Is there enough value in AI to justify burning down the planet for it?

The SEGA Forever program was discontinued in late 2023

Kind of a poorly named program

I kept on checking throughout the day yesterday- Verizon’s website said no outages, but istheservicedown showed most of the east coast of the US was down.

I also heard from friends with business class Internet that they were fine.

Why is this story suddenly getting posted to dozens of communities that in seeing in my feed?

It’s one 73 year old tribal elder who complained that today’s youth don’t respect tradition. This same story has been pre-printed for thousands of years.

I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I’m a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn’t?

Then I remembered Starlink exists.

ITT: “What was the victim wearing at the time? Was the car acting in self-defense? Do cars have qualified immunity? Did the pedestrian pose a threat or instigate the car? Were they wearing their officially state-sanctioned Pedestrian uniform and helmet? Did the pedestrian have any pre-existing conditions?”

Haha thanks that’s actually what I went with.

I went with the Wizard because I always thought the GameCube controller was fine. Not my favorite, not terrible. But I’m at least familiar with it. I saw some reviews mention that the QA and build quality might be a problem, and if that’s the case my next option is probably to try the Hyperion Pro.

Honestly I wish I could rip the controls off the Steam Deck or rip a DualSense in half.

Just because you don’t like them doesn’t mean other people don’t.

As a kid I had no hope of affording the official PlayStation racing wheel, but I could afford the MadCatz one. When I wanted a 2nd guitar controller to play with friends on the PS2, NYKO offered a wireless one that was much better than the official ones. My first wireless controller, before the WaveBird, was a MadCatz PS2 controller that was fantastic.

I spent a good chunk of this weekend researching 3rd party JoyCons because the ones from Nintendo are basically cheap novelty toys that sell for $80.

8BitDo have been making quality controllers for several years now, and they have a whole section of their website dedicated to Xbox stuff. They appear to be licensed, so they will probably still be good?

Especially with how expensive 1st party controllers are, it can make a ton of sense to get cheap 3rd party ones. Especially if you aren’t into hardcore or competitive games.

True, I just felt like I kind of covered that talking about Jack Welch. He is, afaik, the one who really started off the trend of intra-company competition. I mentioned that other companies follow GE in that regard, and Sears was one of them for sure.

A much slower pace, but Jack Welch immediately comes to mind. Tons of short-term decisions that made the numbers go up but had disastrous long-term consequences not just for GE, but all of America. Lawsuits for everything from illegally dumping chemicals into rivers to discriminatory lending. GE used to be a shining pinnacle of manufacturing and innovation: now it’s a weird scribbly logo on the cheapest appliances you can find. He championed outsourcing and intra-company competition, practices that spread and went on to destroy other companies.

Or you could point to Ed Lambert buying and merging Sears and KMart in 2005. Sears especially was egregious. It started as a mail-order catalog designed to make high-end goods affordable to the middle class. It provided good wages and benefits, good quality products, and innovated the retail environment. The idea was that by paying gold wages he would end up creating more customers, and there are tons of examples of Sears employees in the 50’s who had Searss-mad houses filled with Sears-made products. It wasn’t all great (kind of getting close to a company town, also heavily reliant on cars and suburban sprawl). But a lot of what we think of as the sterotypicall “American Dream” was driven by Sears.

By the early 2000’s when Lambert bought it, it definitely wasn’t as dominant as it used to be- it had lost some market share to Wal-Mart and other competitors, and the mail-order catalog business was waning and kind of replaced by TV shopping channels. But it still had a sound logistical network. Online shopping was just getting off the ground, Amazon was still just for books, eBay was incredibly sketchy. There were people at the time who wondered if Sears could just transition their catalog business model to he Internet and become dominant again. Instead, Lampert cut costs. Closed stores, outsourced what he could, cut wages and benefits, reduced quality, sold off brands. Old Craftsman tools are still covered today for their quality and durability, while the modern tools are rusting in landfills. They were in prime position to be what Amazon is today, but chose to squander it instead.

Musk might be setting a speed running record with Twitter though.

I could still use Reddit for free. At any point, I can easily decide to install the app and use it in parallel. I can go back-and-forth with 0 consequences. My income is not dependent on my ability to access Reddit.

Developers have made the business decision to use Unity or not, and this debacle pretty seriously impacts that decision.

I think the even bigger advantage Valve has is the business model.

I don’t know how much the Deck costs Valve to manufacture. And yes, it’s pretty easy to run non-Steam games. But the bottom line is that the Deck does not have to be a profit center for Valve, it just has to drive more sales on Steam without losing too much money. Logitech, Lenovo, Asus, etc have to make money off of the hardware.