This is what came to mind for me too.

It is so much fun to play co-op with my kid. Then I can act old and describe all the gaming industry references that only I get.

I’ve also been to Sweden two whole times, so I get to act all sophisticated and worldly while describing the real world Goatenburg.

From inside, “Made in the USA” feels like it’s going to be us chained to paying 2x the cost for wildly inferior products. See for example, cars.

I did already get myself some Surface Shield which is exactly that kind of lanolin based protectant, after also reading about some of the more hardcore stuff like POR-15 that I’d worry could trap water or hide damage.

I’ve used it a bit on my car near where I have some wheels removed to work on the brakes, and tried it on some garden tools.

Impressions are very good and I totally plan to cover the underside of my car with this stuff when finishing up work on it. Just not the exhaust I imagine.

DONE, lol.

I kinda want to get something with a manual transmission again, so it will very likely be a japanese brand.

I’m in the US where this is coming soon enough. My car is a 2012 which seems like kind of a sweet spot, but it’s not going to last forever especially with our winters and road salt and pot holes.

I didn’t plan to buy a new car any time soon but have been thinking about my eventual next choice. All this BS has me wondering whether it’s better to get something soon without the next level of surveillance, or wait a few years and see how bad it is in practice and how it can be disabled.

That 2012 I mentioned is fun to drive, has low mileage for its age, and is fuel efficient, plus I have renewed my love of working on my own vehicles after not doing so for a decade or two. I’m currently doing work on the brakes. Maybe I’ll just have to try to make it live forever, and not give any more money to the whole damn industry as long as possible. That’s the most economically and environmentally friendly option, after all.

It sounds like a lot of good thought and design went into it.

The biggest problem was/is always going to be consumers wary of trusting a tech company not to mess it up because of greed.

I think it’s fairly easy to imagine what that would be like, given the limited examples you can see with a VR headset with pass-through. It could be pretty sweet for people to have the option of a digital overlay on reality that’s under their own control.

What’s missing are the extremely powerful but also extremely miniaturized and efficient hardware (imagine just constant inside-out tracking of some kind with the storage to remember the 3D layout of basically everywhere you go, but also with 12-24 hour battery life and not generating a noticeable amount of heat with a tiny surface area), and the open technologies and/or lack of enshittification. Who is going to sell such a device but won’t stuff it with ads, surveillance, and paywalls?

The closest we’ve seen is Apple’s headset that was still just a high end VR headset with passthrough and was thousands of dollars while still being locked down.

I’d say this is more like the middle of the end, with the beginning of the end being the Meta logo on them.

Useful details, thanks.

I’ll just point out that they/we did not have a system like that, but just promises of it from a tech giant. (except of course for whatever they had designed internally up until that time) So even as somebody who doesn’t really sell games, I get why people weren’t thrilled with the idea of microsoft being the ever-present broker in the transactions.

I specifically remember that their plan was essentially CD Keys. You’d buy a physical game and it would have a code inside, or the discs would have unique identifiers that force linked to your account, or whatever.

So yeah, essentially physical media with a digital license. If you were going to be able to resell your game it was going to have to go through microsoft, or maybe you could lend a friend your disc and that lets them buy their own license for a small discount to play it.

It won’t really affect me, but I understand the appeal of a physical artifact servicing as time game’s license for those who like to lend, sell, trade, library, etc.

And those same benefits are why the corporations can’t wait to do away with it. It’s been quite a while since Microsoft tried the same thing and people freaked out enough that they reversed course.

Oh boy, just what we need, corpo-wars to go along with the nation-wars.

It would be nice to see them hurting each other instead of the general populace, but we all know that they do collateral damage to innocents even when weapons aren’t involved.

You love to see it.

Unfortunately, with the state of this country I could also see aggressive militarized private security getting more popular around this shit.

That is the most dystopian American-sounding thing I’ve heard all day, especially considering the source.

In this context I expect that “Economic Freedom” means “unregulated, social darwinist, robber baron playground, law of the jungle laissez-faire capitalism.”

I wonder if there’s any chance of all the tech speculation helping to fund electrical grid upgrades (including grid scale storage for renewables) that actually benefit regular human society after the bubble pops.

Absolutely. I think many people would actually be surprised at how big regular old goldfish can get in a pond with adequate space, food, and water quality.

On top of being in the carp family, they can actually produce hybrid offspring with carp (koi), though I think those offspring are sterile.

Source: have koi pond. Have given away dozens of chonky goldfish to other pond people.

Yeah! I was already concerned that people’s eyes would glaze over and they’d skim the latter 3/4 of my message and miss some important connected dots.

Now we’ve all been trained to detect and reject AI slop for a couple years, so the whole “here’s the whole situation described in a single message” strategy is right out the window.

I even like using em dashes sometimes. :/

At least I don’t use emojis in place of bullet points. The more you know. ✨

The trump administration has determined that it is critical to national security that americans play all new games at medium graphics settings or lower.

legal, deliberately stressing you to get your attention shouldn’t be.

I’m thinking of a couple of entire industries that could be banned or destroyed to help people’s brains.

I wonder if anybody has told Micron about what happens when customers sign a contract but then declare bankruptcy shortly after.