I'm curious to know how much $DJT they needed to buy, and at what price, to warrant this kind of exemption? Had to believe this was purely due to industry pressure to explode into a hungry market

On the other hand, the free version gives you more data than Fitbit premium. Garmin DID recently start shilling their premium service but it seems to be focused more on trails and coaching, then raw access to data (for some reason they pay walled real-time workout impact, but the version at the end is free. Server load?)

Can't argue with the price. The current series of venu devices is unbelievably expensive. Some of the others are cheaper but you're still not wrong. As for being developer friendly, Garmin somehow quietly built an entire dev ecosystem, complete with their own sdk, their own simulator, their own LANGUAGE, and so forth. And yes, their tools work on Linux as well. Natively. The simulator uses gtk. What's crazy is it's a dev ecosystem built seemingly from the ground up - they're not using Android Wear but running a completely custom stack. But, this is how they get their battery life to be measured in weeks, not hours.

The Fitbit software ecosystem and posture are just WEIRD. On the one hand, they're trying to position themselves as a clinical-precision health tracking device. On the other hand, their app serves popups for Deepak fucking Chopra and his bullshit. Guys, pick a lane.

But it's the HW reliability that did it for me. Two broken Fitbits (all glitched screens) later, I finally made the jump. Fitbit offered a discount on a replacement, but only one per unit and refused to combine them. They finally caved when I sent them the return receipt held up next to the order confirmation page of a venu2, but, too late.

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