tmyakal

@tmyakal@infosec.pub

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My Car Is Becoming a Brick⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  reliable and familiar that won’t break the bank.

  This is why car companies are not going to offer EVs that people actually want without government intervention. I remember GM leasing EVs back in the '90s to some acclaim. But they didn’t let anyone buy out their leases and they discontinued production by the end of the decade because most of their money came from service. And a bare-bones electric car has very few service requirements.

  Manufacturers need the bullshit features because they need something important and breakable for consumers to come back with. Even if it’s just planned obsolescence driving another purchase, like it sounds like the article’s author is heading towards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox consoles and games will no longer be sold at Walmart and Target, according to employees⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think Valve really wants to be in the hardware market. That said, with the success of the Steam Deck and the numerous Deck-alikes like the ROG Ally or Legion Go, I have to believe they’ll try to talk manufacturers into doing a Steam Machine 2 at some point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rock Band 4 to be delisted on tenth anniversary following the expiration of its licenses⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The TV movie standard of everything being available

  TVs and movies are not universally available. Dogma is a pretty famous case of being universally unavailable for over 15 years. It was only announced this year that a new licensing deal had been reached. There are plenty of lesser-known shows and movies that are just gone forever.

  But that is a case in favor of piracy and physical media. Films like 1922’s Nosferatu only survived to today because of bootlegging. If we’re expecting Netflix to: one, be around as a company for 80 years until their films enter into public domain; and two, maintain their originals on their servers for that entire time, then we’re setting ourselves up for some pretty big disappointments and some rather huge holes in our cultural history.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rock Band 4 to be delisted on tenth anniversary following the expiration of its licenses⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Rights-holders can make these products available whenever they want. Nintendo added many old “abandonware” games to their subscription catalog that had been unavailable for much longer than ten years. If someone else is putting them out for free, they’re stealing Nintendo’s lunch.

  There are very few cases where copyrighted material would have no owner and no legal mechanism to determine ownership.

  Not saying I support the current system. I think current US copyright law is ridiculous and a net negative for our culture. Just clarifying that “Well, no one was selling it” is not a legally defensible position when it comes to copyrighted work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rock Band 4 to be delisted on tenth anniversary following the expiration of its licenses⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s actually a very bad argument in court. Taking things off the market to drive scarcity and boost sales at a later date is a normal and common business tactic. See: the McRib, Pumpkin Spice Lattes, and the Disney Vault.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Purpose of Difficulty | GMTK Mini⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Silksong feels like being thrown into the deep end

  I think it feels less like a standalone game and more like high-end Hollow Knight DLC. The gameplay expects that you’ve already completely beaten and mastered the hardest parts of Hollow Knight, and expects you to pick up from there.

  Maybe that would be fine if I’d been grinding the Godhome continuously for the past seven years. But I think most people haven’t been doing that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Tops 4.4 million sales - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I was shocked to learn that Maelle can one-shot that superboss as well. I would not have beat him otherwise: I spent literally weeks pounding my head against the wall, trying to beat him more conventionally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, yes. Businesses are run as dictatorships, not democracies. This is one of the reasons why no one who would “run a country like it’s a business” should be elected to public office.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I was all-in on Hollow Knight. Beat it multiple times, including Path of Pain and the Nightmare King. But I’m struggling with Silksong.

  I went back and started up Hollow Knight again just to sanity-check myself, and, yes, it’s definitely an easier game. Many fewer enemies can hit for 2 health; there’s more variety in paths in the early game, so if you hit a wall in one direction you can try another; and you get access to upgrades that actually feel impactful relatively early instead of skills that use up my magic pool that I can’t spare because I need them because I’m always one hit away from dying.

  My pet theory is that Silksong is actually just exactly what they originally pitched: DLC for players that have mastered the highest skill points in Hollow Knight. And maybe that would be fine if I were coming straight into it off of the back of Godhome. But it’s been years since I was playing those areas, and my skills have atrophied. It’s okay for a DLC to expect mastery from the start, but a standalone game should have more of a curve.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Age check⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Neither of them should’ve been punished? He was her boss, and decades older than her. He should’ve kept his pants zipped up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games Where Nothing Happens (SPOILERS for various game plots)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What do we think about Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture for this? There is a plot, there is a story, but you as the player have no active role in it. You don’t even see it play out in real time. You’re just there, after, looking at the holes left behind. Nothing changes from the start of the game until the end.

  I absolutely loved it, but typing that out, I suddenly realize why most people thought it was really boring.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who got that landlord money?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That 55% figure has been true of New York for decades. The ubiquity of public transit has historically offset the costs: since people aren’t making car payments, the portion of their income that would go to that gets spread across other spending.

  I would be more interested to see figures in more car-oriented areas for a better apples-to-apples.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most companies have been taking it on the chin for now: eating the cost of the tariffs and taking a reduced profit to maintain prices and help foster consumer confidence while they wait and see how all the tariff negotiations actually play out.

  With regards to the original question, inflation is measured across all consumer purchasing. So prices on goods (groceries, cars, computing hardware, etc) can increase significantly, but if the price on services (Netflix, restaurants, laundromats, etc) stays relatively flat, inflation ends up looking better than it feels.