MudMan

When the product is the content or the features rather than the platform this chart is useless.

You don’t sit down and go “I’m going to stream video”, you go “I’m gonna watch Star Trek” or “Hey, there’s a new season of Severance”. It’s the same with chat and social media. It’s not “I’m going to instant message”, it’s “I’ll text mom”.

You use what you gotta use. You don’t decouple from US big tech by boycotting it, you decouple by having EU big tech (at which point you’ve fixed nothing) or by competing with them with a different standard, which is possible but very, very hard and way outside the typical thought processes and organization patterns of most of these alternatives.

See also: why Bluesky entirely replaced Mastodon as a Twitter alternative despite showing up a year late with no pre-existing working standard.

This chart is less “yay let’s make things better” and more “woof, things are dire”.

Bread is coarse and crumbly. Jam is gooey and wet. Surely butter makes it less likely for the jam to stay on. I always assumed it was just for flavour. My grandma used to do butter toast with just a sprinkle of sugar on top, so I never even considered that butter was there for a functional purpose.

Butter on peanut butter is just weird, though, unless you’re buttering before toasting. But then peanut butter is a recent import here, so maybe it’s an old fashioned thing in the places that cultural imperialisted peanut puree unto us. Who’s to say.

All but one of the major papers where I’m from have a print version. I imagine that changes in different countries.

But… yeah, point taken. Over here you can’t even not have a Whatsapp account. Some businesses and transactions just… assume you do and default to it for communication.

An interesting wrinkle is that some of that legacy media is part of this loop, too. You can, in fact, buy new tape players and tapes and you can put new music into them. It’s all just very expensive trendy, hipstery small run collector stuff that costs a lot of money and sells to privileged people with a nostalgic desire for posturing. Which does put a lot of where this message ends up in context, I suppose.

Consistent habits.

The couple of games where I got those types of playtimes were either things I had semi-perpetually running for long periods of time (because reasons) and one game that became my “one hour decompression post-work” for maybe three or four years. Turns out if you do a thing consistently for a couple thousand days in a row it adds up.

They will record full replays automatically you can use to practice and there’s an “undo” button in some modes where you can trade time to fix a mistake.

One of usssssss

Tetris Effect Master Mode

Have you tried Tetris The Grand Master 4? Came out a just a few months ago.

I’m sorry/you’re welcome.

I guess the car thing comes from the use of “pre-computerized”. Cars have had computers in them much longer than they’ve been connected to the Internet by default. I guess my mistake was taking the panel at its word there.

Also, man, I appreciate the alignment, but the “millions of Americans” really made me feel icky. Beyond the moral and political refusal to give Americans primary decisionmaking power on these things, these trends and companies are global. Even in the US you probably would need tens of millions to make a dent, but some of these userbases are in the billions. Millions of Americans decided Facebook was for old people and left it and it’s still the biggest social media platform on the planet by some margin. That’d be the collective inability to gauge scale in a dystopia of global monopolies I was talking about.

That last panel hit me like a truck because… yeah, that’s what people think happens when they do their little personal choice things to pretend they matter.

They really buy like a paper book once and go “ah, yes, Bezos is fuming right now” while he makes another billion.

We have lost all sense of how to influence society and all ability to gauge scale. For all the folksy traditionalism in this (which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?) the Internet has created this entirely disproportionate sense of our footprint on the world and this strip is as much a result of the hyperconnected dystopia as everything it’s complaining about.

In my experience this is extra bad for Americans who, frankly, didn’t need that much of a push to go from their individualist, self-centered perception of society to this vision of sitting on a couch listening to a walkman as activism.

It’s actually much cheaper to buy MKW bundled with the console than standalone. There is really no good reason to buy one without the other unless you’re extremely not into Mario Kart, and in that case there wasn’t a reason to get the Switch 2 until Bananza came out (after the period being reported here).

Clearly the price was less of an issue than people were guessing on the Internet. Which makes sense. The Switch 2 is still cheaper than a Steam Deck OLED, a PS5 Pro or a mid to low range smartphone. People like to compare straight sticker prices, but it’s been quite a ride for hardware prices since Covid.

1 hour?

Is this privacy, security or both? Because honestly, in one hour to normies I don’t think we’d ever get to proselytism of any kind. We’d barely get through explaining MFA properly.

I mean, all due respect to Firefox and adblockers, at that level you’re concerned with people not having “password123” as their single password across all things with no fallbacks. Depending on the demographic you’re talking to if you can get them to not do that and can explain to them what phishing looks like in a world of deepfakes and voice clones you’re doing work.

Yeah, PS2 is standalone business still. And in its defense, PCSX2 is super user friendly as a standalone package and supports most of the shared stuff you’d want from Retroarch anyway.

I guess it kinda is. Some choices are a bit… peculiar.

I’ve just been using it for so long I have no concept of how it reads getting into it for the first time.

It can also be used as a bit of a behind-the-scenes engine in some emulation wrappers, which I guess sort of works around that issue, but hey, that’s definitely a valid concern. Retroarch makes sense if you emulate a ton of systems and want a consistent experience across the board, and it has some nice shared features across all cores, but all of that definitely comes with some complexity.

It’s one of them, and it’s fine, but it’s not what I’ve been using. I’ve been bouncing between PCSX and Beetle and they’re both just fine. I mean, at this point PSX games run on anything.

I don’t know, the PSX is old and well understood enough now that in my head it’s in the bundle of “just do Retroarch” systems along with all the 8 and 16 bit stuff.

I don’t even remember what core I usually run for it. They’re all at least serviceable to great.

It’s not the first weird rant I hear coming out of this project, which I don’t follow otherwise, so it definitely seems like it’s a thing.

I’m not sure I buy your motivations, but hey, I can oblige regardless. What, top three small things from Windows I’d like on Linux and the other way around? Windows to Linux first?

• Hibernation and states across boots. I know people hate Windows power management on laptops, but at least on my last couple of desktops it’s been surprisingly robust. I can come back overnight to the same setup I left open, even if an update ran in the middle. Same windows, tabs, open documents… It even survives booting into Linux and then coming back just fine. KDE is taking some steps in this direction, but they’re a ways away. I hope they progress quickly on it.

• Scaling and multimonitor. It’s way better than it used to be, but there are still a ton of minor annoyances on Linux. KDE in particular has some issues with icon scaling on vertical taskbars, which you’d think would be easy to fix but have been there for a while now. Other pieces of software still struggle with consistent text and headers, too, especially on multimonitor setups with different fractional scaling. Say what you will about Windows’ look and feel (and I will in a sec), the compositing is super robust and flexible.

• Mounts! Network mounts in particular and Samba mounts specifically. You just click on them, authenticate and you can mount them as either a folder or a drive right from the context menu. On Linux, Dolphin will give you access to them the same way within itself, but they won’t be mounted to the fs in a predictable way, so it’s fine for copy/pasting stuff but it’s not good if you want to use them as local folders. And Windows will remember those mounts across sessions, authentication included. On Linux you need to edit fstab manually and keep a plaintext copy of your SMB password. It’s just so smooth on Windows.

So… Linux to Windows next?

• Just the snappy window movement, man. Linux feels so much lighter than Windows for no good reason. I also really like both Gnome’s more Mac-like desktop and KDE’s default “hold shift to tile” window snapping. Windows used to be the gold standard for window management without going full tiling but I’d say I prefer KDE now.

• Vertical taskbars/no taskbars. I don’t understand why Windows decided to force the taskbar to the bottom. It’s just absurd for ultrawide screens and inconvenient for tablets and touchscreens, or for screens with burn-in issues. I’d argue KDE overcorrects. You don’t need to have a dozen different docks per desktop, but it’s definitely better than zero options. And the top bar is great for touch and more reliable than sliding from the bottom edge to pop up a hidden taskbar on Windows.

• Remote desktop everywhere. Gnome in particular has fantastic out-of-the-box support. Windows’ version of this is actually very good, too, but the server is paywalled to the Pro license, which is hard to justify. And hey, I get it, they’re trying to monetize their OS but that’s actually worse, so…

Now, that was a tangent, but if more people want to share their top 3’s I’ll read them. What the hell.

Not how it’s worked with the rest of these features, for the record. I did get click-to-do, which is activated by default (but does nothing unless you trigger it manually). That’s just an entry in their increasingly large wall of “stuff you don’t want switches” in the Settings.

It’s immensely wasteful in terms of dev time, but at the same time, hey, kudos for having all this stuff centralized in the one list, unwieldy as it’s getting (at least there’s a search in there).

I wish we could talk like adults about these things over here, because there’s a ton of interesting nuance to how Windows 11 actually works, rather than the parody version that everybody loves to dunk on. There are some actually good features and choices I’d like to see make the jump to Linux and vice versa, even discounting things like hardware or software support. But nobody ever wants to have that conversation, it’s all just the dopamine hit chase from rooting for the home team (and/or being contrarian about it).

I seem to remember the feature was opt-in, right?

I’d check, but this hasn’t made it to my Copilot+ PC, despite all the fuss.

Youtube very consistently ranks lowest in terms of reacting to reports of hate speech and is a massive vector for it worldwide.

I mean, I have serious doubts about the effectiveness of the measure, but Youtube is a massive contributor to the decline of democracy around the world.

Tiktok, incidentally, has way better stats on addressing hate speech complaints than Youtube. As in, by far. As in, industry leading, so in the exact opposite end of Youtube’s.

What suits?

We are losing the plot here. What lawsuit would you bring to these companies for doing this? As I said elsewhere, antitrust measures, maybe, but that’s the government’s job. These development companies complaining? Could be, but unlikely. There’s probably legalese in their deals to cover this.

What is anybody here getting sued for and who is suing them? People are just saying things.

“You took away my porn by telling a big company that they couldn’t manage payments of products made by a bunch of different tiny companies” is not a thing you can bring in front of a judge. Do we all realize this?

Do people on the Internet think that lawsuits are how you complain when you don’t like something?