Unfortunately you can’t just recuse yourself from society. You’re still impacted by who the president is even if you don’t vote for them.

You’re still using public utilities. Driving on public roads. Interacting with people who went to public schools.

Acting like both choices are the same because they will always eventually do something you don’t like is disingenuous and you know it.

Also if a quick Google result is anything to go on, Apple sells hundreds of millions of iPhones a year. 3% of that is still a fuckload of people and IMO proves there is a market for it. Just maybe not a market that needs yearly attention. You also have to remember that’s split between tons of SKUs, so you would expect all of them to hover in the single digits to low teens.

I got my wife a 12 Mini - she loves it. The battery life is absolutely the worst thing about it, but it sounds like the 13 Mini was a huge upgrade in that regard and I had hopes it would continue to get better with future versions.

Something else that may not be taken in to account - the kinds of people buying the Mini are I would wager on a longer upgrade period than the kinds of people who buy e.g. a base iPhone or Pro model. The kind of person buying a Mini I would bet is closer to the kind of buyer that has historically bought the SE - they probably only upgrade every 3 or 4 years rather than the more stereotypical 2. Pro numbers are also skewed by the hyper fans who upgrade yearly and therefore show up in the stats a lot more, even though they’re both a firm Apple customer.

There is also this interesting note at the end of the article:

“Other reports … overwhelmingly presented the same picture of low ‌iPhone 14‌ Plus sales, to the extent that Apple was forced to slash production, suggesting that the low sales of the ‌iPhone 12 mini‌ and ‌iPhone 13‌ mini may not have been caused by the device’s size after all.”

I think the Mini should become the new SE. Keep it on 2+ year old CPU, keep it 60Hz, at least the form factor and design language will match the rest of the lineup unlike now where the SE has a design from 2016. That would be perfect for people like my wife, who want the smallest cheapest phone that’s technically an iPhone, and are only going to upgrade every few years.

Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.

Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.

I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.

Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they’re now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just… is not. Especially not in first person games.

In the USA licenses are not contingent upon manual vs. automatic. No one checks what car you drive. So you would have to learn somewhere - someone around you has to own a manual car in order for you to learn how to drive one, and here simply no one does. No one in my entire extended family, none of my friends, none of my coworkers I’m friendly with, none of the 50+ cars I have any tangential access to are manual. So even if I wanted to learn, what are my options? Buy an entire car just to learn? Services like Turo won’t let you rent one unless you can drive one already.

We have Driver’s Education in high school but it involves no actual driving - there are separate paid/private courses you can take that might involve defensive driving or learning stick. I did one on controlling skids on wet or snowy pavement and demonstrating e.g. turning under braking with and without ABS. But nothing about manual.

This thread is an amusing display of sample bias. Only people that want to respond yes and brag about it bothering to respond.

In reality only about 2/3rds of people in the US can drive stick and almost no one owns manual cars.

I’ve never driven a manual car. I’ve had people be like “You can’t drive manual?!” and then I would respond “So are you going to teach me?” The answer is always No, of course not, not in their car (assuming they even owned a manual, which none do anymore). My parents had manual cars but sold them 10+ years before having me.

I understand how a clutch works. It wouldn’t be difficult to learn. But what reason or motivation is there to learn when almost no cars are manual? They total something like 2% of new car sales. If you’re buying something like a 718 GT4 RS or a 911 GT3 RS for maximum driving engagement that’s great, but those cars are priced for the 1% of the 1%.

Even if you had a fun car, which I do, the drive to work is stop-and-go, roads are full, even the fun country backroads are filled with traffic on weekends, forests are burned down, gas is eye-watteringly expensive if you have a slightly performant vehicle. The time to have fun driving cars was 40 years ago.

Transistor - really any Supergiant game, but Transistor in particular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc

Looks like it is basically not changed. I downloaded the data and compared it against US population census data from https://population.un.org/wpp/

If anything it dipped during the pandemic and is returning to “normal” (although I can’t see before 2018).

I’ll be significantly cleaner than average I expect… I don’t like cases, but a long time ago, circa when shiny black plastic was making its way in to touch screen phone design for the first time, a friend and I discovered if you keep your phone in a microfiber bag (like some sunglasses come with, particularly Oakleys we bought together at the time) it effectively cleans itself in your pocket. I still do, and I cycle those out and clean the bag once a year or so, or if it falls on the ground or gets something spilled on it. I have more now from different sets of sunglasses, laser goggles, etc.

I also happen to work in a clean room where you’re expected to wipe anything you bring in, including phone, laptop, etc., with isopropanol-soaked wipes before entering so that’s like disinfecting and taking off the oil every day or every other day.

No one else I know ever cleans their phone beyond wiping it with a shirt or something when the oil & smudges becomes too noticeable.

This is a woeful misuse of this meme lol…

Indeed, at least that’s the idea. Viewing and posting from kbin.social.

By trying to present themselves as the center instead of the far-right, they slowly move people’s’ conception of what the “center” is further and further right. It’s been happening for decades.

I’d like for kbin/Lemmy to be a full substitute, but right now only meme subs on lemmy are taking off or getting significant traction. It’s actually sort of annoying and makes me not want to bother. Apps are rough, block tools are inconsistent, see tons of posts twice or more all day (would happen on Reddit too, but pretty rarely, when big news was relevant to several large subreddits). Until the smaller subs I frequented Reddit for in the first place start coming over, kbin/lemmy can’t realistically be a replacement. Just something I check for a few minutes to try to leave app feedback and contribute traffic where I can.

It will take a very good app and a couple more high profile niche subs (like /r/piracy) mostly shifting to the Fediverse to start a real migration.

More news, more protests, porn on /r/all, but this seems pretty high. There have been a few oddly spiky days the last few days, seems like probably bots.