A rare, levelheaded take.

The changes are fine. Nothing earth shattering, nothing wildly or fundamentally broken, just a visual update to better fit with Google’s new material design language.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. The Internet Archive is a fantastic resource, but to say they take a lackadaisical approach to copyright/IP law is putting it lightly. There is SO much pirated content on there that it’s a wonder they’ve managed to last as long as they have, being US-based.

Whether you agree with the spirit of the laws or not, there’s no arguing that they’ve long been on a collision course with major US copyright holders and I doubt they can survive without a massive effort to relocate somewhere out of reach.

They’re shutting down Assistant everywhere, in favour of Gemini.

Right. There’s plenty to criticise Apple for, both in general and for chasing the AI trend, but looking at it purely in terms of user privacy within AI features they’re miles ahead of the competition.

The approach isn’t what became a joke, it was the absolutely unhinged way in which it was presented in that famous Ballmer stage appearance.

Gabe Newell?

Yeah, seems like they tried to do a direct translation without accounting for the difference in the meaning of ‘pudding’ between UK and US English.

As someone who was dating (and found my wife!) online around that time, it was Tinder that marked a watershed moment.

Tinder gamified dating and made it accessible to everyone with a smartphone, which at the time was itself experiencing massive growth as a platform. The image of online dating changed almost overnight from awkward questionnaires and ‘lonely hearts looking for the one’ to swiping right and hookups.

Not that I agree with it, but isn’t this what other consoles have done for about a decade already?

Physical media for games is on its deathbed.

There’s a price on the UK official store: £395.99 for the system. £429.99 including digital copy of MKW.

Preorders open on 8th April.

Edit: Physical copy of Mario Kart on its own is £74.99. Woof.

Yes, for all but the simplest games it will be one or the other, not both at once. That’s how it tends to work even on the flagship XB/PS systems.

Horrendously editorialised, too; it’s written in such a way as to specifically get people riled up. Tabloid-style rubbish.

For players, the length of play you’d likely get out of a single credit.

For owners, the amount of money a given cabinet could make, on average, per week.

It’s pretty funny how much the tone shifts if you play with the co-op mode they added in a later patch. Suddenly, sci-fi horror turns into Benny Hill in space.

I’m guessing that’s one feature they won’t include in the remaster, haha

YouTubers - especially large channels like this - constantly A/B test with different thumbnails and stick with whatever one drives the most traffic (no pun intended) to the video.

You might not like it, but it’s unfortunately the reality of operating a content creation business on an algorithm-driven platform.

There are plenty of channels I follow that make fantastic videos, but sometimes you have to tolerate the shitty thumbnails because that’s just the reality of the system they’re operating within.

WhatsApp wasn’t a Meta product when it originally took off; Meta didn’t even exist at the time. WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014, and already had hundreds of millions of users at the time.

It was honestly surprising to learn that SMS/RCS/iMessage is the most common way to send messages in the US, as it hasn’t been that way in the UK for over a decade now.

For better or worse, folks in the UK & EU all switched to apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, etc. due to better features and free international calls.

It seems like RCS is finally mature enough to compete, but good luck getting folks to move back.

I think the Atari XEGS probably wins the battle for ‘ugliest grey box’

I don’t think we need an article to figure out the answer: Slay the Spire was a megahit and it’s a copycat industry.

I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way either; there’re always plenty of devs finding interesting new angles on the current hot genre and creating genuinely interesting new games in the process, but also a huge number of devs that end up just chasing the trend and releasing something uninspired/derivative.