nyankas

I think Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais explained their plans for a Steam Deck 2 pretty well in this interview (starting at 8:36).

Paraphrasing: They are happy to work with other companies, but the people at Valve also have their own ideas and goals for hardware. And they want to be able to set the bar for these ideas themselves. That‘s why they‘re working on a Steam Deck 2.

And when you look at how well that setting the bar worked with the Deck, I‘m really glad that they want to follow up on that.

I own a GPD Win 2, a handheld PC from a few years before the Deck was a thing. That device couldn‘t be charged while using it, it had its speakers wired the wrong way, it constantly overheated and was a pain to use because of that. Ever since the Deck came out, the whole handheld PC market, including GPD, improved their device quality by a country mile.

And that‘s one of the best things about the Deck, in my opinion, and will hopefully also be one of the best things about the Deck 2.

I think Valve should really make the current „Betas“-Feature more prominent, and rename it to „Versions“ or something. It should* be pretty easy for Firaxis to just offer an old, cross-play enabled version there, while updating the regular version more frequently on PC. That would make disabling such features unnecessary.

I’ve seen only a few developers actually making use of „Beta“s in that way, but I think it would be very useful in cases like this.

* there could, of course, be other technical issues preventing them from doing that, which only their developers know of

I‘ve been using Kagi since September 2023.

The biggest difference to other search engines is really the quality of the results. Before Kagi, I‘ve used DuckDuckGo for a few years, but had to switch to Google more often than not, as I just didn‘t find what I was looking for. Most alternative search engines only use Bing‘s index, which just isn‘t any good in my experience. Kagi‘s results are built from quite a few different sources as well as their own index. Seeing how crappy Google‘s results are at this point, I don‘t think you can get better search results right now.

Also, the ability to rank and block specific domains in my results is something I really like and wouldn‘t want to miss anymore.

Lastly, I really enjoy using a search engine that isn‘t being optimized for advertisers, but for the user. Kagi‘s team is very receptive for feedback. For example, they’ve implemented an icon for search results with paywalls, because users asked for it. There are many small, nice details like that, which can save you a few clicks or just improve your general experience.

It's nice that they fear it, but it would be better if they learned to recognize it and act accordingly.

Musk was given his own opinion piece in a big Sunday newspaper recently (Welt am Sonntag, published by Axel Springer), praising the right-wing extremist party AfD and telling people to vote for them. Then, he was part of a (hilariously bad) live stream with AfD's leader Alice Weidel. And then he appeared on their party congress. And just today, Bild, which is Germany's most popular trash-newspaper and made by, drum-roll please, Axel Springer, published an article (archive link, German), implying that the current wave of protests against fascism and right-wing-extremists is just state-controlled propaganda. And this covered only [the most obvious part of] the US-side of things.

But don't worry, Russia has been caught recently as well: It came to light, that a series of vandalized cars, where the exhausts were stuffed with building foam and stickers of the Green's leader were put on the cars, were most likely ordered by Russia and not done by some green extremists.

And how is that knowledge reflected in the polls? Right-wing-extremists up, Greens and moderate parties down. Greeeeeat!

I'm so sick of reading stuff about people being afraid of being manipulated by someone. Yes! People are trying to manipulate you, you blithering dingus, maybe you should try not being so easily manipulable instead of sitting there acting like you can't do anything about it! Stop getting your news exclusively from social media and other sources which have been manipulative in the past. And use a bit of common sense when you're being told that the evil Greens want to take away your pet, turn off your heating and ruin each and every farmer in Germany. Sure, there might be more subtle manipulation going on, but not falling for the really obvious stuff would at least be a great start.

TL;DR: Angry rant about people being afraid of manipulation while just letting it happen.

After spending ten minutes on the toilet pondering, I think „growing facial hair“ is the best counter-example I can come up with.

Or I just don‘t know enough women who like growing facial hair.

Da geht doch noch was. Komm, Fritz! Sag was Dummes!

It‘s important to note that this article talks about the protests on Wednesday and Thursday.

The much larger wave of protests happened over the weekend. For example, this article talks about between 6.000 and 13.000 participants in Berlin.

Today there were between 160.000 and 250.000 in Berlin alone, and many more in other parts of the country (detailed statistics are available here, though unfortunately only in German).

I hope we can keep up the momentum. There are enough right-wing opportunistic populists in power all over the world right now. We really don‘t need one in Germany as well.

Die Zahlen gehen heute sehr weit auseinander. Die Polizei redet inzwischen von 80.000 Teilnehmern, während die Veranstalter von 250.000 sprechen. Die Wahrheit liegt meist irgendwo in der Mitte.

Edit: Inzwischen spricht auch die Polizei von immerhin 160.000 Teilnehmern.

Ich war da und kann sagen, dass es auf jeden Fall so voll war, dass man endlich mal wieder ein kleines bisschen Optimismus tanken konnte.

Ich hoffe, das Momentum bleibt bis zur Wahl erhalten und schlägt sich am Ende auch im Ergebnis nieder.

So war es laut dem Artikel auch:

Nach der bisher geltenden Rechtslage erstatten die Kassen derzeit nur Versicherten bis zum vollendeten 22. Lebensjahr derartige Medikamente.

Die Altersgrenze galt also nach oben und nicht nach unten.

Ich war doch ein wenig entsetzt, dass das eine Nachricht aus dem Jahr 2025 ist. Ich hätte gedacht, dass das längst ganz selbstverständlich zur Versorgung der Betroffenen gehört.

Aber besser spät als nie.

Ja, das ist schon richtig. Ich sehe nur nicht, dass das am Ende den gesellschaftlichen Diskurs wieder in weniger extremistische Bahnen leiten könnte.

Ich möchte nicht sagen, dass Deutschland nicht dafür bestraft werden sollte, wenn es EU-Recht bricht. Ich möchte sagen, dass unbedingt verhindert werden muss, dass es überhaupt so weit kommt, weil ich mir nicht vorstellen kann, dass daraus irgendetwas Positives erwachsen könnte.

Ich wär da voll bei dir, wenn die Millionenstrafe Fritz persönlich träfe. Am Ende kommt das Geld aber nicht aus seiner Tasche oder wenigstens aus irgendwelchen schwarzen Koffern der Union, sondern aus dem Steuertopf. Es würde also vermutlich am Ende nur mal wieder beim Sozialstaat scheppern, bei dem dann entsprechende Einsparungen vorgenommen werden.

Zusammen mit dem zu erwartenden Gehetze von Rechts, dass die EU Deutschland mit ihren Strafen ausraubt, wären solche Sanktionen glaube ich nur kontraproduktiv.

Momentan sollte man wirklich alles daran geben, Merz als Kanzler zu verhindern, damit sein rechtspopulistischer Schwachsinn nicht langfristig zu solchen Situationen führen wird, bei denen am Ende nur die Rechtsextremen gewinnen können.