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2 yr. ago

  • I'd argue that in those cases the product is straight-up defective. I mean it was falsely advertised. Expecting me to pay returns in that case is absurd.

  • Okay. We need to get clarity here -- if a product is being returned because it just wasn't compatible with the purpose I had in mind? Like pants that don't fit? By all means, charge me for return.

    But if the product is defective? No, you pay for that. You sent me garbage, you owe me 100% money back.

  • I mean for people that are providing a moral defense of this? Yeah, no, fuck them into the sun.

    But from a legal perspective, that's kind of the problem isn't it? Because no kids are involved in the actual production of the images, this creates a huge legal question - isn't this constitutionally protected in countries that have Freedom of Expression/Speech?

    I mean this is obviously vile and this person is a danger to children... but would this be illegal in the USA and Canada and other countries that have freedoms that make it very difficult to prosecute this kind of speech?

    There's also the wrinkle that it's being made of real people. Not just that it's kids in general, but real, actual, specific kids. Most countries have some form of "use of likeness" protections, but that's essentially making this into a copyright dispute, and a pretty grey one at that.

  • I'd say you get better value and a cleaner experience with the lenovomotos.

  • They should put a little WearOS watch screen on the back of a regular-ass smartphone for that.

  • Even for experts the user experience is shit. Too much has to be done manually when the default should be automatic, like fetching before pull, recursing when working with repos that use submodules, allowing mismatched casing on case insensitive filesystems, etc.

  • I mean I remember grinding for loot and levels in FF1.

  • Hey, I liked NES ghostbusters. You got to design your own car, bust ghosts, and worry about your business' finances. Of course I haven played it in over 30 years so I imagine the rose-colored glasses might be a problem.

  • There's an AJ video where they claimed what he describes. It's.... not convincing. In fact it retroactively destroys some of the respect I had for AJ.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/19/what-hit-ahli-hospital-in-gaza

    It tries to use the video from the local cameras to show that the rocket was intercepted.

    From the commentary "That video clearly shows how the iron dome intercepted these rockets"

    But the images it shows don't really back up their claim. We're not really seeing any "intercepted" happening.

  • You didn't even mention some of the best fragmenting stuff with those products. Like now Google Podcasts is being discontinued and rolled into Youtube Music. Or when SMS messaging was rolled into Hangouts... and then split back out into Google Messages.

    I own a WearOS device (Galaxy Watch 4). If you want to see Google at its most hilariously incoherent, buy one of those. Youtube Music for my watch is spectacularly broken. I thought it would be cool to go for a run with just my watch instead of having my phone clonking around in my pocket. Lol, nope, can't download playlists, and can't download any of my uploaded albums that start with letters after the letter "L" because it can't list more than 100.

  • Yup. And Overwatch PVE has never been good... I know a lot of players were pumped for it, but we've never seen any evidence they had a good plan for how to make it fun. They had lots of zany ideas for powers and RPG elements and whatnot, but all the PVE content for Overwatch released so far has been mediocre-to-bad.

    Imho telling the story through PVE has never been a good idea for OW. It's not a PVE game. Finding some way to tell the story in PVP, even with massive ludonarrative disconnect, would have been better.

  • I watched the al Jazeera vid where they pushed that theory and it's completely incoherent. I honestly lost a lot of respect for AJ there.

  • I mean I like Jeff but the OW1 eras of pretty bad gameplay and pretty long time waiting fixes happened on his watch. He designed a crazy fun game, but I think his stewardship in making it stay balanced and various and fun once you get good at it was a bit more lacking.

  • I like Role Queue. Single-tank was poorly thought out, I agree.

    Fundamentally, I think OW copied some things from TF2 without understanding how they interact with lower playercounts. They copied TF2's long rollouts and respawn timers, but didn't realize that this makes death way too costly in a small-team game. In 5v5 at a good level, a single kill can basically end the teamfight. If they want to drop playercount, they need to find a way to fix that. Imho that's why so many of their "Arcade" modes play with alternate respawning mechanics, like freezetag or the silly "StarWatch" thing.

    Also they wanted big flashy ults without thinking how that interacts with the rest of the game. There's a reason that most competitive twitch-FPS games don't have nukes on the serious maps.

    Imho, if I were running OW2?

    1. For competitive: 4v4. 1 heal, 2dps, 1 tank. All healers share some kind of special rapid-respawn passive, like they can respawn at the Tank or something. Make up for it by reworking more DPS classes into having off-heal powers like Sombra and Soldier. Remove the rapid-respawn passive in open-queue-style games.
    2. Nerf the ults in general. Either slower build or just lower-power. Although if you go slower-build, you need to come up with a sane way to have the charge carry between rounds, which would be tricky to get right.
    3. For casual: 8v8. Double the 4v4. 4dps 2tank 2heal. There's a reason TF2 played 12v12 casually and 6v6 competitively. If you're farting around trying things out, you don't want to be the lynchpin of your team.

    Then the number of heroes and the popularity of the roles reflects the number in play - there are twice as many DPS heroes to choose from, twice as many DPS players, and twice as many on the team.

  • The problem with self-organizing is you get things like the Smash community, where the worst people imaginable take over the competitive level and then you've got a huge reputational problem on your hands. It's a delicate balance between supporting what the community develops on its own and going top-down and forcing it.

  • they needed more heroes from the beginning

    Imho, the problem is the reverse. The game had enough heroes, it's just that too many existing heroes were boring, underpowered, or (if they got sufficient power) game-breaking, and so they were too hesitent to say "this power doesn't work with our format, we should get rid of it". Instead it was tweaking numbers. There's a place for tweaking numbers, but when stuff fundamentally breaks your chosen format (eg. ana antiheal) you have to take a firmer hand. But they let game-breaking powers like Mercy rez ult or just too damned many barriers sit instead of saying "okay, this isn't working, let's throw this bad idea out completely". But of course, gamers scream if their best girl gets touched, so they're really hesitent to make big moves.

    Plus, too many of those heroes were damage heroes considering the team can only have 2 of those.

  • Force manufacturers to offer official replacement parts for 10 years with no profit margin, at least for common repairs like batteries, displays/glass, cameras etc. (basically everything except the logic board I guess).

    I don't think this solves the root problem.

    Let's say you buy an entry-level phone. You bought it pretty late in life, so the $200 phone was only $150 for a brand new phone! 2 years later you drop it and its screen is broken.

    The phone was already worthless when you dropped it. The device was past its support lifetime. It's $40 on eBay.

    And a replacement screen+digitizer? Sure, so let's say "at cost" they charge like $50 after shipping. Then another $40 for labour for an expert to do the job. You've now spent twice what the phone was worth.

    Imho the real problem is the modern glue-sealed phones and short support-lifetimes. I did repairs on old pre-glue devices and it was easy. I've swapped out laptop keyboards, replaced screens, etc. I've had old devices that last forever, the only real flaw that appears is short battery life.

    If you made phones easy to open, swapping out batteries and screens would be easy, and that would naturally create more demand for affordable swappable parts. But right now, that's an "expert only" operation because heat-gunning a phone is difficult and dangerous to get right - I've killed more than a few devices attempting it (the alternative was the dumpster so it was zero-risk).

  • I've already discussed my Software Laws policy, but for the hardware side:

    Simple and nasty law. Make a symbol. An ugly symbol, like the ♻️, or the UL symbol. That symbol says "this device contains a battery that contains toxic chemicals and must be disposed of properly. Make it clear: the symbol must be externally visible on the back of your beautiful iphone. Big 2-inch mess bigger than the corporate logo.

    But you can make it easily removable! Just let the user pop it right off! They learned that the device contains an e-waste battery, and now they know.

    But the trick: It shall be illegal to make the symbol easier to remove than safely removing the battery. Does removing the battery require a heatgun and pry-tools? Then so does the e-waste symbol. Does the battery require a screw-driver? Then so does the e-waste symbol.

    Implementation can be trivial, if the back-panel has both the e-waste symbol and provides access to the battery. Then replacing the back solves both problems! Or taking off the flat part of the back and flipping it over, hiding the e-waste symbol.