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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • Moving fast doesn’t have to mean poor workmanship.

    To make an analogy, if you want to be able to make a cup of coffee fast, you need to make sure that the coffee beans, the water, and the brewer are all near each other, that there is electricity and that the water is running. These are all things that enable you to move fast, but they don’t decrease quality, if anything they increase quality because you aren’t wasting time and effort tackling obstacles unrelated to brewing.

    Which is in fact the point of the article. That you should make sure you have a good development environment, with support systems and processes, so that you can work effectively even if your developers are not savants. Rather than trying to hire people who are good enough to do a decent job even in the worst environments.



  • What forms of media are you taking about that have short life spans?

    I think that as storage density goes up and price goes down, what used to be cumbersome and expensive amounts of data become easily manageable. So the only reasons we loose data will be business or political. Which will also decrease as there’s now money in buying failing platforms.

    But yeah, I’m also happy none of the social media I created when I was young still exists, and the platforms are buried by the sands of time. Having everything you do on the internet stay around forever feels like a nightmare.


  • I’m wondering if it was always this stupid and we just kind of assume otherwise when we look back because we focus on the big serious things that happened.

    And because it’s actually more comforting to imagine Hitler as a political mastermind, rather than accept that a fucking idiot could rise to power and bumble us into world war and genocide.



  • People don’t walk around telling each other they use an “ASUS ROG Strix OLED XG27ACDNG” either. They’ll say they have a “27 inch OLED”, or possibly a “27 inch 1440p OLED from Asus”.

    You could use the sub-brand and say you had an “Asus ROG Strix” if you wanted, but all that might tell someone is that it’s from Asus’ midrange gaming segment.

    The unique id is simply handy to keep the many models apart. Asus has 217 displays listed on their (US) store. They have 14 different 27" 1440p displays under the ROG Strix brand alone, three of which are OLEDs and you better not get them confused because they use different OLED technology.

    Would it be better if they had more diverse product names instead? I’m not so sure. With so many models you’d probably end up with something like the “ASUS ROG Strix Centurion Speed² Ultra+ Black”, and I don’t think that’s any easier than “XG27ACDNG”, which at least is short.


  • And of course it’s updated with new versions a few times every year or so. So the Deathstalker Pro from the end of 2024 is actually better in many respects than the Deathstalker Ultra from 2022, but you’ll have to check the fine print on the box to make sure you’re getting the updated QD-OLED version, and not the older AMOLED version. If it has 220 Hz rather than 240 Hz it should be the newer model. Unless you live in South America, in which case they all use WOLED displays, though the specifications are the same so you have no way of knowing without opening it.


  • This is exactly what the companies try to do. For example ASUS has (in order of increasing fancyness) TUF, ROG Strix and ROG Swift. While MSI has G, MAG, MPG and MEG.

    For each step up you can assume that it will be more cutting edge, have more extras and a higher price. But why would you care? You want to know if the image is good, if it has the features you want and what it costs. You likely don’t care what price segment it was originally intended for.

    As time goes by, what was once expensive premium features become mainstay. So an older top-of-the-line display might be similar in price and performance to a new budget display. Which is better? Well you’ll have to read some reviews and ideally look at it to figure that out. And then you need to know the exact model number of the ones you are comparing. Good thing theres a compact alphanumeric string that uniquely identifies each model ;)


  • You actually gave a good example for why these brand names are useless.

    How many doors does a Honda Accord have? What type of engine does it have?

    It’s impossible to answer even these very basic questions, because there are so many different Honda Accords that the name could refer to almost anything. It could be a station wagon with a diesel engine, a four-door hybrid sedan, a hatchback, a SUV etc.

    In fact monitors do usually have fancy brand names like Predator, ROG Swift or UltraGear that function exactly like the Accord name, giving you some hint as to where the manufacturer think it belongs in their product stack. They just aren’t useful for identifying a specific model, and since there are so many different models, you need the alphabet soup to make sure we are talking about the same thing.






  • I used to do the same, but I lost a lot of confidence in GOG after they retroactively restricted their cloud saves to 200 MB.

    My hundred-hour Witcher 3 save is exactly the kind of thing I want backed up, but that’s no longer possible. And the very low limit they set, and the urgency with which they started deleting the very data they were expected to keep safe, reeks of a desperation to save money that makes me hesitant to invest more in their ecosystem.

    I really want them to succeed though, and I think they have the right idea with Galaxy. Even Epic giving me games for free doesn’t make me actually use their client or store.

    But somehow the obvious idea of forming a consortium to develop open standards and implementations for game clients, doesn’t seem like something that will ever happen.


  • I think the key was that Steam wasn’t created to make money, but to solve problems they themselves had, like “How do we get new versions of Counter Strike out to all these players?”

    Then as Valve wasn’t the only company having these problems, the solution could easily be sold to others.

    If the other companies really wanted to crack Steam’s near-monopoly, the solution would be to tackle the problems associated with not having all your games on Steam. Work together on a open-source launcher supporting all stores, similar to GOG Galaxy. First make something useful that tackles an unsolved problem, then you can make money off it when it becomes successful.

    Instead they go in just trying to make a buck, and end up just being worse versions of Steam.

    That ended up being a bit of a rant, but I’m frustrated at their shortsighted market strategies :p