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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Turned out that scratches can easily be avoided if you are careful, and - more importantly - a few scratches won’t prevent the disc being read, thanks to the error correction.

    Back in the day I remember using one of those AOL internet sign-up junk discs as a drinks coaster, for several years. As you’d expect from grinding around on my desk it was filthy and scratched to total hell, never mind the thermal stress of hundreds of hot tea mugs being sat on it. I’d never seen a CD looking so bad.

    One day out of curiosity I decided to wipe it off and put it in the PC to see what would happen. I was genuinely surprised when the AOL splash popped up (and also a little disgusted because I had no love for AOL and was hoping I’d killed it)






  • It wasn’t shit from the start though, was it.

    Back when Windows 95 was a new thing it blew everything else out of the water. Suddenly there was an operating system that even regular people were paying attention to and getting excited about, and it actually deserved the hype.

    Windows was a product at that time, where Microsoft made their money by people purchasing the operating system. And so the incentive was to make a great product that people wanted to buy and use.

    This was true all the way through the Windows XP and 7 days, and only with the release of 8 and especially 10 did we start to see things change.

    Microsoft - who used to put so much effort into trying to prevent people installing cracked Windows - suddenly didn’t seem to care so much anymore about enforcing that. They’d realised that the true exploitable value was in the online ecosystem and the data, not the product, and that was the turning point for everything.




  • The console hardware is cheaper to produce vs other consoles, so it’s not like they are losing on the hardware and aiming to make the money back later - they designed the hardware to meet a specific price point, and to capture a certain market.

    Having captured that market though (kid owns a switch and now the kid wants games) they can pretty much set the price of games high and keep them high.

    As a gamer buying for yourself, with every purchase you are weighing up the cost of the game against how much you personally want to play it. If the price is too much you will choose something else, or wait for a sale.

    As a parent buying for a child, however, if the child says “I really want the new Zelda game for my birthday please!” then they get bought the new Zelda game, no matter how much it costs.


  • Nintendo are very much aware what their business model is on this one, and who they are targeting.

    For a lot of consumers, especially those who are lower income, the single most important factor is how much money you need to spend at once.

    This is especially true because a key market for the switch is children, who have no direct purchasing power themselves, and depend instead on adults to buy it for Christmas and birthdays. So initial cost of entry is critical.

    Simply put, ‘parents’ who are buying a console for their kids and expect to buy new games only rarely, have quite different needs to ‘gamers’ who are buying for themselves, and want new games often.









  • tiramichu@lemm.eetoAnimemes@ani.socialChain of thought AI
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    8 days ago

    It’s funny though, because as humans we also consider a huge number of factors when someone approaches us and says “hi” - but we are so speedy about being context aware we don’t even notice how much we ‘overthink’

    In a fraction of a second we are thinking “Who is this person? Where do I know them from? Is this a personal thing or a professional thing? What does their tone and body language tell me about the interaction? What is their motivation? Are they a threat? Do they want something transactional from me, or is this purely just a pleasantry?”

    We’re good at that.



  • Google is pretty well known for displaying certain ‘contested’ things with different names in different countries.

    It will change only for those viewing from the US I believe, not the rest of the world.

    That this should even be ‘contested’ is a joke, but Google views this Trump-pandering as the price of their seat at the top table for this new administration, and they’re quite happy to do it.

    If we have to rename it, my vote is for the “Gulf of CUM” (Cuba, USA and Mexico)

    That’s fair isnt it? 💦