You’d have to assume so!

You have to remember, the price isn’t only due to the hardware.

We often still think of “hardware” as if it’s some tool we actually own like a wrench or a hammer that we can freely use how we like, and the price of it should depend only on the cost of manufacture.

But in the modern world, the electronic hardware we buy is subsidised through gated ecosystems, and by profiting from slurping data and selling ads.

The reality is that Meta hardware is priced aggressively low to encourage adoption - on the basis of all the money they expect to make later from your data. Same with smart TVs and everything else with a similar business model.

Valve’s hardware will seem expensive, but that’s just the price you have to pay in the modern world for some small amount of control and privacy.

Personally, I’ll pay it gladly.

The anime Moriarty the Patriot had some interesting scenes for me.

It’s set in Sherlock Holmes-era England, and all the locations are closely based on actual places.

They visited the city I went to university in, and I recognised it down to the level of invididual buildings like “That place is a pizza restaurant these days!”

Pretty surreal honestly - when you are so used to everything shown in media being so utterly divorced from your actual life.

Good anime, too.

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Unfortunately the ‘religion’ of believing and doing what awful people tell you on social media is stronger than ever, and only growing.

Yeah.

I have enjoyed many happy years with steam and for now things are still okay, with Gabe keeping the enshittification at bay. They’ve done great things for the industry, and have my respect for that.

Yet we can’t simply trust the platform will remain as benevolent as it always has been.

If history tells us anything, it’s that nothing remains the same forever.

Heroic Launcher works for GOG, Epic and Prime games.

I guess the beefier your system is the less you will notice the impact of a greedy OS (because thats a fixed/absolute overhead) while the performance hit of having to translate directx through Proton will always be there (because that’s a percent-based overhead for each rendered frame)

So for the most top-end rigs, probably still Windows will squeeze a few more FPS. But it’s close.

At the end of the day Linux and Windows are both pretty comparable for gaming performance, so we shouldn’t worry about that as a deciding factor in which OS to choose, and can decide based on other merits.

On the other hand, some testing has found that running games on Linux with Proton is actually faster than with Windows on the same hardware, because Windows is such a resource hog.

The hardware in in this test being the Legion Go steamdeck rival.

Thanks!

Seems like CCC may no longer be the best choice, but it is still a free choice, and the article doesn’t seem to suggest they are falsifying their data.

Good to know.

This custom SKU trick is also used by retailers to advertise “We’ll price match any other store!” when technically the only store who sells that exact SKU is them!

(Of course some retailers are genuine when they offer to price match, it’s not always a scam)

Do you have a source on that? I can’t find any mention of this from having a quick search just now.

It also plays on that other classic scam tactic - creating urgency.

The victim may not even see the calendar entry until they get a notification “x starts in 1 hour”.

Maybe they’re already in the middle of a busy workday, juggling a bunch of stuff. That calendar popup is just more stress, but it could be important, and they need to find out soon because it’s basically starting!

And so they click.

It’s not in their interest for people to switch to something actually good that they will want to stay on, though.

The ‘reason’ is profit.

And fuck Crunchyroll.

This was never about security. That’s just the excuse.

This is about removing user freedom, and consolidating corporate control. This is about ensuring that every app and service you use is approved by the big G, and consumed in the way they want - with ads, with tracking, and with nothing you can do about it.

For anyone looking for a cheap but decent air filter which DOES do this, IKEA’s UPPÅTVIND remembers its last setting when turned off and back on at the plug.

Yes, significant.

But the point I’m making is that it’s not uniformly significant. It’s not 10% for everyone. So you should make your operating system choices based on which group you fall into.

Significant for some, less so for others.

The games with the most problems tend to be multiplayer titles with aggressive client-side anti cheat. For me, I only play a couple of online titles like Deep Rock Galactic, which are co-op and work fine, and which I wouldn’t miss all that much even if they were broken. Most of my gaming is single player, and if it turns out a game is in the unlucky 10 percent then I can just move on, because there’s plenty more on my wishlist.

So, it really depends who you are. For some people that 10% might cover the entirety of what you want to play, which is a huge problem. For others, they might barely notice.

I’m glad that Strange New Worlds exists, but it’s totally fair to criticise.

I feel a lot kinder towards the writers and showrunners when I consider that we simply don’t live in the 90s anymore, and that the realities of media consumption have changed in a way that forces different priorities.

Back in the era of TNG, Friends, and the X-Files, it was totally reasonable for a show to air 26 episodes over 26 weeks. Seasons would run so long that writers were putting out bottle episodes just to stretch the budget. Yet it was profitable because people would keep watching - after all, there were only a few channels competing for the same limited airtime.

Nowadays we’re utterly drowning in media. The amount of content is almost infinite, and viewers are seemingly fickle, and quickly bored.

Being successful now isn’t about having a great long-running show, it’s about making a massive impact as fast as possible, and hanging on to that top-banner spot on Netflix or whatever platform for just a scant few weeks before people get distracted by the next thing. Only those first weeks matter.

And so, seasons get compressed and the budget gets concentrated, until shows are six episodes all coming at you full force like an airhorn blast of non-stop action and effects. They don’t want longevity, they want hype.

We can blame the industry, or we can blame society, or we can blame people’s viewing habits. Probably it’s a bit of all three. But it certainly explains a few things.

It’s almost a similar story to how the “Triple-A” gaming industry ruined games by optimising for the wrong metric, all while costing a fortune to do it.

Fortunately for gaming we have a thriving indie dev scene now, which is where the true joy, art and creativity can be found.

Perhaps TV is simply waiting for its own indie revolution.