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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Some consider it a hassle, others of us obsessively enjoy manually downloading and sorting our files into our folder structure.

    I’ve got a collection going back to a 128k MP3 from a Napster download in 2000. Hundreds of gigabytes of lossless music.

    Bandcamp is great, but I use Redacted for those I can’t easily find.










  • How many times a day are you shown ads that are completely irrelevant?

    Me personally, I’ve never once experienced the “they’re listening to my mic for ads” phenomenon. I think someone would notice by now either by seeing increased upload usage or a hot device- at least with current technology. On device machine learning will make this much easier to analyze without having to upload audio.

    Not that I don’t think it’s entirely possible to listen right now, I just don’t think it’s occurring to unimportant people. I’m not particularly important or rich nor is anyone I know. It seems much more plausible to me that we’re just seeing conventional web tracking get a lot better + a healthy dose of confirmation bias.



  • deranger@sh.itjust.workstoGames@lemmy.worldSpooky Games
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    30 days ago

    Still Wakes the Deep. Shit goes wrong on a Scottish oil rig in the 70s, it’s sorta like dead space mixed with alien isolation and a walking simulator. Stealth gameplay with some puzzles and a decent emotional narrative. I had a good time playing it and it’s on gamepass. Short and sweet.


  • I really doubt they’re listening to your microphone. Constantly uploading your audio would be noticeable in bandwidth and constantly analyzing audio on device would kill your battery - at least currently.

    What this demonstrates is how good tracking by other methods is getting. You don’t need to listen to someone’s microphone when you know what they and their friends/coworkers are looking up online and likely bringing up in conversation. It’s trivial to fingerprint someone and track near everything they’re looking up online, and even if you’re privacy conscious, many of those you associate with share their contact list with every app that asks for it. This makes suggesting things your friends are looking up pretty easy. Add a bit of confirmation bias to the mix and you’ve got this “listening to the microphone” theory, because you’re not counting the number of times an ad isn’t something you’ve been recently discussing.


  • You could say the same thing for any Fallout/Elder Scrolls game, too. ‘Boring ride through the country’ < oblivion and Skyrim. ‘Boring walk to the next area’ <Fallout

    Exploration is one of the most enjoyable parts of those games. It’s not boring in ES or FO because of all the things you find along the way. Walking from A to B and getting distracted for 2 hours at random POIs you find is a hallmark of these games.

    This aspect was completely absent in Starfield, idk how they fucked up exploration so much.

    it’s a literal SPACE exploration game, how can you complain about travelling through space

    Traveling != exploration. Eliminating the load screens just leaves you in boring space with no POIs to discover along the route.