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.

I see more people in my profession (programming) doing the four-day work week, but we’re still in an extreme minority. Outside of this field, it’s even worse. The liberal and conservative parties are actively pushing against it. Almost every day there’s an article where some rich CEO whines about young people being lazy. Added to that: Our aging population and a general lack of workers paired with aggressive anti-immigration politics - they also don’t help this cause.

So yeah, more people are doing it (especially in IT), which makes me hopeful. But I still don’t see it getting rolled out in a big fashion anytime soon, unfortunately. Especially because salary levels in Germany are already very low and not everyone can afford the loss of pay switching to a four-day work week.

I just know I’ll never go back. The amount of energy I gained by just having a day more to myself per week is extraordinary.

Yes, but it’s actually an “It’s Thursday!” feeling.

The four day work week is amazing.

The nightmare PS2 dirty disc screen

To be fair, PS2’s are so damn rock-solid new generations can experience this for many years to come. They just gotta get one.

There’s a curated list of no-bullshit mobile games which are real fun, without any microtransactions: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/

Mobile Gaming can be fun. :)

Bring back Asbestos!

It’s quite frightening to see how fast these AI models have improved during the last few years. You can still spot errors in the videos, but how long will it take until you can’t do that anymore?

It sounds terrifying to not know what’s real or not anymore. And also, these videos will put a lot of people out of jobs, especially in the creative industry. Who needs someone following a car with a drone anymore, when you can just generate that footage on the fly?

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.

Yes, they are mature and stable now. But they weren’t when they were first introduced into Ubuntu, for example.

In the UK version of Hell’s Kitchen you can see this side of him. In one episode he just hung out at the beach with his whole team and it was so wholesome.

The US show is cut in a way that emphasizes his outbursts, it’s much worse.

Patrick Volkerding. It’s amazing he’s still managing his own Linux distro after all of these years. And I’m eternal grateful for him refusing to adopt systemd and pulseaudio when they were both not mature and stable enough and most other distros didn’t care.

Thank you for your valuable contribution. 😄 It’s just as good as Nvidia’s drivers.

PHP is pretty cool if you know what you’re doing and use its modern, object-oriented features. It’s also very easy to write horrendous spaghetti code with it, which is what most people sadly do and give it a bad rap.

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

I tried upgrading to the 550 beta driver now and it just segfaults in libnvidia-glcore.so when I try to run anything Wayland-related. Can’t even get to sddm with it anymore and have to start KDE from a TTY. Of course, xorg still works fine.

Good to see I’m not alone with this. I have multiple monitors with various resolutions (4K, 2K and an old 1600x1200 VGA screen) and I like the fractional scaling methods Wayland has. It makes it really easy to combine all of these screens into one useable area.

Fractional scaling on X11 can be enabled but it’s such a massive performance hit, that it doesn’t make any fun or sense to use it.

On my UHD 620, Wayland is rock-solid. Everything just works, it never crashes, I don’t have any glitches and the performance is great. On Nvidia, when it’s not just crashing it still feels laggy. Even moving around windows seem to be a struggle for the system and it’s so sad to see that.

Hopefully this will improve in the near future.

An example of what I see when I run dmesg when Wayland is active:

[   18.181604] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00008100] Failed to ioremap_wc NvKmsKapiMemory 0x00000000c73546fd
[   18.181622] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[   18.181623] WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 1902 at drivers/dma-buf/dma-buf.c:1526 dma_buf_vmap+0xf0/0x100
[   18.181626] Modules linked in: nvidia_drm(POE) nvidia_modeset(POE) nf_conntrack_netbios_ns nf_conntrack_broadcast nft_fib_inet nft_fib_ipv4 nft_fib_ipv6 nft_fib nft_reject_inet nf_reject_ipv4 nf_reject_ipv6 nft_reject nvidia_uvm(POE) nft_ct nft_chain_nat nf_nat nf_conntrack nvidia(POE) nf_defrag_ipv6 nf_defrag_ipv4 ip_set nf_tables nfnetlink qrtr bnep sunrpc intel_rapl_msr intel_rapl_common sb_edac x86_pkg_temp_thermal intel_powerclamp coretemp iwlmvm kvm_intel snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event mac80211 kvm snd_hda_codec_hdmi libarc4 snd_usb_audio snd_hda_intel irqbypass snd_intel_dspcfg snd_intel_sdw_acpi snd_hda_codec vfat snd_usbmidi_lib rapl snd_ump fat snd_hda_core iwlwifi snd_rawmidi mc snd_hwdep btusb snd_seq btrtl snd_seq_device btintel iTCO_wdt btbcm intel_cstate btmtk intel_pmc_bxt snd_pcm ipmi_ssif iTCO_vendor_support cfg80211 snd_timer bluetooth intel_uncore snd mei_me pcspkr video soundcore mei lpc_ich i2c_i801 i2c_smbus ioatdma rfkill acpi_ipmi ipmi_si ipmi_devintf ipmi_msghandler acpi_power_meter acpi_pad
[   18.181662]  joydev loop zram crct10dif_pclmul crc32_pclmul crc32c_intel polyval_clmulni polyval_generic mxm_wmi ixgbe ghash_clmulni_intel nvme sha512_ssse3 ast sha256_ssse3 sha1_ssse3 nvme_core i2c_algo_bit mdio dca nvme_common wmi fuse
[   18.181672] CPU: 1 PID: 1902 Comm: kwin_wayland Tainted: P S      W  OE      6.6.13-200.fc39.x86_64 #1
[   18.181674] Hardware name: Supermicro X10DRi/X10DRI-T, BIOS 3.4a 08/16/2021
[   18.181675] RIP: 0010:dma_buf_vmap+0xf0/0x100
[   18.181677] Code: c0 01 89 43 28 48 85 c9 74 1c 48 8b 43 30 48 8b 53 38 49 89 04 24 49 89 54 24 08 eb c3 0f 0b b8 ea ff ff ff eb bc 0f 0b 0f 0b <0f> 0b eb b4 b8 ea ff ff ff eb ad e8 10 36 4b 00 90 90 90 90 90 90
[   18.181678] RSP: 0018:ffffc9000835fae8 EFLAGS: 00010282
[   18.181680] RAX: 00000000fffffff4 RBX: ffff88812076dc00 RCX: 0000000000000027
[   18.181681] RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 0000000000000001 RDI: ffff88885f861580
[   18.181682] RBP: ffffc9000835fb10 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: ffffc9000835f938
[   18.181683] R10: 0000000000000003 R11: ffff88907ff42c28 R12: ffff88810e7c9898
[   18.181684] R13: ffff88810e7c9898 R14: ffff88810e7c9898 R15: 0000000000000000
[   18.181685] FS:  00007fb77685aec0(0000) GS:ffff88885f840000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
[   18.181687] CS:  0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033
[   18.181688] CR2: 0000563fd8fb62d8 CR3: 0000000120dbe004 CR4: 00000000001706e0
[   18.181689] Call Trace:
[   18.181690]  <TASK>
[   18.181691]  ? dma_buf_vmap+0xf0/0x100
[   18.181693]  ? __warn+0x81/0x130
[   18.181695]  ? dma_buf_vmap+0xf0/0x100
[   18.181697]  ? report_bug+0x171/0x1a0
[   18.181700]  ? handle_bug+0x3c/0x80
[   18.181702]  ? exc_invalid_op+0x17/0x70
[   18.181704]  ? asm_exc_invalid_op+0x1a/0x20
[   18.181708]  ? dma_buf_vmap+0xf0/0x100
[   18.181710]  ? dma_buf_vmap+0x81/0x100
[   18.181712]  drm_gem_shmem_vmap+0x2b/0x1b0
[   18.181715]  ? dma_resv_get_singleton+0x46/0x140
[   18.181717]  drm_gem_vmap+0x22/0x50
[   18.181720]  drm_gem_vmap_unlocked+0x2a/0x50
[   18.181722]  drm_gem_fb_vmap+0x41/0x120
[   18.181725]  drm_atomic_helper_prepare_planes+0x17a/0x210
[   18.181727]  drm_atomic_helper_commit+0x78/0x140
[   18.181729]  drm_mode_atomic_ioctl+0xa57/0xc70
[   18.181733]  ? __pfx_drm_mode_atomic_ioctl+0x10/0x10
[   18.181735]  drm_ioctl_kernel+0xd6/0x180
[   18.181737]  drm_ioctl+0x26d/0x4b0
[   18.181738]  ? __pfx_drm_mode_atomic_ioctl+0x10/0x10
[   18.181742]  __x64_sys_ioctl+0x97/0xd0
[   18.181745]  do_syscall_64+0x60/0x90
[   18.181748]  ? __x64_sys_ioctl+0xaf/0xd0
[   18.181750]  ? syscall_exit_to_user_mode+0x2b/0x40
[   18.181752]  ? do_syscall_64+0x6c/0x90
[   18.181754]  ? syscall_exit_to_user_mode+0x2b/0x40
[   18.181756]  ? do_syscall_64+0x6c/0x90
[   18.181758]  ? syscall_exit_to_user_mode+0x2b/0x40
[   18.181760]  ? do_syscall_64+0x6c/0x90
[   18.181762]  ? syscall_exit_to_user_mode+0x2b/0x40
[   18.181764]  ? do_syscall_64+0x6c/0x90
[   18.181766]  ? do_syscall_64+0x6c/0x90
[   18.181769]  entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x6e/0xd8
[   18.181771] RIP: 0033:0x7fb77b52f17d
[   18.181775] Code: 04 25 28 00 00 00 48 89 45 c8 31 c0 48 8d 45 10 c7 45 b0 10 00 00 00 48 89 45 b8 48 8d 45 d0 48 89 45 c0 b8 10 00 00 00 0f 05 <89> c2 3d 00 f0 ff ff 77 1a 48 8b 45 c8 64 48 2b 04 25 28 00 00 00
[   18.181776] RSP: 002b:00007ffd48b3ca20 EFLAGS: 00000246 ORIG_RAX: 0000000000000010
[   18.181778] RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 0000563fd9356ac0 RCX: 00007fb77b52f17d
[   18.181779] RDX: 00007ffd48b3cac0 RSI: 00000000c03864bc RDI: 0000000000000014
[   18.181779] RBP: 00007ffd48b3ca70 R08: 0000000000000007 R09: 0000000000000002
[   18.181780] R10: 0000000000000002 R11: 0000000000000246 R12: 00007ffd48b3cac0
[   18.181781] R13: 00000000c03864bc R14: 0000000000000014 R15: 0000563fd92bee30
[   18.181783]  </TASK>
[   18.181784] ---[ end trace 0000000000000000 ]---

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.