The publishers of Disco Elysium - The Final Cut, want to sell their popular game on consoles in Australia, which requires running it past the notoriously prudish Australian Classification Board to get a rating like PG, MA15+, etc. As predicted it was refused classification (i.e: banned from sale) beacuse there's a portion of the game where you take drugs and any video game featuring drugs is outright banned, despite movies and TV shows showing similar activities. Now the industry wants an overhaul of the classification system, saying that the current rules were set in the 1990s "moral panic" era of video games that don't treat them as the "the mainstream medium and artistic discipline that they are".
You can now pay for a Tesla in Bitcoin (in the USA), with Elon promising that "Bitcoin paid to Tesla will be retained as Bitcoin, not converted to fiat currency". Doesn't sound like a problem until you realise the energy to make the transaction is equivalent to driving the car 5,300km. Also in weird Tesla stuff, they've removed the gear selector stalk on the new Model S and replaced it some machine learning nonsense that "guesses drive direction based on what obstacles it sees, context & nav map" and automatically selects it for you - but when it inevitably fucks up, there's an icon on the touchscreen you slide back and forth. Sounds absolutely horrible.
Slack has launched a new feature that allows you do send a direct message to anyone using Slack - not just the people in your group/workplace. It's called Connect DMs and lets you "send an invite to anyone via their work email address, and if the recipient accepts (everything is opt-in), their new contact is added to their Slack sidebar. The conversations are tied to the users' organizations, but exist in a separate section of the Slack app itself". Sounds handy, but Slack didn't realise people are shit and it opens up a whole new vector for abuse because "the user making the 'invitation' gets to send a message of up to 560 characters to their targeted recipient, and Slack emails the recipient the full body of that message". Slack said they'll fix it soon.
As someone that makes a living selling his work online, I really shouldn't be advocating for people to use adblockers as so much stuff online is funded with the spillage that giant corporations splash out of the trough that's filled by the advertiser dollars they gorge themselves on - but fuck ads are annoying. Not only are they annoying, but as shouldiblockads.com points out, they spread misinformation, include harmful scripts, links to malicious software and aren't even that effective! For what its worth, I run UBlock Origin in Firefox as my main ad-blocker, as well as NextDNS on my entire network so devices/services where I can't install UBlock also get some level of protection.
📻 Familiar Territory - The Mark of Cain
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The Sizzle is created on Wathaurong land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.