Trump
Homeopathy and alternative medicine.
Chiropractors can be heard chuckling nervously
I’m gonna get downvoted for this but… gaming consoles.
Gaming consoles made sense back in the day before home computing took off, and for a while they actually had superior hardware than computers when it came specifically to running games. But nowadays gaming consoles are just locked down user-hostile computers with a subscription service attached. The gaming equivalent of inkjet printers. It’s an industry made irrelevant by advancements in technology, propped up by misleading marketing and artificial hype that sadly many people fall for.
I have a PS5 because it will play the damned games. There’s nothing in the PC realm for $400 I could buy that could come close to guaranteeing the same thing. Consoles don’t exist because people are stupid, they exist because gaming and GPU companies are cartels just like almost every other sector of the economy.
New PC graphics cards alone cost as much as entire games consoles. The top end ones cost the same as multiple PS5s. That’s why consoles exist.
Consoles don’t make money, the expensive games and subscriptions do.
There is value in static hardware so you can perform specific optimizations and target framerate. The subscriptions are 100% bullshit though.
You are underestimating the importance of standards here. On a PC you will always only get a fraction of the hardware’s power, because there’s way more stuff running at the same time, not just the game, and because the developers can’t know exactly what hardware configuration every single gamer has. On a console you can know exactly how much RAM you will have available, so you can design your content to use that amount of data and then stream it into memory that you reserve at the start. If you do that on a PC you may ask for more RAM than the PC has or you may leave RAM unused. Or you can try to optimize the game for different specs, which costs time and money, so you won’t get the same results with the same budget.
Back in the olden days when games were written in assembly and there was barely enough memory for a framebuffer it made sense to tediously optimize games to squeeze every bit of performance out of the limited hardware. Modern consoles are not like that. They have their own operating systems with schedulers, multitasking, and memory allocators, much like a desktop computer. Your claim that “way more stuff is running at the same time” is only true if the PC user deliberately decides to keep other programs running alongside their game (which can be a feature in and of itself – think recording/streaming, discord, etc.) It is true that while developing for PC you have to take account that different people will have different hardware, but that problem is solved by having a graphics settings menu. Some games can even automatically select the best graphics options that will get the most out of your hardware. What you’re describing is a non-problem.
‘Your claim that “way more stuff is running at the same time” is only true if the PC user deliberately decides to keep other programs running alongside their game’ - So did you deliberately decide to run virus scanners, Microsoft telemetry, anti-cheat-software, preloaders for browsers like Chrome so they start up faster, explorer plugins and the usual assortment of bloat- and malware? No offense, but thinking that nothing ran on your computer unless you deliberately start it is naive. Why do you think there are so many “PC-Cleaner”-Tools? Even for Android there are “game modes” and “memory cleaners”. I have never seen anything similar on a gaming console.
‘It is true that while developing for PC you have to take account that different people will have different hardware, but that problem is solved by having a graphics settings menu.’ - And what do you think who designs the content that you choose from in that menu? When artists create meshes and textures they have to decide on resolution and polygon count. If your graphics card simply does not have that much memory then the performance is going to drop significantly. So if you want to have the option to lower the graphics settings you need to have assets that require less memory. I mean sure, some engines offer generic settings menus and there are algorithms that lower the memory footprint of assets algorithmically, but if course the result won’t be the same as if the assets were manually designed for that size. And if the assets are designed for a lower footprint a slider won’t be able to magically add details. The same applies for shaders. If the performance of the hardware is not sufficient a generic settings menus will only switch off effects, and unless you create an alternative the result may look pretty rough.
So that settings menu may be a solution for the players, but for the developers it means that all the options you can choose from need to be developed and tested, and that takes time and money.
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Steam deck makes sense
To be fair, the same deck advertises it as a computer that you can play games on.
You’re not wrong. There definitely used to be a difference back when consoles would get way better support and PC ports were terrible.
Sound On / Off
– The entire options menu of a PC port in like 2006.
But nowadays I struggle to understand the point of getting one of those big chonky tower consoles like whatever the latest Xbox or PlayStation is. (PlayStation even selling entirely new consoles for a simple graphics/RAM upgrade, smh).
At least the Switch’s portability made sense.
The old consoles also were just plug the game in and boot up.
No Hassle.
Now they sounds like Windows boxes.
I LOVED how the original X-Box had an “desktop” in it. Unfortunately that’s gone way too far anymore.
Nowadays I find these interfaces so overly complicated and fiddly that it makes the UX of an N64 far superior.
I pretty much went PC-only after the xbox 360 though, when ports finally started getting good. :)
I downvoted you just because you’re one of those people who is literally asking for it.
My god, how can I possibly recover from this!? My lemmy reputation has been tainted forever!!!
The Republican party.
Cryptocurrency as an investment
Health Insurance Companies
They don’t really exist because people are stupid.
More because of corruption and greed imo.
You’re gonna have to explain further before I can judge your comment.
If people weren’t stupid they would not put up with having the highest medical costs in the world while achieving the lowest quality of care in the first world. Health Insurance Companies exist because too many people haven’t figured out that their purpose is to limit, or prevent, actual health care.
Mmmm the existence of these companies is not enough to say people are stupid. Plenty of places have these companies and reasonable access to high quality care at a reasonable price. It’s just the US in particular allows their companies to get away with murder.
For profit health insurance companies.
Even with universal healthcare, someone has to do all the admin stuff, and putting it under government control directly just screams of inefficiencies.
I always assume people who assert that the government is automatically less efficient, more expensive, and poorly run compared to private industry must never have been associated with a large corporation, or lack awareness.
Medicare, as it exists today, delivers superior care at lower cost than any private insurer. This despite the fact that Medicare covers the elderly and disabled, groups that need more care than the population at large that the private guys cover. If you think about it, Medicare is a giant subsidy to the private market by removing needy populations from their rolls.
The scheme to include private guys in medicare “medicare advantage”, was supposed to bring down costs by bringing in the efficiency of the private market. Medicare Advantage today costs more than the Army and the Navy.
Yes, but the alternative is far worse. I present America as Exhibit A.
Cigarettes
Yes, but have you ever tried being addicted to nicotine? /s
There’s healthier ways
Less unhealthy ones :P
The price of Apple products
Cybertruck.
CEOs
The current climate crisis.
Facebook. (When Zuck was asked how he amassed so much personal information about people, he famously answered: “They ‘trust me.’ Dumb f*cks.”) Growing up, we were told it was foolish to post personally identifying information to the Internet, then the generation that told us that flocked to facebook.
Credit scores. (Less the concept, namely the fact that they’re used so extensively to judge people based on arbitrary rules. It’s stupid that the companies behind them are still operating after major breaches involving more information than they should have had in the first place. The average person seems too dumb to care what happens with their personal information, sadly.)
Services like “Grammarly”. Some folks noted below that there are some legitimate use cases as an accessibility tool, but the service itself seems to target the English-native people “Oh whatever you know what I meant” crowd, to help them sound smart in emails.
And all this other Ai stuff that seems to market itself on the premise that the user is a complete moron who needs to escape the consequences of their ineptitude.
Almost every Ai commercial features someone using Ai tools to quickly cover up the fact that they forgot their partner’s birthday, or quickly cobble together some work memo because they were sleeping or something. (Okay that last one can be kinda based amirite lol.)
Edit: Explanations added because I’m fine being disagreed with but maybe I didn’t communicate very well lol.
Grammarly can be quite useful to people who are not dumb but have dyslexia.
This sounds interesting and I actually haven’t heard of it being used for this before.
What about dyslexia-friendly typefaces though? Would that be more practical?🤔
I’ll be honest a lot of my opinion of the service comes from being spammed ads featuring a targetted customer that’s just too lazy to be hassled with the burden of learning decent communication, and has money to spend lol.
It’s worth noting that those dyslexia typefaces are at best neutral for helping those with dyslexia. It’s a marketing thing. I did a deep dive on this recently.
Thanks for the insight! I don’t really have much experience to go off of, since I don’t experience dyslexia myself, but if you happen to have a link to your deep dive I’d be curious!
I’m an aspiring indie game dev, and accessibility is something I think is too often ignored.
But grammarly gets it wrong.
If it was perfect, then sure.
Gerrymandering?
Gerrymandering is an actual brilliant way to ensure victory.
Yep, but it exists because of the existence of these districts in the first place. Which weren’t put there because the founders figured the populus was particularly bright.
“I’m with stupid” shirts
Warning Labels on obvious things. Like “contains dairy” on a package of butter. At some point they need to stop and let Darwin take the wheel.
I like the “This product may contain nuts” on a packet of nuts.
It better contain nuts or I want my money back.
Most nuts are not even nuts.
Dairy is an allergen and has to be marked on packages by law in the states. There are also people who just avoid dairy, and non-dairy butter very much exists.
Sounds like the problem is the vegans renaming margarine “butter” to avoid the negative connotations
I’m surprised it was allowed honestly. Thought “big butter” would lobby against it for “confusing the average citizen” or some nonsense.
Agreed, it’s not hard to make new names for things. I’m totally fine with calling soy milk that and boob juice the stuff from cows, but at least there is a qualifier. Normal English language Germanic origin behavior. So we could have boob butter and coconut butter, easy…but nooo
That’s what they managed in Europe. So we have sun milk, but don’t you dare naming it soy milk. I am do confused now, I drink my coffee with sun milk from time to time…
Well sun milk is a nice way to put it, I think I’ll keep that.
