When flagships cost $500 I would keep them for 2 years. Now they cost $1000 I expect them to last twice as long. 🤷‍♂️ “The market” isn’t only dictated by supply, it’s supply and demand. It cuts both ways.

Some suggestions in no particular order. You might be aware of some of these but I’m going to try to assume no or almost no prior knowledge.

• After you buy a camera, you’ll start investing body in lenses. You will want to upgrade your body at some point, but probably you wouldn’t want that to mean you have to replace all your lenses. So try to find out what is your “dream” camera and buy the “baby” version of that, so that you get an upgrade path that is compatible with all/most lenses that you end up buying. E.g. Sony A6100 -> A7IV -> A9 Look up the style of photography people use these cameras for, pros and cons… You’re buying into a system, not just a camera. Switching is doable but expensive, so it’s good to get this right first time.
• IF you don’t mind manual focusing (that’s a big if), you can find really nice (vintage) lenses for peanuts on eBay that you can use on your camera with an adapter. This advice used to be more relevant when DSLRs were more prominent, as you had to make sure the flange distance would let you adapt all lenses, but in the age of mirrorless pretty much any camera has adapters for pretty much any vintage system. Do check this though - it’s useful unless you’re completely against the idea of focusing manually.
• If you go the route of vintage lenses, one feature that will make your life a lot easier is IBIS (in-body image stabilization). It basically means that the sensor is on a stabilised mount (not quite a gimbal but picture that) and you can take photos with longer focal lengths handheld.
• Prime lenses (non-zoom, the ones that only have a single focal length) tend to have much better performance than zoom lenses at the same price point. The problem is that you have to know you like that focal length before you buy them. Buy something that comes with a zoom lens and use it at fixed focal lengths (e.g. only shoot 50mm for a day) to see what you enjoy. You can also do try this with your phone.
• At least while you’re starting, embrace second hand. You can buy and sell lenses on eBay or similar losing very little money, so that’s a great way to try gear when you’re not sure you’ll like it.
• Lightroom is almost a standard but Darktable is free and against all odds, even more powerful than LR. I’d recommend getting started with it (or with RawTherapee) so you don’t have to pile up software costs on top of the camera.
• Try to shoot RAW as much as possible. Many modern cameras will produce great JPEGs straight out of the camera, Fujis are particularly good in this regard. However RAW files give you far broader possibilities to edit them to achieve what you want, which means that A) they’re more forgiving when you’re starting out and B) by editing and “fixing” your mistakes in post you’ll learn quickly what’s wrong with your pictures.
• Learn / research what crop factor is. The short version is focal lengths are usually referred in “35mm equivalent”, I.e. the focal length that would give you an equivalent field of view on a traditional 35mm camera. If you have a bigger sensor, the same focal length will look more “zoomed out” as the extra “periphery” of the bigger sensor will be covering more surface, if that makes sense. They’re a useful tool to compare the field of view across lenses / cameras with different sensors.
• Don’t listen to snobs - sure, you can get great photos more easily with a £5k camera but when you’re starting out you don’t need that. Save your money for when you know what you need. E.g. are you craving more resolution because you shoot architecture, or better low light performance because you’ve discovered you really enjoy concert photography? Sony (sorry for being so sony-centric, it’s the brand I know about the most) has the A7R and the A7S ranges which offer radically different capabilities, and neither is better, just geared for different uses. It’s better to start with a cheaper jack-of-all trades until you have a really good reason to spend more money on a body upgrade, as you’re really unlikely to get it exactly right early on.

Agree. If you could go into every single store, house, nook and cranny of Cyberpunk 2077, and talk to all the NPCs, it would feel absolutely humongous. Gameplay significantly affects perceived size.

My flatmate used to call that Tomb Raider (the first of the new trilogy) “PTSD Simulator”. It’s as you say, the first few deaths are entirely survival-driven, with her constantly crying and then she becomes an emotionless one-woman army.

I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.

The paradox of tolerance. You’re quoting an racist remark - there’s no need to tolerate intolerance as the social contract is broken.

For a cartoon game.

With the aesthetics they have, this could have been playable on the steam deck without anybody noticing the difference in graphics.

Why do they need 2-billion-polygon rocks only to flatten them all out and make it look like a cardboard cutout? It’s ridiculous.

With the vibe of this drawing, I feel it’s asking for a weed plant pot strapped to a frog.

I think a better purchase in the fujifilm realm is the instax link wide printer.

Your phone is likely to already take far better photos than the Evo and will get upgraded over time anyway, improving the quality of your Fuji photos. Plus, if you eventually get a DSLR (or mirrorless given we’re in 2025) you can also print instant photos off that.

The Evo only has a 1/3" sensor (an iPhone’s is far bigger and nicer) and a 16mm equivalent focal length, which means nothing like bokeh or subject separation - it’s almost literally a 2018-spec wide-angle phone camera sensor attached to an instax printer.

For me it’s a no brainer. If you already have an iPhone or any phone that takes semi-decent pictures, the instax printer is cheaper and gives you that link to the analogue world.

The other instax you have serves as a “semi disposable” camera that you can still keep but that you care less about (e.g. for going to the beach).

Why do you consider the UK’s ticketing system outdated? There’s oyster in/around London and QR codes everywhere else.

What are you missing, is location-based surveillance what would be needed to modernise it in your opinion?

What happened was, they realised that Arc was a niche product that had a fervient userbase but would never become a mainstream browser, so they announced its development was “complete” and they were moving on to Dia so that they could jump onto the AI bandwagon create the next generation of browser.

The best thing The Browser Company ever did was unintentionally making someone else decide to create Zen.

I’m very mildly pro-AI, in the sense that I remain optimistic there will be at least a few cool use cases and I’d love to find them.

So I tried Dia… And uninstalled it a few hours later. Why would I want to “chat with my tabs”? Even if I didn’t think this was a rubbish use case, every browser comes with a chatbot sidebar/extension/whatever, why would I want to change browsers just for that?

Heavy pass. Also, after how they abandoned Arc, I don’t think they can be trusted to develop a product and not pull the rug from under the users when it becomes mildly inconvenient to keep working on it.

The generation of Amstrad, Spectrum etc had the games on tape. I would say they were the closest thing to a console pre-NES, so 1980s. I had an amstrad that was handed down to me by a friend of an older sister and it had tapes like this.

I don’t use Heroic that much so I might be misunderstanding things, but isn’t that exactly what the OP has said wants to avoid?

How are you launching the games, through Heroic? You could create multiple shortcuts to Heroic as non-steam games, one for each game you want; this is what I do for GeForce Now. Then use a decky plugin to change the cover / etc on the menu so that you have different icons for each game.

Also, if you look up the ID of a game on SteamDB, you can set the name of your “Non-Steam game” shortcut to that (e.g. 3792227499) and when you open it you’ll get access to all the custom gamepad layouts people have made for that game. They’ll stop showing up once you revert the name to something more readable, but this will give you temporary access to set one.

Sorry if this is not very clear, my brain is working at half power right now and I feel this message came out a right mess. I hope it’s a helpful mess though!

They’re absolutely failing because the execs are hype-driven clowns who focus on the wrong metrics.

“Failing to drive rapid revenue growth”, WTF. Leaving aside whether GenAI is a useful technology or not, it’s never been a technology to “drive rapid revenue growth”, just like Microsoft Office, or calculators, or a million other technologies.

This is all just a pipe dream from a clueless exec class that prioritises short-term profits and hoped that implementing a glorified autocorrect would make people flock en masse to their random product. Why would you think an AI chatbot in your online clothes shop would make me like your ill-fitting jeans any better, you overpaid monkey?

Maybe you could have hoped for employees to achieve a “5% productivity increase” or something mildly realistic, but no, your brain-eating slugs told you to shoehorn AI into everything and 👏We 👏Don’t 👏Need👏AI👏Fucking👏Everywhere👏

I know I’m preaching to the choir but I needed the rant.

Could any kind soul provide a TL;DW for those of us who can’t watch a video (for whatever reason)?

In the countries where healthcare has existed (and worked) for decades, there are additional taxes to alcohol, sugar, tobacco, petrol to cover for this.

And also yeah, and I have no problem whatsoever knowing that a small part of my salary goes towards saving the life of people who wouldn’t be able to afford private healthcare. That’s called empathy - and I wish that’d sink in as well.

Because he might not be “Middle Eastern” or “Dictator” but he behaves exactly like “some sort of Middle Eastern Dictator”.