They already have Slim versions of the PS5 without the optical reader by default. The PS5 Pro also lacks one.
This is all data-driven. There's a reason GameStop has more space devoted to Funko Pops and shirts than games, and why Walmart has a half aisle of them: people predominantly buy the games online for that exact reason. Why waste space? So you have to get up to change games, and save downloading half of it? (PSN sales often beat retail pricing as well.)
We're at the point where a lot of games are larger than a triple layer BluRay, and typical home connections are faster than the reader can move data. Baldur's Gate 3 didn't ship on a disc at all, for that reason. It's 122GB, and Gran Turismo is in a similar range.
It's also the return of the concept of avatars, which fell by the wayside when people started plastering their meatspace face on everything they did online.
That's relevant to why it historically had bizarre UX issues, like ctrl+s being the shortcut to erase the scene and start a new one: it predated most of those conventions, and has its own UI tooling. It's also always been designed to use three mouse buttons, coming from the Unix world, which used to be problematic when not everyone had a mouse with a clicky scroll wheel.
It's come an absurdly long way since I first dabbled with it in the early 2000s, and has gone from a niche FOSS tool to something widely used in its field.
Nowadays, Blender is an example of masterful UX for a professional tool. Immediately responsive, information dense UI with keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything. Actions are composable, like with vim: something like "ex5" will extrude five units on the x axis.
I'm disappointed that the USBC is starting to certify tethered pin setups, though it is fortunately a separate category of competition. The pin action is wildly different.
It's the other way around now. Walmart has more games than GameStop, and you're lucky to get $10 off, ever. The PlayStation store is never more than MSRP and frequently has sales. They have a Summer Sale going on right now.
Ghost of Yōtei is 25% off, the bundle of the Final Fantasy XIV MMO and all expansions is 50% off, some things are down 75%.
> Fatalities happen basically from: product stacking combination medicines people don't realize contain acetaminophen and/or multi-day accumulation exceeding max daily limit over multiple days.
I find it obnoxious that NyQuil has taken over as the default brand people grab for cough syrup, for that reason. It has acetaminophen, while Robitussin or such have the other active ingredients without that risk.
The typical person doesn't read and understand active ingredients, and it's lucky if they even check dosage instructions.
It's just loud Internet people. The Switch 2 is the second fastest selling game system of all time, and is keeping up with the trajectory of the first Switch, which shipped the most units of any gaming system. It'll probably get further boosts as Splatoon Raiders comes out (Splatoon is huge in Japan) and other anticipated titles.
I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation. Nobody buys movies there and people who care about physical games are a minority...there are already Slim models without optical drives and GameStops are mostly Funko Pops because most people buy games online. It's too soon to have actual concrete data besides useless internet sentiment reporting though. And a lot of that is just vague anger about prices for all computing hardware being up...and everything else in the US.
We're also at the ending stages of the PS5 lifecycle, but before a PS6 announcement. (With an unprecedented price increase this late in the cycle.) So there's no buzz about what's next, a large base of people who already have the existing thing, and an expectation that it will cost more.
Meanwhile, the anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 is on the way, and a PC release isn't on the table anytime soon.
> Imagine an AI lab steals your voice, and uses it to scam call folks all day.
One needn't imagine, because they're already stealing peoples' voices. e.g. the recent HN thread about a professional voice actor that keeps having to prove he's human.
As an addendum: Japanese isn't as all-in on pitch having semantics as Chinese, but pitch is very important. Words have "pitch accent" rather than "stress" the way English has, and overall pitch is strongly politeness-coded.
Speaking higher is politer, and noticeably dropping your pitch is threatening. You probably would pitch-up when speaking to your boss, and people working in shops or restaurants nearly sing welcome/thank you for coming type things.
When mixing, a 6db boost or cut is massive. 0.5 to 3db edits to tracks are quite common, if they're for stylistic reasons and not just low or high cuts.
0.3db fader adjustments are absolutely a thing.
A common mistake is also putting something like a compressor or EQ on a track and fooling yourself that it sounds "better" in an A/B because you accidentally boosted the gain (by less than a dB) because the makeup doesn't quite match the reduction. And it's hard to fight the psychological effect of subtly louder being an improvement.
Similarly, I have a 2026 Civic: the driver attention doesn't have a camera and ships disabled. Lane departure warnings are toggleable in settings, and it sticks between starts. This is different from lane keeping assist, which is part of the adaptive cruise control and fully steers for you. (Both steering and speed and controlled from buttons on the wheel.)
Climate controls are fully physical controls, but realistically I just leave it on Auto, because it's the 21st century.
The hybrid drive train also makes it feel like an electric car, and it makes older vehicles look like a joke.
> I've heard plenty of stories of victims of theft and crime literally leading police to the door of their assailant and they can't get any action because this "privacy" movement has made their efforts pretty meaningless.
So the police are useless when given a precise location, and you want to give them more invasive tools to continue to be useless? That's not the argument you think it is.
If someone steals my car, I can open an app and find its precise geolocation better than some cameras, and deliver that information to the police of my own choice. (Ideally, the car company would be legally prohibited from sharing that information with any other party.)
"Monitor the movements of everyone in case of the minute chance of car theft and astronomical chance of the police caring" is patently absurd. We probably need cameras in bathrooms too, in case someone passes out and needs medical attention.
Exactly. I don't want to mess with anything, I want an appliance that plays games. I don't want it to do anything other than that either. It must work every time, with every supported game, and have no manual maintenance.
Consoles are also just generally more ergonomic for normal adults: they're built so you can inhabit your primary living space, around other people, on a couch, instead of being a bedroom-dweller sitting at a desk.
Arguably someone who is faster is more likely to just be recalling memorized things faster, while someone who's slower may have a deeper understanding but needs time to actually think it through.
Memorization is already hacking the rules of the game that's supposed to be gauging understanding. An ideal test is resistant to rote memorization as well as outright cheating.
It's news to me that they weren't already. My exams were all in person and on paper in the early 2020s, and even my physics homework was a "do it on engineering paper and drop it in a mail slot" affair. The professors would forbid computers and phones during lectures and would stop to shame anyone who thought they were being sneaky.
Computer Science classes were all on paper for exams, and low level ones did the old "here's a Javadoc, write some code with a pencil."
The only online exams I had were for 100 level electives.
"You can own a printing press, but we'll throw you in jail if you dare to show the printings to anyone."
The first amendment is a two way street. Everyone has an inalienable right to seek and read/view any media, and the government of the United States is forbidden from taking any actions that limit the mass dissemination of media.
The whole context of the amendment is existing governments preventing people from mass printing and distributing political pamphlets. "You can write something, but not distribute it" is entirely antithetical to the point of the amendment.
1. Don't assume Meta is anything other than a state propaganda and surveillance apparatus.
2. It's onerous for upstarts, so it entrenches Instagram and Facebook.
3. Guaranteed knowledge of who everyone is, and their web browsing activities, furthers their surveillance ends.
4. If you keep people off until they're adults and then throw them in with no guidance, they'll have an even worse time. Which is good for propagandizing.
5. They get to collect biometrics from everyone, even the underaged ones who attempt verification. All the better to build panopticon, along side Clearview and Flock.
6. The Heritage Foundation wants it, and everything else on Project 2025 has been proceeding as planned with lackluster resistance, so why would this be different? (Spoiler: the next part is calling everything they don't like, such as LGBT people being visible or alive, as "harmful" and using these new surveillance tools to deal with that.)
Macs have two possible ways. If you have key repeat enabled, option+shift+dash. Some newer Mac users may have the mode on where holding a key pops up an iOS-style bubble of alternate options, in which case they will just hold hyphen.
This is all data-driven. There's a reason GameStop has more space devoted to Funko Pops and shirts than games, and why Walmart has a half aisle of them: people predominantly buy the games online for that exact reason. Why waste space? So you have to get up to change games, and save downloading half of it? (PSN sales often beat retail pricing as well.)
We're at the point where a lot of games are larger than a triple layer BluRay, and typical home connections are faster than the reader can move data. Baldur's Gate 3 didn't ship on a disc at all, for that reason. It's 122GB, and Gran Turismo is in a similar range.