in a modern engine.

Well, at least more modern than oblivion, Skyrim’s is 12 years old…

(Die den Antragstellern heute möglicherweise peinlich sind. )

Nee, das ist niemandem peinlich, so funktioniert einfach Forschungsfinanzierung. Man sucht raus, auf welche Schlagworte die Geldgeber gerade abfahren, schreibt irgendein wildes Projekt zusammen, benennt Methoden um, damit sie trendy klingten (zB. Klassifizierung in Künstliche Intelligenz) und das Geld verschwindet dann irgendwo in der Abteilung. Wenn Berichte fällig werden, schreibt man über irgendwelche halbwegs passenden Projekte, egal worüber die finanziert wurden.

Wir haben auf Neurowissenschaftlichen Konferenzen gerne rumgefragt, wer eigentlich an den Projekten arbeitet, für die er offiziell angestellt und bezahlt wird. Tage an denen die Quote 50:50 war, waren da noch gut…

Fachkräftemangel in vielen Bereichen ist aber wiederrum auch nur das Fehlen von Leuten die zu den aktuellen Konditionen in den Berufen arbeiten möchten und ein Unwillen neue Leute anzulernen.

For a second I thought they wear masks the wrong way, then I realized that those are hair nets for their beards.

But yeah, especially seeing the rest of their clothing the lack of gloves is weird.

The GPU of the series S is simply a lot worse, socutting quality by a bit won’t cut it. I also suspect that since they always quote the split screen as problem, it might be about the number of textures to be loaded in when the game is kind of running twice, not the quality.

Personally I don’t mind, but I find it problematic mostly because not everyone can be around dogs, be it because of allergies or past experiences.

A quick search doesn’t find it in either the Canada or United States versions, for example. I wonder if that’s due to better consumer protection laws in some jurisdictions than others.

Now that I think about it, it might not even be consumer protection but instead a GDPR issue. I’m in Europe. Users becoming inactive can actually force companies to delete their data. Ubisoft might not have any other choice than to completely delete inactive users and of course they’ll do what is best for them, not for the inactive users.

They indeed just “license” the games to us:

The Services and Content are licensed to you, not sold. This means we grant you a personal, limited, non-transferable and revocable right and license to use the Services and access the Content, for your entertainment, non-commercial use, subject to your compliance with these Terms.

For termination, it’s not any reason but a lot of reasons, including the here discussed:

for any other reason in relation to your actions in or outside of the Services; upon notification, where your Account has been inactive for more than six months.

The first one opens a lot of options for them to find a reason. None of those would trigger any reimbursement, though.

Consequences of the Termination/Suspension of an Account.

You cannot use the Services and Content anymore.
In the event of termination of your Account or of Service(s) associated with your Account, no credit (such as for unused Services, unused subscription period, unused points or Ubisoft Virtual Currency) will be credited to you or converted into cash or any other form of reimbursement.

Source

I didn’t want to say that Twitters execution of it is perfect, it’s just why Elon comes up with all these seemingly insane ideas. He has a huge userbase that won’t leave, he had advertisers who he thought wouldn’t want to leave and now he’s trying to squeeze. The problem is that he obviously didn’t have his grasp as tightly around the advertisers as he thought, which is why step 3 of Enshittitication entirely fails, at least from what is known to us. The idea is to keep everyone kind of hostage while you squeeze and while it seems to work with a huge chunk of the userbase, a bigger portion of the advertisers simply move on.

Putting a name on a century-old concept isn’t the worst idea because now we can easily refer to it when it happens once again. And yes, the old age of that problem is why I consider it a bit of a rabit-hole. It’s not just something Twitter does now or that tech companies do now because they copy from each other. It’s a quite old concept you’ll hear about again and again and can read up on quite a bit, if you really are interested into more than the basic concept or why companies keep trying even though the outcome does not always see positive (from an outside, users perspective).

Look up enshittitication, it’s an interesting rabbit hole.

Basically, the idea is that there is a path companies go along where they first please users to build a user base, once you are bound to a platform and don’t want to leave (because “everyone” is there) they instead start to shift towards pleasing advertisers until they also feel trapped (because “everyone” advertises there). The final move is trying to squeeze as much as possible out of all these trapped people and companies. It’s not just social media, although this of course makes it most obvious at least for a trapped user base. But this also applies for any other big thing that “evryone” uses.

All 22 are:

• The Beginners 2023 Cyber Security Awareness Training Course
• Writing Secure Code in ASP.NET
• The Complete Guide to Android Bug Bounty Penetration Tests
• Intermediate Ethical Hacking Hands-on Training
• Offensive Hacking Unfolded - Become a Pro Pentester
• Burp Suite Unfiltered - Go from a Beginner to Advanced
• Web Hacking Expert - Full-Stack Exploitation Mastery
• Fundamentals of Secure Software
• Practical Cyber Hacking Skills for Beginners
• Risk Management for Cyber Security Managers
• The Complete Ethical Hacking Course
• Software Security Testing
• Pentesting Fundamentals for Beginners
• Ethical Hacking - Capture the Flag Walkthroughs - v1
• Ethical Hacking - Capture the Flag Walkthroughs - v2
• Web Hacker’s Toolbox - Tools Used by Successful Hackers
• Becoming a Cyber Security Professional - A Beginner’s Career Guide
• The Absolute Beginners 2023 Guide to Cybersecurity - Part 3
• Cyber Security for Absolute Beginners - 2022 Edition - Part 01
• Cyber Security for Absolute Beginners - 2022 Edition - Part 02
• Learn Man in the Middle Attacks from Scratch.
• Learn Ethical Hacking From A-Z: Beginner To Expert Course

I’m not really surprised, I’d actually assume that sexy John Oliver and the other protests created a lot of additional traffic. People post like crazy and a lot of people want to see that, especially since it got some coverage on news sites. Add to that the big majority of people who do not care (remember that 80% of traffic was still reached) plus some who may have been sympathetic enough to join the two day protest but don’t care enough to continue to stay away. It’s really not surprising that we’re back to normal numbers.

Thankfully this isn’t the only impact people currently still make, so this isn’t over. The real question now will be how else it might change Reddit.

That though process won’t even cross their mind. More like “See? The reopened communities are very active and actually generate MORE clicks now. We were right to force them open!”. Only if the new direction would produce less clicks or advertisers are bothered by it (“I wanted to advertise my camera in r/pics but the new direction makes it unprofitable”) they might look into where that “sabotage” is coming from and care about it.

Why would they normally run into 6000+ subs going private? I’m sure they tested that their code can generally handle some (usually smaller) subs going private, but the number and size of the subs going dark isn’t a normal scenario and I doubt anyone would have assumed such a successful and coordinated protest involving some of the biggest subs would even be possible a few months ago.

I don’t disagree. The topics are a bit hit or miss and yes, my newest free ebook from them is from 2020, so all contents should be taken with a grain of salt. I did manage to grab some on C++, Machine Learning and different Pentesting tools, so not everything is completely obscure but as you said, usually they do not choose their most recent books. I see it more as a nice free resource on some topics in the books as of course not everything will be entirely out of date. It’s also not necessarily worse than buying their 2023 books today and using them for the next 3 years… That’s just a general problem with tech books, at least these outdated books are free.

Fair point, I changed it. :)