This is from PowerToys, which I don't think has much, if anything, to do with the Windows team. It's open-source, too, so it might even come from an independent contributor.

But my thought was: if this will be customisable enough to somewhat serve as a task bar replacement, maybe I could use this to finally get rid of the stupidly-stuck-to-the-bottom W11 task bar. I've used Explorer Patcher before to fix it, but since it's my work computer, that wasn't appreciated by the security guys (it patches system DLLs), whereas installing PowerToys is fine.

Whether you think it's worth it or not, AAA games are ridiculously cheap these days (without going into micropayments, which are another issue IMO).

I started gaming in the 90s. Many today have no idea how eye-wateringly expensive games used to be.

I think this is one of the problems with the industry economics. How are GBP 60 going to recoup investment in a game that 500 people worked on for 2 years, especially when a majority thinks even that is still too expensive and won't get it until it's at least 50% off? Games used to be 2-3 times as expensive, but the teams were also 10-20 times smaller.

I really liked The Crew. I also really enjoyed Watch Dogs, although I only played the first. And the Anno games are great.

I guess we're not going as far back as Beyond Good & Evil, Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, XIII, and Rayman.

For me it's EA where I can't remember when they last made a game I didn't think was a complete waste of time. Must have been the early 00s.

I'm not so sure that's true anymore. Several pieces by economists recently were about how consumer spending is not relevant for the U.S. economy anymore. That's why despite cost of living being up, employment being down, debt being up, the stock market is still way up. It seems to me there are two almost completely separate economies.

Also, billionaires *already* have nothing to spend their money on. It doesn't look like it's making them question what they're doing or still always wanting to make more money.

This is what happens when you vibe code your crawler. I assume these AI bro companies are dogshitting, er, I mean dogfooding, so their internal tools are probably as poor as the rest of the output their LLM tools generate.

I have a static website. It hasn't been modified for years, and the headers indicate as much with their caching instructions. Yet I regularly have it that the same AI bot will be hammering the same static page tens of thousands of times in a day.

They are not competent people.

I thought Spotify didn't have any rules against GenAI music. It sounds like that person was breaking some other rules there.

Bandcamp is much closer to a curated site than the everything goes, dump it all places like Spotify, though. They can probably prevent a lot of it already because they don't subscribe to the firehouse of major distributors, but artists and small labels directly. I don't know if it's even technically feasible to spam Bandcamp in the same way as Spotify.

Also, this may be a financial necessity for Bandcamp, as well, as GenAI output will start outnumbering actual written music. They don't have the FU money Spotify has to host 99% music nobody will ever listen to.

You may not, but plenty of people do. Especially the kind of music fans who use Bandcamp.

To me, music isn't just about "this sounds nice, it doesn't bother me, can put that on in the background". I get *really* into the music and artists I like, and I care about what they have to say, where they come from, the life experiences they put into their music or lyrics. GenAI has, by definition, nothing to say.

It's not about whether one is able to tell the difference or not. It's possible that I could fall for a fake news article, but you better believe I'll feel betrayed and be dann pissed at whoever published that article. It's not, "oh well, as long as I couldn't tell the difference, it doesn't matter." I don't read the news just for the purpose of it sounding plausible, and in the same way I don't listen to music just for the purpose of it being pleasant on the ears. The truth matters. The artists behind the music matter.

Deezer recently published an interesting article on some of the ways they detect and flag GenAI music. There are currently some distinct artifacts you can look for, although of course that might turn into an arms race. But there are also statistical indicators. GenAI music is unnaturally bland and average, even compared to overproduced but human-made pop music.

It's specifically about generative AI, not all ML-based tools. Using "AI-powered" plugins or effects is still fine. Using it to create samples etc. should also still be fine. Only posting the output of some system after prompting it "create a song that...", however, isn't welcome. It just sets a minimum bar for human involvement.

Also, Bandcamp is all about giving people the ability to more directly support and connect with the artists. AI-generated music is just a very poor fit for the site, and something their target audience largely has no interest in. Whoever wants to publish their GenAI music output has plenty of other places that will accept it, such as Spotify.

*your

(How about an edit function, /.? 2026...)

The EU is not a state. The fact that you think it is makes me assume you're from the US, and that this is your way of somehow trying to cope that you're country is in the progress of rapidly passing them by... on the way down :)

I don't like them either, but in a time of wanton scraping for LLMs, their value proposition is that the alternative would be the website not being reachable at all, or going offline entirely because the traffic becomes too expensive.

And who knows, they may even be right. I don't think it's unplausible when I look at the analytics of my own tiny static (unprotected) site, which is less than 500 kB total and barely indexed by search engines, yet generates hundreds of megabytes of traffic per day from LLM scrapers.

It's Quibi all over again!

AFAIK, the MTV music channels had been part of paid packages only for many years, and didn't have any ads. I occasionally tuned in to MTV 80s and never saw them running an ad.

> while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp

Oh, great! More hot garbage to clutter up the WhatsApp UI. Anyone wanna take bets whether there will be a setting to disable these new "agents"?

I complained to the Meta AI about being unable to disable Meta AI in such vile language that Meta AI banned me from conversing with Meta AI. Unfortunately, the useless button is still there, getting in the way, regardless.