TulliusCicero

> Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details.

Some will, and that's great, but as the blog post accurately points out, the invention of these things isn't the primary issue, it's the lack of implementation. And that isn't the fault of the engineers designing better doorknobs or ramps.

> Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it.

Bullshit. The US has had underfunded transit for near a century now because of our obsession with cars. Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse.

> his argument is that these videos dissipate that support.

That seems like a major stretch. Really feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here, like saying that a video about improved airbags means that nobody will care about safer road design anymore.

People do care, but there are so many problems in the world, and only so much caring to go around.

It's extremely cynical to view it as "people pretend to care", rather than looking around and realizing there's a ton of important problems out there that the caring is distributed over. People care about disabilities, but they also care about war, about public schooling, about the environment, about feminism, about animal rights, about transparency in government, about road safety, about child well-being, about unemployment, and so on. All of these are important things, and of course there are dozens more that I haven't listed.

And inventions are sometimes actually useful. Sure, most of those prototypes will go nowhere, but every once in a while something that really helps is invented. And you can't predict in advance only the ones that will actually go on to help.

It's a really cynical way to attack people who are at least sort of trying to help.

And obviously the inventions of "a ramp" and "slightly wider door" already exist; those aren't a matter of invention, they're a matter of regulations and enforcement.

Yeah, it kinda feels like a banal thing to hate on. "They're only doing this because it's easier to create a prototype invention than to redo all design standards and enforcement in the country!" I mean, yeah? What exactly is the implied alternative for the sort of individuals targeted by the blog post?

While I can understand the frustration and the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced.

Yes, engineer types want to solve problems with inventions rather than overhauling the entire nation's infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? Or replacing every building and road regulation and the politicians who put them there?

It reminds me of the people in self-driving car threads complaining that the billions should've gone to transit. Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there.

...you think they've only been planning this for a couple weeks?

Similar issue for me -- I kept my childhood collection and slowly added to it, but hardly ever actually played anything -- until I got a Retron 2 HD that can handle both NES and SNES games, outputting to HDMI.

And then I got the wireless 8bitdo controllers that can work with the original NES/SNES ports, because fuck cables (briefly tried using OG controllers and it was awful).

Now I actually play the games a decent amount, and my wife plays Tetris or Dr Mario all the time.

Most Ukrainian drones don't use fiber optic I don't think. To deal with EW, they're favoring autonomous targeting/guidance for the final part of the strike.

I mean you could have a single protocol and then various different providers still competing, like email, or how even for Visa or Mastercard there's a bunch of different banks that partner up.

God I wish the US had a digital payment system that we could all basically agree on. Having Apple Pay vs Google Pay vs Zelle vs Paypal vs Venmo vs all the others is annoying as hell.

> Come on man, can you please just stop, take the L and let the subthread die.

I'd rather you do this than him. Chill out, please. The pelican pic is fine.

Yeah, or you can just get a cheap retro handheld with similar stylings that will charge via -- you guessed it -- USB-C.

I'm guessing it's because people expect USB-C ports to at least handle 18w.

Yup, gamepads are super cheap now too. You can get actually good quality gamepads for $30. Were you getting good gamepads in the 90's for $15? Definitely not.

The inflation adjusted price of (decent) peripherals seems to keep going down. You can get monitors and mice and keyboards of reasonable quality these days for almost nothing.

It's also amazing how many f2p games are out there that are actually not too exploitative. I've put in hundreds of hours into Deadlock for zero money, and I couldn't give them any money even if I wanted to (because it's closed beta, but still, the game is already very solid).

The gaming audience increased, but budgets also massively went up. You weren't spending $100m+ on Super Mario World.

I'm somewhat skeptical that they actually require more attention per person. Does an 8-person group require more than 2x as much attention as a 4-person group?

> Gaming is getting too expensive.

Gaming is so much cheaper than when I was growing up that I'm kind of blown away.

SNES games went for $60-70. That's like $130-150 in today's money. And they usually had less content than today's games, even if you never do microtransactions today!

In contrast, major AAA titles today are half the price, and you can find indie games packed with content for a paltry $20. Hell, with Steam sales, you can find them even cheaper than that! Some free to play games like Dota 2 make all of their core gameplay content free!

If you check when games like Quake were released, their minimum requirements were absolutely INSANE compared to today. We're talking about mid to high-end CPUs released within the last two or three years, none of this "oh yeah something lower-middle from 5 years ago is fine". Average prices for computers were much higher too (well, maybe the current RAM/SSD crisis has equalized that a bit, but other than that).

Controllers? 8bitdo and the like make highly competent gamepads for $30, which would've been $15 in the 90's. You couldn't even get terrible third-party shitpads for that little back then! It's disgustingly cheap.

If you want to game these days, you can spend a very reasonable amount of money on a mid-range gaming PC* and have it last at least a good 5-6 years. You can then buy games for a steal on Steam, and get surprisingly decent peripherals like gaming monitors and mechanical keyboards for almost no money. The idea that gaming is "too expensive now" is itself laughable.

* Well, other than the memory crisis fucking things up, but before AI companies ate all the RAM, things were very reasonable

It helped me.

Steam has problems but it also has a vast feature set. The family sharing and refund policy are both seriously great, for example. Personal calendar is also really, really cool (and bad for my wallet).

You can still get Steam keys, I usually buy them from Loaded (formerly CDKeys.com).

I think it's one of those things where people only care about a small percentage of the features, but which small percentage varies.

For example, I used the example of remote play together, which is very neat and a lot of people love it, but I personally don't use it.

On the other hand, I make extensive use of Steam's gifting feature, including its ability to handle multiple gifts to multiple people in a single transaction, and to schedule exactly when those gifts will land. And this is something that the other major stores don't seem to support at all, a big advantage for Steam for me, but I'm sure there's many people who don't care at all about gifting.

Being a Steam competitor involves making a store that's actually good. All the other major stores/platforms don't really seem to give a shit, to be frank. Steam has like 20x their feature set, and the gap appears to be still growing.

If anything, it should be easier to make cool new features when you own the hardware side of the platform experience too, but no, it's Steam that has stuff like remote play together, not PSN or Xbox.

People sending unwanted DMs is an obvious reason. At the very least, users should be able to report DMs and then that should allow for moderation.

It's very common in some spaces to get people who send unwanted (spam/harassment/etc) DMs to tons of people. Just expecting everyone to block those people makes for a horrible user experience, because it means new users might be suddenly met by a bunch of unwanted DMs from aggressive randos that remain unbanned. You really need to be able to ban these people (and that means being able to verify that they did what they're accused of).

To be fair, if we waited until there "no more pressing issues", then we'd never get any "quality of life" regulations passed like this.

God I wish we had Aldi in the PacNW. I know, TJ's is technically owned by Aldi Nord, but it's really not the same.

The nice thing about Costco's stuff is that it's typically pretty high quality too.

Honestly I wouldn't say Costco is terribly convenient, other than the limited selection.

I think it's less that America is declining and more that China is rising. And really, most of the world is getting richer.

Hand written is unnecessary, just ban/confiscate phones and restrict internet access if the test needs a computer.