful information in it.

Basically you completely skip browsing the Web yourself and just use the AI to find you what you want. Think of it like some IMDB or Wikipedia, but covering everything and written and curated by AI. When the AI doesn’t already know some fact, it goes crawling the Web and finding it out for you, expanding its knowledge base in the process.

Or see the ship computer from StarTrek, you don’t see the people there browsing the Web, you see them getting data in exactly the format they need and they can reformat and filter it as needed.

At the moment there are still some technical hurdles, the AI systems we have are all still a little to stupid for this. But that seems to be the direction we are heading, things like summarizer bots already do a pretty good job and ChatGPT is reasonably good at answering basic questions and reformatting it the way you need it. Only a matter of time until it gets good enough that you couldn’t do a better job yourself.

If you wiggle them around long enough, they all go bad. But it should take a few years under normal use. They are rated for around 10,000 insertions. Cable bending can also damage them.

The more annoying part with modern USB is that not all cables are alike to begin with. Cheap charging cables that you get with random gadgets (e.g. flashlights, fans, etc.) will often just have two pins connected, meaning they work only for charging, not data. Others might have data pins, but only enough for USB2, not USB3 speeds. Others might have too much resistance slowing down charging or dropping too much voltage to even have a device function properly at the other end (common issue with long cables or extensions). And so on. Rather annoying to deal with when you just have some random cables floating around, as there is absolutely no labeling or color coding to differentiate the cables.

For quite a while by now. Three years ago or so they started recommending older content again, instead of focusing exclusively on new stuff. And since than I frequently end up on videos and tiny channels with just hundreds of views. Meanwhile on a regular Google Web search I literally never end up on somebodies random private homepage, I have to remember that Marginalia exist if I ever wanna see one of those.

Youtube of course still favors professional monetized content, but random niche content still ends up making its way to the top surprisingly often. Youtube also does a pretty good job of not recommending me popular content that is irrelevant to me, all those channels with tens of million of views I can see on the Trending-page, they never make it into my normal Youtube browsing.

While Web search has gotten worse, Youtube has gotten pretty good at finding niche content with a few dozens views. In general it seems most user generated content these days is on Youtube as video, not on the Web as text. The typical Web SOC spam doesn’t really exist on Youtube outside of a few crypto scams here and there.

I am more optimistic on that one. AI provides a pretty clear way out of this, since it allows you to automatically detect the bullshit. Meaning either the bullshit has to raise so much in quality that it is indistinguishable from good content, in which case it would not be bullshit anymore, or it will get filtered. AI can also transform bad websites into good ones, like a super-powered ReaderMode, AdBlock and more all rolled into one, so a lot of the “lets plaster everything with ads” will lose effectiveness.

The problem over the last decade was that Google completely lost interest in being a search engine, they are just an ad company and as long as search leads you to more ads, they are quite happy. So the user experience went down the toilet.

The real problem with AI is that it will remove the incentive for the authors. Content producers want to get paid, with AI you can just extract the information from an article without ever viewing the article or the ads around it.

Yawn, are we still repeating blinding repeating this utter nonsense from a year ago?

Removed by mod

FreeCAD requires a lot more clicks. Simple example: You want to extrude part of a sketch. In Fusion360 you select the part, hit extrude, done. In FreeCAD you can’t extrude a part of a sketch, only whole sketches, so you have to make a new sketch, important the geometry of your previous sketch, repaint over the imported geometry to make it an actually sketch and now you are allowed to extrude it. When you have an extrusion that would result in multiple bodies, you have to redo this produce for each and every body, since FreeCAD extrusions are only allowed to produce one body. This can easily turn a 5sec operation into a 10min operation.

On top of that you have the topological naming problem that forces you do basically remoddel your whole thing from scratch if you want to change anything in the early build steps.

There are numerous ways to ease the pain (MasterSketch, Datum planes, ShapeBinder), but they all require a lot of discipline and planing ahead. You can’t just YOLO your models in FreeCAD the way you can in Fusion360.

On the plus side, the discipline FreeCAD forces on you can result in cleaner results. In Fusion360 it’s quite easy to model yourself in a corner were everything is underconstrained and will just exploded if you touch anything. Fusion360 will let you get away with a lot until it is to late. FreeCAD will go “I can’t do that, Dave” a lot sooner and force you to clean up.

All that complaining aside, FreeCAD is my CAD tool of choice. I am never going to touch Fusion360 with its ever more restrictive licensing scheme ever again.

Not really. Systemd had the complete opposite problem, it did far more than the previous hackery of shell scripts. The complaints were that it was too big, had too many features, violated Unix philosophy and was less deterministic. Systemd had no problem fully replacing init, cron, DNS and Co. Wayland simply can’t replace X11 in it’s current state, it just can’t do a lot of basic things.

such as no massive gaping security issues.

That’s an utter strawman that doesn’t get any more true by repeating it. Nobody cares about display manager security at this point, since every app you run already has full system access anyway. Wayland security is like making sure the door is locked after the thief is already in the house. It might become relevant in a future when every app you run is in a Flatpak sandbox, but we are a very long way away from that. Even apps that use Flatpak are rarely sandboxed to the point that it would improve security. And on top of that, the sandboxing model Flatpak uses fundamentally doesn’t really work with a lot of Unix tools, e.g. how would you Flatpak something like make?

The issue isn’t just that the features had to be reimplemented, but that they were not part of Wayland to begin with. Wayland does only do the most basic stuff and leaves everything else to the compositor (aka Gnome or KDE). That means every compositor will implement their own hacky version of the missing functionality and it takes ages until that gets unified again, so that apps can actually use that functionality.

Wayland is a classic case of an underspecified software project, they do a thing and they might even do it well, but what they are doing is only a fraction of what is actually needed for it to work properly in the real world. That’s why we are 15 years later and the new “simpler” Wayland is still not ready.

but missing some amenities

Like doorknobs or windows. Wayland wasn’t just trimmed down, it was trimmed down to the point of being non-functional and it has taken ages to slowly patch that back up.

X11 is an multiple decade old dinosaur, the developer decided it was growing too complex and no longer representing how graphics are done on modern systems and decided a rewrite. While doing so they decided to simplify some things along the way and in doing so they drastically overshoot their target and removed tons of fundamental functions that was present in X11 (stuff like being able to take screenshots, window manager, etc.). Some of that is slowly getting reimplemented and Wayland is getting closer to actually being a feature-parity X11 replacement, but it’s also taken 15 years and is still not done. The whole drama is the conflict between people wanting it as default and the other group of people for which it simply doesn’t work in its current state.

Straight from Amazon, eBay, Aliexpress and Co. All still early days, but things are ramping up.

Call me when there is an actual battery based off peer reviewed research that has been successfully tested in production systems by at least 5 major companies.

While everybody was busy writing bullshit hype articles, we actually got a real revolution with the sodium-ion battery, which you can buy today. It won’t replace Li-ion in terms of energy density, but it’s much more robust, cheap, handles low temperatures, deep discharge and much more charge cycles, making it ideal for off-grid-storage.

I really wish we had tech news that just reports on stuff that’s tested and available for purchase. Things do actually keep improving, but it’s completely drowned out in all the other hype.

Yes, but that’s self inflicted. They make the rules. They build the software. They decide how ads are presented.

Because that has been tried so many times over the decades.

When? “Will it Blend?” is about the only time I can think of when a company went in an alternative direction and turned their ads into entertainment and was quite successful at that. How many products do even have as little as an official unboxing video? Stuff like the SteamDeck teardown is what I would love every company doing for all their product. But it’s super rare. Why limit your ads to 30sec fake nonsense when you could have 15min of talking about your product in detail?

They just block everything for the exact same reasons

There wouldn’t be a need or even the ability to block anything if it wouldn’t be forced on the user. If Youtube had a “show me a random ad” button, I’d click it. I don’t hate ads. I hate bad ads that are forced in my face when I don’t need them. I have plenty of downtime where I wouldn’t mind seeing what new products are around. Gameify that stuff. Make it interesting. Make it explorable. Make it interactive. You have million dollar budget, mountains of collected data and random garbage forced into the users face is the best you can come up with?

“What can we do to actually get ANY ad revenue out of this so that we can keep the lights on?”

You are forgetting that there is an advertiser in all this. People that care about getting clicks on ads will have no problem tricking users into accidentally clicking on ads. But why are the advertisers themselves ok with that? If I want to advertise a product I’d not be interested in paying for accidental clicks users were tricked into, I’d be interested in finding users that are interested in the product I want to sell. And I really don’t see current ads doing that very well. They might be better than literally nothing, but I really don’t see them being better than all the potential ways to make better ads.

I’ll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people’s faces that don’t want see them and so little making ads more attractive.

A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.

Forced ads with mandatory 5sec isn’t making people interested in your product, heck, numerous times I might have been interested in a product, but lost interested since I couldn’t rewind the ad or because the ad didn’t link to anything that gave me further information. A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.