You get what you pay for and your local business is going to provide customer service that is most likely worth the markup

There are two victims. The illiterate who get taken advantage of by malicious actors gaming the results and your company whose tech support center has to deal with the victims shame and distress and the reputational impact that your company faces from scammers impersonating you.

There is actually a third victim and that’s the rest of your customers who have to pay higher rates for services to cover the losses due to fraud.

The bad guy in this scenario isn’t any of the victims but if the two victims don’t have empathy for each other, ultimately the bad guys are empowered to further steal.

A boycott would work, I just think most Nintendo fans are empty in their threats and will still buy the switch 2 just like all those MW2 players did back then.

It’d be as effective as the PC players boycott of MW2

I’ve been playing more of my old retail games that don’t require any launcher or drm beyond requiring the disc. It’s nice.

I’m not exactly sure if “xfire on steroids” bloat of steam actually adds anything anymore these days. Steam is nice because my library is already there. Even the friends list has mostly been supplanted by discord now.

I use the epic launcher for 1 thing, to launch Fortnite to play with my son. I don’t want more steam features, I’d rather acknowledge its existence less. Start selling games without DRM that only use the launcher to update and it’s better than steam. That’s the 1 feature it needs.

Mother’s Day is in March in the UK lol

I’d agree with others that have said to use a framework like Hugo to serve an RSS feed. I wrote an automation using Google apps script to scrape blog pages and manually update the RSS feed but it was more trouble than it was worth. Letting your framework automatically update your feed is much easier.

The Apple silicon Macs are really great when it comes to battery life. If you already use an iPhone it makes so much sense.

I’m still on a 2014 Air. It’s doesn’t work near as good. But still does well enough for me.

There are legitimate complaints against Apple for its iOS/iPad OS AppStore practices, their former hardware upsell practices, their botched AI roll out, and their corporate practices in general. But there really aren’t any legitimate complaints about their hardware, software, or services.

It’s within a standard deviation, it’s not like it’s getting him into Mensa.

Firmware is dumped almost immediately as well, not a big deal to update a switch offline.

They probably use a third party company to mail statements and such. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have already tried to contact the account owner but are unable to. They still need an address on file for account verification so they can’t exactly remove your address without an updated address from the customer. I don’t know why they asked you though. You wouldn’t have permission to update information on someone else’s account.

That’s strange, having bridged my account to both, I actually feel the opposite. I have way more engagement on the Mastodon side to the point where I forget I bridged my account to bluesky.

I mean it certainly helps that all my posts are tech and retro gaming related but still

I agree with you in part, but I find just wanted to put the footnote that good moderation isn’t censorship (unless it’s literally being used to suppress alternative viewpoints). Good moderation is just reminding everyone of your grandmother’s rule that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it all. And there is nothing wrong in joining an instance like that and doesn’t make your instance an echo chamber.

It collects and stores information about your system and also has your identity tied to your purchases.

I don’t think it’s a big privacy concern as far as tracking and spying on you.

But realize any device you install steam on then is tied to your real identity if you purchased games on that account. And can be used with data gained from other parties to determine your online activity if a government were to be able to obtain both.

It’s worth noting that I had to retire a few devices that I used with my iCloud before I could enable ADP because they didn’t support it. That may be why it’s opt in, although it’s not a very good reason.

The other reason may be because Apple can’t recover your passcode if you turn on ADP and they don’t want customer support nightmares of users losing access to all their precious photos and memories because they could be bothered to manually back them up or remember their passcode

If you don’t use a second factor to unlock your password database then you are correct.

Here is the real secret. If the only authentication you have on an account is password auth then you really have no authentication at all. Passwords are not security

Apple: “Brainwashed”

iMessage: “Beginner”

Well which one is it?

I don’t think he’s being nasty to you. His frustration is with Rockstar for abandoning GTA to sell microtransactions instead of make content. A lot of people are mad at valve for not making Half-Life/Portal/Left4Dead 3 just like a lot of people are mad at Rockstar for taking 13 years to release a new GTA game.

Obviously I don’t know your personal situation, but they can’t actually force you to play Roblox. You’re allowed to say no.

Mainly I’m bringing up Fortnite and Roblox all these years later, not because I think they are bad games but because their monetization strategies have negatively influenced the gaming disasters that have tried to copy them. I don’t think if you strip Fortnite down to its mechanics that it is bad, I think it’s quite good just not for me.

Multiplayer games are nearly unplayable in 2025. And I just don’t have the free time I had back then. So I get frustrated that we wait more than a decade for good games from established studios and we don’t really get many new IPs.

I fundamentally disagree with your take that only a couple games of 1998 still hold up but I think we can agree to disagree there since I think that’s a matter of taste.

Rockstar made GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, Bully, Max Payne and Max Payne 2 in the PS2 generation. We are 5 years into this current generation and Rockstar has made 0 total games for PS5.

Yeah there was a lot of shovelware back then. We get barely anything now.