As someone who recently started getting into digital art, I’m genuinely shocked at how good Krita is.
This is a raster graphics editor that could could potentially rival the likes of Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Paint Shop Pro in terms of features. GIMP by comparison is dogshit.
Sadly the current status quo is the best solution.
I wouldn’t really count Valve as a competitor because
Their pivot towards Linux came from a perceived threat that Microsoft could force users into using their app store exclusively, and effectively shutter Steam out of the market entirely. This is something Microsoft have already done with Windows 10 S.
The OG Steam Machines were a massive flop for various reasons, and the new one Valve is creating in-house is set to be priced more equivalently to a gaming PC than a home console. It’ll give a nice accessible path towards PC gaming but because they’re not selling it at a loss and recouping that money from software sales…
PC gaming has always been treated as its own separate thing since home computers became a thing.
While the Steam Deck has been incredibly successful, handheld gaming is also its own separate thing, and their main competitors in that regard are Nintendo, Asus, Lenovo and all the budget Chinese Android handhelds designed with emulation in mind.
Do you want a future where PlayStation is the only home console? Because that’s how you get a future where PlayStation is the only home console.
And with Sony holding a monopoly (not counting Nintendo because they’ve pretty much been doing their own thing since the Wii), they’re gonna jack up prices and force exclusivity deals to further consolidate their monopoly, as any company with such a dominant market position would.
Phil Spencer was a shit CEO. He absolutely cucked the hell out of Microsoft’s gaming division by releasing all their exclusives on competing platforms and eliminating any reason to even buy an Xbox Series S or X console.
Newsflash: Exclusivity sells games consoles. It’s why you don’t see Sony pushing their IPs on other platforms other than in very exceptional circumstances, i.e. Helldivers 2 and MLB The Show. In the case of Helldivers 2 it was their biggest and only successful live-service release in recent memory, and The Show likely got ported elsewhere due to pressure from Major League Baseball themselves.
It’s hilarious that one of the most beloved sex toys came from Hitachi, and was never intended for clitoral stimulation.
Literally Spez right now…
(I’d post the uncensored image but IIRC Lemmy World is German-based and have strict laws against Nazi iconography)
He’s wilfully given the data of users who have criticized Trump and ICE, AND he looks like a spitting image of Tintin…
Why does he look like Steve Carrell playing a sociopathic big tech asshole?
Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!
Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it.
This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can’t even do basic shit like this. Like, I’ve genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they’re a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.
The only other group where I’ve personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.
My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I’m left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.
We didn’t have graphing calculators in school. The most we used were scientific ones which had sine, cosine, factorials, that kind of stuff.
This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.
During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.
They were never used in lessons.
Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.
Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.
The tech and entertainment industries have slowly eroded any and all moral arguments against piracy.
Streaming and digital distribution have led to situations where we no longer own the media we buy. We could buy a licence to access an app, song, show or movie and then have our access revoked at any time for any reason, and maybe we’ll get a refund if we’re lucky…
Landmining terms of service with clauses banning class action lawsuits and imposing forced arbitration have become increasingly common and is further eroding our consumer rights so if a company does fuck us financially, we’re SOL.
Then we have companies like Nintendo that have litigated hard against emulators, ROM sites and third-party flash carts which have given access to old games that Nintendo otherwise have little interest in making available on modern hardware - in some cases bankrupting people like Gary Bowser for life with seven-figure judgements in the process.
We now have a substantial risk of more shows, games, songs, movies and other forms of media becoming lost because of this.
But the biggest kick in the teeth has come from the AI industry.
Hosting pirated streams of PPV events or sports matches locked behind expensive cable channels, or even selling modded Fire Sticks that enable piracy can earn you significant prison time and a massive fine. Yet training LLMs on copyrighted works without the rightsholders’ knowledge, consent or compensation is apparently perfectly fine and not landing people like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg behind bars?
The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.
A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.
I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…
Fucking hell. You were not kidding. This was posted five days ago! The comments on that review are even more vile, to the point where I don’t even think I can show them here.
Do you have evidence of this? I thought the Guardian was pretty left-wing?
While I do question a lot of the changes they made to Skullgirls 2nd Encore, there was one context where censoring panty shots was entirely understandable.
Filia was one of the characters censored. She’s a sixteen year old schoolgirl, and while this may be a stretch, her name sounds like a reference to “paedophilia”, which makes the fact that some of her animation frames and concept art were originally drawn upskirted with clearly exposed panties even more problematic.
I also see it as a cruel reminder of my ineptitude with women, and I write this as somebody who lost their virginity on Valentines Day last year.
That being said, my hatred for the holiday has diminished over the years. You don’t really need a special holiday to justify going on a spontaneous date or showering your SO with sexy lingerie.
Eww, Voat and Ruqqus.
If somebody pisses me off or upsets me, I need to stop brooding about it like a little bitch and call them out directly.
Over the last few years I’ve learned that I avoid confrontation to a fault.
Bonus: how did this past year’s go?
Shit.
This time last year I was meant to be moving into my own apartment, then I was laid off, my mortgage offer expired and I had to pull out of the purchase. I now work in a shitty purchase ledger job as a temp, where my office is 50 miles away. The pay sucks and I question why I’m torturing myself working in this role just for some recruiter to earn commission from my misery.
Halfway through the year I had a (kinda close) friend disappear for roughly two months after a rough breakup. I met up with her at a karaoke eve when she reached out because I was worried about her wellbeing. She came on to me pretty hard, we kissed at least a dozen times, dirty danced a few times and made out once, but then she apologized and friendzoned me via text after I got home. And to make it clear, she was the one initiating all this.
My love life wasn’t all bad though. I did date someone at the beginning of the year and while that relationship didn’t last, the breakup was amicable and we’re still really close friends.
Still not sure what I’ll do NYE tomorrow…
I use Firefox because Google killed Manifest v2 support and (with it) uBlock Origin. Unfortunately they seem to be heading towards the AI slop route.
Yes, Edge and Brave exist but one is maintained by Microslop and will likely also follow in Google’s footsteps, and the other I don’t particularly trust because they have a homophobe as CEO and did some crypto token shit with their ad system.
The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2008. Back then the state of FOSS was absolutely dire.
I used to have a shitty Packard Bell PC at home which was weirdly partitioned, 20GB dedicated to the C:\ partition and 100GB dedicated to D:. An asshole “friend” at school goaded me into pirating Norton PartitionMagic and using it to merge the two partitions and pretty much totalled my Windows installation. As I didn’t have a backup CD I had to use Ubuntu for a few months.
The only game I genuinely got working on Linux was World of Warcraft and even installing that was a pain. WC3 was supposedly “Platinum” on Wine’s AppDB but would often freeze and didn’t support using the mouse to move the camera. Some versions also couldn’t connect online.
Fastfoward to today and gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds, in large part thanks to Valve. The only games you genuinely can’t get running are those with kernel level anticheat software.