> In many countries car is not something essential thanks to public transport.
Is that true in many entire countries? It seems like most of the countries I've visited, there are usually places within the country where transit isn't very good, and if you point at a map and say "I want to visit this part of the county" the answer is "You should rent a car, because there's no good transit connection there."
I absolutely believe this to be true in many cities, though.
That's what gets me too. I've been tasked previously to help a young relative with budgeting, and there were so many "It's only $x a month!" items we found that it was ridiculous.
It's pushed me in the other direction, away from subscriptions. For most things, if I see that it's being sold as a subscription, I just walk away. Obviously this doesn't work for internet service, etc., but it's possible to avoid for most things.
I'm glad it was straightforward when it come up for me. In my case, I was dealing with an airline based in my county of residence, and I just emailed them saying that the law says I get the money and they just said "okay, we're sending it" and then I had the money.
For those asserting that Kimi identifying as another model is evidence of distillation, is this evidence that Claude was distilled from Chinese models?
I agree. I honestly think it's strange that it's often viewed as "good enough" to get a refund.
If I paid $5 for a movie, I did that because I want the movie more than the $5. If I didn't, I would've kept the $5. You giving me $5 and taking the movie away is just replacing the thing I value more with the thing I value less.
The other issue is that, if I paid $5 for a movie 10 years ago, that's now more than $5 due to inflation. If you give me $5 back, you're short.
I do always think it's interesting that the "bad" guys like EA had, for a long time, much friendlier store terms (refunds) than Valve did.
I also never thought that it was very nice of Valve to historically have security practices that are so bad that a group of security experts wrote them a letter begging for better security practices.
The guy in charge of it has demonstrated that he'll cut people off from accessing it on a whim, though, so it's not really cheap and easy access for the entire globe. It's access for the selected people.
If you want to see it outside the context of tech forums, you can look up the industry reports and see the numbers yourself. There are some media types that are dropping, obviously, but there are multiple types of physical media that have seen notable growth recently.
> I doubt that they will go back to where Sony are now.
I agree. However, I do think they would get some positive attention (and some accompanying sales) if they were to backtrack and announce a console more like the 360.
It feels doable if they care to do it. Physical media should still be viable for holding all the game data for a while longer. Blurays can manage up to 128 GB, and I think the average game install size is ~60GB right now, giving most games some room to grow.
The biggest issue with a strategy like that is that they're, like you said, pushing digital-only hard already, and they're also trying to save money, so the idea of spending more money to make future consoles with disk drives, and to make disks, is unlikely to appeal to them.
It is a shame, though, because it seems like the Xbox 360 will have been widely viewed as peak Xbox until the end of Xbox.
Xbox has an interesting opportunity going forward, that I expect they'll fumble.
Interest in physical media has actually been on the upswing, and, with Sony announcing their plans to abandon physical media, it feels like MS has a chance be the "good guys" like what Sony did to MS when MS threatened to ruin physical media prior to the Xbox One release.
However, I'm expecting Microsoft to simply follow Sony's path, because I think they are already going down a path that favors digital-only, and I also think they just don't care to distinguish themselves. It seems like Xbox's claim to fame for the past few years is "It has game pass, and it can play a lot of the same games PlayStation can."
Yeah, it definitely requires some luck or planning. I mostly meant that all simply to say, I think that, with Blu-ray physical media, the odds are pretty good you'll be able to watch it in the future, via some means. Right now, used PS3s and Blu-ray players are pretty cheap, used PS4s that haven't been updated in a few years are available, etc. There are ways to play Blu-rays even if all the supporting online infrastructure is shut down, even without resorting to breaking any DRM or pirating. That's a contrast to movies on services like PSN.
Funny enough, if you keep your PS4 on an old version and jailbreak it, you can just go in and activate the license yourself. No internet or servers required. Turns out, you can also pirate games if you do this. Piracy wins again?
> Sony was the principle architect of Blu-Ray, if even they can’t build a system that comes with decryption keys then who can?
The even weirder thing is that Sony did build this, with the PS3 and their standalone players. They just skimped on the PS4 (and I assume PS5).
I think Sony just really started half-assing the video player part of their consoles after the PS3. For example, the PS4 Pro, which is specifically advertised for 4K capabilities, cannot play 4K Blu-rays. In contrast, when Microsoft updated the Xbox One, they added UHD Blu-ray support to every model, even the cheapest one.
For what it's worth, if it was a PS4, they only require internet access the first time a Blu-ray is played. And, I don't mean the first time a specific Blu-ray is played, but the first time any Blu-ray video is played.
My guess is that Sony didn't want to pay the licensing fees for every PS4, so, the first time you play a Blu-ray, it connects to Sony to get a license. From then on, you can play them without internet.
The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, except their stuff. It's okay to hammer some random website with AI crawlers, ignoring robots.txt, and causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
Games at a certain point in their life are cheaper on console. At least, physically. I remember being shocked at this years ago, because I expected PC to be cheapest. But, a few years back, I went through and looked up a bunch of AAA games that were about 6 months old, and a lot of them were cheaper to buy physical, on console, from Amazon or another retailer. Cheaper than they'd ever been available for on PC, according to IsThereAnyDeal.
I think it's partly because, on console, the sellers / devs have an incentive to reduce the price of physical copies, because they need to compete with used copies. They killed used copies on PC, so they don't need to compete with that market.
Doesn't Steam do that too? For a long time, offline mode in Steam didn't work for many people, and, when it did, it wasn't reliable for being offline for long periods of time. Is that all sorted?
I don't understand why anyone who sees how the world works would expect us to end up with a utopia where people work less.
The trend has almost always been to work the same, or more, hours as new technologies come out, and you'll be expected to get more done using the new technologies. Why would AI be any different?
But, yeah, the people who no longer have jobs will be working less, that's true.
Jobs allegedly spent years lying about whether his daughter was his daughter. That's not necessary for Apple to succeed. That's just being a dick.