Nintendo really has no incentive to improve. They make money hand over fist selling half-baked titles to their combined market of actual undiscerning children, and rabid fanboy manchildren who will praise any first party Nintendo title as a 10/10 every single time.
They're phoning it in, coasting on old IP and goodwill earned decades ago. Animal Crossing had less dialogue options than the Gamecube version that preceded it by two decades. Smash at mid-high levels is still plagued by lag switching cheaters. BOTW was okay, but clearly overrated by people who had never played any sort of open world game before. TOTK being lauded as a 10/10 (fine, 9.5/10 on MetaCritic) was laughable given how empty the game world was, how janky the construction mechanics were for those silly machines, and how boring and childish the puzzles were. I stopped playing Pokemon 15+ years ago but come on, the graphics of the Switch games looking worse than some of the DS editions...
TOTK was the final nail for me, I vowed to never purchase another Nintendo game or piece of hardware and I haven't. I just couldn't square my actual player experience of a janky, boring game with the rabid fanboys crowing about Nintendo doing it again.
I’m assuming the author was thinking Minecraft with the kid’s friends would be Peer2Peer or something. I doubt Switch has the power to host a Minecraft server, but I might be wrong.
See Smash, which is entirely Peer2Peer for the main gameplay, but requires a Switch Online membership to play for… what exactly? Hosting a database of player ratings and using it for matchmaking? There’s probably one server rack on each continent running the entirety of Smash online.
Rhode Island is trying this. The gantries have been up for years, but it was challenged in court by the trucking lobby. The state prevailed with some concessions, and is planning to reinstate the truck tolls soon.
Probably, due to the small size of RI, it will just cause goods not bound directly for RI to divert along I-395 up through CT and MA, and I-290 and I-495 in MA.
Stuff like this is common in states with no income tax. If public services in two states are equivalent and one has income tax but one doesn’t, the latter state residents pay the same total tax burden through property tax, tolls, and sales tax.
Yep, people really think they've hacked America when they move to states with lower/no income tax. Meanwhile they pay 5-figure property taxes on a house they've paid off until the day they die.
In the northeast I regularly see idiots slowing down for the high speed toll lanes that have explicit signage not to slow down. People going 65-70MPH, then as the toll approaches one car brakes down to 45MPH because they’re afraid their transponder won’t be read or something.
As an outsider, to me the framing that USA is "car-oriented" was always off the mark. Cars are just a tool, which people would rather use as little as possible (I mean, who actually enjoys sitting in traffic or having a long commute?).
The real issue is the notion that everyone needs crazy amounts of space inside and a yard. I've found this calculator[0] that says that for my family I would need 2280 sq ft to "live comfortably", which to me is an absurd amount, as I live on a third of that and was only ever considering apartments with at maximum half the mentioned square footage.
You can't reasonably organise public transport over such a sparsely populated area. Over here we have districts of detached houses and they're notoriously difficult to get in and out of.
Apple’s most interesting value proposition was ignoring all this AI junk and letting users click “not interested” on Apple Intelligence and never see it again.
From a business perspective it’s a smart move (inasmuch as “integrating AI” is the default which I fundamentally disagree with) since Apple won’t be left holding the bag on a bunch of AI datacenters when/if the AI bubble pops.
I don’t want to lose trust in Apple, but I literally moved away from Google/Android to try and retain control over my data and now they’re taking me… right back to Google. Guess I’ll retreat further into self-hosting.
I also agree with this. Microsoft successfully removed my entire household from ever owning one of their products again after this year. Apple and linux make up the entire delta.
As long as Apple doesn't take any crazy left turns with their privacy policy then it should be relatively harmless if they add in a google wrapper to iOS (and we won't need to take hard right turns with grapheneOS phones and framework laptops).
Because topics like these always attract some Very Smart People to comment and engage in order to share their Very Correct Opinions on macroeconomics and politics.
Laughing aloud at the thought of the average paycheck to paycheck consumerist blowing a gasket when they see a $24k tax bill for their $80k pickup truck.
