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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Oh yeah, I understand the sentiment entirely. With so many dark patterns dominating the world we live in because we live in a society that decided to embrace greed instead of seeing it as a primary motivator of evil, I can’t blame anyone that looks at the state of things with suspicion anytime there are downsides. And while it isn’t realistic to expect as good audio from a built-in system as a separate dedicated audio system, I do think it’s ridiculous that the standard is so dysfunctional that you either can’t understand what people are saying or explosions are way too loud. Especially in this digital world where mixing separate audio channels isn’t a difficult task. Streaming services should just have a stereo and mono version of the audio that is mixed well for that format if it is actually a harder problem than I think it is.

    Some of it is practicality, but I don’t doubt that greed also plays into it. I mean, even on the modularity side, I don’t have the option of easily finding a TV without any speakers at all, or a TV without smart features that a) aren’t as good as other options I have to access those features and b) were actually thrown in to spy on data, as your previous comment mentioned.

    So yeah, I don’t blame you at all for being suspicious of the companies that absolutely are trying to fuck their users because their real customers are data buyers, even if I do prefer my soundbar.



  • I appreciate TVs not wasting resources on putting decent speakers in it that I’ll never use because I did buy a soundbar over a decade ago that has decent sound and has outlasted the TV I bought it for. Plus TVs are so thin these days that they probably can’t even drive decent bass, and the speakers they do have are rear facing, so they don’t even drive the sound towards you.

    Modularity isn’t a bad thing IMO.


  • They tried to jump right into the “popular thing drives high demand for popular spaces in popular thing” and skip the whole “make thing popular” step, banking on their name and people thinking it’ll make them a ton of money.

    Though tbh I can’t say that was necessarily the wrong move (at least not if their entire goal is maximizing gains), since it wasn’t going to get popular like they wanted in the first place, so skipping that step and going straight to fleecing those dumb enough to throw money at it might have made the most sense.

    That said, I think they put more money into it than they got out of it, so I doubt that it was deliberate. Zuck probably just thought if he paid people to make it, users would just flock to it and it would be as popular as fictional VR worlds are, despite missing the tactile VR system they tend to use or the whole “VR world is popular (or the focus of everyone’s life)” being a plot point rather than the consequence of someone building the world and people choosing to spend their time and money there.

    Also, I’m in the demographic that probably would have been the most interested (like as a user of VR, not someone looking to just make money from it), but their offering didn’t even raise enough curiosity for me to check out what they made. There is an anti-meta bias in play, but even if it had been offered by a separate entity, I still wouldn’t have been interested because it sounded enshitified from the moment of concept.







  • Yeah if the movie industry got their hands on it, Jack Black would be the engineer and the machines would talk (or act like animals that perfectly understand him and communicate effectively via body language) and the psychologist would end up an unlikely love interest that ends up remaining with him and his wacky machines at the end of the movie.

    And after the conclusion, there will be a shot of his love interest looking at something in horror and saying, “ew, bugs!”, setting up the sequel that never gets made because the people who would like it aren’t drawn to Factorio, and those who are drawn to Factorio are disappointed that the only thing it has to do with Factorio is that it has machines. The execs played the game for 5 minutes and came up with a building system that involves him quickly building things by hand and Harvey Cavil quit production two weeks in, once it was clear they didn’t care about the actual lore.



  • To an immortal, it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference. Either they die from cancer or they survive but then die anyways a few decades later. Plus, vampires have ways of extending someone’s life without any medical science anyways.

    Though some lores for Dracula had him very deep and advanced in science as well as magic, so it’s possible he did have a cure for cancer but just didn’t care to share it because humans are just livestock to him.





  • I recently noticed that when a user gets banned, all of their posts and associated threads also get removed but with no notice.

    I’ve also seen entire discussions removed because they included some heated words, despite also including useful discussion or even one sided rebuttals. While I’m under no illusion that things can get solved here, it’s annoying to see shit get deleted just because someone got upset. Even if there isn’t anything useful in comments, it breaks up the discussion because any replies have lost context.

    IMO if it’s a disruptive user, ban them, but leave the evidence of their disruption up, unless it was spam or the kind of illegal shit that can get anyone who sees it in trouble.


  • Personally, I like my PS5 because I don’t really gaf what any games do with my PS5’s kernel. It’s my way to play games that I’d never touch on my PC (even before switching to Linux, kernel anti-cheat/DRM was a dealbreaker).

    Actually kinda ironic because Sony is the company that made me not trust shit companies install on PCs for security purposes after their rootkit (also stopped using autoplay because of that). But between the three console options, Sony is the least shitty today.

    That said, I’m not sure I’ll be ever getting another console because I still do most of my gaming on my PC while those games collect dust.



  • I own or owned every one of their consoles other than the Wii (though can play the games on the wii u). No more, between their pricing (especially on recycled content), wastefullness (all that excess plastic for a case that holds a tiny cart because a small box makes their prices even harder to stomach), and legal bs (going after modders, emulators, and the used game market via anti-piracy bricking depending on what the previous owner of the game did), fuck them.