MudMan

Isn’t this pretty much the same system Google was intending to implement on Chrome before backtracking? That’s my understanding anyway.

Ultimately the issue is that we’ve gone to extremes. The response to the data market that runs the Internet is now that many people are against ANY amount of information being dislodged from users to anybody else. That is obviously way more strict than pre-internet standards, when people’s location data was widely available and TV advertising ran a whole lot of live reporting and segmentation data, but it has become the goal.

Mozilla (and Apple, and for a bit Google), are suggesting to go back to a world where someone quietly aggregates some info without tracking individuals in excruciating detail and now advertisers don’t want to lose the granularity and resell ability of the spy-level data gathering… and users don’t want to give up even aggregated info.

We’ve scorched the earth so badly there is no path forward, so we stay where we are. I have no moral stance on this, but it seems to be what’s happening.

I don’t know, I think maybe it depends on age? Most people exposed to US media will recognize at least the landmarks, but that’s probably true of other cities as well.

But NYC has been in so many videogames I feel younger people with a passing interest in gaming will at least have a weird set of expectations. Of Manhattan, if nothing else. The twenty years of open world Spider-Man games alone are more exposure to an overhead map of a city than most people get of the place where they live in that amount of time.

Anecdotal, but relevant: I had forgotten what the “smears” were supposed to be until I saw this and went “oh, right, they did that”.

Oh, cool. My current device uses Logitech Options+, which is not the same as the old G Hub and is not the same as what you’re describing.

Which honestly, before we get into the mandatory login and everything else, begs the question… why does Logitech need three different multi-device software hubs? What the hell?

It’s not (just) that manufacturers are trying to mine all this bloatware for data, it’s that most of them are absolutely terrible at making software in the first place.

Yeah, I’d like to know the specifics, too. My Logi mouse still uses the same application (although they did update terms recently) and while they’ve added some AI shovelware to it the mouse stil remembers its shortcuts with that thing off and I haven’t noticed any changes to how the application is put together.

It’s entirely possible the application is a Chromium-based browser thing, but in any case it still doesn’t require a login (although it does support one) and it will run offline.

Don’t get me wrong, Logi’s approach to this, along with a lot of other hardware manufacturers, sucks really bad. I do appreciate Microsoft, of all people, recently starting to standardize RGB controls, at least. It’s still wonky and interacts weirdly with some third party software, but it’s a start. I don’t need twenty different apps to keep glowy lights and saved shortcuts going.

I would assume the inability to complete a single sentence would be a tell way before you get into the skill carryover between micro and macroeconomics. But then we’re way past being surprised that anybody could look at this guy and go “ah, behold, a functional candidate to elected office”.

Hah. Your bar for “super rich” and mine may be in different places.

And you’re preaching to the choir, I’d much rather sail myself. But nerding out about the specifics aside, it’s very weird to leave it out of the renewable-powered sea travel conversation the way these guys are doing.

Admittedly it’s WAY easier to operate a motor boat than a sail boat, so depending on how you like to recreationally bleed your unlimited money I can see reasons for that choice.

But I fully agree that we’ve had renewable energy-based ships with unlimited range for millenia. The claim that “The aim was to demonstrate that zero-emission sea travel [is possible today]” broke my brain a little.

Let me agree with you explicitly on loving the return to a sane power configuration here. I was watching Hardware Unboxed’s retest of this after the patches and it takes almost fifteen minutes of them reiterating that the 9700X and the 14700K are tied for performance and price before they even mention the bombshell that the 9700X is doing that with about half the wattage.

The fact that we keep pushing reviews and benchmarks focused strictly on pedal-to-the-metal overclocked performance and nothing else is such a disgrace. I made the mistake to buy into a 13700K and I have it under lower than out of box power limits manually both to prevent longevity issues and because this damn computer is more effective as a hair dryer than anything else.

We don’t mention it much because Intel was in the process of catching on actual fire at the same time, but the way this generation has been marketed, presented to reviewers, supported and eventually reviewed has been a massive trainwreck, considering the performance of the actual product.

Well, that’s a new one. I wasn’t expecting the leopard to be resentful about all the face eating.

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.

See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.

I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.

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.

Absolutely, and if you can’t take the plunge on either do whatever feels right.

But I’ll say if you’re anxious about it at all, shaving is a good way to not have to think about it. Not everybody has an easy time just getting over the way they look and not giving a crap, obviously.

Plus if you’re worried about your hairline, going to get a haircut can be a stressful time and shaving means getting it out of the way. And it’s super cheap and fast by comparison.

Well, then you don’t need a phone review, do you?

Which is fine. Most people don’t need a phone at any given time. You go check reviews for phones when you need one and when you care about the differences between them. If you just need a phone-ass phone you can just go to your carrier and grab whatever is packed-in, no need to check reviews for that, most phones just fine work out of the box these days.

Okay, I’m here to help.

Shave.

Seriously. The amount of pressure put on guys around balding is horrendous, and it can consume your attention if you let it. The moment that superfluous, vestigial hair comes off, it’s such a breath of fresh air (no pun intended). No more fussing, worrying or stressing about it. Plus, in many cases it looks pretty good. Give it a couple of weeks and it’ll just become your face.

Give it a couple of months and the moment there’s a scratchy, annoying milimeter of hair on your head will be a natural call to give it a shave for the comfort alone.

See, this is the exact process I am trying to describe. I’m sure that made sense in your head, and I’m sure if you think about it for a second you’ll realize that Target will very happily set up an affiliate link, just as Amazon does. And, of course, a whole bunch of the SEO listicles are the SEO hooks of bigger traditional review sites, including RTINGS, IGN or whatever. For the sake of argument, punching in “best bluetooth speaker” on DDG returns SEO listicles from Tom’s Guide, Wired, RTINGS, the New York Times, CNET and The Verge, in that order.

Which is not to say it’s not annoying, affiliate links and SEO have done terrible things to how practical reviews on websites are presented and parceled out. But that’s not to say they aren’t done honestly or lack validity on the sites that do it right, which are also the more successful ones.

I am… unfamiliar with the ecosystem of print newspaper appliance reviews, but I can tell you that having sloppy or obsequious reviews isn’t generally a sign of having taken a bribe or even having any direct influence from the manufacturer. Reviewing things is hard, by definition you are not in the same position as the people who will buy the thing later. It can be difficult to make that shift and appreciate value, particularly when it comes to tech where reviewers are often assessing the cool factor of whatever is new on the market while users just need a tool for everyday life.

Also, good reviews and hostile reviews aren’t the same thing. This depends a lot on what is being reviewed, and it’s not to say extremely protective reviews are bad themselves. This is more true in media reviews than on tech reviews, but even on tech reviews, some of my favorite people working generally provide fairly positive reviews, or very neutral spec reviews with relatively little judgement. Very often I don’t need to be protected from harm, I just need a savvy overview of a thing before I pull the trigger.

But also, let’s be clear, don’t book product placement that looks like a review. And if you do, make it a full on ad and make sure it’s presented as a sponsorship, although even when big names do that while trying to stay honest, or because they genuinely like the thing I don’t particularly like it.