VSCode is by far and away the best thing Microsoft has ever done. (I’m sure therefore they will ruin it eventually, but that’s a separate issue)

Its good for two main reasons IMO:

1. It is plugin-based

2. It is (therefore) language-agnostic

Plugins mean the DE starts as a very lightweight thing that is basically nothing more than a text editor. You can then add as much or as little as you want to get the level of features you are comfortable with but without being too bloated.

And then, because it’s all plugins, you can work with any language and still stay within the same editor. Divine.

I personally love how lightweight it is compared to a full IDE because I don’t like it when IDEs hide the magic behind UI. Press the button and it compiles huh? But how? What’s going on there? What toolchain and commands are being executed?

I much prefer a good MAKEFILE where you know what your entry points are and what is going on, because it makes everything so much more portable and also improves your own knowledge and understanding.

OP specifically said they don’t want to dual boot, and I honestly understand why they would say that.

When you dual boot you need to worry about what bootloader is in use and how it is set up. You might find yourself in a situation where you later decide to move fully to Linux and use the old Windows drive as storage but you can’t because if you wipe it then everything stops working.

Windows has even been known to destroy dual boot setups occasionally during Windows updates.

All very solveable if you have the right knowledge, but if you want to keep your life simple then swapping hardware has guaranteed safety (nothing can go wrong with the contents if a drive if it’s not plugged in, after all) and it’s very predictable and understandable.

We simply didn’t need those things. Cold winters were more of an issue than hot summers, so our homes historically have been built with brick or stone construction that holds the warmth.

When it is hot for just a few days in a row, that same construction actually helps stay cool, because even if it’s hot outside the heat takes a long time to penetrate, and inside stays nice and cool.

But now that climate is changing and we’re seeing summers with a couple of weeks of intensely hot weather in a row with temperatures higher than ever, that same construction actually becomes a problem. Because now the stone and brick become completely saturated with heat, and even at night when it’s cooler outside the brick is staying hot and radiating that heat. It’s basically like living in a pizza oven.

The past few years it’s been like that maybe only a couple weeks of the year, but nonetheless air conditioners are starting to become more popular.

For insect screens, same deal - we just never usually have a problematic amount of insects. Which is why when we do have a lot of insects it’s in the news.

Ragyo Kiryuin definitely has one of the best personal themes in all of anime https://youtu.be/6M1UU53Y4LE

Damn, now I need to rewatch Kill la Kill

Every major shift in how media is consumed has always come because of evolutions in the technology used to deliver it - going from just a few broadcast channels, to cable, to “on demand” cable and satellite, and finally to Internet delivery.

And it’s just really hard to imagine what delivery technology could provide any new capability beyond the always-on, bidirectional, high capacity data stream in your pocket that is the Internet we now have.

With streaming we’ve already achieved what should in theory be the best way to watch - and with the studios all having their own streaming platform now, there’s not even any middleman to undercut anymore, like there was when the cable companies were cut out by Netflix at the dawn of streaming. This is endgame.

The only thing left now is enshittification.

The one thing that could save us from this fate is if new programs and content are produced that are competitive in quality with what the current giants are putting out, giving people other places to go and forcing competition.

This is what we’ve already seen with indie studios and single developers disrupting the games industry, and perhaps with ever more achievable 3D animation, AI and other accessible production techniques we’ll start seeing this disrupt the film and TV industry too.

Just because something always used to be some way doesn’t mean it’s automatically acceptable.

TV might have been designed for the ad break but what if it wasn’t? You give Star Trek as an example, and here in the UK growing up I watched TNG episodes on BBC2, which is a tax-funded station without adverts. Did the lack of adverts make my childhood TNG experience worse? Personally I’d say it made it better.

Even in the cable TV age, to have adverts in something you are paying for is still horrible, and to me it’s unacceptable.

I will do everything in my power to not expose my brain to a barrage of advertising, and that includes not using any service where I have to subject myself to it.

“Somebody punch him out!”

The idea there should be some definitive, canonical domain for the Fediverse is somewhat at odds with the core tenents of the Fediverse itself - decentralisation, and no single point of ownership or control. And on that basis, we absolutely should not care about a particular domain, or assign any level of ‘specialness’ to it.

I understand your worry - that some ‘bad actor’ could buy the domain and do something anti-Fediverse with it and mislead the public, but my response would be to simply not worry. The strength of the Fediverse is that we are diverse and unbothered by whatever nonsense some centralised platform is trying to pull. We don’t have a profit motive. We don’t care.

People who want to find the real Fediverse will absolutely still find us, all on their own, regardless of who owns some random domain :)

If you are in a healthy relationship, you can do this voluntarily and for free using functionality built into the OS or third party apps, without paying your network operator $10/mo

This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.

When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of “content” right in people’s faces where they don’t have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.

From Netflix’s perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s a failure which they will optimise away.

The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.

If they changed this in the way you describe, I wouldn’t even personally consider it retcon.

To me, “retconning” is changing some point which is kinda substantiative so that it disagrees with what was presented before. “This thing we said happened? Well it didn’t.”

If, as you suggest, they kept the idea of making the Mojave hospitable and pleasant but changed this so it’s more respectful of the existing ecosystem, then to me that’s not a retcon, it’s more like updating the existing concept to be better in line with the ideals of a contemporary audience. A refresh, if you will.

It would be very much in line with what the original was trying to say and mean; that humans have this power to change the environment for the better and we are using it for the good of society, it’s simply that our understanding has changed in the last several decades in a way which means the visual presentation of that concept on screen needs to change.

So I’d be totally fine with that :)

Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.

When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.

If it’s not broke…

Right, and I’m not challenging you on that :)

As someone who games a lot it would be more cost-effective to do it on systems other than the switch (or switch 2) - I agree.

You said what the case is, I was hoping only to add some commentary on why.

The console hardware is cheaper to produce vs other consoles, so it’s not like they are losing on the hardware and aiming to make the money back later - they designed the hardware to meet a specific price point, and to capture a certain market.

Having captured that market though (kid owns a switch and now the kid wants games) they can pretty much set the price of games high and keep them high.

As a gamer buying for yourself, with every purchase you are weighing up the cost of the game against how much you personally want to play it. If the price is too much you will choose something else, or wait for a sale.

As a parent buying for a child, however, if the child says “I really want the new Zelda game for my birthday please!” then they get bought the new Zelda game, no matter how much it costs.

Nintendo are very much aware what their business model is on this one, and who they are targeting.

For a lot of consumers, especially those who are lower income, the single most important factor is how much money you need to spend at once.

This is especially true because a key market for the switch is children, who have no direct purchasing power themselves, and depend instead on adults to buy it for Christmas and birthdays. So initial cost of entry is critical.

Simply put, ‘parents’ who are buying a console for their kids and expect to buy new games only rarely, have quite different needs to ‘gamers’ who are buying for themselves, and want new games often.

Exactly according to plan.

When someone buys a used physical game, publishers don’t get any of that money, and the publishers want that money.

Digital-only is how they get it.

Exactly, it’s not on Nintendo to fix, this could be happening anywhere in the chain.

Could be within the stores or their suppliers, or it could be returns from end-customers.

My personal bet would be scammers buying games with cash, taking the games and then shrink-wrapping the box before returning them for a cash refund. And then they flip the cartridges on eBay or whatever.

I was quite intrigued by the article and thinking I’d put this on my wishlist, until I saw “multiplayer”, and suddenly all my interest is down the drain.

It feels like some developers are making live service games simply to chase the revenue stream, not because the specific game they are making would actually be better online.

Adding on to this comment, it is very often not possible to change your auth method.

If you use email to register, you can almost always change to a different email (same method) but you can’t change between methods, like from Google auth to Apple auth, or even to a different google auth.

You’d need to create a new account, and therefore lose all the data on your old account.

Always choosing email gives you the most control and most privacy, I’d strongly recommend it.