This is the same between many different software development disciplines, fpga devs (or hardware devs for that matter) vs. driver devs, driver devs vs. backend dev, backend devs vs frontend devs, integrators vs everyone.

Well… cults with an exit are just groups of people.

Apple looks more like a cult, similar to Scientology. Linux user as well.

Well, the issue with that is that achievements are global over all playthroughs, so it doesn’t really work as a checklist.

Sure there are some interesting achievment, like the Stanley parable ones. For instance: ‘Go outside: Don’t play the game for 5 years’ (https://thestanleyparable.fandom.com/wiki/Achievements)

I only play single player games, but couldn’t care less about achievements. It is all about exploration, story, game mechanics and modding for me.

People treat achievements as if they are a status symbol. I mean sure, if you don’t know what else to do in a game, they can give you some goal, but IMO the game itself should encourage you to reach the goal, not some external badge. The experience doing the task should be the reward in of itself.

Git bisect?

It is racist/sexist/discriminatory to make assumptions on individuals based on statistics.

The statistics can still be true and can be used to counter discrimination against specific groups.

I like RPG games, however I don’t like it when the company has the ability and incentive to bate and switch my game into a worse version after I bought it.

Denuvo forces me to be connected to the internet, which makes playing the game on the move difficult or even impossible. It also allows them to make sure that the most current version is played. MTX means they don’t have incentives to fix the game and instead sell you the fixes, or even enshittyfy it, to squeeze out more money.

This gives me the incentive to wait a couple of years, until the game doesn’t receive any updates anymore, and then decide if the final product is worth it. And hope that I will get a good experience out of it, before the Denuvo activation servers are shut down.

So you have to wait for a few years, in order to know if the gameplay is (and stays) any good.

No idea.

I don’t have access to any CRT TV. I also don’t remember ever hearing it on CRT PC monitors as a child, only on the TV. If I did, then it was just much quieter than the TV.

What I found fascinating at that time was, that it was so noticeable to me, but my parents didn’t believe me at first, when I mentioned it. I had to prove it to them. To me, that was just a normal noise.

Like growing up with an additional sense, and assuming that everyone else has it too.

I noticed if the TV was off or on (muted and black screen) without looking at it, but my parents did not.

Nvidia has created a bit of a sore spot for many Linux Developers and thus users. Through their actions and non actions made it impossible to create FOSS drivers for their hardware that work well and are integrated and tested with the rest of the system.

Many fresh users don’t seem to recognize the reason why they are having a sub par experience using their hardware is Nvidia and not the open source community. They often blame and complain to the developers of the open source drivers or applications, who either have to hack around hurdles placed by Nvidia or cannot inspect closed source drivers written by that company.

It is IMO understandable that at some point the community stops providing free and unpaid customer support for hardware and software, they have no control over or don’t even own.

If you would start paying them, then I suspect you might get better answers. Otherwise you just get information about stuff people are excited about.

Luckily in many European countries it is not used.

I would credit institutions like the chaos computer club and other non-profits, which where instrumental in convincing the government about the dangers. It was a difficult battle against the corporate lobbyists, and is understandable that other countries could not fight against the corporate interests or corruption and succumb to use them.

There where and still are so many issues with them, one of the most fundamental is described by Ken Thompson in his Reflections on trusting trust, which is especially effective for electronic voting machines, where no other way of verification is possible.

The secret to better tech is rebuilding everything from scratch. The internet wasn’t designed with security and bad actors in mind. Plenty of corporations are running a Frankenstein system that contains code older than most millennials, botched modernization efforts, buzzword laden over-engineered applications, and bugs that aren’t features just permanent residents in your code base.

Rebuilding everything from scratch will take ages and cost everyone a lot of money, because you have to replace all your hardware (router boxes, PC s, phones, smart watches, …), because the internet protocols are often designed into the hardware itself, and changing them fundamentally means a lot of trash. Also there is no system that guarantees that the result will have fewer issues or will not required to be succeeded by something else a couple of minutes later, because some new issue was discovered.

Also software is highly complex and need to adapt to many different scenarios, while maintaining compatibility to each other, which the other disciplines of human engineering don’t have to deal with as much, they are much more purpose driven.

It is like trying to create a universal building code (for building houses) that simultaneously works on every country on earth, hell, maybe even on multiple planets, with wildly different and constantly changing environments and is guaranteed to result in save houses. Not really possible in one shot, only possible by constantly trying to adapt. That is what software has to deal with. I am talking about fundamental software like the Linux kernel here, for example.

You cannot just start over and be better.