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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I assume that the system will still be very hard to get on release. Nintendo is going to hoard systems until November and flood the market until December. If you or I cannot get the system on release day, we will complain to other fans, but we will keep looking until we find one or break down and pay scalper prices.

    On the other hand, parents will want to go to Walmart at 3 PM on Black Friday and grab a system. If they don’t find one, they will be super mad that they have to explain to little Timmy that he is not getting a new Nintendo for Christmas. It will make the news.

    What I would like to see is Nintendo limiting how much their resale partners can bundle with the system. For a while with the Switch, you could find one in stores… assuming you also buy a GameStop carrying case, a GameStop controller, a set of gold audio cables, and 3 shovelware games for a premium price.



  • I would seriously question the competence of Nintendo developers if their system cannot survive an unexpected shutdown. Computers losing power unexpectedly has been a possibility for server and desktop computers since those form factors were first created.

    Sure, maybe some clever code cowboy decided that since the system will always have a battery, their OS can be optimized around never losing power. That reasoning should have been rejected, with prejudice, in a code review. Batteries fail and the older they are, the less charge they hold. Even if the battery is still good, the connection between it and the rest of the device can wear out or come loose.



  • That reminds me of the time, quite a few years ago, Amazon tried to automate resume screening. They trained a machine learning model with anonymized resumes and whether the candidate was hired. Then they looked at what the AI was looking at. The model had trained itself on how to reject women.



  • The model only works if users are forced to subscribe to a battery swapping service for the full life of the vehicle (or there is a large upfront fee to join with a used vehicle). Otherwise it would be too easy for a consumer with a worn out battery to do a one-time swap and get a like-new battery as a cheap alternative to very costly battery repairs. The dumped battery is likely to have very poor range and the battery swap company will need to dispose of it.




  • Nintendo is always good at supporting its systems past the end of the generation, especially portables. Based on past behavior, I expect that when the Switch 2 comes out, Nintendo is going to market the Switch as a cheap alternative for families who are uncomfortable with the new console price.

    “Buy the Switch Lite, now with a lower MSRP, and start enjoying its vast library of great games. Once we release some great Switch 2 games and you are in a better financial position (or saved up), you can buy a Switch 2.”


  • I am a little disgusted by this because now both major browser engines are being developed by an advertising company, creating more incentives for future web technologies that strengthen tracking and undermine ad blocking.

    From what I understand, this is an anonymized targeted ad company. In other words, ads are still targeted to the individual user, it is just harder for the advertiser to track (or profile) an individual user. Are there any companies still doing untargeted ads, ads where the advertiser might pick what site their ad goes on but cannot target a specific user demographic?





  • TAG@lemmy.worldtoCalvin and Hobbes@lemmy.world31 May 1987
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    8 months ago

    From a high level, small plumbing repairs are easy: screw hoses together, water flows down hill. The devil is in the details and oh boy is it quite a devil. Parts are often rusted in place. Trying to shut an old valve can just as easily create an additional leak. In many American homes, working on a kitchen sink is especially difficult because it is built into a narrow cabinet and there may be a garbage disposal and dishwasher hookup getting in the way.