If the Internet has taught me anything, they’re 42 and 69.

It may work for a subset of the Dragon Age fans, but the old school DA:O CRPG fans are left to look elsewhere.

I miss Windows phone, still the most intuitive phone UI I’ve ever seen.

There’s an old but IMO still very relevant white paper by Microsoft titled “So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users”. It argues that security measures often cost more in employee time (and hence wages) than the potential benefit. It’s an interesting read and I think about it whenever our chief of security cooked up with another asinine security measure.

You got a lot of great recommendations already, but I want to add one more indie game: Lost Words Beyond the Page. Gameplay is simple and it’s not very long, but the writing is excellent.

You should be aware that “maintaining” that PC may be more than you expect. Just this weekend I had to help my aunt because the bank’s website had a “big thing in front of it” that she couldn’t get rid of. It turned out to be a cookie banner that was just a bit too big for her laptop screen, and the buttons to close it were out of the frame.

That’s just an example of course, but depending on the person(s) using it, there may need to be someone at hand to help at all times.

This is the same kind of fear mongering that Orbán has been spouting in Hungary. Tusk may be in a different place on the political spectrum, but here at least he’s using the same techniques.

Yes you should go vote, but not under the threat of war.

So this is where Speed 2 ended.

Violations of privacy. Microsoft has that too though, so unless Google has wallpapers they need to step up their game.

But that’s exactly their point: it it’s legal for them to bug your house when all prerequisites are met. That last part is very important. Without voicing my opinion: that is the current law in many western democracies.

End-to-end encryption means that even with very stringent limitations, they would never be able to listen in. None of the previous spaces “beyond their reach” has been that.

And BTW as far as I know churches have never been this, legally. There was a time when you could find asylum in a church, and you couldn’t be arrested, but they were never barred from law enforcement listening in.

And, for the record, this part is my opinion: end-to-end encryption should be possible, and without backdoors.

You mean the thing that Opera had in the 90s, and Vivaldi since inception?

Wait ‘til you hear about magnets!

Unfortunately now it seems to be the worst of both worlds: companies don’t have a contact email, but only a phone number and sometimes a useless chat bot. When I finally work up the courage to use the phone, I have to go through a long automated menu system, and/or wait for half an hour.

Once I actually get a human on the phone it’s never as bad as my mind made it out to be -but I would still very much prefer an email.

I often feel this bot is no better than selecting random bits from an article. I’m exaggerating a bit, but it’s clear the bot doesn’t actually understand the essence of what’s written.

That said, I do still appreciate it for getting at least a gist of what an article is about. And I very much appreciate the people working on it and making it available.

The problem with all these alternatives is that the language selection is extremely limited. You want to learn English, French, German, or Spanish? Great, there are a million options for you! But if you go a bit more niche like Finnish or Irish, your options are much more limited. Of course there are ways to learn those languages - and much better ways than Duolingo. But Duolingo’s strength is offering a bunch of them, for free, in one place.

Note that I’m not trying to defend Duolingo, but rather deploring the lack of alternatives.

How quickly they forget. Canonical added Amazon ads to Ubuntu 10 years ago. They walked it back after huge backlash, but don’t believe that any corporate-backed Linux is immune to “shittifying”.

Removed ‘/dev/null’. You wouldn’t believe how many things rely on /dev/null.

43 metre? Those are some real tall children.

Indeed, this sounds like a scummy way to sell vpn. While it is true that Facebook embeds tracking in other sites, these can be easily blocked without vpn.