Wow thanks! Didn’t know that. I remember reading about it when it first came out and gamers didn’t have much compatibility and could only get standard vibration with Steam input, probably around when the console first came out. I now see there’s full support, and while most devs can use Steam input, there’s a new DSX version for PS5 that claims to support adaptive trigger haptics on Windows. I game on my PC with KBM and an Xbox Series controller though. I don’t know how well PS5 haptics will work on my Linux PC though.

Astro Bot. I’d argue it is a system seller. It’s as wonderful as Mario Odyssey was for the Switch 1, one of the greatest platforming adventure games I’ve ever played, has a breathtaking soundtrack, gorgeous visuals and art style, incredible dynamic controls especially with the PS5 haptics, and a top 10 game for me. I had so much fun playing both Astro Bot (paid) and Astro Bot’s Play Room (free game). This absolutely deserved game of the year, and I’m happy it won. Asobo (developer) showed their full passion and love for gaming in this gem, and to play it is well worth the price of a PS5 in my opinion. It’s that good. And I’ve been a PC and Nintendo gamer for a long time.

I hope it’ll come to PC one day so that others can experience it. PC won’t have the tantalising PS5 haptics that immerse you into the game (the incredible adaptive triggers as you’re climbing, as an example, or walking through grass in that game and feeling the gentle scintillating haptics in the controller), but regardless, it’s a magnificent game that I want everyone to experience. I can’t praise Astro Bot enough, it’s such a gem.

JD Vance: “It’s not there. I was poking around and didn’t find it.”

I see many of my favorites, so I’ll throw down the first book I really remember loving as a kid because it is so touching:

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

If you enjoyed The Hunger Games, check out the author’s other series “The Underland Chronicles”. It’s a slightly younger audience than The Hunger Games, but it also tackles heavy themes. I love both.

For anyone passing through, this is book one in Percy Jackson and the Olympians young adult books. Basically the Greek gods are real and still exist in the modern world, and the demigods have to go on quests to save the world.

There are multiple spin offs and they are fantastic. These ones are basically direct sequels to the Percy Jackson books:

• Heroes of Olympus
• Trials of Apollo
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians (6&7). More books are coming out for these ones that continue the story, but now where Percy is in college. Books 1-5 written in the early 2000s are him as a kid/high schooler.

I’ve only read these spin offs so far, and they are also great:

• The Kane Chronicles (Egyptian gods)
• Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard (Norse gods)

There are other series he writes too, along with an imprint called Rick Riordan Presents where other starting authors can get imprinted and exposure - books that span many inclusive themes which is fantastic for diversity and inclusion.

Show:

• Grover betrays Percy
• Annabeth argues with them
• Percy picks Annabeth because she’d be willing to sacrifice him if the going gets tough (???)
• Percy runs from danger and is often saved. Barely fights. Dances and pees in the woods for comic relief.
• Gabe is loving and comic relief. Then suddenly he villainized Percy for stealing his car, which is completely out of left field for the character the show sets him up to be. He still gets turned to stone, which seems cruel.
• No tough choice or suspense when the offer for godship is made. We don’t see Annabeth nervously scared that she will lose her best friend.

Book:

• Grover is loyal, steadfast, and ardent friend.
• Same for Annabeth
• Percy picks Grover and Annabeth for his quest because he has faith in them.
• Percy tackles issues with courage. Despite being scared, he faces those challenges head on.
• Gabe is an asshole and abuser. He beats Percy’s mom. Gets turned to stone with the Medusa head.
• Percy turns down godship because he loves being a mortal and loves his friends. He’s also wise to the fact that the gods are so detached from humans, their creation, that he doesn’t want to become like them.

Those are just some of the major problems. Love the books, hate how they squandered the show. All they had to do was keep it consistent with the books. Such a shame.

Not just unexciting, but completely wrong. Despite Rick Riordan, the author, being fully involved in the show, he made so many changes that took away from the books. The series sucked for sure to the point that the first Percy Jackson Lightning Thief movie was actually more accurate to the book.

Reported for spam

What’s wrong with me?!

I’m getting what I deserve I’m reaping what I sow—

100% this. My favorite retro games to revisit.

Nice! Do you feel like sharing your strategy that works for you?

She was an extremely active user here, despite being a busy Academy Award nominated actress. I assume she’s busy filming her next movie, or maybe in talks to do Barbie 2.

Such a shame because she was actively involved in the Fediverse. We need more Academy Award nominated character actors and actresses to join. Then this place would really take off.

@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world, not sure if you’re still filming out of the country but drop a line here if you can take a break from your busy schedule!

Meanwhile, Nintendo in their rebellious youth:

Note: mario didn’t exist at the time, but i got this image from a news site that added it to censor the woman’s breasts.

Never heard of this ad since i was a kid at the time and not Dutch. Here it is.

Wow.

https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/5/15190396/sony-psp-ad-white-is-coming-pepsi-kendall-jenner

Fun fact - the voice actor that played the young boy in Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego also voiced Lloyd Irving in Tales of Symphonia. He also voiced Robin in Teen Titans.

Still sounds gross. While the developer might have opted in to selling your processing power to scrape websites, I doubt the users of each extension opted in.

Response from the developer:

" Users who want to support a free software product or creator can decide to opt-in to share their bandwidth. … Developers can decide to offer them additional features and content or simply use the money to keep the products free and available."

On User Consent:

“Our approach is always opt-out by default. I’ll write more below on how we are going about enforcing it now as part of a stricter approach to maintaining a transparent ecosystem. We provide default opt-in/out hosted pages to simplify asking consent and have left this page where users can see all the plugins to which they have opted-in and manage their settings with no developer as an intermediary: mellow.tel/user-control.”

In other words, users are opted-out by default. They can also go to that web site, and when they click the link, the page checks which extensions are installed in the browser and whether or not you opted in.

On Opt-In Enforcement:

Ars Technica article states there are “no checks to determine if a real user knows what they are approving or to determine if the developer just opts all users in on their behalf”.

“We do have a page where users can go and see if they are opted-in or have been opted in without their knowledge from the developer: mellow.tel/user-control. But you are right and we should do more. We have started enforcing the opt-in policy from today (by simply checking each integration and not sending requests to those that don’t show an opt-in) and will be doubling down on that in the coming days. Each new websocket request from an unknown integration will be quarantined and we won’t allow requests to go through until we have controlled the integration is compliant and is asking users to opt-in + is leaving an opt-out option clearly visible. We will also start enforcing routine checks on our Mellowtel integrations to create a transparent environment.”

In other words, the Mellow.tel developer has it set to always opt-out by default. However, developers of extensions may just opt-in the users without consent - which, I agree with you is gross. It’s possible those developers don’t explain the full implications. Now, the Mellow.tel developer is putting in remediations to ensure that the opt-in policy is enforced, and users will have more exposure to knowing whether or not this is happening. Meaning, they’re going to try to enforce default opt-out (as they stated this was always their policy), and make it easier for users to know they get opted in.

On Personally Identifiable Information and Monetisation:

The developers basically claims everything is anonymized. And the way they make money is, if you opt-in, you share “a fraction of your bandwidth” when browsing the web, fetching from a server, etc. They don’t collect or sell your user data because they aren’t advertising, and their business model is not advertising.

“all [Response data] is completely anonymous, it doesn’t point back to any user, and isn’t stored except the minimum time to at on it… Location - The only information used is country level (e.g., US, ES, DE), [and] it isn’t associated with any Personally-Identifiable-Information (PII) at all.”

So my conclusion - I care about my privacy. I don’t like being opted into things without my consent. According to this developer’s response, they never did. They’re trying to come up with a model to help the web stay free. Who knows if this will be viable or not. Developers of extensions can leverage this stuff, and in the past, some of those developers may have opted users in without their consent (or without full transparency or understanding of how this was happening). Even if a user was “opted in”, it doesn’t appear to be a significant impact to privacy as they have their source code published, processing happens locally on the user’s device, and the data that gets process is not transmitted, sold, or even have any identifiers. In fact, the data they claim is quite sparse to the extent that it’s limited to bandwidth allotment, country, and simple “keep alive” checks (heartbeat). Now I don’t have any association with this company, know this developer, nor do I have any stakes at all in this. This just caught my attention and I Had to read and learn more about it, and assess whether or not it affects my privacy threat model (it doesn’t for me, simply because none of the extensions I use have this thing).

For my background - I’m a software engineer for a SaaS provider. My company processes observability telemetry, and we assist customers to instrument agents in their environments (server, machines, clusters, DB, and end-user devices like browsers and mobile devices) to collect metrics to enable observability of their platform, and generate automatic application topology. Also a suite of tools to examine metrics and dynamic baselines, health rules for baseline deviations or other anomalies, analytics, user queries, complete business transaction view, incident remediation, etc. However, I have no background whatsoever in security. So I can’t comment on the security point because I don’t have a cyber security background. I’m only going off what the developer said, and it made sense to me. But I’d defer to a person with cyber security expertise to comment here.

Edit: Added some additional context, fixed some spelling.

Nice, thanks for discovering that. I wasn’t aware there was a rip off version of it.

These extensions use MellowTel-js. After this article from ArsTechnica went live, the developer responded in full detail and transparency.

If you’re a Dark Reader user (as that’s one of the most widely used extensions), definitely read MellowTel’s response on how their technology works. It made me realize the Ars article was not fully vetted.

https://www.mellowtel.com/blog/responding-to-ars-technica-and-mellow-drama-article

Edit: Dark Reader on this list is actually a knock off version just for Edge browser only - it’s not the widely used Dark Reader that’s on multiple browser engines. See another user’s comment that replied to me.

Thoughts and prayers for the next CEO to not get Grok-blocked.

Thankfully, Linda Yaccarino’s Golden Parachute worked perfectly fine.