Drove a few cars with “lane hold” and it’s infuriating to have to suddenly correct the car’s trajectory at every curve because it misjudges the road line. Some cars are worse than others but it was literally the first thing I disabled every time. I wonder how truck drivers feel about it. Do modern trucks even have this?

This is a great interview, thank you! It (sadly) confirms some stuff I’ve been suspecting for a while about the piracy scene: that repackers are a very rare bunch, repacking is getting more complex and liveservice/streamed games would truly be the end for piracy.

Yeah, I was just trying to get the point across and didn’t really have other recent metrics. Just checked and it grew to 1k avg users per day after the most recent update and is now 15x less active than FH5, if that paints a more accurate picture.

It was just a really strange comment. I mean yeah, road quality varies wildly ( jyst come to eastern europe if you wanna see some remarkable road craters ) but its a broad generalization and the quality surely it varies in china as well, no? I keep trying to imagine what roads were these vehicles designed for if “european” roads prompted a redesign.

I was going to say “because they’re probably state subsidized” but your suggestion is better

Edit: looks like you’re right lol

The urgent pace is baked into BYD’s structure. Taking advantage of China’s lower labor costs, BYD deploys about 900,000 employees, nearly as many as the combined workforces of Toyota and Volkswagen, to accelerate design and manufacturing. At its headquarters, BYD promotes a work-focused life through company-subsidized housing, transportation and schools.

They also combine that with skimping on quality ( admittedly a low bar these days, when even daimler uses cheap chinese interior plastic ):

Chinese engineers have essentially concluded that global industry-standard vetting processes are a wasteful pursuit of “excessive quality,” Han said.

Instead, Chinese automakers release good-enough vehicles quickly, with far fewer prototypes and a fail-fast philosophy mirroring Silicon Valley tech startups, industry executives and experts said.

This sentence makes no sense though:

The problem: The car had been designed for China’s smooth streets and slower speeds. Now, it had to withstand Europe’s winding, bumpy roads.

It’s almost as if this was a propaganda article.

Wang spends many nights in Shenzhen employee housing, eats simple meals and works long days, sometimes in a BYD uniform, two BYD investors and others who know him told Reuters. Unlike many Chinese executives, who are chauffeured around, he often drives himself

I got it - they’re quoting directly, that’s why it reads like propaganda.

It may be, and I feel for Turn10, but they really dropped the ball with the latest motorsport. It only has like a few hundred players on steam, after two years of essentially live service game. Of course the game itself is fine, it’s the “update trickles” and “grind to own” philosophies that are at fault and those were probably decisions also pushed by MS, but here we are. I really hope that Playground doesn’t screw up their next Forza, because rhey might meet the same fate. Then again these days success doesn’t guarantee you’re not getting the axe.

Decentralized platforms based on open protocols, such as Mastodon and Bluesky, have been designed from the ground up to prioritize user choice and agency—without needing permission from a corporate gatekeeper. This is most apparent on Bluesky

Tells you that you can take your social media back from big tech then casually recommends Bluesky. Gimme a break.

Also if you want your news free of the constant noise of social media, RSS still exists and it’s still beautiful.

Boy, they really are pulling all the stops in trying to make the game shit, aren’t they?

We’re in the honeymoon phase, shit didn’t hit the fan yet. Problem is we devs are fucked either way. If productivity does increase, then workforce demand will go down especially for entry level devs and seniors will be relegated to vibe coding and fixing AI bugs. If it all goes south then layoffs, because line must go up!

Company I’m at also does the forced AI and it’s all but mandatory now. Problem is as code monkeys we’re past the point of heading down to the Winchester for a pint until it blows over. They’re pushing so hard in order to “not fall behind” that you literally can’t escape it. I think even malicious compliance won’t cut it. And when 8/10 companies that dictate the market say that “this is the future”, then this is the future they’ll make whether we like it or not.

Edit: the silver lining is that we’re working with tools that are better than copilot at generating menial work like generating boilerplate code, unit tests, release notes, walls of text for app documentation etc.

I don’t know about Kojima making the best games. All I know is Death Stranding 1 was a jumbled mess of barely coherent and oddly paced plots and I loved every minute of it. I must have more! When PC Kojima???

Not sure. This phone seems better in some regards and worse in others, so I’d say wait for reviews.

As for me I probably won’t get it. Already have a fp4 I got in a sale to experiment with and see if I can completely degoogle and couldn’t ( not completely anyway ). Now it’s more or less a paperweight that I might revisit in the future, when my daily phone kicks the bucket. The dealbreaker is Android15 because that’s when they shoved gemini in, so any phone with Android14 and security updates will do fine. God I hope that linux phones finally get off the ground already

I know I know, but it was really convenient to keep a spare battery and do a quick swap on the fp4.

Is it me or did they get slightly more vague on their marketing materials, wrt the environmental impact ( at least compared to fp5 ) ?

Also the battery seems a bit harder to replace, as you now need a screwdriver. It does appear to be more flush, so it may be due to size constraints.

Edit: and there’s “more” replaceable parts because the back is split in two. That split might prove better for durability tho, because pulling the back on their older phones felt like it would break every time.

I was worried Subnautica 2 would be just a sloppy cashgrab, but seeing that dev-vlog with the awkward devs describing their work actually gave me hope that they’re actually putting some soul in this game.

Of course it is. Textbook enshittification: first be good to your users, then to your providers, then fuck both and rake in the cash.

I think the initiative just ran out of steam. I remember seeeing it everywhere for the first month or so, and then nothing, and it plateaued around where it is now. Maybe the vast majority of EU gamers just can’t be arsed to read and sign a petition like this. I mean most can’t even vote with their wallet when a shit game releases. And of course it’s fun to blame thor/pirateguy for this ( and they probably did have their share of fault ) but in the end it looks like 500k is the amount of gamers that actually give a fuck about the state of things.

It’s probably a good time for any farmer to get off john deere either way.

These days they fancy themselves an AI and data-driven solutions company rather than an equipment manufacturer: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/03/15/the-amazing-ways-john-deere-uses-ai-and-machine-vision-to-help-feed-10-billion-people/

To me that means they want to go the way of HP, enshittifying everything they have.

Lack of innovation: checked. Locking users into their ecosystem: checked. Chasing only shareholder value : checked.

The only thing diferentianting them from Apple now is the pricing, which hasn’t reached outrageous levels ( yet ).

I used to respect them for doing their own thing - sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but in the end still innovating. Apparently not the case anymore.

Narrator: It wasn’t.

At the very least the entity that bought it will not rely on donations and revenue from upgraded download speeds, so it will definitely enshittify further to some degree.

The problem is not capitalism, it’s really us expecting shit to be free and rewarding good development and maintenance effort with thoughts and prayers.