MudMan

Every time I accidentally pay attention to US politics in any way I end up with a headache, but…

Addressing the issue of the strait, Hegseth disparaged reporting that the US had not been prepared for Iran’s effective closure of shipping route. “The only thing prohibiting transit in [Hormuz] right now is Iran shooting at shipping,” Hegseth said. “It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”

…what?

Yeah, that number went up pretty fast during the 2010s and 20s. Honestly, I think at this point it’s a cost/manufacturing reliability thing. There aren’t that many panel manufacturers, and these days a 65 inch OLED can be found for like a grand and a LED one for half of that. That’s sort of been “what a TV costs” for most of this century, so cheaper panels at scale in that price range probably means people go for the bigger one they can get in that price range unless they have some hard space limitations.

Yes.

I mean, for one thing, that’s a misrepresentation. You don’t need a behavioral scientist to figure out that “come back tomorrow for another reward” is a good engagement tool. For another, it’s a misnomer, because that’s not a dark pattern, it’s a deliberate, out-in-the-open design that is transparent about how it works.

But do I think that people freaking out about engagement tools they don’t like while giving functionally similar ones they do like a pass is a moral panic?

100%, absolutely yes.

There’s a reason why the PEGI rep talking to Eurogamer clarifies that this specific wording would absolutely have unintended consequences and they’re limiting the age ratings impact and leaning on content descriptors instead:

“There was some discussion here,” he added. “Some people pointed out that these are features that make the game engaging and fun - this is enriching the game experience similar to a cliffhanger in a Netflix series. So we mostly want to inform parents about this, because there’s no reason why we should give Animal Crossing a very high rating. So this is going to stick to a PEGI 7 but it will have a descriptor that explains this. The exact language of the descriptors still needs to be figured out.”

So yes. Slippery slope, moral panic, will somebody think of the children stuff.

EVER is a long time.

The current implementation? Not unless they stoip training along the same lines they currently are. I think there’s some value, and you can access it pretty easily with the open source freely available models that are out there and some semi-decent hardware, but hundreds of billions to trillions in revenue for multiple corporations? Nah.

They’ll maaaaybe mitigate it by shifting people away from home computing and into connected systems, but I suspect the moment the bubble pops or hardware production levels off with their current demand people will end up realizing they can run 90% of what’s being offered in a gaming laptop from 2020.

Myeh. I think they mostly do fine, but they’re certainly not perfect. These are reasonable, but some of the stuff they’re saying about it is factually incorrect, too (like I said, there ARE age-based commerce lockouts in games already despite their statements).

All they need to do to be functional is have a modicum of consistency and at least be reactive to feedback. The Balatro thing sucked, but they did correct it. Some of these changes seem to be specifically a reaction to the Balatro thing, in fact.

See, I have a real issue with the “12 year olds (or anyone, really)” bit there in juxtaposition to all the pushback on OS age verification.

The gaming community has spent the past decade and change doing the exact same moral panic routine that anti-game violence crusaders did in the 90s and are in the process of finding out why it’s a bad idea.

Age ratings and content warnings? Awesome. Gating content and design concepts on moral grounds? Not that.

It doesn’t need to be too specific, in that PEGI actually reviews the products it rates. You get to send them a preview and then talk to them about the rating.

I also think some of the stuff Eurogamer is reporting is weird, or maybe PEGI is just not aware of some tools? For instance, null

A game will be able to reduce this PEGI rating to 7 if it contains in-game controls that allow you to turn spending off by default. As Bosmans noted, these systems don’t really exist yet, but the hope is this change will incentivise them to be developed.

Is not actually true. Many games do include turning spending off based on the user’s reported age or whether they’re on a child account (Nintendo and Sony both support this as a feature, I believe).

So there is some confusing stuff going on here, but it all seems mostly reasonable to me.

Well, cool, then. It’s a genuine struggle to find a 32 inch TV of any decent quality these days.

But by far the most popular TV size today is 65 inch, which as far as I know isn’t available as a PC monitor at all, and even 32/40 inch PC monitors with a similar feature set can be as expensive or significantly more expensive than an equivalent-sized TV. That’s probably partially due to the focus on speed and responsiveness and partially due to the whole… you know, monetizing your data and selling ads thing.

The difference is the LG TV has a computer already in it. Otherwise the panels are pretty similar.

But some types (and especially sizes) of panels are hard to find in “dumb” PC monitors and vice versa. You can (maybe) find a 42 inch TV, but I’m not aware of a 65 inch display without TV features, let alone any larger sizes.

This is not it. Not only is there a microinverter and a breaker there to address that issue, but my understanding as a layman is the load in the circuit is down to how much you’re drawing (i.e. if you’re generating 1200 behind the microinverter and pulling 1500 you’re pulling 1500 through the circuit, not 2700).

The bigger fire hazard here is the battery many of these come with for storage, honestly.

That’s not to say there isn’t a bit of a risk. You need to be careful if you need to do something in the installation that you disable both the grid breaker and the microinverter. Otherwise it’s entirely possible for the grid safety to blow and the inverter to keep pumping power into your house. But as the previous poster says, there’s a reason these are legal to install in apartments all over Europe, and it’s not just European grids being set for higher amps. FWIW, most of these kits come with 800W max out. My understanding is they’re perfectly fine to use as a cost mitigation and they’ll keep your fridge going in a blackout but no, they won’t be constantly tripping your fuse.

I mean… good luck finding a 65 inch PC monitor.

That does seem like a bit of a downside.

I keep thinking back to all the conversations with alleged leftists here on how they were both the same and Biden was too soft on Israel, which disqualified Harris and at least Trump was running on ending foreign wars.

Still haven’t seen any “oh, wow, yeah, that’s way worse than I thought it’d be, I was kinda wrong on that one”, either.

I know I should not be pushing the issue in hopes that they quietly show up for the midterms, but at this point US politics is not worth engaging with and you can only take so many middle class cosplayers smugly calling you a naive centrist for even entertaining a gradient of madness between US political factions before you start getting flashbacks the circling of the drain speeds up.

In places with a strong Apple presence, maybe. Android, and Samsung specifically, are very much in a position of absolute dominance of the market in many regions. Samsung phones have no “selling points”, they are the default choice.

The future of what?

I mean, most people won’t know or care, and there are plenty of worse things Samsung has done in the past decade. I stopped buying their stuff for those reasons after the S10. I’m sad to report they don’t seem to have noticed or shown the adequate amount of remorse.

I can’t believe I walked into this comment one hour after it was made in a 9 month old zombie thread. I haven’t even opened this app in days.

Anyway, I do think it’s funny that you said Morrowind when I was comparing it to Oblivion, because it just goes to make my point: this is about age and where specifically you set the focus of your nostalgia goggles.

You give the jank and smaller scope and jank of Morrowind a pass because it’s weird and was advanced at the time, but probably think Oblivion traded visuals for a more boring setting and truncated world, which was the criticism at the time. I think Daggerfall was doing some crazy sci-fi stuff in 1996 and just making a console RPG was a step back for Morrowind, which was the criticism at the time, and I bet plenty of people are more than happy to be nostalgic about Oblivion. People tend to think stuff holds up depending on how into it they were when it came out.

I absolutely don’t understand Calibre at all. That’s been my point all along.

I can tell you that I’ve actively tried to avoid Calibre when setting up a self-hosted ebook library and I’m currently chugging along with my Calibre-web install.

Turns out, somebody is forcing me to use Calibre, because I promise if I could have stuck with the half a dozen attempts at having a ebook library handle my pre-existing directory structure I wouldn’t have wasted a day having Calibre ingesting and duplicating it all, then manually checking that everything came over before feeling safe enough to delete the original repository.

Because that’s how it still works as of today, as it turns out.

And again, Calibre gets no more respect from me than… I don’t know, Canva. I owe neither of them anything and if I happen to have a bad time using any part of it I feel super happy and safe sharing that on whatever venue seems applicable with as much sarcasm as I see fit. Software is software and end user criticism is end user criticism. I’m being exceedingly articulate and respectful about it, by those standards, speaking with full understanding of what the bad version of this looks and feels like.

Hah. I’m old enough to watch the norms play Street Fighter II The World Warrior.

All my joints ache. Even the ones you didn’t know were joints.

Hah. You get the “FOSS gets to be crap because you can’t do it yourself” cop out often, but rarely when you haven’t actually complained about it.

I mean, there are a ton of Calibre alternatives, the point everybody is making here is that a bunch of them don’t get enough support or stick to Calibre conventions anyway because Calibre is at the ground floor of the entire thing and has sort of metastasized into a de facto standard architecture. I don’t even know that you could make a commercial Kindle alternative and not at least support Calibre conventions at this point. It’s like trying to not use HDMI anymore, and for similar reasons.

Unless you’re Kovid Goyal (made me look that up and man, what a rough name to have in the 2020s), I don’t see how that connects to your response at all. And even if you were, honestly. I’ve seen some of the other stuff the guy has done and said. I’m not sure he’d take it as an insult and I don’t mean it as one. The man made the piece of software he needed the way he wanted, which is very much not universal. It just happens to now be the core of entire chunk of the ebook industry that isn’t made by Amazon.com Inc., much to my annoyance.

But since I’m at it, if your software is annoying people have no need to hide their anger or contempt for the ways in which it is annoying, even if it’s FOSS. If you put it out there don’t be mad when end users act like end users. People who stumble upon a piece of software and try to use don’t need to do an audit on your accounts and licenses to know if they are allowed to be mad at the stuff that’s annoying them. FOSS competes with commercial software in equal terms, as far as end users are concerned. Some of the ways it competes have to do with privacy, security, code access and lack of fees, but all the other ways, including UX, polish and feature set, still apply.

Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it’s old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.

It’s not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there’s all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.

I’ve been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it’s weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.

There’s a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.

A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it’s inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.

See also: Gnome.