Woooo sodium-ion batteries.

Probably not Ankh-Morpork, because Vetenari is nothing if not competent.

Reality is a team sport, to some people. They don’t mean things when they say words. They’re just signalling loyalty to their ingroup hierarchy, and playing a dominance game where they get to decide what’s true. It’s not a judgement call. In their worldview there is no objective means to evaluate claims. There’s just whatever their guy says, and whatever our guy says, and their guy is right because he’s their guy.

So please stop falling for it when they declare themselves fiscal experts. They don’t give the slightest shit. They’re just shuffling cards. It’s another song and dance they do, to grasp for narrative legitimacy. Nothing else exists in their moral universe.

Situation: there are 14 competing editors.

That is not what Firefox has done.

Linking to another instance is kind of silly.

… by submitting queries to another website that only does what’s ruining search engines.

I had great internet, and it was still frustrating bullshit.

Valve really abused their big-ass sequel to force their DRM’d marketplace upon PC gaming. We just got used to it because they’re competent at UI development and happy with console-level gouging of publishers.

All three of them were right, but one of them was doing the wrong amount of cocaine.

I would still be using 7 if ransomware wasn’t a thing.

I went back to Mint instead.

You pay how much to be told no?

Windows 9x was low-bullshit.

NT and 2000 were corporate enough to be no-nonsense. They belonged to the administrator, but the administrator can be you.

ME was a mistake.

XP was not yet online enough to be properly skeezy.

But from Vista onward, yeah, it’s been an escalating shit-show that’s difficult to miss.

Advertising shits in your brain.

Exploiting trust is worse. That parasocial z-list celebrity isn’t recommending something - they were paid to read corporate propaganda.

The most painful version of this is Lindsey Ellis’s video on “Manufacturing Authenticity.” It ends with a deep sigh and an ad read. The brand knew she was doing a video about how brands pay the popular kids to shill their whatever, and they did not care, because all that matters is getting a known face to say the words.

And she’s the kind of woman Spike Spiegel loves: she’ll fucking kill you.

Guru Meditation red.

Alternately: yellow-and-black ASCII approximating Evangelion’s ALART.

Dehumanizing people who recognize the power of overwhelming market share is a lot worse than pointing out the power of overwhelming market share.

Folks will shit on Alan Wake II for only releasing on EGS, like that’s obviously the only reason it’s not selling well… and then refuse to consider the implications of that claim. I have led people by the nose through what it means when there’s only one store that really matters, and developers are generally screwed if they can’t or won’t sell through that one store.

“AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”

Nintendo is a toy company. They make incomparable products to avoid direct competition. It’s their “blue ocean strategy.”

They also crank out first-party titles that tend to be fun prototypes reskinned to a handful of popular franchises.

Platforms are an obstacle to customers, from the developer’s point of view. This has been obvious since the PS2-PS3 transition - and it’s why Sony is freaking out about PSN accounts. They don’t give a shit about your data. They desperately want to go back to when every game was made for one system and maybe got a conversion or two. The closest they can get is roping people into their ecosystem to justify the continued existence of their deliberately0incompatible AMD laptop opposite Microsoft’s deliberately-incompatible AMD laptop.

Same deal with Epic refusing to make Fortnite work on Steam Deck. It’s not a technical issue. They’re just having a slapfight with Valve. They want their store to stand up against (let’s face it) the de-facto monopoly source for major PC games, and the market says no.

Where this ends is the death of consoles.

There is no reason to release a game three or four separate times, with a private screening process for two or three of them, even if each release is goddamn near identical. All that’s really different is which middleman slices off an entire third of the publisher’s revenue. There are no technical reasons three of these platforms couldn’t just run the same executable with the same data. There’s differences - but not important differences. And even the ARM version could be served if games were published in .NET or SPIR-V or whatever. Slow startup time? Yeah, once, but games already take their sweet time installing. Even shaders need to compile and cache. That nonsense would be a lot more sensible if it let you buy whichever hardware was best from whoever the hell was selling it.

So really, where this ends is the death of platforms.