They don’t “work” at all, in the sense that most of us understand that word.

Burning DVDs was really a thing there for a hot minute. I remember buying them in big spindles of 50 at a time, and burning at least two or three a week.

Back then I already had my first ever USB flash drive, but they were still very expensive and small - 128MB was great for some documents, but no good for large files. And my PC’s hard drive was still only about 120GB or something.

DVDs were in their element. 4.7GBs of storage, and super cheap. I was using them to back up data and clear apace on my hard drive, and I was loading them up with content for friends, where I could just take a disc over their house and leave it there for them.

Then flash drives got bigger, and hard drives got bigger too, and that sweet spot the DVD occupied got squashed from both sides until poof, in just a few short years the age of the DVD was over.

VCRs.

Spent my childhood merrily taping things off the TV, and thought it was the best thing ever. i love those nostalgic whirring and clicking sounds as the tape loads.

But digital media is just the best, and tapes can stay in the past where they belong.

This can sometimes be because the lyrics of a song have different licencing considerations to the song itself, and they are legally not entitled to put the lyrics as subtitles.

No such problems for fansub groups! :)

That’s such garbage!

From tiny companies of five people, to huge companies of five hundred thousand, I have never worked in an office where you couldn’t get a brew.

But then, I am British. Take the tea away and it’s riots (or at the least some quiet complaining)

A quick search suggests this appears to be a revised version of Tanita’s MC-980 scale, which is intended for professional use and costs $13,000 USD anyway - even without King of Fighters.

So not really any difference, just a very unusual collab and bit of fun for marketing! :)

https://tanita.com/products/mc-980uplus

Of course they do, but let’s unpack that.

When people buy a new car who already have one, they generally do it because either 1. they think it will bring some material benefit over their old car, or 2. they want a new car simply for vanity reasons.

Looking at the PS5 Pro, there will absolutely be people who think “I want to upgrade to the Pro just for bragging rights” but I’m pretty sure the majority of consumers wil simply think “This doesn’t play any games my PS5 can’t already” and pass on it.

Not if they already have a PS5, though.

There’s also the option of electronic scales which are rechargeable via USB

Haha yeah. People are so accustomed to short TLDs that ‘smith.technology’ just intuitively feels kinda wrong, and it still feels that way to me, even as a tech person who knows it is perfectly valid.

You’re thinking like “smith dot technology dot what?”

Another reason is brand identity.

Using ‘.tech’ or ‘.flights’ or .sports’ for your site feels too “on the nose” and gives vibes of like browsing some directory where things are categorised and sorted. Even worse it implies there are other sites under the same category, and those other sites may be competitors, and this dilutes strength of brand.

lt also suggests strongly what the business does, and while that might seem desirable at first it actually isn’t from a corporate perspective because it means the company becomes tied to their business area and can’t expand and grow out of it into other things.

I think this is a major part of why descriptive TLDs continue to be less preferred over ‘meaningless’ two letter TLDs, because companies want the focus to be on the main part of the domain, not the TLD.

Japan is like this too, and I loved to see that when I was living there.

The bus drivers often wear nice uniforms and white gloves, and clearly take a lot of care in their appearance and work. And people give them respect.

I wish it was like that everywhere, because being able to have pride in what you do and be respected for it is such an important thing that everyone deserves to have - regardless of what your job is.

I feel trypophobia quite strongly with some triggers, even things like budding plants pushing through the ground can make my akin crawl. But for some reason crumpets are okay.

I guess my brain just sees the crumpet texture as being like a macro bread texture, which is okay because it’s kinda bready.

There are some ways in which the newer shows like Discovery are realistic, but there are also ways in which they are stupid.

For example, two federation officers in a life or death situation where they have two minutes to solve an urgent crisis, and they decide to spend 60 seconds of that having an emotional heart-to-heart.

If that was in TNG, they’d have got the job done like professionals, and then had the friends chat later in ten forward. Because that’s how people with jobs get their jobs done.

TNG era was quite cheesy in some ways, but it kept characters real in that they always acted appropriately for their role and position, not just like a bunch of emotional oddballs who get to be in charge of a spaceship for some reason.

I agree with all of that, pretty much.

If Asus or whoever else dropped a “steam deck killer” I’m pretty sure Valve wouldn’t even blink.

Valve didn’t make the deck because they wanted to make money on hardware. I expect very much they made it specifically because they wanted to encourage the move of steam gaming from the PC to the couch, and they needed some hardware to prove their point with - like with the Steam Link where they tried this before, and that time failed.

If it later ends up being other companies in the long run who make the hardware then no worries, the mission was already accomplished.

Even being prerendered, it was an intensely impressive game for 1993.

And it’s not like they didn’t have plenty of problems to solve.

Here’s an interesting interview with founder Rand Miller about developing Myst and how they were barely able to make it work due to the limitations of CD drives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX5B6cD4_4

This is a tricky one, honestly, because the steam deck straddles the line between PC and console.

If you were a Sony fan, you’d be rightfully upset if Sony released a new PlayStstion every year, and made new games only for the new hardware. It’s just not long enough to feel the hardware has ran its lifespan, and you feel cheated.

Conversely in PCs, the expectation is that the hardware slowly improves constantly, and new hardware doesn’t stop you playing all the latest games on your old hardware; the only limiting factor is how far your old hardware can be pushed before the performance is too poor. And that is YOUR choice as a user, not an artificial choice imposed on you.

I’d expect that any Steam Deck 2 is going to be more like the PC model - it won’t create exclusives or stop people playing the new games on their old deck, it will simply be better and faster.

So on that basis I wouldn’t personally have a problem if Valve put out a deck every year.

All that said however, I think waiting several years is the smart business move. People have longer to enjoy their hardware while still feeling like they have the “latest model” - it’s psychologically better from the consumer perspective.

There may also be an argument that longer release cycles makes things less complicated for devs (less devices to test on) and also keeps the hardware going for longer, because devs will be incentivised to optimise performance for the current deck (which they might not be as much after a new one comes along)

Hell on earth, perfect

I feel like it’s also an outlook/mentality thing.

I personally am happy to take a few extra seconds parking, because I see it as spending time to make life easier, faster and safer for my future self when I come to leave.

Zooming in forwards is like “I care about now more than I care about later”