1,363 karma · joined April 14, 2018
The state of their infrastructure is wretched. The fact they saved themself from forced nationalization is depressing as well.
It’s pretty nakedly obvious that they’re run poorly by design.
The only circumstance where I wouldn’t be surprised would involve regulatory action I see as an outside chance.
That doesn’t mean I’m a robot without feeling. Doing your job isn’t “toxically masculine”.
Growing up I was raised in all the bullshit about not crying or never appearing “weak”. It turns out bottling all your emotions isn’t a super healthy thing. Even worse when you don’t gain the meaningful perspective of understanding the implications of them because you’re conditioned to pretend to ignore them.
Men are emotional creatures whether some of them want to admit it or not because they’re human.
Cleaning human shit for a living or part of your living doesn’t change that no matter who you are.
Thankfully we’re largely past that.
That said, I rarely see malware on most of the machines I touch. I get more calls about automatically fullscreened browser windows with scare text and a phone number to call than any actual software problems.
Defender does work well enough for any average person and I’m happy if only because the vast majority of AV software is sold in the most disgusting way. Just as bad as the malware scare tactics honestly.
SSDs mitigate those issues but it is so painful to run things on mechanical drives, a lot of which is down to the antivirus processes. The practical realities have changed.
(Also things being snappy and fast I don’t think is a common memory of people when the machines the author is writing about were contemporary. The world of software is much bigger than notepad and cmd.exe)
Gamepass is literally the best deal for someone playing video games, full stop. The price may get jacked up in the future but right now it is stupid good.
Also you’re really not being honest about the historical aspect of Sony and first party games. You said as much but I don’t see why you’re giving Sony a pass for snapping up a stable of developers for first party games over time but knocking Microsoft for being late to the party and close the gap. It’s the same thing for the same result.
Whichever you prefer is fine. Most of Sony’s first party stuff is very different to the Microsoft stuff.
Sony has engaged in anticompetitive practices a lot in recent history. They tried really hard to prevent cross platform play, going so far as to both lie about it and also throw a “think of the children” in there. They also are the platform that wants money to support cross platform play.
Go be homeless somewhere else is not a practical solution and never has been.
Big corporations didn’t reluctantly close down factories, hat in hand, because people weren’t buying their products. They moved the manufacturing offshores and people kept buying the products they always have.
Certainly safer than your average road car in most circumstances.
I’m happy to let people enjoy them but it is not something I can do. It does bother me when people say that they’re all harmless with no problems though. As with all things there are adverse reactions and it’s irresponsible to claim otherwise. I don’t advocate prohibition to be clear, just actual truth and honesty.
If you’re really able to just hold on to that money and squirrel it away without spending it frivolously then it’s hard to imagine it not being enough.
The guy making 250K a year isn’t worried about not being able to put food on the table. But maybe he has a monthly car payment that is more than the person making 28k a year pays per month in rent.
I also just prefer the video player of my choice.
Paying customers should never have a worse experience than pirating customers. I think this is a huge reason for the success of music streaming. Less so for video streaming now with the huge fragmentation.
I torrent a lot of games because 2 hours (steam refund) is a very narrow window for a lot of games. The reality is 90% of them I don’t end up meshing with. The ones that I do, I buy.
There was a phase of games shipping with uncompressed audio in every language they support for no good reason that ballooned file size (Titanfall)
Some games have gotten around this problem by having higher resolution textures or additional languages being optional installs within whatever ecosystems DLC implementation is. I think this is the smart way to do it.
Examples of games shrinking I are hard to come by but special credit to IO interactive and Hitman 3.
The install size with all the content of the previous games included (If you own them) is less than the install size of the first game. That is impressive and commendable.
Games are weird and some people will look at the file size and think it means the game is better, just the way some people think games with more hours are better. The psychology of people who play video games is weird.
Duplication of assets on disk was a very weird byproduct of HDD file access conventions, but we shouldn’t need that anymore. There is still a shrinking, but valid crossover window between devs being able to assume all storage is solid state. I think things will get better but the debate of file size vs average/expects storage capacity vs Network speed will never end but there is certainly work to be done.
Though I always have a power bank on hand, not for security, but for convenience. Much more preferable to the physical limitations of a wall outlet.
What I hated was huge orders where they didn’t tip. I had to double check everything because the restaurant staff were sometimes openly hostile to us, and the bigger the order, the longer it takes.
The biggest order I ever delivered was about $350 of food. The place I delivered too was like a cartoon. A huge mansion set back a mile long driveway and I was literally surrounded by hounds as I came down the driveway. They had a fountain and a huge cul de sac and a half dozen luxury cars.
They didn’t tip a dime.
The best tip I ever got was from a guy who was high out of his mind and just handed me a bag full of change. It was $56.
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.
For wha it’s worth, I had random crashes with Hitman 3, though more recent versions of ProtonGE seems to have resolved it.
But a game called Ultimate Chicken Horse was labeled incompatible for a while because of a weird corner case with special characters.
I think over time they have been less strict about flat out incompatible flags but also the human review process leads to some variability.
I love this thing and the trackpads to me are key and none of the clones seem to want to or are able to replicate that part of the product.
Ultimately it is easy to push it beyond its guardrails to ensure a smooth experience for people who just want to play games without fuss and I think that is the right balance to strike with a device that has aspirations to be as mass market as a switch but has a core audience of enthusiast PC users.
Not everyone is a cynical monster who would only ever do anything that benefitted themselves personally.
The single issue of that voter maybe be the most overriding important issue for them, but it doesn’t mean that the consequences aren’t still a net negative for them (Or especially society as a whole).
To my previous point, they may be doing so with full knowledge or with partial knowledge. They may knows Candidate X supports Issue Y and that is their top line issue. They may not know Candidate X’s position on Issue A, B, or C.
Those positions may have an impact on what they would actually prefer to vote on.
Candidates are not single issue, even if voters are, but they often advertise them that way to limit single issue voters from knowing or caring about anything else they represent.
You can also vote for someone who says the thing you like or prefer but the reality of their plan is contradictory to the stated goal. (Preventing Medicare from negotiating drug costs will somehow make them less expensive, according to some candidates)
To be clear my point isn't to blame voters specifically. My point is that due to imperfect knowledge (Anywhere from willful ignorance to not learning enough about a candidate to the particular candidate straight up lying about things) people make choices in voting that can and do contradict their own interests.
The model also helps make a difference. Starbucks can kill a store to prevent unionization from taking up, but not all business make this a valid method of squashing unionization.
To be clear, it is obvious and plain to see that Starbucks and other corporations view their workforce unionizing as a bad thing for them. The reason they are that is because they believe, reasonably or otherwise, that it will impact their bottom line. The money is what the care about. It is the only thing they care about. Their natural incentive structure of being a publicly traded company is specifically about the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
I work for a non-profit and when unionization occurred there was no pushback about it. My industry is also not traditional in so far as our funding is almost exclusively from federal and state health agencies.
But the increase in wages and quality of life for the members was measurable, and the demand for home health care only continues to rise as the population ages, as well as social/economics factors around the expectation and realities of family members taking care of family members as they age.
It could also be argued, )I hate the argument but it is true) that he has to oppose any and all unionization efforts because as a publicly traded company they are required to look out for the interests of their shareholders.
Which comes back to the same place ultimately. And I have no sympathy for him regardless of his excuse.
Seriously, I’m interested to know why you think that. I am a member of a union and without it I would be significantly less well off. Am I a bad person because I want to be treated like a human instead of a replaceable cog in a machine?
The real point of Starbucks doing this isn’t to avoid having to cut into their profit margins a bit in that location but to suppress unionization in their other locations.
They have to shut it down early and often, or they’ll actually have to go to the table with a Union and that idea makes them crap their pants.
They would rather lose all profit from that location and send the message that unionization will get you fired.