Feeling a strong sense of deja vu here, but... what do they mean by "ultra-processed?" Like, actually, what do they mean?

It's a bit of a personal grudge when people use vague, poorly defined terms and overgeneralizations when talking about nutrition. It really dumbs down the overall conversation about it and it's why I try not to talk to people about the topic offline; most people have no clue what they're talking about and just repeat now-meaningless terms like "processed."

There is no legitimate reason for it.

I think Microsoft has, in the past, been too heavy-handed with forcing updates, with the initial release of Windows 10 being the most egregious example. However, in this case, it's a relatively much smaller upgrade from one version of Windows 11 to another. The vast majority of consumers aren't going to notice a difference, and as far as people who might, presumably by now any businesses or power users who do not want this have measures in place to block it. Additionally, Microsoft now lets you roll back feature upgrades for I think 30 days.

As far as legitimate reasons, I would say moving users from an unsupported, unpatched release of the software to a patched release of the software is a valid reason.

All this will do is force tens of thousands more tons of e-waste into landfills as people chuck perfectly good systems because they've been conditioned to be afraid their machines will collapse if they're not on the latest and greatest pile of shit coming from Microsoft.

Microsoft does do things that would generate e-waste. Automatic upgrades are not one of those things. A much better example of Microsoft generating unnecessary e-waste is the arbitrary requirement for Windows 11 of an 8th generation or newer Intel processor (or AMD equivalent) despite the fact that the OS works just fine without this hardware. They can't even say it's about TPM 2.0 because that's a separate requirement entirely that is tracked on its own; you can even get add-in cards that will provide TPM 2.0 on older systems.

People are plenty likely to abandon hardware that Microsoft says is unsupported; nobody's going to abandon hardware because they didn't receive an upgrade from Windows 11 22H2 to 23H2. Your average consumer doesn't even know what those things mean.

As for the general sentiment from your post and other replies to it that it's completely fine to use unpatched Windows, or that "hackers will get in anyway," a sufficiently determined thief will get into your house even through a locked door, that doesn't mean you should leave your doors open when you leave. Two of the most fundamental aspects of computer security are (a) understanding the kinds of threats you will face given your profile, and (b) minimizing threats you are likely to face by reducing relevant attack surface.

When talking about your average consumer, the vast majority of threats they will face are going to be drive-by attacks from things like malicious ads and malicious documents, these days usually with the end goal of scraping valuable information like credentials and credit cards or installing some kind of crypto miner. These are typically very low effort programs and target low-hanging fruit to get the most people with the least effort. This means targeting recently disclosed exploits that are well-documented, easy to reproduce, and have a high severity factor but that many people haven't patched yet. Staying on top of patching will outright block many of these threats simply because the exploits they use have already been patched on your system. It's not a silver bullet in and of itself, but it's one aspect of good security.

For your typical consumer, I'd say the important things to push are install an adblocker, keep your browser up to date, keep your OS (which probably includes Defender) up to date, and basic common-sense stuff like don't run untrusted files. So yeah, I don't think patching is a joke here, even for end users, any more than I think locking your door is a joke just because a determined thief can get through it anyway. It's not about blocking all threats, it's about a comprehensive plan for blocking most of the most likely threats.

There are multiple metrics to consider here. I agree that propping up puppets of the dead is disgusting, I felt the same way when Disney did it with AI Tarkin a few years ago. With that said, sometimes people do distasteful things that aren't and shouldn't be illegal. Lincoln is a good example; copyright should not extend to people over 150 years dead, nobody "owns" Lincoln's likeness at that point. It's distasteful but it should not be illegal; the correct response should just be to point out that it's distasteful.

I'll be interested to see if Nintendo pulls an uno-reverse and makes their own Pokemon survival-crafter at some point. Obviously it'd have to be more G-rated than this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.

Half of the Pokemon designs are themselves just a very slightly modified real life animal. Garbodor is literally just trash with a smiley face. Other clones like Digimon and Monster Rancher have been around for like 25 years. If Nintendo doesn't like it, they can get involved.

The game's fun, there's a reason the concurrent player peak is close to 2 million (approximately 3x what BG3's was, and that was an awesome game). Game Freak and TPC have been sitting on Pokemon since the 90s with minimal innovation on the formula as the RPG genre has evolved around them. Golden Sun on GBA in the early 2000s had a hold b to fast-forward battle messages feature; Pokemon to this day still makes you sit through a transition effect, an appear effect, several messages, and a throw-and-burst effect just to get into a battle, for every single battle in the game, with basically no improvement in this since the originals on GameBoy. They're lazy designers and I'm glad someone else finally did it better; they deserve to have their lunch eaten.

I was apparently in this one. I understand that for a lot of reasons they don't want to actually hold onto that information... but it's frustrating not to know which of the (I just checked) nearly 700 websites I have unique passwords on was affected. Yes, I'm not vulnerable on other sites because of this, but I'm still affected on whatever site originally had that information! Telling me to "use unique passwords" (which I already do) doesn't fix that!

When I go to the grocery store, the self-checkout aisles are the most popular ones, usually because they're also the fastest moving. At fast food joints, it's about 50-50.

Maybe this guy lives in idiot town where people don't understand how to scan a barcode and select the "credit card" payment option, but where I live in Michigan, the system works just fine.

Wi-Fi 7 also uses a clever new feature called Multi-Link Operation (MLO) that lets devices connect to two bands at the same time, leading to better signal strength and bandwidth.

That could be useful, if only for the signal strength. At this point, ISPs near me don't offer sufficient speeds for bandwidth increases to really matter all that much. Signal integrity and resiliency improvements are always nice, though.

I don't understand what their reasoning is for targeting something that's been a basic feature of Windows for a very, very long time. It's not as though it takes up a lot of space on disk.

I can't remember if the N64 was among them, but several systems have started seeing FOSS flash cart projects popping up to replace the historically proprietary flash carts that have traditionally been available. I'm on a DS hacking Discord and someone there's apparently getting close to making one for the DS (which is great because most R4 variants you can get are trash that, probably by design, tend to fail after a year or two).

Actually, I spent a few minutes looking through my Discord message history and found the link I sent a month or two ago... the N64 is indeed one of the systems that have recently had a FOSS flashcart project! https://github.com/Polprzewodn...

That's a different problem than what TFS is talking about. What TFS is about specifically is that Valve is dropping support for older OSes for the Steam client specifically. This is happening because Steam has CEF integrated and Chromium and CEF no longer support those OSes.

Developers failing to provide modernization updates to their game while still selling them is a completely different problem. Steamworks (which not all games use) is Valve's DRM solution and that works fine on Windows 10 or 11 if devs bother to update for it. If they don't, that's the developer or publisher's fault, Valve doesn't make their games for them.

As far as games not working when they're being sold on the storefront... Valve has probably one of the most generous refund policies in the business. Even if you don't meet the requirements for a refund, half the time they'll still grant it if your case is reasonable. So just... buy the game, see if it works, and if it doesn't, you can get your money back. Even if you take issue with this process for some reason, it's still a completely different issue than what TFS is about.

Yeah, the Win10 and Win11 defaults are pretty awful. The other reply's recommendation of Education is a good one if you're actually able to get it; it's like Pro but for legal reasons there's a lot less advertising and telemetry enabled by default..

Otherwise, privatezilla for Win10 and thisis11 for Win11 are nice utilities that automate some group policy/registry settings that you're likely to want configured. All the changes are provided in a list and you can turn them off or on as desired. I personally also use StartAllBack as my Start Menu replacer, but it's a $5 utility and I know there are free-gratis ones out there (probably libre ones as well). I don't think OpenShell was ever ported to 11, though.

Nice FUD. Got any actual evidence or just insinuation?

Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 are out of service. I am sympathetic as far as Windows 10 and 11 having a lot of problems but that's not an adequate reason to use an OS that isn't getting updates anymore; either switch to Linux, which works with Steam fairly well these days, or do what I do and use a combination of the local group policy editor and third party utilities to make modern Windows usable.

I don't like the forced CEF push either (there's no reason it couldn't be optional, 95% of what I use Steam for used to be usable without it and it's an unnecessary memory hog and exposed attack surface), but the screeching of people who insist on using out of service software and expecting the world to give a shit what they do falls on deaf ears. If you want to use old, unsupported software, fine, but expecting anyone to support your obsolete setup is silly and I don't fault Valve one bit for ignoring these idiots who are, according to the Steam hardware survey, less than 1% of their total userbase.

Like another commenter said, Apple does this every few years and it's always a focus on some Apple-specific system that doesn't address pretty much any of the concerns of people who are actually trying to port games to their platform.

For example, here's a fairly major one for independent game developers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This guy is a former penetration tester for Activision Blizzard and I believe at least one other major games publisher; he's now an independent game developer. This is one of the people Apple should be trying to appeal to the most. Is this something they've addressed in the 1-2 months since this video hit? I didn't see it in TFS, so I highly doubt it.

That's just one example. I've followed the progress of the cross-platform Dolphin Gamecube/Wii emulator over the years in their (sometimes-attempting-to-be) monthly progress report. An occasional recurring theme I've seen with several of their feature implementations or big bugfixes is that the OS X solution requires some kind of kludgy workaround because OS X lacks basic support for something important, assuming they even implement said feature in the OS X build. I can't point to any specific examples (I have an unfortunately bad memory), but it's definitely come up more than once.

There's also Apple's apparent lack of support for something as basic as a native Vulkan implementation, presumably because they want to push developers to Metal instead? I'll admit I don't know all that much about the specifics of the situation. What I do know is that almost everyone that bothers to port games reliant on Vulkan to Mac apparently just uses MoltenVK, which is a FOSS project that just implements Vulkan on top of Metal. Supposedly it's a really solid project, but it's still a third party workaround for Apple's lack of first party support for something pretty basic and fundamental to modern cross-platform game development. And let's be real, OS X is not getting many games that aren't cross-platform.

For the record, I'm not even a developer at all (anymore), let alone a Mac one... this is all stuff I've just kind of heard about over the years following various gaming topics. I'm by no means an expert; I'm sure someone actually involved with game development for OS X would have much more insight on this and probably other major problems with OS X game development.

But I do know enough to know that a half-assed gaming push like every other one they've made won't be enough to capture any substantial percentage of the market. They'd need a much, much bigger, much more sustained push that addresses the existing fundamental problems, something which they seem unwilling to do.