MudMan

He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.

In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.

It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.

What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

I don’t know that it’s an eyesight issue. I mean, if you have good enough eyesight to read stuff on your phone screen you have good enough eyesight to see the difference.

It may be an awareness thing, where the more you care about photography the more the limitations of the bad cameras stand out. And hey, that’s fine, if the phone makes good enough pictures for you that’s great. Plus, yeah, you can get phones with the exact same lens and sensor where one of them has a big fat bump that is deliberately blown up to make the cameras “feel” premium. There’s been a fair amount of marketing around this.

But if you compare A to B it’s very obvious. Camera bumps became a marker of premium phones for a reason.

Yep. That sample above is from a review, but digging into my own archived photos at the time it’s crazy to see how much blur picutres taken from moving vehicles have, even in direct daylyght, and how grainy indoors images are, even when well lit. That thing was genuinely just opening itself up for a while and hoping for the best.

I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but… yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.

EDIT: This thread made me go look up reviews, and man, yeah, I remember every single indoors photo on my own S5 looking just like this. What a blast of nostalgia. I didn’t realize there is a digital equivalent to 80s pictures having gone all sepia and magenta-y, but here it is.

Oh, that works for me, definitely. It just takes maybe two hours, instead of 20 minutes. Same principle, though.

How do you get motivated in the afternoon? I have maybe three, four hours of semi-effective brain function between waking up and what seems to be some form of power saving mode that lasts the rest of the day. If I’ve eaten food with a fork that day, doing things is a struggle. Send motivation tips for post-lunch humaning, please.

I once had a guy walk into the subway, sit down, loudly declare he’d sneak into a military base, steal a tank and kill us all, then rant for a while about specific ways to kill his fellow passengers, including some very specific grenade action.

Then he sat there in silence for a couple of minutes, quietly turned towards the too-horrified-to-change-seats nerdy guy to his left and politely ask him if he had a lighter for his cigarrette.

It was a morning train, most people just kept trying to nap.

I know a few. Xerox is used for photocopying in other languages. Kleenex is the accepted term for “paper tissue” in Spain. Zodiac and Vespa are used for specific types of ship and motorcycle in multiple places, even when not manufactured by those brands. Thermos is a brand name, used in multiple countries as well. Sellotape is used in the UK for transparent sticky tape.

I don’t speak every regional variant of every language, but the short answer is this is definitely not a US thing. At all.

“Jello” is a brand name, which I think may be the example most people in the US specifically don’t realize. There are tons of others.

I think “googling” counts because a) it kinda makes sense even without the branding, b) I hear it all the time, and c) I say it myself even though I haven’t used Google as my default search engine for ages.

Eh… where? This seems like a very location-specific question.

Yeah, this seems like one of those things where people casually discussing the issue are talking about wildly different scales. I, to be clear, am talking about having a hangover or sleeping in a rough position and pinching my neck once in maybe two or three months and refusing to take an analgesic to get through it faster. I get the feeling that what you’re describing is either on a way different level or a rarer interaction or side effect.

Which is why my other comment below still goes: if you need to deal with pain beyond sporadic usage to get through a one-off event, please go talk to a doctor and don’t listen to me or anybody else on the Internet.

Define “slightest pain”.

If you’re in occassional discomfort and it’s impacting your wellbeing having an aspirin once in a while is probably not a huge deal.

If you have recurring pain constantly or frequently then you need medical attention and you should follow that guidance, not what anybody says on the Internet.

Man, this took me so long to get through my skull. I used to be a “I don’t need the medicine, why self-medicate when I can just endure it and it will go away”.

I got older, started having those little aches turn into ruin-your-day annoyances that only reset with a sleep overnight and now I mildly resent young me for being silly about it.

I do for many things. It’s just convenient and their logistics muscle at this point is wild.

That said, I will go to first party online stores for things like hardware most times. It’s often just cheaper and delivery is about the same.

An interesting observation: Back when I lived somewhere else there was a local alternative, because it was a country far enough out of the way that Amazon didn’t directly support it, and it’s interesting that the local alternative wasn’t meaningfully worse at the logistics or availability. Amazon’s existence does, in fact, heavily suppress competition. You don’t need to be as big as they are to do what they do, it’s just impossible to do it if they’re already there.

That’s presumably the back of the box feature MW2012 was trying to address, but honestly I’d take the over the top crashes and slo-mo hood crumpling over the branding any day. Authentic car sims already exist and they’re for something else. If you’re not going to accurately model the physics and instead are aiming for arcade fun, then who cares?

Well, you care, and that’s fine. I’m saying if given the choice I’d take Burnout’s approach.

But still, hot take. Paradise is absolutely on my very short list of perfect games. Every piece of that game is designed to go with every other piece, and when they ran out of pieces they stopped. It’s all grain, no chaff, I can pick it up and play it any time.

And also, man, both Paradise and MW12 hold up so, so well. In retrospect Criterion had some rendering juice at the studio at the time. You guys made me boot up MW12 by talking about it and that thing looks better than most games I’ve played in the intervening decade. It’s nuts.

Well, there I can’t help. To each their own.

Pretty sure I’m with the consensus on this one, though. “Burnout Paradise is boring, actually” is a Carolina Reaper, lava-hot, coronal ejection-level take.

Wait, what? No, you don’t, you drive up to them, press Y and off you go. This is literally the first thing that happens in the game. Like, the very first thing they tell you in the tutorial is to do that.

I think eventually when they released a DLC pack they’d load in the DLC cars and events and those would tell you to buy the DLC if you didn’t have it, but that game has been all but given away in sales as a full edition for years now, so I don’t even remember the specifics. But yeah, no, they absolutely didn’t sell you individual cars on the side of the road. They don’t even sell them to you for in-game currency, you just find them.

MW 2012 certainly feels less like the UG games and closer to the old aspirational supercar games, which is fine by me, maybe because I’m older and I thought the proto-Fast & Furious stuff in the newer games was super cringey. Given the franchise started as a sports car magazine tie-in and remained pretty much that for a solid decade, though, I think “THE ENTIRE CONCEPT” is a stretch.

I genuinely think both of the MW games have somewhat wonky driving, for different reasons. You can get used to both, no question, but I will say that for how much of a learning curve the weird sense of weight 2012 had, I ended up 100%-ing that game multiple times in a way I never felt the need to do with OG. That game has flow in a way only it and Paradise have ever nailed. The Horizon games come very close, but I tend to feel they are a bit too big to get you there. I like the small puzzle worlds in Paradise and MW2012 a lot.

I am partial to the classy NFSs, myself, but the two UGs are very good games.

Quietly, the best NFS is Hot Pursuit, and it really doesn’t matter which one of them you pick.

The remake that was basically a sequel to Burnout Paradise? Agree to disagree.

I mean, OG MW is… suitable for ironic appreciation, but man, yeah, no.