At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud, does anyone ever wonder whether humanity is just moving too fast sometimes?
Centuries of slow, gradual, non-linear progress. Then the industrial revolution, electrification, computers, the Internet. The past couple hundred years have had incredible and ever-accelerating progress that has drastically improved our understanding of all sorts of sciences. You can find all sorts of global stats that show how humanity has benefitted from this time. But there have been drawbacks. Pollution and environmental destruction, climate change, rampant capitalism and exploitation. And now we have AI on the horizon: will it upend society or go the way of 3D TV? Are we at the point where we need to cool off “innovation” and take more time to figure out the things that we already have?
And I think that applies to much lower-stakes technology like what’s referenced in this post too. Looking at videogames: there were huge advances from 8-bit to 16-bit. From 2D to 3D. From CD to DVD. The jump from PS3 to PS4 and 360 to Xbone was still noticeable, but not huge. But did we really need a PS5 and Xbox Series? The Switch is definitely past it’s prime, but is the rumored 2028 PS6 really going to be necessary? The jump from 1080p to 4k is nice, but nowhere near as significant as the previous ones. I can’t imagine 8k ever becoming more than a niche application. Higher frame rates are nice, but I think anything higher than 120FPS is the same as 8K: always reserved for niche and enthusiast use cases.
Or you can look at phones. The market is finally slowing down, but for a while phones were only built to last 2 years. To the point where they stopped making user-removable batteries, and they’ve even stopped including SD cards on a lot of models. I have several old HTC and LG phones that are just as functional as when I bought them, but they can’t handle web browsing and most apps are no longer compatible with their operating systems. I could jump through hoops to install something like LineageOS, but that’s relying on a community of volunteers to help to circumvent the restrictions put in place by manufacturers who do not even make phones anymore.
How many different storage formats existed in all of history prior to 1900? Maybe a dozen? How many have been retired since then? Laser disc, 8-track, VHS, cassette, wax cylinders. Vinyl came, went, and has kind of come back again. CD’s peaked in the early 2000’s and are a fraction of what they used to be. Best Buy and Sal-Mart are going to stop selling DVD’s and Blu-Rays next year. Floppy drives have disappeared from computers, and internal optical drives are almost wiped out. Cars are replacing CD’s with Bluetooth and streaming services.
Humanity seems to be moving towards all science and culture being stored on the servers for a handful of huge corporations. All our science and culture at the whim of a billionaire. Library budgets are under attack. Copyright laws get more and more draconian, to the point where even saying something about an IP that it’s owner doesn’t like can result in that content being stricken from all but the most niche platforms.
I applaud organizations like Wikipedia and Archive.org, and of course all of the pirates out there. I’m trying to personally hoard enough physical media to satisfy myself through my lifetime. But it all just seems like a battle humanity is destined to lose with itself.
Honestly maintaining or figuring out a migration method for these dinosaur systems would be my ideal job. I just love tinkering with these relics of the past but have no idea where to find this kind of work
I don’t think folks remember how truly shitty Nintendo‘s online service was when it was free. The fact is these companies will not put meaningful resources into them unless they are directly generating revenue. I hate it, but that’s reality.
It’s still shitty even now that you pay for it. The free retro emulation doesn’t offset the connection issues and massive lag, nor does it excuse the god awful store.
I played online on the Wii quite a lot, it was fine. Smash bros a ton, 007 Golden Eye and The Conduit, and good old MH Tri.
Literally a thousand hours in that last one alone most of which was spend online. Did you not use Ethernet? Wi-Fi was shitty for sure, because everybody had shitty wi-fi back then. (I’m also not saying it was amazing, but it was free and serviceable)
I really don’t see how this is any better, they are using the same peer to peer netcode they always have. Maybe the general quality of Internet has gone up, but there is nothing I can point to that Nintendo has fundamentally changed between previous free MP and NSO, except giving some ROMS and DLC occasionally. Smash bros is still a lag fest with wireless players, splatoon still delays collision detection, Mario kart still has weird rubber banding and desync… they just slapped a price tag on it.
i’ve been in relationships where someone passive-aggressively refuses to communicate (or simply through incompetence doesn’t know how, and/or came to believe that I was supposed to already intuitively know their position and condition)
One such relationship recently ended on thankfully good terms.
One such relationship was years ago and never quite got off the ground because I was NOT going to play along with the stupid games.
Several others got up through the initial courtship phases but then disintegrated as I realized that my partner at the time was not going to engage me on an honest basis.
These people are real. They’re really out there. And they’re either destined to be vaguely miserable forever, or someone is going to have to teach them and make them intensely miserable in the immediacy until they learn - and not many people have the patience or psychological energy to guide someone (who is kicking and screaming objections about how they shouldn’t have to change or grow or adapt because they’re special and perfect just as they are) through establishing a basic understanding of communication.
When people are adults, it’s their job to learn the things and seek the knowledge and self improve. That thinking that you can save someone, that one will always get you in hot water. You just focus on improving you. And leaving the drift wood behind.
There are companies that still sell new machines of archaic operating systems for this reason. I’d really recommend anyone in the situation of justletmeremember to look into it, all that stuff could be backed up and given redundancies pretty inexpensively considering the risk.
And yeah, it’s really common. There is way more horrifying applications than research that rely on legacy machines. Everyone has heard that nuclear weapons required floppy disks until very recently, but it wasn’t some isolated case. Stuff like that is all over the military despite the insane amount of money it steals.
I honestly don’t understand why anyone buys major-publisher games anymore. There are indie games that are at least as good and that come without the garbage.
The games industry got fucking huge and most people are just mindless consumers who buy whatever is advertised to them. It sounds crazy, but people buy these $70 games, buy the 'deluxe' editions for almost double, then buy loads of cosmetics in game. And they do it every year. All these companies are going to do is milk this mindset, so triple A will never change.
Indie, as you say, is the way to go. Actual games made by passionate people, with (most of the time) no bullshit attached.
Why mindless? Why can’t I enjoy a multi-player arcade shooter without being called mindless?
I almost exclusively play AAA games, with the occasional indie in between. The indies I play are basically all the famous ones that got really big.
It’s my entertainment, my time. Why call me mindless? The only issue Lemmy has, this whole “rebel without a cause” attitude against everything that is mainstream :)
A friend of mine is a top level director on a recent AAA game that wasn’t very well received. I can assure you, he was very passionate about his game.
Fair enough. Even if I like cod, I’ll still bitch about the campaign this time around. It’s not original and not exciting at all. I still don’t regret getting it for the mp/zombies.
Sorry, I wasnt calling people mindless, you are right that anyone can enjoy whatever they want. I was referring to 'mindless consumerism', where people arent really frugal and just buy whatever thing the big companies want to you to buy.
And the passion thing, obviously theres a lot of passionate people at big studios, but the leads of such places usually dont and bring it all down in the name of profit for them and their shareholders. Triple A is a money making machine, there's not a lot of innovation there anymore and a lot of the games are very unimaginative, regardless of how passionate the individual developers are.
Most indie games just don’t draw me in. They’re usually missing some major mechanic that ruins it for me. I also enjoy quality graphics, and in my experience, that’s the first thing to go with an indie developer.
That’s not to say I haven’t found some I enjoy (bastion, sea of stars, stardew valley), but most of the time they just don’t do it for me.
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