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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I’m sure Nintendo intentionally throttles the Switch to improve battery life, preserve the integrity of the hardware, and provide a consistent experience. Not to defend their decision at all. I just think it’s funny how people tend to react to learning about how much the Switch is artificially held back, as if Nintendo is just being stupid about the potential of their own console. I think it’s very likely they did plenty of testing and concluded that the specs they targeted provided the best balance of positive overall user experience with the least amount of complications for developers. And it clearly worked because it’s one of the best selling consoles ever with a massive catalogue of titles. The small handful of power users who want a Switch 4K Pro are just destined to buy a Steam Deck anyway. Nintendo doesn’t want anything to do with that niche group of gamers lol.












  • This is Microsoft, an American corporation, actively developing the things the Internet spazzes out about China probably doing. How happy this makes China? Buddy, imagine how happy this makes every marketing company in the world, your local police department, and your own government, all of which have a much more vested interest in everything you do on your computer and are considerably more of a threat to you than the ruling party of a country on the other side of the planet. Seriously, y’all need to get your fucking priorities in order. It’s borderline satire how fast your average Lemmy user slaps the China Panic button as soon as a privacy-related issue hits their front page.







  • I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.

    But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.

    This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.