They're not free, you spend your time watching their ads and they collect your personal information. Falls sqaurely in the too good to be true camp.

So... I understand how many indie shops would suffer greatly here so I think Unity does need to solve some challenges, like base it on installs per account (aka a 'purchase') for instance. Nothing is free after all.

The problem I have with many indie games is that they are just adware. They can drop it into the app/play stores for free and then burry you in ads. An otherwise fun game is nothing but a ad delivery mechanism or a pay to win model. The ads have found some balance of one slight step below too annoying to plan the game for many. By saying that every game install ('purchase lets say') has a cost, those games have to produce enough revenue to justify that cost so the ads will either need to increase or the game needs to cost $.99 or something. If the ads are any worse, that model is dead. it should die.

I have a different take. I feel like I've successfully converter people with your opinion so here we go.

Freedom of speech (including social media) must be preserved, but freedom from consequences should never have been a thing.

Facebook and TikTok and the rest should not have a blanket exemption for what is published. These platforms are selective of what they promote and elevate, they have their hand on the scale, and they should not be exempt from consequences.

They try to claim to be like the press, but the press isn't immune from prosecution. They claim that they are only the platform, not the publisher, so they are immune, but they are the editorial staff no different than a newspaper that decides what is on the front page.

Remote the exemptions that protect them and then get out of the way. Slander/Libel laws alone should put them in check.

There is another factor here which is anonymous vs attributate work. In my opinion, anonymous posts or rather, posts by unverified people, passes the responsibility on to the publisher to vet. Facebook or Tiktok want to allow effectively anonymous posts, then it's their problem. However, if there are attributed posts then consequence can/likely should be partially passed on to the writer of the post. lets say 50/50 for the sake of argument.

Let the laws that govern the people also apply to corporations and platforms.

Their system has essentially no arbitration and generally doesn't even allow a player to request a review.

Considering that these games are purchased and the service is purchased, the lack of arbitration and the eventuality of being banned from a service that is the only way to utilize a purchase is troubling. I can see banning a user that continously violates the terms of service, but because there is money involve there needs to be a transparent arbitration process. These people that complain about a curse word and the 'mods' suspend over it but don't review the accusers 50 curse words leading up is an issue.

If all of that lands in some sort of a grey area, what shouldn't be in the grey area is that a game that was purchase and requires this connectivity can be essentially and effectively revoked without a refund...

i have a teenager that get's suspended for cursing. I literally presented his twitch stream with the other player saying outright racist things and badgering him and get got a suspention for saying F**K OFF.

I can tell you that I know a handful of people that have moved to playstation because of the xbox terms, and if we get bans I'll be moving off as well and I'll do it loudly. Enough of us nobodys saying things loudly enough...

no, there are tons of taxis in NYC. Sometimes an uber or lift is a bit cheaper, sometimes more expensive. yes you can still flag one down in the street.

Agreed. We do the same or look for alternative transportation. I was in NYC a few weeks ago and we did a lot more subway and bus rides than usual. Also found that Lyft or a Taxi can actually be quite a bit cheaper.

in legal fees... sure. but that's because of their poor labor practices in the first place. the technicals of the app are not an issue.

If you just took and paid an uber driver $25/h and multiplied that by 1.3x to cover employment costs, then paid them federal fuel wage for their car, you'd see what the real world costs are on the ride. And this is NYC, wages for this sort of work are really low there. 2.9 miles at 10am is like... 10-15 minutes and maybe a toll if you're crossing the river. If that driver was completely independend w/o the app he could make a great living charging $12-15 for a ride like that. Uber is just taking way too much of a cut for offering the app.

It's not like the uber app is billions to build and maintain, it's a pretty simple mapping and processing app. Not free, but spread over the number of rides it's nearly nothing.

Uber is just gouging. They've grown too big and have to gouge to support the increadible amounts of overhead.

I'm reading this blog post and watching the videos and am about to have a seizure. It's all the default behavior I don't want.

I open apps that I need and then place them in the context I want to use them. That differs based on what I'm doing. My browser could be in a dozen different orientations depending on if I'm blogging, reading, watching videos, or doing a quick search. I can't and don't expect a window manager to have any clue how I want this. If I open up a calculator, I don't want it to shift other windows around. Same with a terminal.

Windows 11 window management is quite good in this regard. Open on the focused screen (if multi-monitor) and then I can snap to the grid I want if I want, or use keyboard shortcuts. Macos +Magnet get's me the same. Various linux environments also offer really similar and highly functional systems.

It's not disorganized/mayhem by default. It's flexible like a desktop/laptop computer should be. Notice how tablet OS' haven't replaced the desktop environment with their 1-app or tiling arangements? Because they aren't universally functional, great in one context, not so great in many others.

I think what youtube/google... and really everyone faces is that people are getting subscription fatigue and now every service is simultaneously reducing the amount of content and increasing the price. They're also reducing the rev share with content creators. It's a cash grab.

What's strange is that normal capitalistic methods are being ignored. Increasing prices to compensate for a stagnant user base almost always means losing users. Youtube is still growing, but the trend lines are leveling off and it looks like it's near the apex. I doubt a price increase will cause it to go up. It's not like they'll be using that money to add content.

Why is it that every alternative I see to airdrop has a really lame name? Can you imagine a group of people and someone is like 'yo, let me nearby share that to you'.

Form over function is almost always true in the consumer space. 'airdrop' is great. 'nearby share' is lame. apple would win this in just the name even if 'nearby share' is better tech.

you're too hung up on specs and benchmarks. As an owner of an M1 MBP and Mini, and a M2 MBP and Mini, it's not a tiny difference in use. Those improvements are a few points here or there on a benchmark but they aggregate up in actual use.

My M1 MBP was awesome because it was fast enough and had a great battery. My M2 MBP is the fastest laptop I've ever owned, and what I mean is that the time it takes to 'do' what I tell it to do is the least I've ever seen by a good margin. I open the screen and I'm in, I click on my app and it's there. I also own a Dell XPS 15 with 12th gen i7 and an alienware m15r6 with an 11th gen i7 and an nvidia 3070 so I'm comparing top of the line across the board. That XPS claims 14 hours of battery... survey says... that was a lie. I get....6? If I'm lucky. MBP M2 16" is 14 hours and I go home with 15-20% left. Yes, BOTH of those windows machines can best the MBP M2 in a few benchmarks and the 3070 is a good 50% faster in every graphics benchmark, but that just doesn't 'matter' in the sense that Apple seems to have put performance where I would feel it most. I find myself impatient when using either windows machine, just sitting and waiting for it to do something.

Now... I like Windows just fine, and I think I'm more friendly to Win11 than your average person. I'm by no means an Apple zeolot and frankly, I would probably use a Dell ultrabook on Windows 11 if I could get the same battery life and performance as my MBP M2 16" (except I'd lose iMessage... this is a tough one but it IS a close battle).

True, conveniently missing comparisons, but I don't think this is what apple is going for. I suspect that they will go after the gaming market more like a console and not try to dwell on specs but rather output. Yes, we all know that xbox and playstation HAVE specs, but we don't talk about that in regards to performance like we do gaming PC's. I grabbed no mans sky when they released it for apple silicon and metal and guess what, it's butter on an m2 max on my MBP 16" native resolution. It's probably smoother than my alienware m15 3070 though they're similar enough we're talking about an unimportant difference.

We find benchmarks when the products hit reviewers, but the hard truth for Nvidia is that in workloads that professions that use Macs are using, they've already lost the performance race. Apple's M2 Max already shreds everything nvidia has on offer for video editing and effects in the context of images and videos. Most of these users aren't actually interested in a 4090 being 60% faster in GFXbench, they like the realtime decoding and encoding of multiple streams. Apple actually knows their customer base that has money to spend and is catering to them. They have very little of the gaming market right now and who knows if they ever will. I'll tell you what though, I can play no mans sky on my MBP for 8 full hours on battery.... I wonder how that will play into the overall market's opinion on mac gaming.

I suspect that Apple isn't planning on a 'what's next' in the naming. There will not be an M2 ultra max iridium whatever, M2 Ultra is the permanent top of the line for the generation.

Next year, the M3 Ultra will be again that top of the line, being 2-4x M3 MAX chips or whatever, and the M3 MAX will be the mid and the M3 will be the standard.

I wouldn't say any of this stuff is an afterthough, just a concession made to get the M1 out the door. I suspect that M2 is the bigger jump we'll see and M3 will be a somewhat lesser increase as Apple's engineers have to start optimizing existing things instead of adding things for general compute. I do expect they'll keep adding specialized things for AI/Neural processing etc or offer macs with R1 chips etc. Natural progression I think.

All I know is that my MBP M2 Max 16" is the best laptop I've owned. Incredibly fast and all day battery. I don't care how many cores or how many Mhz, in fact I have to google it up when asked.

I only skimmed over some highlights others have quoted on the bill, but it looks like a train wreck. I don't really like these guys either so I'm not really a fan of their work... ...but, I actually do agree that these platforms should have to have parental concent and have that given via a reasonably secure means. These companies have unfettered access to our youth and completely bipass parents. They absorb information from kids that parents have no access or filter to. The excuse that parents should keep their kids off the platform is basically absurd because you'd have to keep your kids in a dog kennel prevent their access.