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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 6th, 2025

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  • I’m confused. Are you looking for a fancy text editor (VS Code) or a full IDE (Most Jetbrains Products, the actual Visual Studio’s)?

    Either way, for a fancy text editor, there’s VS Codium. Just VS Code without MS bs like telemetry and stuff. Works really well, I switched as soon as I heared about it and never looked back.

    Now when it comes to a full blown IDE, I don’t think there is anything comparable, especially when you look at features vs cost. Free, or even FOSS solutions, won’t even come close to Jetbrains products and I never bothered looking for enterprise solutions since I can’t afford them anyway. Depending on your language requirements and OS choice there’s Visual Studio of course and even Community used to be pretty good, but I haven’t used that one since my switch to Linux so I can’t tell how it perfoms nowadays.

    Now if I’m wrong, my information is outdated or I may not know about some software that is actually really neat, please correct me.


  • When you use the site for the first time and search something where AI overview is available, it shows a toggle for how often you want to see it, with “sometimes” as middle ground being the default. Without showing that a feature exists, it’s hard to decide if you want to use it or not. And since peoples opinion about it seems pretty spit, I think that is pretty valid.

    Or would you rather have a cookie-popup like choice box pop up every time you use the service without cookies enabled asking you for your preference? Because that would annoy me very much.




  • If you are talking about the smaller, seperate news window, you can disable that in the settings. My switch (1) also has a news feed but you can decide for yourself which news channel you want to subscribe too, or none at all. For GOG, there is no ad free version of the installer, you’d have to use third party tools or maybe powershell/cmd (I never tried the latter).









  • IMO due paid reviews and companies being too scared of getting sued for defamation or similar reasons I also do not trust “professional” reviews any more and stopped reading them. But while less professional and more subjective, I almost always read user reviews on plattforms that allow them like Steam on PC or the Play Store on mobile. At least you can tell if there are some issues that most people seem to hate and then you can judge for yourself if that is a dealbreaker to you or if you’re gonna gice it a shot anyway.

    Way better than any review is a free demo for an actual hands-on experience. Or I also often look for some gameplay on YouTube, especially if there is no demo available.




  • No impact? Nothing? I mean, they shoud at least notice something, right?

    A study published in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among 6,000 CEOs, chief financial officers, and other executives from firms who responded to various business outlook surveys in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia, the vast majority see little impact from AI on their operations. While about two-thirds of executives reported using AI, that usage amounted to only about 1.5 hours per week, and 25% of respondents reported not using AI in the workplace at all. Nearly 90% of firms said AI has had no impact on employment or productivity over the last three years, the research noted.

    Well duh, that explains everything. Me getting paid for taking a dump 1.5h a week hasn’t had any impact on my productivity score either. My guess is those 1.5h were mostly used to ask questions you’d otherwise just look up yourself, which also doesn’t change much in terms of productivity.


  • So far, this bill (and every other one I’ve) seen basically wants to force OS developers to add a birthdate field to your account setup process and an APi to expose this field, which should then be used by other software to obtain your age and limit what they serve you (ads, tracking, nsfe content) based on the legal requirements of your current age bracket. So, no more age gates for every virtual “adult service” you consume, just once on OS setup.

    And how to circumvent this? Simple: You lie, just like you did when you were a teen and wanted to access inapropriate content for your age.

    Now, if they expand the bill to actually require verification instead of indication, that’s when things will get interesting. But even then, as long as you own a PC and not use a cloud PC, which means that the data is still stored somewhere locally, it can and will be manipulatable and therefore circumventable. How exactly is hard to say without seeing the actual implementation of the affected OS.

    One thing to actually fear tho is how Microsoft and Apple will handle this: They tend to overshoot what the bare minimum law is asking for and actual, verified age data can be valuable when harvested in larger quantities, combined with other metrics and sold (think about how many surveys ask for your age or an age bracket). Most of the bills I read do mention “privacy and security when it comes to sensitive user information”, but as we all know: A fee is just another expense when it comes to calculating your net profit from your total revenue…



  • Yes, although it is not just about the engine. For AAA story games (think of something like Resident Evil) I couldn’t care less, but anything small scale with great modding potential gameplay-wise, I avoid engines that compile to bytecode like Unreal because they make it insanly painful to create mods. I prefer something that I can easily decompile to look at the souce code like Godot and Unity.

    But as I said, that is not just an engine issue, since you can provide official mod support on Unreal or make it harder to mod on other engines using stuff like obfuscation or IL2CPP. But in general, especially on most small-scale Indie games, just looking at the used engine is enough to determine modability and therefore influence my decision.