xep

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asian_mancala

The same Sony that put some software on CDs that would install itself, could not be removed, and was invisible to the end-user? Oh yeah, very secure.

Why seek the approval of strangers if what you wish to do is behave poorly on the internet?

Yes, an IoT device would certainly be a huge headache if it was on a proprietary protocol, I’d avoid that if at all possible. Thankfully, they haven’t made something absolutely indispensable yet.

Where I live, cashless payments via NFC. But I have the option of using a plastic card too.

It’s really just banking, I can still use the browser for most other things.

The situation is dire, since plastics slowly break into smaller and smaller pieces that get everywhere, including our atmosphere. I recommend the book “A Poison Like No Other” by Matt Simon for details, but it’s a very uncomfortable read.

https://islandpress.org/books/poison-no-other

I believe those are games made by other studios with the League IP and published by Riot. AFAIK there’s no reason for them to have anticheat.

Thank you for pointing that out. I don’t use it for anything critical, and it’s been very useful because Kagi’s summarizer works on things like YouTube videos friends link which I don’t care enough to watch. I speak the language pair I use DeepL on, but DeepL often writes more natively than I can. In my anecdotal experience, LLMs have greatly improved the quality of machine translation.

The services I use, Kagi’s autosummarizer and DeepL, haven’t done that when I’ve checked. The downside of the summarizer is that it might remove some subtle things sometimes that I’d have liked it to keep. I imagine that would occur if I had a human summarize too, though. DeepL has been very accurate.

It’s great at summarization and translations.

I do everything important like banking etc on a separate device that isn’t my gaming PC. This has been quite liberating since I worry less about invasive anti-cheat, drm etc. I realize not everyone wants to do this but it’s been a nice compromise.

Are there Riot games on Steam?

The point of anti-cheat is to create a substantial barrier for cheating. If you have to go the extra mile to run an external hardware cheat so as to be “undetected” then surely this means the anti-cheat is working. If it were as ineffective as you imply, cheaters would be cheating on their main accounts.

The DMCA is a curse.

Hopefully Servo gets a good UI soon.

I’ve found it remarkably difficult to replace a battery in a modern smartphone, even as someone who’s quite handy with electronics. Any improvement is greatly welcome, and I wish we’d do more to make it easier.

It’s about usage patterns. If you know you only need 60% of the battery, charging it to 100% will degrade it more, for little utility. The newer Google phones get 7 years of updates, but without due care the battery will reach 80% of its capacity before that. On an aside, a battery is considered to have reached its end of life at a capacity reduction of 20%, and not 40%.

If you 100-0 the battery every day, then there’s not much you can do. But if you’re a lighter user, then using the 20-80% (or 40-60) part instead of the 40-100% part of the battery makes it last longer. And that’s good in terms of environmental sustainability, reduction of e-waste, and you can use the phone for longer, too.

Pragmatically speaking, for battery health you should charge only as much as you need the battery, so it sounds to me that in your case that’s 90%. Also, here’s a paper about battery charging:

Strategies to limit degradation and maximize Li-ion battery service lifetime - critical review and guidance for stakeholders https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/154859/Woody_Maxwell_Thesis.pdf

Funny thing is, now that I have it I keep finding uses for it. Sure, some of it is “well I’ve got it now so why not?” but I didn’t expect a handheld pc of this configuration to be so handy to have around.