cerebralhawks

@cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After Apple originally announced the first version of Halo in 1999, Xbox apparently called Bungie and said "'Steve Jobs can't have that. We're going to buy you.'"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  There have been exclusives for a long time, even before Halo. Mostly console, because Windows hasn’t really faced competition. Macs could never decide on a chipset. First it was Motorola, then PowerPC, then Intel, and now Apple Silicon. It’s a moving target. Apple Silicon may not be forever either. If Apple wants to get into gaming, I can see them working with AMD, but not soon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After Apple originally announced the first version of Halo in 1999, Xbox apparently called Bungie and said "'Steve Jobs can't have that. We're going to buy you.'"⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  No, he wasn’t making a free version of Crossover, but it did the same thing as Crossover. They both use free software made by WINE. The Whisky dev was not stealing from Crossover. However, Crossover gives some of its proceeds to the WINE community, so the Whisky developer felt that users using Whisky were indirectly cheating the WINE community by getting a free ride. Note that Proton and WINE are free. Crossover is the outlier being paid, but Crossover also gives back.

  There are no assholes in this situation whatsoever. Not the Whisky dev for giving us a free alternative and not the Whisky users not paying for Crossover. Not even Crossover since they contribute to WINE. If there are any assholes, it’s developers who make games for Switch but not Mac (since they’re both ARM64 platforms; obviously not counting first-party Nintendo developers), people who pirated Crossover, and developers not developing at all for ARM64. But that’s a stretch and I’m not after any of those people, I’m just saying, if someone has to be an asshole, that’s where I’d look, not at Whisky/its dev/its users, and not at Crossover/its dev/its users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which of the two would you purchase for someone who’s not so technical?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Can you remote into a Steam Deck? I’m guessing yes but I’m not sure.

  Switch 2 is an easy win in your mother’s case, though. People see emulation but they don’t see the hoops you have to jump through, and the Switch 2 is a solid machine, it just doesn’t have the breadth of games.

  I kinda want a Deck (I only have a 3DSXL and Switch 1 for mobile gaming, not counting phones) but I’m also not discounting the Switch 2. On Switch, I almost exclusively play Animal Crossing, and the performance gains of the Switch 2 upgrade alone make it almost worth it for a game I play almost daily. But I’ve been playing for a year, I’m on my third island, and I’m afraid I’m starting to get tired of it. I know about the free hotel DLC/update coming in January, it’s basically a lite/free version of the Happy Home Paradise DLC (same mechanic), but I think it’ll be too little too late for me, let alone people who have been crossing since ACNH came out in 2020 — or longer, with previous titles. (I have the modded HShop version, Welcome Luxury, which supposedly fixes a lot of stuff, but I’ve had a hard time getting into it after being spoiled by New Horizons.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After Apple originally announced the first version of Halo in 1999, Xbox apparently called Bungie and said "'Steve Jobs can't have that. We're going to buy you.'"⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Apple announced a game without securing distribution rights first? Seems a bit shady on Bungie’s part for letting them, and negligent on Apple’s.

  Also, if we want to paint the narrative that a potential future of Apple in gaming was stolen by Microsoft, wouldn’t that put Apple in the perfect position now to hit back? They’ve been toying with the idea of bringing gaming to macOS, but they seem to want someone else to do the heavy lifting. On Linux you have Proton, and on macOS we had Whisky, but the guy threw in the towel when he realised another company was making a commercial product out of it, he didn’t want to take away from the work they were doing. (To be fair, they had been at it longer.) But it seems like if Apple wants to be serious about gaming, they need to build something like Proton. Maybe they should buy Crossover and make it part of macOS. Let just any Mac user run games made for Windows. But I’m also not saying non-gamer Mac users should bear any part of the cost of gaming, but something gotta give somewhere.

  Microsoft is screwing up by running people off of Windows when PC building costs are at record highs and the economy is so low, and running up the price of the Xbox due to a situation they had a hand in creating (the AI bubble). While Linux will be a better target for people with perfectly good computers who don’t want to build a whole new one to satisfy Windows 11’s requirements, anyone looking at the end of the life of their gaming PC should be looking at the M4 Mac mini at $500 and at least considering it. And Apple can help them make that decision by appealing to gamers and actually being serious about it. Because if fucking Apple of all companies starts taking gaming seriously, maybe Microsoft will again, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, so you have to buy new ones? Yeah, no. I have Xbox 360 and Xbox One (RB3 and RB4 era) instruments and neither generation work. I’m not buying a new guitar for Fortnite. That’s crazy.

  I heard there’s a new guitar controller out (Gibson?), some like 20th anniversary thing? And I’m wondering who this is for. These games are dead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Some people don’t like to hear it, but Fortnite is basically the new Unreal Tournament… in the same way it’s the new Rockband. For the latter, it’s easy: Epic acquired Rockband and Guitar Hero creator Harmonix, and Fortnite Festival is just the latest version of that code, only you can’t use instrument controllers with it, only gamepads (or, I suppose, keyboards or touch screens). So what Fortnite really is, it’s a free-to-play showcase of the Unreal Engine. It’s meant to show off what it can do and anyone can pick it up and play for free. Of course, it doesn’t have all the features of Unreal Tournament. It’s pretty much just battle royale with base building. But it’s the newest version of the same engine and it’s a shooter. Not the same thing… but your skills with older UT definitely translate. My nephew got me to play it. I’d never played it before, and he had spent money on the skins and the extra stuff, so he would go around making big purple explosions and he’d attract attention. Me, I was blown away by the detail, but I found the movement just as fluid as I remembered. Once I got the hang of weapons and their grades, I was scouting out the best pistols and SMGs I could find, and shadowing his character, and when he got into fights, I’d circle around, flank his enemies, and we’d win every fight. We won our first match and I don’t think we’ve lost a match. If we did, we finished in the top 5-10%. We have an unconventional playstyle, and it’s really all me. He plays like most Fortnite players, and they engage him as such. I play like a UT player… or, more accurately, I play it like a Deus Ex player (which was based on the same UE1 that UT99 was). I pick my shots and I shoot to kill. My nephew doesn’t think I’m playing the game right, but he’s having fun and he likes winning.

  That said, I don’t love the game. I keep it on my Xbox, but I only play with him (or, I suppose, I’d be open to playing with anyone who asked). Even solo (I did that once on my iPhone when Fortnite came back to iOS this year or last) I still do alright for myself. Rarely take the top spot though. I need a decoy. But if there are 100 players, there’s no shame in being in the last 5 of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there an optimal home/apartment size that most people would be happy with?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it greatly depends on how big the family is. If someone has six kids, they need rooms for those kids, and that would be too much for people with two or fewer kids. Even if you take away the dumb “girls need their own private locking space with two doors between them and any male in the house” rules.

  Going to the other extreme, I’ve heard of prisons shut down and renovated as affordable housing. I think if you were going to make prison cells into housing for free people though, you would have to give those people control of the doors, and while I suppose a prison probably has a centralised location to cook for the entire population, you would probably want more local cooking on each housing unit, if it’s a big one with more than one. And the doors would be opened by the residents, I’m thinking with RFID or NFC cards. You can run power to each room through the water closets, i.e. where the plumbing goes. But none of these would be good for families, only singles. This would be a better solution for homeless people who don’t have anyone, and possibly for those who need help, as you could have social services, mental health type people go there instead of guards, to care for the people and their needs. Yes, almost like an insane asylum, but you give the residents full agency. No lockdowns or anything like that. Just people with basic living conditions being helped as needed, with conditions that are livable but would make anyone want to seek something better outside, anything, even if it’s just a single-wide trailer in tornado alley, just for the room and the space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex’s crackdown on free remote streaming access starts this week⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Is a domain name strictly necessary though? You would need a static IP. I thought you needed something like a VPS or VPN — I know what a VPN is, but I think it was something with a similar acronym — and that was a service that cost money.

  With Plex it just works. When I load up Plex on a remote machine, first it tells me my server is offline, because my server is a Mac and Macs are sleepy bois, so it wakes up the Mac, which wakes up the drives, and then the server loads up and I can play pretty much anything.

  I’ve ran Jellyfin on both Mac (current setup) and Windows/Intel. I like Jellyfin overall, and it does some cool things Plex doesn’t. Like you can fix details Plex won’t let you. Like for some reason it only lists the foreign actors in anime, you can manually specify the English voices if you want. Plex doesn’t let you do that and AFAIK there’s no way to. (There should be an API out there that taps into a service that lets you access any language cast, and there should be a way to set it to dynamically change the cast to whatever language you have selected.) But anyway, Jellyfin is somewhat fine, but to use it on other devices (e.g. an Apple TV box on the same network), you have to do a fair bit of configuring. It’s not just, log into the account on your phone and type in the text on the screen. Jellyfin doesn’t even prioritise Apple development, but they have come a long way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex’s crackdown on free remote streaming access starts this week⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is for remote streaming. Can Jellyfin be accessed outside the network? I thought that was the difference.

  Like if I didn’t like Plex and I ran Jellyfin (and I have done), I could access it locally but I couldn’t access it, say, from a hotel a thousand miles away. Or it requires a lot more work (and maybe some paid service) to do.

  Plex may have gone up, but a bunch of us got it for $100 or less years ago and we are not affected by the new limitations. Still free for our family members accessing remotely. Wasn’t free for us to set up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WhatsApp appears to have ads now. Good thing I don't really use it anymore.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice. I might have to look into that sometime.

  I had a Motorola phone that had three profiles. It was really just home screen layouts though. This was in 2012? Proton/Electrify (4G/3G versions). Way ahead of its time.

  I went iPhone before Google implemented profiles. I have an old S10, I wonder if it has the feature.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WhatsApp appears to have ads now. Good thing I don't really use it anymore.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, this is /MildlyInfuriating and not /Privacy, so I’ll just say that I very much don’t like Facebook and all its spinoff products (or acquired, in the case of WhatsApp).

  I will say, Facebook didn’t spend $21 billion on WhatsApp and not expect some kind of return on that investment. Classic WhatsApp charged $1 a year. There’s no way that’s profitable. I don’t think it asks for that money anymore. I think just selling your data/snooping on your business is enough.

  There is a somewhat interesting solution, though it’s hardly cheap, or practical in many cases. Have one phone be your daily driver and you’re signed into it with your personal accounts and you have stuff on it you trust. Then you have another phone that is not so easily trusted. You sign in to the provider (be it Apple or Google) with a dummy account that is not related to you, and you install these apps you don’t trust. You don’t give the phone location permissions, and you don’t activate it as a cell phone (no SIM card or eSIM). You use it as a WiFi device and hotspot it off your phone or home WiFi. Do the shady stuff (e.g. WhatsApp, TikTok, etc.) on that. If your main phone has a VPN on it, even better, because the other phone can use network location to help identify you. If you’re always in different places, good luck with that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So now that it's that time of year again in the US, what are some tips and tricks for dealing with that one relative who goes on about the same bullshit for hours and won't shut the fuck up?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly I’ve never had that issue.

  One of my favourite things to do at a holiday get-together is hijack the TV with my MacBook. Most people think Apple stuff only talks to other Apple stuff in the Ecosystem/Walled Garden and that Android is some rebel front against Apple. Most people are also fucking stupid. If I’m on your WiFi and you have a smart TV, best believe I can take that shit over with like two clicks. My family has one of those TVs, I think it’s a Roku? where if you don’t watch anything, it goes to this city skyline screensaver with billboards advertising the streaming services it has? Like there’s a Netflix billboard, there’s a Disney+ one, you might even see one for Apple TV at some point. But it’s just a looping video. When I see that — nobody’s picking something — I pull out the MacBook, find a movie, and cast to it. Nobody questions why the TV did that without anyone touching the remote.

  Last time, it was KPop Demon Hunters. Maybe a couple people assumed I had something to do with it, but within minutes, all the kids were occupied with it. By the second or third song, even the adults were singing along (I was playing the Sing-Along version). It was great. Might do it again. I can’t just put on anything. It has to hook a few people, which in turn draws others.

  So, distraction.

  Also, I sit at the kids’ table. They have far more interesting conversations. And there’s always some kid, almost always a girl, usually one around 7-12, who will tell me I don’t belong there. Like some little Philosopher’s Stone-year Hermione, some little know-it-all. I’ll wait until none of the other adults are looking, and she’ll catch a pea or a carrot slice to the face, look at me, and see my look of “I’ll do it again” on my face. That usually settles it. Once in a while it turns into a food fight, which I never get blamed for because I know when to stop.

  We only do these whole-family get-togethers a few times a year. It’s usually a good time. But honestly, by the end of the day I just wanna take my pants off and wind down watching TV (at home I mean, and we don’t have kids so I don’t mean anything weird). Get tired of people after a while. Even the fun ones. But the time I gotta be there? I make it work for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could another country like Great Britain Release the Full Epstein files?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the question is, does London actually have the files? Washington has the files, which is why it’s down to the Americans to release them.

  Others have said it already, but by contrast, the big paedo controversy in the UK a few years back, Washington didn’t have those files, so Washington couldn’t have exposed London in that way. Just like London can’t expose Washington here. London may have had its own investigation into Epstein, but they don’t have all the files that Washington has. They may have some of them. But the UK is very much, in some of the sense, “the 51st state,” meaning their fate and destiny is somewhat, at least, based on the strength of the US. Can the UK stand entirely on its own, or without US support? I would like to think so, but London certainly enjoys the support it has, and I do believe PM Starmer and President Trump are allies, if not friends, and agree on some important things. So no, London isn’t going to take hostile action against Washington, and Starmer isn’t going to sign off on an attack on Trump, because they are not enemies.

  I think the better question is if Elon Musk could get his hands on them and release them unredacted? I think he has the skill, and he and Trump keep butting heads, but I don’t see him going for the nuclear option. Besides, and what a lot of people don’t seem to realise is, no one is going to change their mind about Trump whether he’s in the files or not. We all know he is. He doesn’t care because he can’t get a third term as president, which is why he was holding up food stamps for weeks, he was trying to start riots so he could declare martial law and suspend elections. That’s his only play for power past 2028, but he’s also 80-odd years old, he’s not going to be in power long regardless. It’s the younger men in his party who are implicated in the files, who could shape party politics for decades to come, they’re ultimately trying to protect, while trying to spin the files against the opposing party.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could another country like Great Britain Release the Full Epstein files?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Because these “radical hacker groups” often support the right, not the left. They’re not going after their friends.

  The whole “Guy Fawkes” and “for the people” is just a smoke screen. They aren’t your friend and they certainly aren’t your champion. At best, they do what they want, and taking down the alt right is not something they want to do. Wishing for them to do it is one thing, but don’t hold your breath.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does a community called no stupid questions allow comments that say the question is stupid?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Being rude, in and of itself, doesn’t break the rules in most communities. Some do say to argue in good faith or something to that effect, but none really outright ban rudeness. Maybe the “nice” communities where people go to get away from drama. I dunno. I don’t read a lot of sidebars. The way I try to conduct myself generally fits with a lot of communities. The ones it doesn’t, will kick me out. And that’s fine, to a point. I mean it’s not great but it’s also not the end of, well, anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You can now try the Xbox Full Screen Experience on any PC, laptop, or tablet⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Any PC, laptop, or tablet running spyware Windows 11. Not any.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does a community called no stupid questions allow comments that say the question is stupid?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Can’t speak for the mods, but I think people who subscribe here also subscribe to the AskLemmy type communities and they don’t look at what community they’re in.

  Mods will do what mods will do. I think users should just downvote unhelpful comments anyway. I myself have voting (both ways) enabled, but I don’t see numbers or vote weight, but I think a lot of people do. So I don’t fully participate in the voting, but that is what it’s for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨apparently, the T button dosent exist for some people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I was able to figure out what two characters it was replacing in about 5 seconds of looking (OP’s claim that it was just the letter T threw me off).

  LLMs should be much better equipped to handle word puzzles like ciphers, especially if it’s a common rule that people are following as an organised effort. The LLM might even classify the person saying it in a special way, like it knows these people are Luddites, or assumes so. Maybe that is the real poison. Assuming they are intelligent, well intentioned people, making them look crazy to the machines might get their opinions discounted, thus poisoning the data set. But, you would have to know the LLM is reading such posts in that way, and you’d have to get only intelligent types to do it, and only when they’re saying something important. Otherwise, the LLM will just translate and add the data. And I think the more basic ones will do just that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Want to play the latest multiplayer games? Just go into your bios settings or upgrade your PC if it doesn't have TPM chip.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I got tired of Windows pulling this shit with my 4th gen Xeon and 6th gen Core i7 (laptop) that, when they died, I replaced them both with Macs. Always wanted to be a Mac user. Now I am.

  I know, “Apple isn’t much better,” but at least I can say I voted with my wallet. Just buying another PC, even if I could find one without a Windows license, and installing Linux, would not have been enough of a shift. Plus I feel I would have just came back to Windows anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which Doctor can pass as a JoJo Character?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Off the top of my head, Ten, Eleven, and Strange.

  I’ve only seen the first few episodes of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, it’s not for me, but I understand the question. Eccentric and kinda wild looking.

  So maybe also Twelve when he had the guitar in the arena. Definitely some JoJo energy there. But otherwise I wouldn’t attribute Capaldi to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GTA IV Is A Snapshot of the World Before It Changed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of us have been on the web since 1994. It’s not much older than that. The World-Wide Web, I mean. HTTP. Of course you had Usenet and such before the WWW.

  2008 would be 14 years later. Sure, it was 17 years ago, but in 2008, people were on MySpace. Pretty sure 4chan was around then, wanna-be hackers and pedophiles posting anonymously. So yeah, I think people were aware the Internet could be a dark place by then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do crew have cabins below decks on short-distance ferries?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t speak to ferries in particular, but it’s a feature of vessels of a certain size to have accommodations for crew. Even if it’s for short trips, you kind of have to have a space where crew can relax for a bit.

  Most airplanes, even those doing shorter (4-6 hour) flights, have crew cabins. This, I know about. They’re typically located in the front half of the plane, accessible by hidden spiral staircase(s) in the front area, where the staff prepare food and collect drinks. It’s a short area up there, basically just pods to lay down in. The entire staff wouldn’t be standing at the ready on a plane. At any time, you can assume a bunch of them are up there, even if they’re just playing on their phones, reading, or catching a short nap, with an alarm set for the next meal/drink service.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'The PS5 is only in the middle of [it's lifespan],' says Sony CFO⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it will — AI is just getting started, and I think it’s going to get a lot better in terms of what it can do and fooling more of us into thinking it’s real. I think it’s also going to pull more on the AI fence toward it than push them away, though those of us already firmly against it probably won’t budge much.

  We’ve been talking about PlayStation, but specific to Xbox, Microsoft wants to bring Copilot to gaming, tapping into guides online (IGN and such) to get Copilot to be able to help you through a game, while you’re playing it. Like Clippy in Word… Copilot in Halo (or whatever). And it’s not going to be free. But we’ll also pay more for the Xbox that can do it, even if we aren’t paying for AI help. But I think Microsoft will try to justify the higher price of the next Xbox (hell, the Xbox handheld is $1000 to start) by getting out of software (game) exclusives, opening it up to Steam, and basically making branded gaming PCs. Yes it’s hopium when Xbox fanboys try to sell it as a sure thing, but, it makes sense. Xbox is porting its remaining exclusives over to PlayStation. But they show no signs of getting out of hardware, and opening up to Steam, especially if PlayStation doesn’t, makes an Xbox a sure sell with gamers, especially if it’s cheaper than building a gaming PC and they don’t want to mod. I don’t see a future for Xbox with neither exclusives nor third-party stores. And I don’t think anyone wants Sony to be the only “game” in town.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game marketing company takes down blog post bragging about how good it is at astroturfing Reddit after Reddit finds the post⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sprog, that was it. Yeah. What’s a sprog, anyway? It’s not flagged as misspelled. Yeah, I don’t like AIs that steal content, but funny jokes are fine. Novelty accounts are fine. There were a few people who claimed to be famous people. Maybe they were those people. I never cared. They weren’t anything special to me. I just treated them like novelty accounts, same as anyone else really.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'The PS5 is only in the middle of [it's lifespan],' says Sony CFO⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also to be fair, we’ve kind of plateaued in gaming performance and demand. Cyberpunk set the benchmark 5 years ago and nothing’s really topped it yet. And now the Switch 2 can run it, and so can Macs built like iPhones with the GPU, RAM, and CPU all on the same chip. My MacBook Air can run it. I run around and there’s no traffic and almost no pedestrians, but it works! (I previously owned the game on Steam. I did not buy it for my Mac.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'The PS5 is only in the middle of [it's lifespan],' says Sony CFO⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That makes more sense — and I bet they will, too. If they aren’t still supporting the PS4, they did for a while. PS2, also. PS3, I’m not so sure about, but that sounds like something Sony has done. A game will come out on Xbox, PlayStation, and the previous PlayStation.

  PS5 and XSX are both still great for 1080p gaming, despite one claiming 8K (since removed) and the other (still) claiming 4K. I’ve heard the next generation will support 4K native, and this leap in performance will come with a leap in price. I’ve heard the Xbox will basically be a branded PC and run Steam titles (I think this is mostly hopium); if so, I wonder what PlayStation will do to compete. Besides continue to support the previous generation longer. Either way, they’re too expensive now; I can only imagine what the next ones will cost.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'The PS5 is only in the middle of [it's lifespan],' says Sony CFO⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Didn’t they say that about the PS4 just before the 5 was announced? They want you to buy their current console. Nintendo denied Switch 2 rumors right up to the announcement. Same reason.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People who don't wear earphones outside - why, and what do you do instead?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, I have a pretty nice setup. iPhone and AirPods. Both Pro, for whatever that’s worth. More marketing than function these days, though it used to mean something. I wouldn’t use a base 16, but base 17 is the best of this year’s lot. And AirPods 4 are good enough for anyone.

  Anyway, I think sticking AirPods in your ears in public is kind of a rude gesture. It indicates “don’t bother me.” And I like strangers far less than normal people, neurotypical, whatever you call them. And I’m hard of hearing, so even if I’m not listening to music, I benefit from Apple’s “hearing aid” mode (which I have set up). We also have this thing, it’s buried in accessibility, called Live Listen. Superhuman hearing. Takes whatever the phone mic picks up and amplifies it. I stick the AirPods in my wife’s ears, go into the bedroom and shut the door, place the iPhone on the bed, then go past the bedroom into the bathroom, and whisper a phrase, and she hears it, clear as day. It’s that good. It’s literally spy tech. “Leave” your iPhone hidden and completely out of sight in a room, leave the room, pop in AirPods, hear every word spoken in that room. (When you first set up the feature, it actually tells you not to do exactly that.)

  So, yeah. I can hear way better with them on. But mostly I just do what I came to do and GTFO. I listen to the music in the car. Weird stuff like K-Pop (and not just the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, though that’s good too) or Enya.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game marketing company takes down blog post bragging about how good it is at astroturfing Reddit after Reddit finds the post⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There’s a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don’t comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.

  When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s fun to see it try. Then there’s a guy — pretty sure it’s a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. “Something for your something”, I think. I don’t block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why I uninstalled ublock origin, this is WAY better!!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A good question. I think both. I am not their agent, nor their customer/user, so I don’t have that answer.