FWIW the international broadcasts did the same, I think it was a single feed to all syndicates

If you buy a phone that doesn’t come with the stock OS with a locked bootloader, just reflash as a precaution.

Identity theft is not worth saving yourself a half hour of messing about

Guy tried to do the right wing grift and didn’t realise you need to target the people who already don’t have much, the people who do have money for this kind of thing are the grifters who don’t fall for the scams because they run them.

I was gonna say, of all the big chains in America, Costco at least seems to try and be half decent to its customers and staff

Sounds like the jury is out then

When I worked in GAME (formerly EB in the UK) in the mid-00s we never unsealed new stock for display, we just changed the lining slip on the dummy boxes that always stayed on the shop floor (head office would send us the updated slips they wanted every couple of weeks). Fairly sure we had a policy that once the plastic wrap had been removed it was only returnable as a pre-owned trade-in (which seemed kinda scammy in some cases, but it was the policy)

FWIW I imagine genuinely pre-owned stock would get a label on it to not mix it up with new stock, but yeah no idea how they’re handling non-preowned returns

The closest thing to PayPal in Europe is probably Klarna, albeit they put a stronger focus on their credit product, you can use it to just pay up front.

Wero is being rolled out slowly as an alternative to the Visa/MasterCard duopoly, but that’s a bit different to what you’re asking

Edit: I’d forgotten, but Curve bank could be a viable option, but I’m not sure if you can get it outside the UK

If it had the shrink wrap on it when you bought it, this is almost certainly from QA at the factory as others have said. It is trivial to build a machine that would read carts on the line, but also plenty of places will still do manually sampled QA.

If no shrink wrap, then it was either opened at the shop to use as a display case (pretty sure they had already stopped using real game cases for this about 2 decades ago, when I last worked in a shop like that), which could either mean a mix up or a staff member testing it out (this wasn’t allowed with non-preowned products when I worked in a similar place)

Or perhaps someone bought it and returned it within the return window if the store allows such a thing, I don’t think typically it would go into pre-owned, but maybe clearance in that scenario. Though I think many places don’t really let you return games once they’re opened due to online registration features

Anyone else see Vinnie Jones in lock stock?

Honestly you shouldn’t need to break the bank at all to be better than the built in speakers in most cases. I don’t want to say definitively because I’m sure there’s some basically scam products out there, but pretty much any sound bar will be an upgrade in 99% of cases.

A quick search shows a number of well known brands with offerings under £100, and one from a company I don’t recognise that apparently seems to have a number of positive reviews and available for £40

You’ll obviously get a further improvement if you go above the budget level, but that’s definitely not to say you can’t get a decent improvement over not having one at all.

If we’re boiling water why not skip the middle man and get a solar kettle?

TBF this always ends up with a lot of misplaced blame on the consumer

TV manufacturers decided/figured out long ago that Joe public cares more about a screen being thin, at time of purchase, than it having any semblance of audio quality. And they assume anyone who cares about audio will buy a set of speakers or (increasingly) a sound bar anyway, so they just need the bare minimum included.

This has gotten to the absurd point now where the speakers included in your average TV aren’t much better than a particularly loud phone speaker.

It’s basically impossible to get something that sounds even audible on those speakers, without doing what adverts do and compressing the shit out of the signal, which has the bonus of sounding loud and bad for everyone, there’s no bringing the detail back that was squashed out. Movie studios aren’t going to mix a movie that sounds bad on a system designed remotely properly (e.g. a cinema or reviewer’s TV), so we’re in the current situation.

The unfortunate situation today is you basically need some kind of separate speaker(s) with a TV because the manufacturers all have cheaped out across the board and don’t include anything good enough any more. The consumer shouldn’t be expected to know this and have to pay extra, the TV should come with speakers capable of producing audio properly.

As others have mentioned Go and rust are nearly old enough to drink.

And the answer is pretty simple, if an existing language does something differently to how a group of people wants to work, someone will eventually write a language to do it that way.

There’s no single way to solve a problem, and that’s a good thing. If someone wants to whip something up quickly there’s a host of high level languages to do that in, it just probably won’t be especially quick. If you really care about performance, there are low level languages with varying levels of safety measures. Then there’s the whole code style thing, you might be a functional programming monk who is truly at home in APL, others may still long for something a bit more LISPy.

stuff that used to work fine in whatever old language it was in is now rewritten in a new language.

This is an illusion. If a project is moving from one language to another, that’s not a lightly taken decision, and almost definitely means they’ve had it with all the issues brought by the first language. I’m assuming you’re referring to the movement from C/C++ code to Rust that I’ve seen a fair bit.

This one particularly is because in C-like languages, any engineer will make mistakes, and those mistakes may never be obvious enough to be fixed. These kinds of mistakes are what cause those random crashes that never get fixed, but more severely, they often also give an opening for a security researcher (or someone more nefarious) to exploit. No one typically wants their software to be used for making people’s lives worse, so a lot of effort will be put into trying to catch those issues early, and manage the situation when one isn’t. With the advent of AI many projects have seen an exponential increase in the number of security issues they’re dealing with.

Or, they could bite the bullet and move to something like rust which keeps the performance benefits, but removes the ability to even make the mistakes in the first place.

Focal length motherfucker, do you choose it?

If you don’t, you’re letting your focal length choose your photos

It’s not every day you get to use a word like dilettante, so I figured I’d make a salad

Flukey dilettante regards stochastic parrot as unfathomable prodigy

Read all about it

He wasn’t impressed and I didn’t make it to the next round.

Poor Stockholm syndrome afflicted fool

Breaks my heart to know people are still suffering this particular hell

That was always the fake dream that was sold, about 15 years ago there were a lot of people writing cukes

I never saw a single business analyst or product owner ever open even one of those text files that ostensibly primarily only existed for their benefit.

The closest we got was copy and pasting the user story from the ticket and hammering it into the shape of the existing regexes

Then we all woke up from the fever dream about 10 years ago and I’ve basically not seen one since.

Tbh with this AI bubble it’s only a matter of time before someone tries it again

Mostly posting this because holy shit what a jump to blame schools distributing laptops being the cause and not psychologically addictive social media algorithms having a total domination of their attention

Definitely nothing to do with the fact that schools giving out laptops disproportionately benefits less wealthier families

Honestly, just type a lot and try to get it done quickly. I never did anything specifically to try and learn, it just happened naturally following that for me.

I’ve heard people have a lot of success with various typing games, there’s a few on steam now if that’s your jam. Glyphica and The Typing of the Dead are the ones that immediately jump to mind

Letterboxd is pretty good, though it got bought by private equity a few years ago and they’re now trying to flog it off to Netflix or Paramount, so probably numbered days