Netherlands here. Most people I know (outside of gamers) tend to have a laptop only if they have one for work anyway, they use their phones for banking, tax, searching the correct spelling of words etc. That's in the age groups from like 30 all the way to 70.
I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.
For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
Latops and desktops, it's a mix here. Older people had mainly desktops in the past. That's my experience, at least.
Banking, yeah mainly phones because of ridiculous forced banking apps from corporate masters, like everywhere else? (certain bank even lost a lot of customers because of that)
Taxes, if you are just an employee, taxes are done by your employer for you, by law. (I presume it's a post-communism BS, so people doesn't pay attention how much taxes we pay.)
If you have other types of income, you do it yourself, you have app/website to click through it, easy. Not automatic though.
Self-employed IT pay less taxes than normal employees :D and overall lower-income people pay bigger taxes by percentage, what a great country :D
We call your country Holland, great country imho, If I would thinking about moving, that's top option for me.
Only thing that keeps me here are best gun laws in EU (I have Glock, AR15 clone, Bren3 ordered), you can conceal carry nearly everywhere, you can even use gun for self-defense, sadly very low criminality here :)
Hell, I can even legally carry katana, not kidding.
Linux is used only by IT people, friends cannot switch because they play MP games with invasive Anticheat running on kernel.
Personally, I'm only switching people to Linux if they cannot afford new PC because of Win11 upgrade. Zorin OS usually.
> Only thing that keeps me here are best gun laws in EU (I have Glock, AR15 clone, Bren3 ordered), you can conceal carry nearly everywhere, you can even use gun for self-defense, sadly very low criminality here :)
Think the last time I used a pen is about 8-9 years ago when I had to sign something to buy my home. Notes and stuff I just write on my phone or computer and I don't see what else I'd use a pen for.
I tried for a while to do the whole "notebook life" thing that was really trendy to blog about some years back, but found I never had the notebook I wanted on-hand (even if I was just using one notebook...) or forgot to grab a pen or can't find a pen et c. Then making it possible to find anything in them requires more effort afterward.
What do I have on me basically all the time? My phone.
I've done everything in Apple Notes for years now, and it's so much less hassle, and actually works for me. I just make sure to include words I might use to search for a note, when writing a new note. Search does the rest. I can and sometimes do organize things into directories, but usually it's kinda wasted effort. Search is enough.
Meanwhile, the few dozen pages scattered across four or five notebooks that I generated in that brief kick remain, passively, a pain in the ass. I've carted them through two moves, meaning to digitize them, because when I remember they exist and browse I'm like "oh yeah, that was a good idea!" but, out of sight out of mind and when I stumble across them I'm always in the middle of doing other, more important shit.
Wow, I use a pen nearly every day. Sometimes I deliberately get a pen or pencil and paper rather than a phone. I was doing some home improvements in my attic, and I would often need to jot down a measurement so I could cut wood etc. I did this once or twice on my phone and realized it's much easier to do this with a pencil and small notepad.
In what is perhaps the most ironic blend of high and low tech, I wrote my own software to build grocery lists, which I then print and use a pen to cross items off as I shop. This is by far the most efficient vs trying to faff about with some mobile solution.
Apple Reminders has native grocery lists now. The collaboration feature (a household can keep just one shared grocery list) and auto-categorizing by store section are serious time and frustration savers. No "oh shit, I left the list at home", no "I could go to the grocery store while I'm out, if we need anything... but the list's at home...", no manually organizing the list, no grocery-list-by-text. It's so nice, saves far more time than any faff it introduces (I'd agree that without the collaboration and auto-categorizing, grocery lists on phones would be more trouble than they're worth)
(I know other apps have also done it, but having it on a built-in is really handy and it works well)
I prefer an app for grocery lists since it can be managed with a single hand while shopping - no need to stop in the middle of an aisle to pull out a pencil and cross something off, nor to print anything out before heading to the store, for that matter. Plus, I won't have to re-sync the list with what remain on the physical list at the end of the trip.
My software is highly idiosyncratic. I input recipes for the week, and it adds ingredients to the shopping list, but only some ingredients. Other staple ingredients are things we keep in standard inventory and these go on the shopping list periodically rather than on demand.
UNIX is a friendly environment for me to write my own software like this. Phones are hostile, they’re more like appliances. Pair up UNIX with old-school peripherals like printers and I’m in business.
But yeah I love my phone for its appliance-like uses.
I feel like one of the most "extreme" examples here can be Path of Exile. Complexity there is high enough(I can't really think of a more complex game from the top of my head) that planning out how you're going to play(making a build) using external tools can be a whole game in itself.
Some people really like to go in depth on mechanics, look up every little mechanic on the wiki and optimize their build. Other people just copy what someone else did and mostly just play the actual game. Both are totally valid ways to play as long as you're having fun.
If I think about how the devs could've designed their game so these tools aren't needed I feel like that'd be nearly impossible without a massive time investment to bring basically those exact tools ingame. The easier path would be to reduce complexity which would make the game appeal less to players who play precisely because they like the complexity. So an external wiki and external tools seems like the right solution here to me.
Same, and I watch a lot of Youtube. I've never even seen the warning yet. My theory so far is that it's because I'm on Linux and they're guessing Linux-users tend to do whatever they can to avoid watching ads anyway so we're not included in their testing (yet).
That being said I do get quite some ads on Twitch(and I know there's solutions to this, but they're separate from uBlock origin and I have to keep updating them cause they keep breaking so I stop caring sometimes). The way I solve it there is to just have 2 different streams open in 2 different tabs, one of them muted, as soon as ads start I switch to the different stream.
I assume they mean ads for other shows on the same platform(at least Netflix and Prime Video do this), which in my experience not everyone sees as "ads" in that sense(I still do myself).
Even ignoring the whole spying issue(which you shouldn't). Wouldn't problems like we had with DigiNotar(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar) take much longer to resolve if it had to go through some government revokal process each time?
Besides the payment processor I use allowing these things afaik(but that might be an EU vs USA thing): isn't the point of blockchain that everything is immutable and a full history of every transaction is kept? That means that if your wallet(or w/e you use to pay) is ever connected to you as a person, everyone will know what "morally questionable or financially risky" things you did in the past, which unless you don't care about that will still cause you to be really careful using your money on these type of things(honestly: even more careful than right now probably).
You could be careful to not leak your wallet address of course, but if we'd truly be a cashless society without decentralized currency you'd want to buy your groceries with it too, or order computer parts. What prevents these shops you buy from from having a security issue and leaking your wallet address? You could have a separate wallet per shop, but you need to get money into it somehow which can be traced as well(because it's the blockchain).
Note: I'm not an expert on blockchain/crypto, there might be ways to mitigate this, I'm just legit curious as to how this would be solved in a world like this.
Answer #1: relax, they already know everything about you. With every interaction in society, you leave some combination of name, email, address, purchase history, security-camera footage, license-plate footage, IP address, cell-tower history, credit-card number, Venmo likes, etc. The history of a unit of digital currency certainly helps fill in gaps. But whoever "they" are to you, they already know.
Answer #2: No single tool is a one-size-fits-all answer to privacy. TCP/IP needs TLS for transport-layer privacy, DNSSEC and TLS certs for authenticity, VPNs and Tor for protection against traffic analysis, throwaway accounts to segregate one's personal workstreams, and so on. The privacy of the internet results from an ever-evolving collection of tools.
Bitcoin is TCP/IP for money. It's a pipe that allows transfer of value from one place to another -- that's it. It doesn't provide anonymity, but unlike centralized payment-processing systems, it allows the creation of tools on top of it that could provide a practical level of anonymity. A Bitcoin mixer, for example, is comparable to a VPN.
Note that if VPNs or TLS were invented today, rather than decades ago, the Hive Mind would be demonizing them as tools for criminals and/or the kind of person none of us admits to being (purchasers of porn, etc.). We take a lot of internet privacy tools for granted, mostly because we're accustomed to them, but also because they were grandfathered before September 2001.
Do you mean in Path of Exile or in games in general? Afaik most of the economy stuff in PoE is behind an API that's relatively open(you have to request access, but you pretty much always get it).
The complexity in Path of Exile is less in the economy and more in build creation though. With tools like Path of Building that you can spend almost as many hours in as you're playing the actual game(or you just copy what someone else did like most people).
Well, both! But for POE specifically, there's a lot of stuff they don't want to expose (the UI, damage numbers, MTX info, etc.)
I wanted to build a better catalog for their MTX (because their shop site is pretty terrible) and was explicitly denied API access even though they already have a public API for it that their site uses. Shrug.
Path of building is great, but AFAIK the formulas used for it are from observations and not an API.
That's true yes. Most of the Path of Building stuff is datamined and/or tested ingame. Interesting that they declined the shop idea, guess they dislike people touching anything to do with their monetization.
As in they have a bunch of endpoints that are perfectly usable but they don't want you using it for some reason. It spawned a small ecosystem of third party docs and wrappers on poedb and github.
I can't tell if GGG just don't have the resources to support more APIs or if they are worried about increasing access for other business reasons, but they do threaten an account ban for unauthorized use of their public APIs. It's too bad, as someone who's both spent a lot of money with them and wanted to spend more but could never find the right items because their official shop is so bad. Oh well.
