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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.

    A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.

    I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn’t tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.

    I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files…it was not a good time.

    For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn’t pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone’s battery, they didn’t shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that were definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.



  • I see more people in my profession (programming) doing the four-day work week, but we’re still in an extreme minority. Outside of this field, it’s even worse. The liberal and conservative parties are actively pushing against it. Almost every day there’s an article where some rich CEO whines about young people being lazy. Added to that: Our aging population and a general lack of workers paired with aggressive anti-immigration politics - they also don’t help this cause.

    So yeah, more people are doing it (especially in IT), which makes me hopeful. But I still don’t see it getting rolled out in a big fashion anytime soon, unfortunately. Especially because salary levels in Germany are already very low and not everyone can afford the loss of pay switching to a four-day work week.

    I just know I’ll never go back. The amount of energy I gained by just having a day more to myself per week is extraordinary.






  • It’s quite frightening to see how fast these AI models have improved during the last few years. You can still spot errors in the videos, but how long will it take until you can’t do that anymore?

    It sounds terrifying to not know what’s real or not anymore. And also, these videos will put a lot of people out of jobs, especially in the creative industry. Who needs someone following a car with a drone anymore, when you can just generate that footage on the fly?




  • Tentatively called “Alexa Plus,” the paid version of Alexa is intended to offer more conversational and personalized AI technology, said one of the documents obtained by Business Insider.

    But the quality of the new Alexa’s answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found.

    Do they really expect people will pay for a large language model making up results on-the-fly?

    “If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble,” one of the people told BI.

    I will not shed a tear when Alexa gets shut off, to be honest.