• 1 Post
  • 74 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • You’re right, and your take is more nuanced. A huge thing about it being a private company is that they aren’t required to disclose who has ownership stakes, performance against revenue targets, etc. Ostensibly, anyone who isn’t on the inside, and even employees who aren’t privy to management decisions, will be met with more or less a black box about the company’s drivers.




  • The evidence doesn’t support the outsized FUD. Firearms in general are dangerous. A $500 novelty that very few gun owners will ever purchase or install isn’t a serious safety concern. Seemingly only one instance of one being used in a shooting in Fargo in 2023. That situation was tragic, and the police who responded likely prevented the shooter from committing a larger and more destructive attack. But the fact remains that these things are novelties or gimmicks. They make shooting the gun worse in nearly every way, and have extremely limited practical application.


  • This alarmist and factually dubious fear mongering is part of what is hurting the Democrats and the left in the US. Binary triggers do not turn a firearm into a “fully automatic machine gun”. What they do is cause the gun to fire on both the trigger pull and the trigger reset. This allows the shooter to fire very quickly, but not as fast as a true automatic weapon. Machine gun, and assault rifle both have specific legal definitions that hinge on the firearm firing multiple rounds with one trigger action. A standard trigger has two actions for every trigger pull - the pull and the reset. This is why these devices are technically legal. It’s also why bump stocks are legal.

    It’s splitting hairs and is pedantic, but the tilted and inaccurate narrative only serves to disenfranchise people who lean left but also enjoy firearms.

    All that said - restricting access to this vaccine is asinine and needlessly dangerous. To your point, we paid for this medicine with our taxes, our isolation, and unfortunately with many lives. Fuck this administration and the spineless republicans who enable them to trample on our rights.






  • But those inexpensive phones most often don’t deliver a comparable device experience to the flagship devices. Honestly, this is the crux of things. Comparing iPhone to “Android” is a fool’s errand. Apple often only has one more budget conscious model available explicitly. But OS support tends to last longer on Apple devices, so multiple model years are viable at once.





  • The Switch was just the Wii U refined into something consumers actually wanted, rather than an innovation on its own.

    I’d argue that Nintendo has always been pretty similar in terms of the amount of innovation they bring to their segment barring perhaps the quality of the Wii motion controls when launched and compared against similar attempts both by Nintendo and their competitors prior.

    The Famicom / NES and the subsequent Super Famicom / SNES / N64 were just iterations on the same home console market for which Nintendo was far from the first to launch. The GameCube and the Wii shared a lot of DNA, with the motion controls really being the innovation. The Wii U, Switch, and Switch 2 seem to be a lineage of refinement as well.

    In handhelds, they went from monochrome, to backlit monochrome, to backlit color, to two displays and some touch controls. You could argue that the 3D effect of the 3DS was innovative, but the allure of the feature died as soon as the industry realized the demand wasn’t there to keep developing it. Hardly as revolutionary as other competitors products, but more in touch with what their consumers wanted than their competitors, hence the market lasted longer for Nintendo than Sony with the PSP and Vita.

    Ironically, the things Nintendo has done at the base system level that truly attempted to innovate have mostly been failures. The Virtual Boy was way ahead of its time, but the form factor was half baked and the eyestrain was horrendous. The Wii U was a success in that Nintendo learned what about the console was worth iterating on, but otherwise it was an abject failure as well because it didn’t offer enough to differentiate itself from the Wii.

    For innovation to occur, there needs to be a predicating breakthrough in technology around which these companies can build a product. We’re in an age of rapid miniaturization and simultaneous increased power of integrated systems. It feels like more power = better, but this trajectory is going to yield new potential applications of technology in form factors that haven’t been fully explored yet. It’s just cyclical, and things take time to develop.

    Plus - everything is slower when consumers demonstrate they’re satisfied with what the company is selling them. No need to dramatically change course when the current model is satisfying customers. The confluence of a new technology landscape and a dip in consumer enthusiasm for existing offerings is the typical spot for a hardware developer to innovate.







  • The overwhelming majority of development to Chromium is done by Google and not the open source contributors to the project. Maintaining a browser is not something that can be done for free as a hobby. It requires an army of full-time developers to sustain.

    Given all of the major browsers except Firefox are using Chromium, the best case scenario for spinning off Chrome is that Microsoft would pick up the lion’s share of development to keep Edge up to date.

    This is the same reason that all of the major Linux distributions have large foundations to support them.

    The DoJ would do less harm to the internet if they just forced Google to sell off Search instead. Then they’d be an advertising and cloud services company that happens to maintain a major browser to serve their ads.