My induction hob comes with physical handles, and so does washing machine. And for them, it doesn’t make sense to do otherwise - wet fingers don’t go well with sensors, and I don’t know who came up with that terrible idea.

For the smartphone, though, touch controls allow for the precision and speed of input unmatched by any other input method. They also allow to maximize the screen space on a very small device, allowing better interfaces and reducing eye strain.

The quality of an OS and the developer incentives are different matters entirely, though.

I want my electronics to have buttons. Not screens.

Could you elaborate? Do you miss tackle controls so much you’d rather have that vs screen space, or you genuinely don’t want a bigger screen?

If I’m being very picky and perfectionist, Obsidian.

It’s closed source, and there are open-source alternatives, be it Trilium, Zettlr or whatever strikes your fancy

There’s not one, but plenty of terrible jobs.

I’ve been at the slaughterhouse, and it is indeed one of the most horrific experiences I had. The smell of stale blood, the heat, the constant repetition, and normalized violence. It takes a mental toll.

And working in delivery (which I also did) takes a physical one - especially when you’re a walking courier, which these things are aimed to replace. Back problems, damaged feet, severe calluses, chafing, muscle pain, high risk of all sorts of traumas…the list goes on. Add to that that the rates paid often force these people to overwork way past their healthy physical limits, and you get a recipe for disaster.

Students choose it, because they need an unqualified job that can adapt to their study schedule. Gig work does that. But the rest is pure exploitation, which finds its reflection in health issues, lack of time and fulfillment, and, in case of students - a fall in academic performance.

Eliminating terrible jobs may come with new, somewhat less crushing ones.

The reality of the labor market on its lower end is that plenty of jobs are unnecessary and artificial. They are meant to generate employment while not reducing working hours or (re-)educating people to take jobs that are actually in demand. It is a simple band-aid, that is easy for the government and good for capital (as it gets both incentives from the government and a pass on building a gig economy).

The more terrible, crushing jobs we eliminate, the more the government is forced to actually do something meaningful about the labor.

To be fair, the delivery robots I’ve seen (made by Yandex, which is known for bleeding-edge developments in self-driving technology) made good job to be as unobtrusive and predictable as possible, while also avoiding humans in quite a large range.

My only issue with them is that these are camera-equipped devices rolling the streets and likely sending all that footage to their Big Tech daddies. Besides that, they do their job well, reducing the need for hard human labor.

Google already does what it should: sideloading apps requires you to manually approve the source, and when you do, a popup appears warning user of potential dangers. No need to play daddy any more than this.

Having a locked ecosystem is very convenient and profitable for Google, but terrible for its users. Google wants this walled garden not out of safety, but to get a tight grip on the app stores - and get a solid buck while doing it.

Hey, it’s gonna be alright

• You still will be able to sideload apps, they just add a nasty 24-hour cooldown
• In the meantime, it’s worth having a migration strategy to a mobile OS that actually respects you - be it Graphene, Lineage, or Linux/Sailfish.

For all I know, Goldberg emulator only works with multiplayer titles to enable local multiplayer capabilities. If the game is SteamDRM protected, it should not work and is very illegal.

Illegality is a general issue with piracy to begin with - Valve can snap on it any time, leaving us empty-handed. It is not a sustainable solution - just the only one we’re left with. Instead of not suing emulators and certain tools just yet, I’d rather see them actually removing the damn DRM. I mean, we had enough Nintendo drama, didn’t we?

On my end, I make sure to purchase DRM-free games and yarrr the hell out of the DRM-protected ones, but personal activism can only get you so far.

Steam does not have any DRM by itself

It does, and the default practice is to enable it, even when DRM-less versions are available elsewhere. It might not be as fancy as Denuvo, but it is there and it doesn’t allow you to run games without also launching Steam.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm

1. Steam features its own DRM, ensuring games cannot be launched without it.

2. Steam has enormous leverage in the gaming market and could at least influence the devs to make DRM transferable between the publishing spaces (but that might hurt Steam’s bottom line).

Plenty of games release both on Steam and, say, GOG. GOG versions don’t feature DRM, Steam versions do. Why?

Indeed, Steam is just one culprit - yet culprit nonetheless.

This. One reason I’m reluctant to purchase games on Steam is how impermanent it really is.

You buy a game in Steam, you can’t play it without Steam. Should Valve decide to cut you off or just stop existing, your games are gone. And switching to another platform leaves you trapped to play your previously purchased titles on Steam or buy it again.