Cylinsier

Cylinsier, 10 months ago

It’s honestly insanely impressive that these things are still working so long after being built and so far from us. One of mankind’s greatest achievements and even after they die they’ll still be out there somewhere floating around. Maybe long after we’re gone and the Earth is swallowed up by the sun. The last piece of proof that we even existed at all.

Cylinsier, 10 months ago

By sequencing the genome of this Rip Van Winkle roundworm, scientists revealed it to be a new species of nematode

If this nematode could read I bet it would be offended at being called “new.”

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

I think it’s down to a few reasons. One you touched on is exclusives. Most consumers aren’t going to have both consoles like you do, they’re going to pick one or the other and Xbox doesn’t really have many exclusives, even fewer than PS, and theirs are much more likely to end up on PC when they do have them. So for consumers who want the larger variety of games, PS5 currently wins.

Another is performance. While both the PS5 and Series X are comparable, the Series S offering has created a very odd phenomenon of accidental exclusivity for Sony because of performance limitations. It’s a relatively new thing but I suspect it’s going to be more common as the generation goes on. The current example is Baldur’s Gate III. It simply cannot run on the S. As a result the developer has put an Xbox release on hold indefinitely and it may never come out on Xbox because they don’t want to have to deal with the confusion of selling an Xbox game that is not playable on one of the two SKUs. They decided that if the S can’t run it then it just won’t come out for the X either.

Third, and probably more relevant earlier in the generation, Sony had some snappy gimmicks on their side that might have been a difference maker for some consumers on the fence. The advanced haptics of the Dual Sense for example. I think the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly but there was a lot of buzz around it closer to launch to the extent that it’s impact on sales is probably more than nothing at all. I think the PSVR2 was also briefly a console mover as Xbox doesn’t have comparable hardware. I don’t think anyone at this point is rushing out to get a PS5 just for VR now, but there was a brief period of time after the PSVR2 was announced where people were eager to have a PS5 because if they did want VR, Sony’s was the cheapest way into that market at modern performance levels without having to give Facebook your entire identity just to game. Again not significant on its own, but it’s impact is more than nothing at all.

Fourth is just that Sony came into the generation ahead of Microsoft with the PS4. More PS4 owners with big libraries are going to want a new system that can play their old games rather than starting from scratch. So if you have a bunch of PS4 games that you still play, you’re going to choose PS5 and it’s kind of a no brainer.

And lastly I’d say Sony has just done a better job marketing it’s console as a must-have piece of consumer tech. From the jump there were a lot of people who already had gaming PCs questioning why they would ever need an Xbox. And Microsoft did little to address this narrative, it almost felt like they accepted that they were going to cannibalize their own console’s sales right from launch because everything gets ported to PC for them and just decided they didn’t care. There are plenty of reasons to own an Xbox but MS has pushed like none of them in advertising. Sony meanwhile did a great job early on marketing the PS5 as a status symbol and has kept in the public eye much more consistently with game exclusivity, and more recently media tie-ins with the Last of Us tv show. And while the exclusives may be few and far between, they are big draws like Final Fantasy, Horizon, and Spider-Man. When Xbox occasionally gets an exclusive, it’s always in the news for the wrong reasons like Halo almost universally agreed upon to be no longer good or Redfall being an absolutely embarrassing catastrophe of a release.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.

I agree, but who’s going to pay for it? Those aren’t just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

High speed glass cannons were always a fun build archetype to play around with in these games. I had tended to go the other way as a kid though, building hulking behemoths loaded to the teeth with bullets and bombs. Just don’t ask me to walk anywhere in any kind of efficient manner! Next mission waypoint a hundred steps that way? Meet you in an hour.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

Obviously it varies from person to person but Sony exclusives would be the main reason most people want to be in the PlayStation ecosystem. As others have said even when those exclusives do eventually reach PC, the ports are usually lackluster at best and unplayable at worst. So why upgrade to the 5 if you have a 4? For me the difference in load times alone justified early adoption. Probably not everyone can justify the cost and hassle just for faster loading of their PS4 library, but as someone whose time is at a premium and who still tries to play a lot of games often, I have probably saved countless precious hours of time and therefore played far more of my gaming library in the same time frame just be being on the 5.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

The thing is I don’t think Sony cares about peeling PC gamers away anymore for exactly the reasons you said; they just release most of their games to PC eventually anyway. But PC gamers and console gamers are not the same market. There are certainly people who play both, but I rarely play PC games anymore because my whole gaming setup is centered around the couch with family now. I simply don’t have time to also park myself in front of a PC and game that way as well, and as far as purpose built PCs that connect to a TV go, well, none of those bring the same features for the same cost the way the PS5 does. Pretty much the only PC gaming I do now is on Steam Deck and those games are chosen for playability on the go. So you’re not really comparing Sony exclusivity to PC at that point, you’re comparing it to Xbox. And between the two Sony wins on exclusives so far this generation.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

The issue is the consumer who is most likely to consider buying a console doesn’t want to have to worry about waiting months for a port and then another several months for performance to be fixed, nor do they want to pay for a very expensive gaming PC and then regular hardware upgrades to play new games. As I was saying to someone else, Sony isn’t really competing for PC gamers. They’re two different markets and Sony knows this which is why they do release a lot of their games to PC eventually. But for people who want to play Sony games when they are relatively new and active, either to experience the story with others and avoid eventual spoilers, or to play in an active online community that may not last, waiting for a functional PC release isn’t worth it, especially at the higher cost it brings to have a decent one compared to a console.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

How does it’s performance compare to a PS5? Because at least where I live, I would have to spend about twice as much on a PC to get the same performance as a PS5.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

Given that the studios have now openly admitted their plan is just to wait the writers out, actors need to step up and throw their weight in on the writers’ side. Because its not that easy to replace quality writing with AI just yet. But we’ve had the tech to replace quality acting with CG and text-to-voice for years already. So actors aren’t even doing this for the writers, they’re doing it for themselves because they’re next. They cost way more to employ but are easier to replace with existing tech.

Edit: I realize this strike isn’t about the writers but rather the actors own collective bargaining, but my point that they’re all in on this together and being threatened by the same emerging technologies stands.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

No, you will have to create a separate account on Lemmy.world or another instance which still federates with them to do that. It is worth noting that the defederation is indefinite but not permanent so you could also just wait. The defederation was done because Lemmy.world users were creating an overabundance of moderation issues so the intention is to eventually federate with them again when it is possible to address those issues more efficiently.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

Barbados is a beautiful country which is poorer than it should be. I had the opportunity to visit it as part of a cruise many years ago and that experience along with similar ones is why I doubt I will ever go on a cruise again. Not to say I didn’t have a good time, it was a fantastic opportunity to visit a number of small island nations in a single week and since it was a gift, it only cost me a single roundtrip plane ticket. But something was abundantly clear in Barbados, St Lucia, and St Kitts. And that was that if you were not the cruise industry or the handful of local resorts who contracted with them for day excursions, you benefitted absolutely fucking nothing from their presence. The economies of these small nations had absolutely no right to be as poor as they were with that kind of money coming into them. I went on several of my own excursions and got to see the local areas outside of the preplanned trips the cruise had in mind and saw very poor but very happy people living lives in the shadows of these high-pollution ships bringing rich people into places they themselves were never able to afford to go in their own countries.

This is all a very roundabout way of saying I hope this works out for them. Barbados is a free, self-governing nation that has a lot to offer to tourists and a lot of locals who should benefit from that but, in today’s economic realities, you can’t start making money until you have enough money to buy your foot into the door first. The specter of white colonialism still hangs over these small nations.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

Except with a lot of features removed.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

I think Bsky’s biggest challenge is that you can’t get on the damn platform.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

God his dumb fucking grin is so phony. This asshole fires tons of hard working people keeping the lights on for him, won’t pay his bills, props up right wing talking points on one of the biggest public platforms on earth, and is a faux-intellectual bigot. But then he still thinks he can act like one of the cool kids and nobody will see through his charade. He mistakes gawking for admiration.

Cylinsier, 11 months ago

I agree with that but they have also at times banned people for just regular swearing on their own private servers.

Cylinsier, 1 year ago

Absolutely zero percent chance that happens. The only outcome of this is undisguised dictatorship. The only thing we don't know yet is whether it's Wagner succeeding and installing a military junta or Putin surviving and using this as an excuse to dissolve whatever semblance of a democracy they pretended to have.

Cylinsier, 1 year ago

Spaghetti carbonara is always a winner. A lot of people make it with garlic but traditionally it's just guanciale (or pancetta or bacon depending on what's available for you), eggs, cheese, and noodles. It's the Italian bacon egg and cheese. There are plenty of good recipes but whichever one you choose, the key to getting the emulsification right is to mix the cheese and eggs together cold and then add them to the pasta heat off while stirring quickly. Add the leftover water from boiling the pasta in small amounts until you get the consistency you want. The sauce should be creamy, not thin or chunky.

Cylinsier, 1 year ago

Huffman looked at this clown and said "I want to be like him!"

Cylinsier, 1 year ago

This already looks better than 90% of 3D Sonic games.

Cylinsier, 1 year ago

The enshitification of the internet continues. How can we offer our content, but without having to pay anyone for it and at a much higher rate of delivery? By not giving a fuck about the quality anymore and not having any real competition so people have no choice. Except people always have a choice. We can walk away.