CrazyLikeGollum

Personally, I don't like the idea of any recommendation or advertising algorithm using personal information of any kind. Though I can understand why location would be needed for advertising: in order to ensure ads for regional services are not shown outside of that region.

The kinds of data that I think should be used:
-Recommendations:
-Like history
-Watch (or view) history - specifically (and only) if I click on a post or watch more than some reasonable percentage of a video that would indicate I watched the entirety of the video.

-Advertisements:
-Location (based solely on IP)
-The content currently being viewed, based on a general categorization of the content. If I'm watching a video about technology I don't need to be seeing ads for financial services.

So, not graphic, just verbose.

pegging -v

Barclay, stop pissing the holosuite!

The 2 live crew bowl cut.

I’m currently using this. It doesn’t appear to have a way to auto import a list of subscriptions. But it fits all of OPs other requests. It also has a jellyfin add on to import the videos into a library there with title and thumbnail.

The funny thing is that, contrary to how they act in their roles as Captain, Kirk was a studious nerd and a bit of teacher's pet at the academy while Picard was a hard-partying drunk who not only participated in, but started bar fights.

Kirk would do his best to defend you in a bar fight and then would punish you after the fact, according to Star Fleet rules.

Picard would try to stop the bar fight from happening to begin with, would break it up if it escalated, but probably wouldn't defend you specifically unless you had a good reason for being in the fight. He would only punish you if you were in the wrong and then it would probably be something more creative, more immediately punishing, and less impactful (career-wise), then Star Fleet's regulations prescribe.

If it’s been more than 30 or 60 days (can’t remember which) you will be unable to sign in if you don’t have an active internet connection. I found that out in 2022 when I had to travel for work (90 days in a fairly remote area) and the only internet connection I had was at the worksite on a company computer.

That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.

It also sounds like Valve's price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.

As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don't know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data's integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.

I like to be able to sing along to songs when I'm alone in the car, so even if I don't understand the meaning of the words, I like to know the words.

I also enjoy word play, and Du Hast has some of that. So knowing the bit of trivia about 'Hast' and 'Hasst' being homophones in German and meaning 'have' and 'hate' respectively, and the main portion of the lyrics being wedding vows adds a layer of enjoyment to the song for me.

The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I'm sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on "accidentally" after some updates.

They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it's impossible to actually do that in practice.

That's just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don't give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn't even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.

They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.

Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.

So, between the inherent security nightmare that is this feature and the myriad of other things in Windows that push ads, steal user data, and generally make the simple act of using the computer less secure, when do we give Microsoft an APT designation and start treating them as the world's largest vendor of malware on the planet?

I haven't tried any RT stuff on linux since the 30 series launched and then it was very hit or miss, a cursory google search makes it sound like things have improved substantially though.