kimbernator

I'm trying really hard to like Lemmy, but whenever I'm reading through posts on "active", "hot", etc. it will initially load with the correct content. But then, I get about 10 seconds before the entire list frantically reflows and fills with brand new posts from all over the place. Extraordinarily annoying. I get that creating a new post is itself "activity" which is probably why it does that, I don't think posts of that nature meet the description of "hot".

Maybe I just need to be going by Top->Day

I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value. I've seen willingness to pay a reasonable amount from most people.

Reddit brings the platform, users bring the community. If Reddit flexes their muscles to force users to their will, it's only natural for users to flex back.

That's an entirely separate discussion from what is being talked about right now. They are being dishonest about the service they provide; users are responsible for the communities working at all. Their representation of the situation as for-profit company vs. freeloading users is a slap in the face to the many years of engagement that gave them this platform.

They are well within their rights as a company to attempt to monetize further. The problem is that they seem willfully ignorant of where their value actually comes from.

Agree. It's already democratic in Reddit's current form in the sense that anybody can just start a community to replace one with moderation they don't like. The subreddit with the moderation that works the best often wins out.

I think a big point in this change that people are ignoring is the restriction of explicit content, even to paying customers. As I understand it, anything labeled with the "NSFW" tag will only be available through the official app, even for paying customers.

I think you're underestimating the effort required to complete the task you're suggesting, probably by multiple orders of magnitude.

The point that people seem to not get is that Nintendo's entire brand rides almost entirely on having a "perfect" experience. Word is that they spent an extra year just on polish for TOTK; having played it myself, I believe it. No game is this quality on release on any other platform. They have their walled garden in the switch (and previous consoles) where they make sure it works absolutely perfectly, and it costs them a lot just to do that. I believe it might be literally impossible for any company to achieve that reputation under any other circumstance, and the polar opposite circumstance is emulating your game on the hyper-chaotic hardware situation that is PC gaming. Not to mention the fact that modern emulators almost universally offer things that Nintendo wouldn't dare: upscaled textures, higher FPS (this is a huge one that causes a litany of bugs), mods, etc. Even a release to PC wouldn't matter because people would demand parity with what emulators offer or just go back to them.

Look at this list: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_games

What you are suggesting would require the following for every one of them:

1. Thorough testing for performance and stability to ensure a PC port works at all

2. Thorough testing of innumerable hardware configurations

3. Thorough testing of every conceivable type of controller, display, keyboard/mouse, etc.

4. Ongoing support of some sort, forever.

Nintendo's focus on quality means that what you're asking is probably a multi-trillion dollar effort that would take decades even if they increased their staffing by 10x. Do you think there's that kind of money in it for them? To top it off, I will repeat that hardware on PCs is far, far more chaotic and unpredictable than any other platform. To even attempt this would be folly; it would be guaranteed to be a buggy mess (like how emulators all have been and to some extent remain), and their main selling point would be ruined.

It seems self-evident to me that Nintendo doesn't really care about emulators for old games. They throw their weight around and make broad gestures to say they hate it, but that's the point. They know they can't stop people from doing this stuff, and they make almost no effort software-wise to prevent it. They just want people to know without any shred of doubt that if they play a nintendo game outside of a platform they have deemed worthy, they are not getting the "real" experience. This absolves them of any blame when the games inevitably don't work right, and it makes clear that they will never allow emulators to become "official" platforms. I'm sure they carefully weigh their actions to ensure they don't actually extinguish emulators, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have covertly contributed to their development at some point. These old games are unlikely to be money makers, but keeping people playing Nintendo IP will make them more interested in buying more in the future.

Because why would they? They would have to dedicate a shitload of resources to optimizing decades of work for PC so a small slice of the market can buy old stuff. All of those games would stop being a hacky thing you're okay with bugs on to a thing Nintendo now needs to support. Not only software, but widely varying hardware and worse yet, controllers. There's simply no way they release wii games as paid products on PC and make a satisfying experience with a keyboard/mouse.

I have seen this idea now suggested multiple times. Nintendo's business model is sound. Protect the "official" experience at any cost so that it's 100% clear when you're playing on a Nintendo console vs a non-official emulator. Blocking dolphin's steam release is consistent with this goal; if it's on steam, it looks like a real product and non-tech people might start to think it's official.

"physical presence of you and any other individuals using the TV at any given time"

okay, so the deal is we give you a cheap TV that's constantly showing ads and we are going to watch you through this nifty camera. But you can video call on it!

This TV would have to be pretty damn good for me to accept advertisements being shown to me constantly as I watch a movie. By the vague description, I assume it's not. I'm sure you could find something that matches the description "55” 4K HDR Theater Display" for under $300 easily.

Something about this makes me feel uneasy, as though its success would cause the rest of the TV industry to adopt similarly invasive ideas without any price reduction.

I think it's a really smart strategy. They avoided the raw-power hardware arms race and are thriving because of it.

It seems like Nintendo picked up on what makes video games so fun early on while a lot of studios struggle with it even today: The gameplay comes first and it has to be fun. Art/style comes next, then way down the list is graphics. Graphics are the only thing about a video game that get worse with time. If you focus on making fun games that have a distinct style, they will remain fun forever. Importantly to a corporation, they also remain sellable forever.

Nobody talks about crysis 1 anymore, but people definitely talk about wind waker.

I doubt there's much, if any profit margin on the consoles themselves. I think it's pretty typical for consoles of all brands to be sold at a loss in order to capture customers for their ecosystem where they will buy games and other media which have very healthy margins.

Nintendo's biggest concern is probably controlling the experience. While it might not be a marvel of gaming technology on the Switch, it is consistent. Allowing it to run on any old computer hardware means a lot of it will be poorly optimized as a rule. non-technical people will likely have no idea what that means; to them it will just be a shitty gaming experience and they will then associate that experience with Nintendo. Technical people will probably not even bother and they'll just emulate it for free instead of paying $70 for a game that isn't going to have any official support on their platform. There's really no upside for Nintendo in this plan.

Apparently "invest" is only 6% related to "investor"?

I think the logic here needs some work, very cool idea though.

I had the exact same first guess. Easy, I figured - that's a perfect connection between them. It just seems like the logic dictating how "close" two words are is opaque and incomplete.

These things always cost more at first, so I agree that it's "overpriced" for the value it brings. That said, I think the practicality is that it provides all of the value of a phone and a tablet in a single device that fits in your pocket. It's a fairly large leap in the ever-growing list of other devices that smartphones are replacing.

I also like to think that long-term maybe they will have the ability to fold out along more than one dimension and potentially be dramatically larger than this, but that's just dreaming at this point.

Haven't tried that one, but after going through a few this one is far and away the best I've had: https://www.mattressfirm.com/sleep-mask/5637147694.p

It's got issues but when the other big option is Teams, there's not a lot of room for complaining

My credit card is 0% interest if I pay it off, and I get all sorts of benefits from it. Why would a responsible consumer use this over a credit card?

I don't really think Apple's interest is in collecting interest on these payments, but I do think it will cause people to use Apple Pay more because it enables (perhaps encourages) them to buy things they otherwise wouldn't buy. That can be good or bad depending on the circumstances, I just expect this will be frequently utilized in an "impulse buy" sort of way because it creates an illusion of affordability.

If you have impulse control and can properly conceptualize a loan, it could be a useful tool. In my experience, however, these kinds of programs don't target responsible spenders. People are pretty bad at thinking about monthly cost in terms of total cost.

If you're referring to a carrier's zero interest payments on the full price of the phone, that's just smart. No penalty for borrowing. If there was interest involved, it gets fuzzier.

I'll amend this by saying that there's also another huge requirement for it to make sense: The new iphone must be necessary for any of this deal to make sense. If it was impulse bought because of this financing offer, then the financing has cost you >$1k

The truth is that the assertion that elementary schools are trying to expose children to pornography is outright untrue, because of course it is. Conservatives have simply decided to equate that with allowing children to freely see same-sex relationships portrayed in the same way as opposite-sex relationships have been portrayed to them forever. It's a lie that only serves to divide people and try to convince them of the outdated notion that non-straight people are child abusers, and therefore that the republican party is the anti-child abuser party.

In the end, the only hope the republican party has to survive as the older generation passes is to rely on lies of this nature to divide enough people that vote based on moral outrage instead of fact.

These arguments are no different than when governments try to have backdoors installed in technology. They say it's about protecting the kids to make the new laws hard to argue against without looking like a monster, but in reality the laws are tools for them to do more nefarious things. If a politician ever uses "protecting the children" as a justification, that should be a huge alarm bell in your head that means you should really consider what arguments you would have against their suggestion if kids weren't involved.

Nobody was ever trying to show 1st graders sexually explicit material in libraries. This is a tool to suppress ideas about things like LGBTQ.

Why are you defending the bigots in charge of the state that wish to marginalize their fellow man?

Not everyone can afford to just buy whatever books they want, but they still pay taxes. It's a huge cop-out to say "oh it's not banning the books completely, just removing the only method by which tons of people are able to access that literature."

It's a huge violation of the spirit of libraries. It is effectively censorship. I guaranteed that the bible, despite portraying just about every subject they are trying to hide, is present in every single school library in the state.

Saying that kids only get free access to the books the state legislators agree with is absolutely censorship.

Woops, I was looking at the wrong figure and just trusted it in haste. Thanks for the correction.

Just a nitpick, but "source code" might imply that it was something secretive. The guy found SSNs of teachers in MO served up publicly on a state website within the page's HTML. The governor went on a crusade against this guy because he didn't understand it, and despite being told by numerous experts that there was no case, he kept it going.

The worst part was that this guy was beyond reproach - he went out of his way to notify people and said he wouldn't mention it to news outlets etc until the issue was resolved. It was a clear case of the governor misusing his power to prosecute a free press that he didn't like using a pretext he knew was incorrect. While it's funny to poke at the governor for this, I personally believe it should have caused his removal from office.

https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/23/claim-that-report...

excerpt:

  State education officials initially wanted to thank Renaud for discovering the problem that, as investigators would learn, has existed undetected since 2011. And an FBI agent who looked at the incident informed the state that it was “not an actual network intrusion,” noting that the website in question “allowed open source tools to be used to query data that should not be public.”

  State officials made it clear the information was on a public site, it was not encrypted or password protected and the reporter was not anywhere he wasn’t allowed.

  The governor decided to blame a government failing on the reporter who discovered it.

  Despite all this, Parson convened a press conference to label the reporter a “hacker” and demand a highway patrol investigation. He accused the Post-Dispatch of trying to use the security flaw to embarrass him, and his political action committee launched ads to raise money off Parson’s attacks.

It's comically evil to cut such a small amount of money for the state's public libraries under pretty much any circumstance (The total budget is ~50 billion dollars). Libraries should be considered some of our crowning achievements: (nearly) free and unprivileged access to as much knowledge as we can cram into a single building.

Unfortunately, one of the primary political parties is actively waging war on education and information.

I would take a few issues with that claim. The average price of a home is a function with a lot of inputs, supply and demand chiefly among them. We see issues with both, but the demand is surely the largest issue: as single-family homes are seen increasingly as investments to be collected rather than basic human necessities, the price shifts from the "average" income to the income of corporations or moneyed individuals, and they consume a huge number of these homes. That creates a supply issue for real people.

Real wages have been stagnant for a long time. The average person is not likely to be borrowing more than they were able to in 1985 adjusted for inflation and assuming the same loan terms. While real wages have stayed stagnant, all homes sold today will cost their new owners ~43% more of their individual purchasing power than the same homes would in 1985.

Interest rates like this were a lot more manageable when the cost of homes was less. Adjusted for inflation, the average home price today is about 60% higher than it was in 1998.

Adjusted to 2023 dollars and assuming interest rates of 5.5% in 1998 and 4.5% now (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS), home owners on average are spending about 43% more money on their mortgage payment per month.

How is that relevant at all?

Pretty interesting that I knew precisely which sounds you meant before even clicking the links