It really depends on whether you care or not about State Surveillance.

If you don’t and only really care about general privacy and things like not getting letters from lawyers demanding money because you torrented something, then any no-logs VPN will do:

• For starters just having a VPN means it’s not just a case of a lawyer claiming to represent a copyright owner demanding from a local ISP the identification of the user of a specific IP at a specific time (which many countries have made laws to facilitate, so they don’t even need a court order) so now they probably need a court order
• Then if the VPN is in a different legal jurisdiction said court order needs to be from a court there, not where you are. Even if said lawyer are there and get that court order, they still need the ISP in a different country to give them the information of the user whose IP is in the VPN logs, so that’s a lot more complex.
• Then if the VPN has no-logs, they can’t even get the user IP address because it’s nowhere to be found. They would need a court order to install what’s basically wiretapping equipment or software in that VPN in order to catch a user whilst they’re actually using that connection to torrent some file or other. No court is going to be issuing a wiretapping order for a VPN provider to catch a non-commercial case of copyright violation.

If, however, you care about State Surveillance, then merely a no-logs VPN isn’t necessarily safe anymore. You see several countries, such as the US and UK, have special surveillance courts (such as FISA courts in the US) which can issue court orders to facilitate data access for mass surveillance WHICH THE RECIPIENTS CANNOT PUBLICLY ADMIT THEY’RE UNDER. In other words, the wiretapping equipment/software to allow bulk tracking of what users are doing might already be installed at the no-logs VPN (and they cannot tell you about it otherwise they’ll literally end up in jail) so it’s not in fact no-logs because the likes of the NSA is actually logging it all. Any VPN hosted in such legal jurisdictions can be the target of it, any company registered in such legal jurisdictions can be the target of it and it doesn’t matter how honest and pro-privacy the people in those companies are - I vaguely remember the case of a secure e-mail provider in the US (forgot the name now), who tried to fight one such court order and ultimately the only way they found to do so was to close down the service and their company.

So if you VPN company is for example registered in Gibraltar (which is a British jurisdiction) or the US and they’re still operating, they’re very likely compromised and even if they’re not, they can silently be compromise at any time.

If you care about avoiding mass surveillance from actual governments, then beyond the usual autocratic nations you’ll want to avoid VPN exit points in and VPN providers based in or registered in at the very least the US, UK and Israel and any of the regions under their jurisdiction (for example Gibraltar and the Channel Islands for Britain, Puerto Rico for the US), probably more broadly all the 5-Eyes nations (so, the first 2 plus Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

So check were that “wonderful no-logs VPN” company is registered and were is based and avoid those in countries with insane civil society surveillance legislation like the Patriot Act and even avoid exit nodes of other VPN companies in such countries.

We’re at the end stage of literally a century of corruption in the domain of Intellectual Property.

All that it takes is to look at how Copyright used to be 20 years, after which the works were in the Public Domain (in other words, for 20 years the public enforced an otherwise impossible right - as intellectual anything being property is not a natural thing - for somebody to have a monopoly on reproducing some intellectual creation and the quid pro quo was that after 20 years everybody had free access to it), and then over the 20th Century it kept getting extended and extended to the point that now in most countries is around 100 years after the death of the author, so in average copyright lasts about 125 years, so for example YOU WILL ALMOST NEVER be free until the day you die to access a musical work which you grew up with in your teens.

The whole thing was a massive corrupt landgrab, only the “land” wasn’t actually physical but an artificial kind of property that would not exist otherwise, created by artificially restricting what the many could do, an which was continuously expanded by extending those restrictions to increase the breath of said “property”, mainly for the benefit of a few.

This didn’t just happen in Copyright, by the way, things like Business Method Patents are also another corrupt expansion of intellectual property, though those haven’t spread outside the US quite as much as the “longer than a human being’s lifetime” Copyright periods.

I used to buy a lot of films on VHS and later on DVD.

Then came bluray which was purposefully locked down tight so I couldn’t rip them and I couldn’t even play discs from other regions, plus the whole anti-circumvention legislation passed at the time meant that even after somebody cracked its DRM it was hard to get your hands on good tools to rip the disks.

As by then home internet speeds were high enough, I switched to pirating that kind of content.

Streaming came along but it was already obvious back then that the customer didn’t own the media - you couldn’t just download a non-DRM-locked video file and watch it whenever and wherever you wanted because nobody would sell that to you, they would “keep it” for you in their systems or send it DRM locked and kept control of when you could access it with some kind of “phone-home” unlocking mechanism - so I never subscribed to any streaming services.

I have literally pirated all video content since the mid 00s.

Meanwhile, like you, in contrast and thanks mostly to GOG, even though I can pirate my games, I just buy them instead. Steam is a bit more iffy because they have the whole “phone-home” control thing and although their DRM isn’t really tightly locked and you can easily go around it, in my view the intention is there to restrict your freedom, so I’ve only bought a handful of games on Steam (and, curiously, recently I had to turn to piracy because one of those games wouldn’t run on Linux but a pirated version of it ran just fine).

I’m perfectly willing and capable of buying the content, but it has to be free for me to use (same as in the old days, before phone-home DRM, a Game or Movie DVD was free for me to use) and in my possession not in a “trust me this is yours (but not really as per an obscure paragraph in a Terms & Conditions agreement which is 50 pages of legalese)”.

There’s only so much space the “names of all steam engine trains in Britain in the 19th century” can occupy in one’s brain, so there’s plenty of room for old memes.

And that’s even before they have to deal with parents who think their little precious child acting like an out of control chimp with rabbies in a classroom is absolutelly normal.

(Warning NSFW) “Backroom Casting Couch”

That said, their “porn job interview but there wasn’t really any job” schtick is theatrics, as far as I know.

Sadly she got fucked in that interview and it turned out there wasn’t really a job.

Tech Industry paliative care is more mainframe stuff and systems still running in DOS.

Looking for “Time Travelling Senior Software Developer” …

In my own experience, now in my 50s and having played games since my teens, including a long period of RPGs and FPS online, reaction times start dropping in your 30s.

It’s a tiny bit and you only really notice it when you’re operating near your limits (same for intelligence, by the way - if you’re using it near capacity, you’ll notice that your capabilities start falling at around your mid 20s).

However, you can compensate it with experience, smarts and even wisdom - for example in FPS games you use the environment against other players, lead them into doing something predicable and get them then and/or prefer play styles that don’t depend on reaction speed.

(IMHO, the world top people at for example sports, are the ones who already early in their careers combine top physicallity with experience, smarts and wisdom)

It’s just a fact of life that physical and mental capacities do decay with age and far earlier than you seem to think, and whilst if you keep on using them it’s not that much, if you’re using them at a near peak-level it’s noticeable if you pay attention as you can’t just reach the peaks you could reach before.

Well, I’m in my 50s and the previous poster is totally right about reaction speed - there comes a point were your aim is as good as it gets, but so is the aim of the kids doing the same FPS 10h/day and they’re faster than you.

That said, with age comes experience (well, can come, if you’re trying - plenty of people age but don’t learn) so you can beat the kids with smarts and wisdom (things like leading them into situations which are traps, using the environment in your favor and, more generally, just playing in ways were your reaction speed doesn’t matter).

That said, I’ve been out of the FPS genre for a decade now. Like the previous poster I simply don’t get enough fun from a game if it’s low complexity, which tends to be the case for fast paced games that require fast and/or precise moves.

If I wanted to be the target of homophobic insults, I could just do it to myself in front of a mirror, though granted, I can’t really emulate the voice of a 12 year-old so it’s not quite the same experience bouquet.

Beyond that, multiplayer is almost like working - you’re supposed to relentless keep at it, on somebody else’s timings even if you’re in a guild: done it in EVE Online and WoW and, frankly, for the experience of work I have real-life were I actually get paid for it rather than the other way around.

Then there’s the whole creepy monetisation shit - I’m not really interested in the constant sales pressure, especially when it’s “buy this or else you’re handicaped vs those who did” (EA is still in my shit list since they did it with a DLC in one of the older Battlefield titles), especially nowadays when I’ve managed to mainly remove advertising from my life.

So I just stopped doing multiplayer a decade ago and pretty much avoid it like the plague.

Maybe I’ll try Guild Wars 3 if it’s in the same style as Guild Wars 2 (which came out before the monetisation era).

“Possession is 2/3 of the Law” and guess who has possession of that data?!

Sure, one could take them to court, at best spending a ton of money to get a few dollars worth of movies back if you actually win.

If you had possession instead and they wanted to take it away from you, then it’s they who would have to take you to court.

The point being that those who don’t have possession are the ones who get the hassle of trying to get their shit back when they’re in the right which is often not worth it.

It’s not by chance that the industries using digital media absolutely love phone-DRM - it means that even when the data is stored in your data store, access to it is still under their control hence they de facto have the same level of control as possession gives (in great part thanks to corrupt governments which passed anti-circumvention legislation, otherwise you could likely turn that possession of the DRM-locked file into possession of the contained data)

The possession logic applies to just about everything, not just digital media. For example, if your power bill is directly charged to your bank account and they make a mistake and overcharge, it’s YOUR problem, if they send you a bill that you then pay, if they make a mistake it’s THEIR problem.

Time to put the *boom* in the boom.

What “democracy”?!

The whole point of Neoliberalism is to have Money be a higher power than the State (which is the part controlled by voters via elected representatives) - their entire schtick being all about how the Market should not be “interfered” with by the State and the State shouldn’t actually own or do anything other than National Defense and a Judicial System - so the very opposite of Democracy (were the greatest power of all is that of voters and it is not restricted to just some areas).

This kind of “liberalism” is never and was never about Democracy (though it definitelly disguises itself as “democratic”), it has always been about replacing Democracy with Oligarchy.

I’ve lived in Britain, Germany and Portugal during the period since 2009 and saw no big improvements in pedestrian infrastructure beyond a few streets being closed to traffic and turned fully pedestrianised.

The biggest change I saw was improved infrastructure for cycling, rather than for pedestrians.

From what I’m seeing here in Europe, the fines for driving with a phone are seldom applied and outside a handful of countries aren’t even that large.

Also infrastructure for pedestrians hasn’t actually improved significativelly in Europe since 2009 - the big difference in the quality of pedestrian infrastructure between Europe and the US comes all the way back from the 60s or even earlier, so it doens’t explain a change of trend on the US but not Europe in 2009.

I’m leaning more towards the “oversized light trucks are dangerous as fuck” theory since, well, they are and the trend to see more of those on the road hasn’t happened in Europe but it has in the US.

I remember back in the day when they had to pull Cobol programmers out of retirement to update mainframe software because of Year 2000 and they got paid a bundle for it.

Similar thing for customization of older SAP systems after SAP changed the language used to Java but those systems were still done in the old language.

So I expect that freelance senior designer-developers are going to get paid A LOT of money to come fix things in a few years’ time, especially since in places with high AI adoption this is going to be way bigger in terms of size, complexity and seniority of expertise needed that either mainframe code updating for Y2K and updating customizations in old SAP systems.

Those things are mostly a problem due to limited number of sales and thus lack of economies of scale, as they’re mostly the kind of cost that are global rather than per-device hence the more the sales the less their impact in the device price.

That’s the vicious cycle of “not enough sales for cheaper prices via economies of scale leading to higher prices leading to fewer sales” for hardware startups without massive upfront investor funding and the reason why, say, a Fairphone or Jolla Phone are a bit more expensive than one would expect.

And then somebody changes the auto-formatter settings and all of a sudden every single file changed and committe appears as having most lines changes and you loose the ability find the real code changes between a version before that and the current version.

Guess how I found this out …

Standardizing code format via that path only works well if you start it really early in the project and never change it after that.

(Also, it doesn’t solve the problem of different software design styles)