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.

Just use smplayer as the frontend for mpv and you’re all set.

Had a similar experience, but it was a video of a guy who got run over by a truck, or in more accurate terms…smushed into its radiator. There was not a lot left that could be recognized as a normal human body, but he was still alive and crying for help.

I’ll also never forget that, fucking traumatizing thing. I believe the Nokia phone camera quality which was usual back then made it even worse, because there were missing details you couldn’t see, only imagine.

That was the first thing I learned when training for that job. They really drilled that into all of us.

German finance minister noises intensify

What the article doesn’t mention (or I haven’t seen it when I skimmed through it):

• This is only a pilot project for half a year, after that it’s probably back to the grind, unless the company decides otherwise
• Only 45 companies are testing it and around half of them are very small (10-49 employees). So this is not the big thing this article is suggesting.
• Craftsmanship and industry only make up for 6% of the companies doing this test. The biggest labour shortage is currently in these areas, so this is a slap in the face to young workers, because it implies that companies in these areas still don’t care about better working conditions, like they’ve done for the past few decades.

At least they’re doing one thing right this time: They reduced the amount of hours to 80%. So if you’ve worked 40 hours a week before, you’re now doing only 32 hours. This is a real four-day-workweek, which honestly surprised me. Mostly, companies try to just shove the same amount of work into four days, which is really stressful.

Source

From personal experience, most companies are not adopting the four-day-workweek out of principle, especially when older people are running them. I have the privilege of a 32h week with Fridays off, but I’m also working at a very young and very small company. It’s not the norm and we still have a long way to go.

What also doesn’t help is that major conservative parties, our finance minister and bosses of big companies and banks are openly against it. When you go into mainstream media, there’s a new article almost every day telling young people to start sweating because they’re “ruining our economy”.

That won’t go away that easily.

I used an Exynos S8 up to December of last year and it’s still blazingly fast. And the consensus on xdaforums seems to be that the Qualcomm variant from the US is terrible. :) Weird, but maybe I’m wrong and I just got used to a slow device. I mean, I had a Sony Xperia XA2 before and that thing was so slow, everything else felt like The Flash. :D

It’s the good one. As far as I know, Exynos phones are much faster than the Snapdragon variants. Custom ROMs like LineageOS are only available for Exynos phones, so those are the only ones still getting updates.

The S8 is pretty nice, but only the Exynos variant. I hated the glass back, though. Shattered mine two times, one time the phone just fell 30 centimeters out of bed. Gorilla Glass only in the front was a deliberate decision by these bastards.

Yeah unfortunately that Custom ROM scene is dying out

I feel like recent Android has gotten good enough for me that I don’t really need custom ROMs anymore. As long as I can still root the stock ROM and install AdAway, I’m fine.

For some reason I thought the Safari engine was proprietary, but you’re right, you totally can.

However, you need to have the specific Webkit version on your system that’s also used on the iOS release where the bug is present. Which can be a real pain to manage and I imagine compiling this engine will take quite a while.

Still better than buying unnecessary, overpriced hardware, though! I will for sure check this out soon.

only WebKit is truly optimized and safe for iPhone users

So that’s why it interprets certain standards differently than all other engines. Must be the security. The amount of rendering errors I have to debug just for iOS is annoying. Especially, since you need a MacBook AND an iPhone to debug this bad engine properly, so either me or my employer needs to buy into their ecosystem.

Exactly. “Apple is forced to allow” would be a much more legit headline.

But it’s easier to go to the big media outlets and tell the workers “We have to be prepared to work harder and harder again” and “You also have to sweat”, like the bosses of the biggest German bank, Bosch and our finance minister did.

(source)

I believe the liberals are really afraid of a wave of people realizing that working less for the same amount of money is an option. When the train drivers get their 35 hour work week without any pay cuts, there will be more people also taking a liking to that idea. Worst nightmare of the upper class.

And the major reason why they are voted for, our broken asylum system, remains unfixed.

I’m not sure that’s really the main reason. We also have an energy crisis and a recession and a lot of people simply don’t have the money to pay for their basic needs. In 2022, 5.5 million people weren’t able to heat their homes properly due to monetary reasons. Our current political party leaves these people alone, energy prices are rising again this year and the FDP clings to their debt brake (“Schuldenbremse”) which makes the situation even worse.

The AfD promises simple solutions for the current problems and a lot of people want to believe them. I’m sure a lot of voters flock to them because of immigration politics, but I believe it’s not the only reason.

I don’t know but banning #1 political party in a region might have unexpected negative results

The biggest problem is: If an attempted ban fails, it will further legitimize a fascist party, which will probably bring them even more votes. It’s a really hard and dangerous step to take.

The Hollywood actor was held for three hours at Munich airport on Wednesday.

Last I checked, Munich is still in Germany. :D

I wonder, if he’ll be back here in Germany after that incident.

Because he’s always forgetting things…

Finally, Europe is part of the world again.

We have the Do-Not-Track standard, enforcing its functionality by law would’ve been so useful. Most cookie consent software has an option to respect DNT, but people/agencies just don’t configure it, because they don’t have to.