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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

Very cool post by, uh, the European Commission. Yay casual-tone governance.

Does anyone have a link to some reputable third-party explaining the actual issue?

The issue is that the Joy-Cons joystick has what appears to be a design defect that, regardless of how much care is taken, means they have a high likelihood of developing what is known as "drift" or phantom movement without the joystick actually being engaged. This issue has been, at the very least, acknowledged by Nintendo, and for a few years now Nintendo has been repairing/replacing Joy-Cons for free (at least in the US) because of it. I don't know if there have been design changes, but Nintendo's public release response has been mixed in an effort to avoid as much culpability as possible.

The entire controller industry has this problem. Even ~$200 controllers do this; the Xbox Elite 2 for example was/is infamous for it.

Everyone I know who plays on controller complains about the failures.

In +20 years of using mice, guess what I've never had fail?

Hall-effect joysticks don't drift. I've also never had a 360 controller drift. Switch joysticks drift much faster than average.

>Hall-effect joysticks

Is this standard for controllers?

Nope. Hall effect joysticks were encumbered by patents though they are starting to expire off now

I'm not denying that eventually most controllers will drift, but the speed at which these controllers developed a drifting problem was much higher than what is expected on average, even for cheaper made third party controllers.

The scale of the problem is totally different. I've used a bunch of Xbox controllers that never had this issue, but my JoyCons developed it almost immediately.

The issue with Joycons is so much more pronounced. I used the same 360 controller with my PC for about a decade with no issues. The Series x controller I’ve used since then is fine.

My joycons were drifting less than a year after I bought the switch.

Mice are not immune to failure and I have had mice fail on me. Have you been using the same mouse for 20+ years? My favorite one (Saitek Cyborg RAT7) died at the year mark and I won’t buy another one from them for fear of the same thing but it was adjustable in every dimension and as a result was the most comfortable mouse for my merry paws.

Plastic gears running against plastic gears wear down over time because of friction and that creates dust. I have seen some retro modding solutions to this problem that add lubricant to the gear box to significantly reduce friction and wear.

Here's the official press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

Of course it's casual. It's a toot on Mastodon.

A toot? That can’t be the real name…

tweet only sounds normal because we're used to it.

That’s not the only difference. “Tweet” had a preexisting definition that’s pleasant: a bird’s chirping.

“Toot” is slang for a fart.

"tweeting" apparently means "to suck your own cock", which describes Twitter pretty well :) /s

Ha, my mistake was using boomer dictionaries.

You can't sleep on Urban Dictionary. It's an essential research tool when brainstorming new product names!

For sure! I'm not a native speaker and didn't know that toot was another word for fart, guess we both learned something new :D

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