ya basic, son

They could say no. No-one is stopping them.

You're right. Also a professional baseball player *could* put their bats down and just stand at the plate, but pointing out that it's physically possible is stupid, especially if your argument supporting that "They Can Just Do That" is that baseball players *should put their bats down*.

This is why such people shouldn't be in positions of power.

Again with the should. It's dumb saying "they can do something, but they won't, but they should" because it's a moot point. Yes, they could also write a press release that is an 80 page Star Trek fanfic set in the narrative universe of Mr Rogers. Nothing is stopping them. But what is the value of pointing out something they are physically capable of when even you seem to understand why they won't? It's just a completely meaningless observation, particularly since you couch it in phrasing that suggests it's just a simple easy thing to do? You're trying to have your argument both ways - it makes you sound simple.

This is why such people should never be in positions of power.

What you're trying to do here is deal with the world the way you think it should be, not the way it actually is. So saying, "You can just do this" if the world was the way you think is should isn't a particularly well supported assertion.

"The whole point of this is because Waymo isn't supposed to make those mistakes,"

There is no whole point in such a complex issue, but I would like to tell this person that the idea is part of the argument for automated vehicles is they may make less mistakes. Perfection shouldn't be a condition for improvement.

Microsoft is not a person. It is a massive company capable of pursuing many mandates, some of which can either appear or can actually be entirely at odds with each other.

I don't think the US actually enforces anything approaching the spirit of robust anti-trust law now. The goalposts have been moved back so many times, they're on another field now.

In an of itself, that's a perfectly cromulant opinion to hold, but I doubt it's going to be shared by a bunch of people with Robinhood accounts paying electronically for the delivery of "freedfrom from techy surfdom". :D

Low quality PC to console ports have always existed (and vice versa for that matter.) Define broken - crashing your console?

I'm a game programmer, 20 years in the industry shipping dozens of games across the entire history of consoles starting from the PS2/GC era up to and including the consoles of today. Take it from me, the fact that console hardware is fixed ensures the experience of running games designed to push hardware to their functional limits is far more stable/hassle free.

If you don't wanna play games that do that, then this might not be as big of an issue. But the fixed hardware of a console simply cannot be discounted. Valve is not stupid for making a "verified on our console" program. The console platforms spend OODLEs of money ensuring that console games are by and large rock solid. (Counter examples not welcome, I'm just saying in comparison to the arbitrary hardware landscape of the Windows PC install base)

Also console OSes are designed for their main purpose - turn it on, play the game, stop playing the game whenever you like, come back to the game whenever you like. They're optimized towards that experience in a way that a general purpose PC struggles to do (admittedly Steam's big picture mode is pretty good, but you can't totally handwave away the fact that Windows is running in the background)

I'm not against gaming PCs, I have a nice one, it's my main daily game driver. (Also have a PS5, because I'm not only a developer, I'm also a customer!)

there are 5 billion Roblox accounts created

5 billion more accounts than you have brain cells, apparently

wait, which restaurants require an ID scan??

No man is an island. It's basically impossible to do anything that affects nobody else. If you kill yourself, you might have kids than then needed to be provided for by the state. If you harm yourself, even if nobody is obligated to help you, you can do emotional/mental damage to others who observe your suffering. If you decline protection of infectious desiese, you out others at risk. And so on and so on. Libertarians hate this one weird fact ...

"Almost nothing in the real world is a 2-player game"

That's quite untrue if you ignore rounding-error players in a substantial number of markets.

Gracious of you to make a joke that illustrates that you actually understand how braindead your original analogy was.

It boggles my mind that somebody could write those words while presumably entertaining the thought that they were making a cogent point.