Just for fun: this would have worked so much better if they price dropped the PS5 and introduced the PS5 Pro at the old price.

People are anchored into thinking the PS5 is a certain value, and if they did that, it would instantly make the PS5 Pro and the PS5 appear to be a bargain, and so much of the PS5-owning public would have bought another system because it would be “such a good deal,” while PS5 fence-sitters would jump at the core system. I’m not trained to say for sure, but I think while their profit margin would be lower they’d be making much more money.

This is tragic. I can’t think of how many computers I built using incomparable Anandtech articles. The depth of the testing, and careful, scientific planning really has no match in tech journalism.

The high water mark just lowered.

Musk is taking it to the farm upstate.

Ah, I remember that timeline. The one where things got, what do you call it…better?

When you don’t have any convictions of your own…

Weelllll…I’m pretty sure Trump has some convictions now that the jury has weighed in.

It’s called Unreal PT. The last version I believe is 1.0.7, and it’s still hosted on the Internet Archive.

Musk repeated the DDOS claim when the Space finally began around 8:40PM ET. “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” he said.

So not only is he fabricating the DDOS out of thin air, but he just assumes out of nowhere that it’s politically motivated by the “opposition” to silence Trump - when Trump is vomiting nonsense that blankets the media 24/7 and this would do absolutely nothing to prevent Trump from exposing himself to the unwilling public. Galaxy brain genius logic right there.

My good faith response to your good faith question: because having a DRM-free copy on your own server or hard drive is the only way to be sure you will be able to play it tomorrow.

Streaming services are a complex collection of licensing deals that are by design temporary. You may not hear beforehand when your favorite artist’s label’s parent company’s conglomerate’s CEO decides to pull their content because they’re going to start their own streaming service, or another service gave them a lucrative exclusive deal.

And while you’re never going to have a hard time finding Taylor Swift, that one 70s esoteric album may become instantly impossible to find once it drops off a streamer.

In the end there are no promises with a streaming service. On the other hand, you put in a small amount of work to grab MP3s or FLACs, set up your own Plex server (or Emby, etc), and you’re good for pretty much forever.

Similarly, support artists by buying their direct merch, going to shows, and so on, but they are barely seeing any Spotify money. Between Spotify and the labels, they are cleaning the plate and artists are getting whatever crumbs fall off the table (unless you’re Taylor Swift or another global artist).

Today, the House Judiciary GOP’s official account on X called GARM being discontinued a “big win for the First Amendment” and a “big win for oversight.” X CEO Linda Yaccarino also applauded the news.

It’s just opposite day? We just say whatever is the opposite of what’s true?

Has a GOP-controlled congressional committee uncovered any actual evidence in the past 20 years or so?

I take notice of whenever they have a new hearing or investigative issue, and each one I can remember has always been “let’s go on a fishing expedition to find dirt or at least impugn the character of a political rival” followed a year later by a Friday-night quiet disbanding of the committee with no findings, or a report being issued that says nothing of importance whatsoever.

The beatings will continue until ad revenue improves.

Yeah, I had the same reaction - The puzzles were definitely “learn how to think a new way,” my favorite kind. I ended my play on one perspective-shifting pattern puzzle that I was so close to beating, so I kept pushing myself through the motion sickness, and just ended up disabled on the bed feeling ill and unable to move for two hours (without completing the puzzle).

I tried a bunch of things - permanent reticle in center of screen, disabling walk shake, etc. I still play high-motion FPS shooters with no issue. It’s just some games (The Forest was another). I am guessing it’s a middleware-introduced visual filter that adds 15-25ms delay to screen latency, just enough to mess with inner ear visual/motion sync in sensitive people.

I appreciate letting me know about the anti-vaxxer conspiracy stuff. Makes me feel better about never finishing The Witness (not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because whatever filters were on there, it made me cripplingly motion sick for hours every time I played it).

It’s actually a fascinating bind Steve/Reddit has put themselves in. Because it is a non-exclusive license, you can affirmatively declare your content is free for anyone to scrape or use.

After that, if Reddit ever asserts rights over your content by, say, suing Microsoft for improperly using your content in training data, you now have a legal claim against Reddit for interference with either your ownership rights or with a contract via whatever license you have made your content available under.

Now, maybe Reddit has a claim release in their TOS, but it wouldn’t prevent you from getting an injunction enjoining Reddit from restricting your data from being used by Microsoft.

It’s kind of academic, because… it’s not really a victory that Microsoft is also training its AI on your data. But, hey, they’re probably doing it anyway and at least this way we get to screw over Huffman for being an ass.

Honestly? Just use YouTube and ublock. There’s pretty much always a better karaoke selection.

I wish I knew as well. I’ve been using Chromecast Audio myself, which works with PlexAmp self-hosting my music.

The problem is Chromecast Audio has been discontinued for years of course - Google did their Google thing, and unfortunately I never found anything else like it on the market. But you can connect those devices to any speakers and sync multi-room high quality audio very easily. I managed to pick up 4 of them when they did their fire sale, and I think you can find them on eBay for now still.

Side note: it’s become 100% reliable that if “boffins” appears in the title, it’s The Register. Damn, they love that word.

Ah, yes, I’m off by a lot then, thanks!

Interesting - how do we know it’s 36 billion entries? I just estimated that it hadn’t been used that much based on almost never seeing anyone actually use it…

Google shuts down a lot of things, and usually there is nothing to do and parts of the internet break forever. But…I feel like this is one that would be cheap and at least possible to mitigate without Google’s help.

Crawl for all goo.gl links prior to the 2025 shutdown, cache and enter the link and the redirect link into a database, and create a simple open source in-line replacement extension for browsers that intercepts goo.gl links and replaces them with the real link. These are just URLs, so the database even for hundreds of thousands of entries shouldn’t be huge.

I mean, I’m not going to do it, but…