Had Comcast as an ISP for five years. The only ISP in town, $85/mo for shit service. Moved ten minutes down the street, Comcast is suddenly $55/mo for the same plan, and gasp! there's a competitor in the area. Tried to offer me to relocate my service..... I politely told them to go fuck themselves and they knew there was no point in trying to save the contract.

I'd rather read as well, but I do a fair amount of driving so the audio option becomes appealing. NPR is generally a reasonable option but some of the local radio shows aren't relevant to me, so it can be hit or miss. RadioLab is pretty legit, though sometimes the sound effects and overexplaining can be a bit much. Still, it's pretty alright. I guess I could always just put on the podcast version of the radio shows I already like? I've learned to tune out the call-to-action to do that (or to follow them on all their silly socials, ugh) but maybe this is actually a reasonable idea for once

I tried to get into podcasts, but most of them are just so friggin irritating. They're largely just two or more windbags talking, cracking inside jokes and going off on completely irrelevant personal stories and trying to make you feel like you're there and part of the conversation. Problem is, "trying" is the operative word - none of it is real and the whole thing sits in the uncanny valley of fake authenticity. There was one podcast about the history of a company I worked for - yes, it was remarkably well-researched and largely spot on, but the random tangents and windbaggery made it utterly infuriating. Nobody cares what restaurant you went to yesterday and if it was better than that other place last week - that's not why your audience is here! Okay yes, there may be a few actually decent podcasts that are information-dense and light on filler, but such content is very expensive to produce; the long tail is mostly two randos chit-chatting and I can't relate to anyone who'd want to listen to that.

Yes exactly. It's called the 3M Opticom system for traffic light preemption. A while back, there was a market for homebrew transmitters which quickly became criminalized. Some cities are transitioning to GPS-based preemption (centrally coordinated) but the IR-based system is still very common. It's also used by buses to extend the duration of the green phase (low priority preemption) without changing an existing red, like the high priority signal would.

That's an interesting point actually. I've never thought of it that way. Though for myself, I have never even considered owning a motorcycle, due to safety concerns (mostly it's not trusting myself not to crash into stuff, but being on a road with much heavier and much more protected vehicles is part of it too).

Is crash safety. Don't get me wrong, the attempt to strap solar panels to a "car" in an efficient way is admirable. But, the main approach to making the design tenable is through improved overall efficiency, a big part of which is weight reduction. That's all well and good, except you're going to be compromising structural strength in an effort to reduce weight. This would be "fine" except it also compromises crash safety, which is a much bigger deal. Yes, you can talk about lightweight components and yes they help, but only to a limited extent. Even putting aside the structural issues, there's the matter of what happens during a collision with a traditional, much heavier vehicle. Physics dictates the lighter car will be the one to go flying. It sucks but that's sort of how it is, unless the safety "incentive" to maintain mass is slowly eroded across the global fleet

Are you talking about Halo Infinite in multiplayer mode? Because campaign runs like an absolute pile of shit. When you are in the standalone levels, it actually runs perfectly fine. But you can clearly tell when you're in an area that will eventually open up into the open world, because the frame rate will nosedive by approximately 3x compared to baseline, even if you're still in a simple room with four walls. It's likely that someone isn't bothering to do culling, or optimized/localized collision detection, or any of the other resource management techniques that are commonplace in open-world games (at least those not written by a pile of underpaid contractors who can't see ten feet in front of them and take zero pride in their work). You know, things Ninty had figured figured out how to do on their comparatively-underpowered aarch64 CPU, at least ten years ago. This is exactly the kind of corner-cutting I'm talking about - it just won't fly on a battery-powered system, and it's going to be a culture shock to xbox developers who are used to solving problems simply by chucking more resources at them.

This is fair. My expectation is the S2 will be a noticeable improvement, but we'll see. What helps the Switch is that the games are designed to be fun without the need to lean into ultra-heavy GPU performance, whereas PC games tend to rely on the WOW! factor of raytraced 8k 240FPS graphics more heavily (though granted, not entirely). So, I guess we'll wait and see.

Don't get me wrong, I think a low-poly cel-shaded master chief would look hilarious, but MS will definitely have to "manage expectations" of the more typical Xbox crowd.

Nintendo's secret to getting away with battery-powered handhelds is simple. Their games do not rely on ultra-shiny photorealistic graphics in order to be FUN. While Microsoft and Sony duked it out over who's got the bigger GPU in the early 2000s, Ninty got busy focusing on gameplay elements that were genuinely novel and entertaining, a strategy that absolutely shines if you're trying to build a handheld constrained by size, power, and (importantly), thermals. Yes, Steam Deck is existential proof that portable PC gaming is possible, but the architecture (both of the system and of the processor) is a compromise on power across the board. Yes, they did a really good job given the constraints they were under, but even well-known and reasonably-optimized titles are limited to 3-4 hours of play time, running at 720p. It's not nothing, but compare that to a Switch.

Now, let's look at big consoles. We've seen a number of triple-A titles being released (prematurely) and running like absolute dog shit, as a result of an utter lack of optimization. In some cases, we've seen updates 1-3 years later, that finally bring performance up to par. Software is a gas, and with increasing pressure to bring a product to market, we've seen developers rushing and cutting corners and being lazy with their algorithm design, rather than taking the time to properly optimize their engine from the start. Or, it's possible that in some cases, even basic optimizations may have existed but were backed out at the last minute due to bugs and a lack of engineers available/qualified to fix them. Looking at you, 343i (obviously).

Staying reasonably sane in a modern tech landscape requires hopping the wave of new platforms, just in time to stay ahead of the wave of enshittification coming up closely behind it. Time to do another hop

You discern them by knowing that a stingray will ask your phone to disable encryption and/or downgrade the connection to a less secure protocol (2G/3G). A repeater has no need for such things

More importantly, they're basically one of a kind, stateful,. physical systems. Given that they're biological systems, you can't just back them up, or snapshot them, or duplicate them, roll them back, scale them up, check them into git, extract their weights, or debug them easily. They may be able to do many things, but overlapping with digital LLMs is not one of them.

Expect more gemini junk to be vomited over even more of the google products you are inevitably forced to use (as if this more possible). âoeâoeâoeâoeâoeâoe

Well, yeah. In other news, the sky is blue and water makes things wet. The trick to living peacefully in the tech world is staying ahead of the enshittification by frequently jumping onto new platforms that try to outdo their predecessors, at the cost of having to be being nice to users to encourage growth. Basically, use em while the VCs are subsidizing the enormous cost of NOT enshittifying, but don't get too attached.

I feel there's enough greed out there that even a premium-tier subscription to this service would include some form of paid/promoted product placement, because it would be a revenue stream too lucrative to pass up.