tiramichu

"72% of that group say real-world rewards are 'important' when selecting a new mobile game to download" - says report commissioned by company whose business model is putting real world rewards in mobile games and apps.

Piss off.

I play games to escape the real world a bit and forget it exists, not to slave away doing meaningless tasks for pennies.

Very cool!

Is there any version of those blurprint-type illustrations that is higher resolution with legible text? I really want to read them!

Looking back, I think we can say that the year 2000 was a much better time than 2025

I may not have realised I was using a British English specific term :)

"High Street" does etymologically derive from the main shopping street(s) in a town where most shops would have premises, as you suggest.

In a contemporary usage it means physical retail (versus online) and also connotes city centre, versus places that have enormous out of town "big box" stores.

So economists might say "The high street saw the best Christmas profits in five years" and they mean all retail in that sector of business.

So when I said CVS were a "high-street pharmacy" what I really meant to imply by that was "they are a brick-and-mortar chain with physical stores on streets in towns and cities all over the place"

CVS is a high street pharmacy chain.

So the "CVS guy" is the cashier on checkout at the store.

The lack of conclusion is kinda why it's interesting, right :)

Animals certainly make things that to us as humans appear, visually, as if they could be art, like the bower bird pictured. They certainly have aesthetic qualities that are compatible with being art.

But the wider question is, what is art anyway? If we do it as a consequence of some innate biological purpose, is it still art? Or does art require intent, an expression of that which is within?

And as for not knowing whether even humans make art, I suppose there is at least one human that each of us knows quite well and indeed can look into the head of; ourselves.

A lot of the reviews that are for the "wrong item" are there because of the seller repurposing the listing.

The seller will list some item that is easy to get good reviews on, like a hammer or something. Then after they rack up several hundred 5* reviews saying "Works great, seems high quality!" they edit the listing to change the item title, description, everything to a new product but keep the reviews.

Then the new product gets a big boost from the high review count and star rating of the previous product.

Very scummy.

It's a disaster out there right now when it comes to decent review sites.

Google is absolutely complicit in this, if not entirely to blame. Their search ranking has over the years pushed to the top all the low effort listicles that are full of sponsored Amazon links and no actual reviews, and a lot of the real reviews have disappeared due to traffic starvation.

And now those top sites are often just AI nonsense that steal content from whatever few other sites actually exist. Nonsense "reviews" just spouting the product specs, from people who have never even put their hands on the product for real.

My personal go to these days (although I wish it wasn't) is youtube.

There's still a load of nonsense listicles on youtube, but with a bit of searching you can usually find some actual person who is genuinely knowledgeable about the product category, and has a bunch of different ones actually in their possession for real, that they can compare and give honest opinions on.

Spam and phishing are pretty tough problems to solve, even for the big players.

The amount of spam DMs I get on Telegram for "investment groups" and scam "job offers" is no joke.

Its an arms race between the admins and the spammers, while also trying to balance not cracking down so hard that that normal registration and usage of the platform is affected for actual, legitimate users.

I'd like to believe that the admins and moderators are doing the best they can to tackle problems like these, and that they certainly aren't just being lazy.

Personally, I don't feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it's demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

I don't think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

In my opinion, even if you aren't paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that's cool, that's business after all, but they shouldn't mess around with what they already offered you.

When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that's a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

So yeah, it doesn't matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It's still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that's not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.

Ohh yeah. I remember the tech news coverage of the cars being so easy to steal, just didn't realise there was a "challenge" about it. Unbelievable Hyundai and Kia got away without immobilisers for so long. Really cheeky of them to cut that corner, and it backfired.

What the heck is that?