Work in Germany, both in some retail jobs as a student, as well as as a dev, sometimes in rather ‘fancy’ office environments. No one ever cared, though I only ever cursed about a situation, never a person.

I’ve also got the cheapest possible pledge. Played the game with friends a bunch, was a lot of fun when it worked.

Honestly, I feel like I got my money’s worth. If it comes out, nice, if it doesn’t, oh well.

I’d argue that the problem with non-physical releases is mainly conservation, and software pirates seem to have that covered for PC releases.

Now if you wanna buy a game, DRM free is of course preferable. I buy as much as I can from gog, because I don’t want to blindly trust any corporation, regardless of their past record. After all, valve is set up in a way that gives them all the leverage.

Yeah. I’ve lived in one in eastern Germany for a few weeks at one point. It was in a park, which had seating, locations for BBQ, playgrounds, and all streets around where very reduced speed. The flat was sized and partitioned well. Insulation sucked, though I’m pretty sure renovating one to modern standards is cheaper than leveling and replacing it.

I grew up between a big house with it’s own forest, and a town house. At this point in my life, I have spent more time living in apartments, and the last 4 years living in studios. Gotta say, I have no desire to move into a house at any point. Having an apartment in a well built city with good public transport is just way nicer.

While valve has a lot of deserved goodwill, that’s always the problem - they’re well-behaved, but set up in a way in which the customer has no leverage if they where to change their approach tommorow.

Good thing drm-free games run just as well on the steam deck.

That’s why I stopped using it. They require a phone number, phone numbers require kyc with an ID around here, and there’s just too much illegal shit on there.

It’s of course possible to get a more pseudonymous experience, but honestly, what they offer isn’t worth the hastle.

That presumes that those corps have any respect for their customers.

Anyway, I get the Smart TV Problem. I personally solved it by living in a studio with no space for a TV, but I like your approach too.

I know, but what other OLED panel manufacturers are there? Samsung? Not sure their smart TVs are better, privacy wise.

Actually, I’m pretty sure any manufacturer that also sells high end smart TVs has a 2k TV that sells your data.

I also never understood his apparent expectation that a higher end model from a manufacturer that sells data will be more privacy friendly. Wealthier people make for more expensive ad sales.

I mean, LG Displays aren’t bad in that regard. The different departments of some of these conglomerates might as well be wholly different companies.

Also, if you buy an OLED Monitor from another Vendor, chances aren’t all that bad it’s a LG panel either way.

If I remember correctly, the app was originally built by an Australian public broadcaster and then sold to WordPress Matt, so yeah.

Oh, yeah, wait, I am using AntennaPod too. The subscription stuff was actually the reason I switched from Pocket Casts. Mixed up the names. I’d claim old age, but I’m not that old yet, really.

Many modern podcast solutions seem to be injecting ads into the audio file they serve, to varying degrees of success.

I listen to several ad supported English language podcasts, and most of them seem to have difficulties with Pocket Casts AntennaPod, or some other part of my setup. The only ones that do get ads placed are the ones that use Spotify Megaphone for their backend.

There is a paid version of pocket casts?

I think that assuming that editorial decisions are never influenced by financial interests would be naive, but they’re such a big organisation that covers such a breadth of topics that it would also seem foolish to assume a douplicitous intent behind every story. It might just be journalist covering a currently relatively widely discussed topic.

Also, Reuters generally does quite well in remaining relatively neutral in their coverage (though that impression might of course just be based on my biases).

Well, producing illegal drugs seems to be generally rather high risk, high reward. You’d also need a lab, possibly employees, a distribution network, and might encounter potentially rather violent competition, though, so I’d say there might be a few more cost centres other than the raw materials.

I mean, we all knew it was quite easy, but I still think that it’s journalistically valuable to go through with it to see, and show how easy it actually is.

I mean, Gmail isn’t necessarily a bad email service. Most people on here probably just want to avoid giving Google more data about them. Whether other VoIP Providers are better on privacy - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Twilio, or Vonage, maybe? A lot of the phone stuff as a service thingies are more b2b focused, and a lot less easy to use and integrate than Google Voice (if you’re not using them as a company).

Also saw some people reccomend voip.ms, but I have no personal experience with them.