That says that there is less pub-going recently. And I do see some articles saying that many pubs aren’t using up their allotted time because traffic has fallen off. So that may be an effect in addition to this.

This one, though, describes the legal mandates as a much-longer-running phenomenon, legislation dating all the way back to World War I:

https://londonlhr.online/why-do-london-pubs-close-early/

The World War I Defense of the Realm Act (DORA) of 1916 is where the practice of early shutting originated.

The goal of the ordinance was to prevent excessive drinking and maintain sobriety among those employed in weapons plants and other wartime industries.

Despite DORA’s long-standing repeal, its effects on pub closing times have persisted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_of_the_Realm_Act_1914

Alcoholic drinks were watered down and pub opening times were restricted to 12 noon–3pm and 6:30pm–9:30pm. (The requirement for an afternoon gap in permitted hours lasted in England until the Licensing Act 1988.)

An article from 1987 talking about the Licensing Act 1988:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-25-mn-10623-story.html

The current law that affects about 50,000 pubs dates back to 1915. In that year, the Defense of the Realm Act was introduced to restrict the nation’s 18-hour drinking day so that production of munitions would not be impaired. The government promised that normal service would be resumed at the end of the war, but the promise was never kept.

Hurd said that under the new bill, public houses will be allowed to stay open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. six days a week. He did not specify what the Sunday hours will be.

Licensing laws have already been liberalized in Scotland. But elsewhere in Britain, pubs can open only nine hours a day (9 1/2 hours in London) Monday through Saturday and only five hours on Sunday. Basically, pubs can open only at lunchtime and in the evening until 11 p.m.

The government will allow pubs in England and Wales to close at 1am on 9 May to allow drinkers to continue celebrating into the early hours.

Wait…pubs over all of England and Wales can’t stay open until 1 normally?

kagis

Hmmm.

Apparently, pubs in the UK typically stop serving alcohol earlier than in the US. TIL.

Apparently the standard deadline is 11 PM, but licenses can be granted that run longer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_licensing_laws_of_the_United_Kingdom

Until the 2003 Act came into force on 24 November 2005,[27] permitted hours were a standard legal constraint: for example, serving alcohol after 23:00 meant that a licensing extension had to exist—either permanent (as for nightclubs, for example), or by special application from the licensee concerned for a particular occasion. There was also a customary general derogation permitting a modest extension on particular dates, such as New Year’s Eve and some other Public Holidays. Licensees did not need to apply for these and could take advantage of them if they wished without any formality. Now, permitted hours are theoretically continuous: it is possible for a premises licence to be held which allows 24-hour opening, and indeed some do exist.

Most licensed premises do not go this far, but many applied for licences in 2005 that allowed them longer opening hours than before. However, as in the past, there is no obligation for licensees to use all the time permitted to them. Premises that still close (for commercial reasons) at 23:00 during most of the week may well have licences permitting them to remain open longer, perhaps for several hours. Staying open after 23:00 on the spur of the moment is therefore legal at such premises if the licensee decides to do so. The service of alcohol must still cease when the licence closing time arrives. Only the holder of the comparatively rare true “24-hour” licence has complete freedom in this respect.

https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/last-call-for-alcohol-by-state

According to this, the earliest average last call time in the US is in Georgia, at 11:45 PM.

Most states are 1 AM or 2 AM.

Alaska runs until 5 AM.

I don’t know how you’re viewing these posts (native client? Web browser?), but as long as you can share the URL, which I can in Eternity or the Lemmy Web UI, you can hand it off to NewPipe.

On Android, you’re looking for a menu item or button that looks like this:

The first time you share something with NewPipe, you may need to scroll through the list a bit, but Android has a least-recently-used sort on the list, so it’ll be at the top next time.

I’d include video games.

You can get a small roguelike that’ll provide a ton of playtime.

I use mpv, but VLC has GUI config stuff that is a lot more approachable.

Audacity: free, robust audio editing/effects tool. Not a proper DAW but so feature rich some people treat it like one. Another peak FLOSS.

If you need what I understand to be considered a full-on DAW, there’s Ardour, which is also FLOSS.

deleted by creator

The EV maker on Jan. 2 reported its first decline in annual deliveries last year, and analysts expect sales to fall again this year for several reasons, including damage to the brand reputation by Chief Executive Elon Musk’s close work with U.S. President Donald Trump and support of far-right European politicians.

https://electrek.co/2025/03/28/most-americans-would-not-consider-buying-tesla-new-poll/

A new poll shows that 67% of Americans would not consider buying or leasing a Tesla vehicle – with most of them citing Elon Musk as the reason why.

The results from this survey clearly point toward Tesla having an Elon Musk problem.

If he were removed from the equation, Tesla would have much better chances in the US market.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-delay-us-launch-affordable-ev-lower-cost-model-y-sources-say-2025-04-18/

Link to article rather than lemmy.ml post.

https://archive.ph/bFbVi

I’d love to have and collect DRM free titles that last even after a platform is gone,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc.[1] and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.[2]

M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.[5] The M-DISC DVD looks like a standard disc, except it is almost transparent with later DVD and BD-R M-Disks having standard and inkjet printable labels.

Those will outlive you.

You can get an M-DISC-capable burner on Amazon for $35, and M-DISC media for about $3/pop, each of which will store 100GB.

GOG is probably more-suited than Steam for this, since it’s aimed around letting you download the installers, and they make a game being DRM-free a selling point and clearly indicate it in their store.

But you can just install a DRM-free Steam game — there are some games that don’t have any form of DRM on Steam, and don’t tie themselves to Steam running or anything, if you’re worried about Steam dying — and then archive and save the directory off somewhere. Might need a bit more effort if you’re on Linux and trying to save copies of Proton-using games, since there’s also a WINEPREFIX directory that needs to be saved. And then you can stuff that on whatever archival media you want.

I’ve copied Caves of Qud to my laptop, which doesn’t have Steam installed, for example. Just requires copying the directory.

Now, that’s not going to work if a game makes use of some kind of DRM, but you specified that you were looking for DRM-free titles, so should be okay on that front.

Fair enough. All that’s contingent on whether you’re up for multiple runs through a game.

So do I go back to end of now or never and change the answer? Do I go back further and leave novigrad when it was in chaos? Even further before the questline began?

If you think that you’d like to play The Witcher 3 more than once, one suggestion:

• The first pass through a game is the only time that you can play the game without foreknowledge. You can never experience that again. If you’re going to play without guidance from a wiki or anything like that, really sit in the main character’s shoes, I’d do it that time. Just don’t worry that much about getting your ideal outcome, because you can do another run. Maybe it’ll give some interesting variety, have you experience something you wouldn’t normally have done, with foreknowledge of the consequences of decisions.

• Then in subsequent runs, you’ve already experienced a number of “spoilers” from your prior runs, and you can try to use that knowledge (as well as knowledge from wikis or forums or whatever) to guide the plot to your desired outcome.

And an adult sized (please, dear Eothas, let it be adult sized…) android is not something you can hide in a sock drawer.

Not a sock connoisseur, I see.

I don’t, and to be blunt, I don’t think that there is going to be any approach that is effective in the long run. I can think of many technical approaches, but it’s fundamentally playing a game of whack-a-mole; the technology is changing, so trying to identify flaws in it is hard. And false negatives may be a serious problem, because now you’ve got a website saying that something is a real photograph. Under some cases, it may be useful to identify a particular image as being generated, but I think that it will very much be an imperfect, best-effort thing, and to get harder over time.

I am pretty sure that we’re going to have a combination of computer vision software and generative AIs producing 3D images at some point, and a lot of these techniques go out the window then.

I’m also assuming that you’re talking images generated to look like photographs here.

• Looking for EXIF metadata flagging the image as being AI-generated. Easiest approach, but this is only going to identify images that doesn’t have someone intentionally trying to pass off generated images as real.

• It’s possible for a generated image to produce image elements that look very similar in its training set. Taking chunks of the image and then running TinEye-style fuzzy hashing on it might theoretically turn up some image that was in its training set, which would be a giveaway. I don’t know the degree to which TinEye can identify portions of images; it can do it to some degree. If I had to improve on Tineye, I’d probably do something like an edge-detection, vectorization, and then measure angles between lines and proportional distance to line intersections.

• Identifying lighting issues. This requires computer vision software. Some older models will produce images with elements that have light sources coming from different directions. I’m pretty sure that Flux, at least, has some level of light-source identification run on its source material, else I don’t see how it could otherwise achieve the images it does.

• Checking to see whether an image is “stable” with a given model. Normally, images are generated by an iterative process, and typically, the process stops when the image is no longer changing. If you can come up with exactly the same model and settings used to generate the image, and the person who generated the image ran generation until it was stable, and they’re using settings and a model that converge on a stable output, then an image being perfectly stable is a giveaway. The problem is that there are a vastly-proliferating number of models out there, not to mention potential settings, and no great way to derive those from the image. Also, you have to have access to the model, which won’t be the case for proprietary services (unless you are that proprietary service). You might be able to identify an image created by a widely-used commercial service like Midjourney, but I don’t think that you’re going to have as much luck with the huge number of models on civitai.com or similar.

• One approach that was historically used to identify manipulated images was looking for images with image compression artifacts — you can see non-block-aligned JPEG compression artifacts, say. You might be able to do that with some models that have low quality images used as training data, but I’m skeptical that it’d work with better ones.

• You can probably write software to look for some commonly-seen errors today, like malformed fingers, but honestly, I think that that’s largely trying to look for temporary technical flaws, as these will go away.

I think that you can have as many as you want, though if you’re in Texas, it’d be technically illegal to have six or more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_obscenity_statute

In 1973, the Texas Legislature passed Section 43.21 of the Texas Penal Code, which, in part, prohibited the sale or promotion of “obscene devices.” The statute defines “obscene device” as “a device including a dildo or artificial vagina, designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.” The legislation was last updated in 2003, and Section 43.23 currently states, “A person commits an offense if, knowing its content and character, he wholesale promotes or possesses with intent to wholesale promote any obscene material or obscene device.”[1] Section (f) of the law also criminalizes the possession of six or more devices (or “multiple identical or similar” devices) as “presumed to possess them with intent to promote.”[1]

The other elephant in the room is if steam refunds are meant as a demo for everything or just to check technical issues like FPS and network connection issues

I’m pretty sure that the refund window isn’t primarily intended to create an ad-hoc demo of games, but to let you return a game that doesn’t function correctly on your system.

Game developers who do want to create a demo can (though I’ll admit that it’s a less-common route than one might expect).

https://store.steampowered.com/demos/

I usually read review content, maybe watch a YouTube video of someone playing the game if I want to see gameplay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KePY3IfxqOQ

I believe that the traditional thing to say is “zoom and enhance”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhF_56SxrGk

I don’t think that it’s all that hard to blacklist Fediverse hosts, if that’s the comparison made. You just have a spider that walks the federation network, builds a list of hosts, and update your blacklist accordingly. A larger blacklist will mean more entries to stick on routers or whatever, but I assume that they’re gonna be able to scale pretty well.

Oh, and @[email protected] has kept a flow of material to [email protected], for one other game-specific community that has some activity.

https://sffa.community/c/sffgaming?dataType=Post&page=0

Sffagaming is for sci-fi games, but I haven’t seen a post in there in a while.

I can’t DNS-resolve sffa.community, either on IPv4 or IPv6. Google’s DNS root can’t see it either:

$ host -t a sffa.community 8.8.8.8
Using domain server:
Name: 8.8.8.8
Address: 8.8.8.8#53
Aliases: 

Host sffa.community not found: 2(SERVFAIL)

$ host -t aaaa sffa.community 8.8.8.8
Using domain server:
Name: 8.8.8.8
Address: 8.8.8.8#53
Aliases: 

Host sffa.community not found: 2(SERVFAIL)

$

It clearly existed at one point, because lemmy.world has local copies of some stuff from a year back:

https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]?dataType=Post&sort=New

But I think that the instance is gone now.

EDIT: The last time archive.org’s Wayback Machine was able to successfully index it was September 16, 2024:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240916061246/https://sffa.community/