Used games held the console market in balance. You knew if you didn’t like a game, you could trade it and get something back, or at least buy a cheap used copy if you weren’t sure on a title.

The PC game market is kept in balance by constant discounting and availability. You manage risk by saying “I’ll wait a few years and get it for $4.98 instead.”

The presence of secomdary sellers (Fanatical, Humble Bundle etc) and even distinct markets (GoG, itch, service games that sell through their own accounts) means Steam still doesn’t have the same market-defining power Sony will in a post-disc world.

Tell us what we’re supposed to be excited about?

If you’re a white-collar worker, it’s either a bludgeon your boss is using to threaten to sack you, or an excuse as to why you should generate 5x more output without any more pay.

If you’re a media consumer, it’s a fountain of endless low-quality crap. Resources you used to be able to trust are being undermined.

These might be exciting if you’re a sociopathic billionaire or wannabe-billionaire, but for the rest of use, the closest to a positive payout we have is a bunch of gacha machines that can produce mediocre graphics/music/text shaped things which might dovetail with what you’re doing, until their economic unviability causes them to go out. (I think consumer video gen is already disappearing)

Not sure I’m quite willing to undermine civilization rather than fibd stock photos for my blog posts.

I work in payments.

Remember the Superman movie scheme taking a fraction of a cent off of every transaction? Every time you dip your card, 1/30 of a cent is sent directly to Kim Jong-Il’s personal hairdresser.

Coming in 2027 is the all-new Hezbollah Rewards scheme, where 125,000 points can be exchanged for a custom-painted missile lofted towards Tel Aviv.

We switched from TSMC to Frito-Lay and passed the savings on to you!

This seems like a joke where the punchline is “Gary, Indiana.”

They’re also tiny. I had one land on my arm recently and it was maybe 7mm in the lobgest dimension when fully stretched out.

So big “u wot mate?” energy with the tiny waving pincers.

I wonder if having at least one eye on the ball might be their secret sauce.

I have to think right now there are people at nVidia (and also AMD) saying “gamers are a buzzing insect like distraction” when every barely-consumer-afforbable $750 “midrange” GPU they sell represents some fab capacity that could have been part of a five-digit AI component.

Where was the picture taken? The locomotives look like common North American SD70M types, but the headlights are weird and the lack of numbers is atypical.

They used to say something along the lines of “you don’t buy a drill, you buy a hole.”

Any tool, whether a widget, software, AI, or labour, is a means to an end. This might be something coherent, like “we bought sheet metal to make tortilla presses, which we can sell for more than they cost to make” or a a rejected Bond-villian vision like “if we acquire all the potassium in the world, they’ll be forced to declare our boss the next king of eSwatini.”

Specifically, right now, the “end” seems to be “if we vapourize enough cash, investors will buy our stock becsuse we’re the most True Believers in the current trend.” I’m not sure, but the potassium plan might make more sense.

They said “country”, not “performative farce.”

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I use it as a desktop. I like that it’s free of the nasty surprises of modern Linux (flatpak/snaps, systemd, X11 is still pretty first-class) while not feeling quite as isolated as Slackware and its sort of pre-broadband approach to packaging.

My biggest issue was poor support for an old Epson scanner that rewuired a binary package that wouldn’t install cleanly as it was designed for Debian; solved by buying a $10 used Canon scsnner which worked out of the box.

I like it better than Devuan for a non-systemd distribuition because, as its own thing, you don’t end up with as many “do I need to follow the Standard Debian guides or do something special” questions.

I’d think AI imagery is uniquely toxic for product marketing because it reads as an admission the product is worse than the picture.

We know you’ll pick the most flattering angle, and the one perfectly formed unit out of 500, with a photo of a real shirt. It’s the upper bound on reality, but it’s still reality. If you have to hallucinate instead, you probably can’t even make that cherry-picked example look good.

It feels as like a dick move by whoever assigned seats.

You have a well-known celebrity who’s famously tall, and you place him so 3 or 4 people straight behind will have an obstrcted view of the event.

I guess this is the “… But at what cost” we’ve been asking about.

I do want to see where China goes with soft power.

I’m ashamed about the amount of my life I’ve wasted in Genshin and Where Winds Meet, but it still feels like the a lot of their cultural exports haven’t cracked the “just exotic enough for broad global appeal” that big-brand anime or K-pop have hit.

If nothing else, imagine they treat it with the same strategic importance they gave industrial dominance. There would be a room full of very stern and sincere Vice-Ministers for Waifu Development and Fanboy Accelerstion.

Use a shared external source of randomness, like one of the shortwave “numbers stations”, to seed an agreed upon algorithm that simulates shuffling a deck and dispensing the cards. You’re running the same code on the same data, so you could show the cards you had seen after each hand to confirm everyone is in sync.

I was always more of a fan of the Pennsylvania Railtoad than the competing New Youk Central.

It knows and demands blood.

Yeah, but it was the norm prior to 1909 and was a little more aspirational than “he just got perforated, let’s slap his face on the half dollar.”

What’s sad is that the obverse of the 250th dime is probably the best of the redesigns. For the first time since 1946, we’d have a circulating coin with an idealized figure of Goddess Liberty instead of a dead politician.

The typography is atrocious though. And the lack of a cohesive design language sucks. The Charles III coinage from the UK are so much better as a thematic set.

Then maybe the West shouldn’t have spent 50 years selling the PRC the rope they’re using to hang them with.

Even some of the near east is starting to think about what happens when the goo runs out. Only the US is doubking down.