This definitely plays a role, and depending on your use-case the “stability” of your software and system varies greatly. E.g Messing around with mods could leave your game in an unplayable state (to the point it just wouldn’t launch properly), whilst today you just download/install them from Steam workshop with 1-click.

Sure, but the parent comment is saying the “matter of time” should be in the past. I wouldn’t buy a 60hz device today.

If you needed a mini tablet you would cause there's practically zero competition

I bought the new 8 inch Alexa tablet the other day, and the price was decent but it's a piece of shit. I only wanted it for putting on a video in bed while I fall asleep but it can't even do that because when you drop the brightness to minimum, the display randomly turns off (not actually locking the screen, it's still running the app and active, you can touch stuff you can't see, but the pixels are turned off)

> I bought the new 8 inch Alexa tablet [...] for putting on a video in bed while I fall asleep

That's...horrifying.

Have you tried closing your eyes?

I've seen some TVs do that, turn off the screen when it gets dark (not talking OLED). Often takes too long and is a nuisance. There's a similar awful gimmick with speakers turning off when quiet, but it results in sound cutting out because it's too slow. I've seen some monitors that even try to do this when using headphones through them.

If they do, you dodged a bullet lol.

I'm surprised that's still around! I probably haven't been Slashdot for a decade or so.

I hadn't since CmdrTaco left. But I've been going to it more and more in the last few months. I don't read the comments - but I do like the headline curation.

Blizzard is owned by MSFT now, so it did get bought out (back in 2022). So it fits the 'startup mode' model that I _think_ you're trying to say?

There's other studios that similar to Blizzard didn't get bought out early and published multiple hit games, like Insomniac Games.

Blizzard has not been independent since 1994, but people on the internet love picking some arbitrary point in time when "Blizzard died" when in reality the timeline and quality of their releases has almost zero correlation with who they were owned by at the time.

I like Jason Schreier's take that the end of Blizzard began as soon as WoW blew up in popularity.

"Imagine a Blizzard that never made or never found the success they did with WoW and continued on the path of boxed releases every couple years."

I did find myself rather salty back then that it felt like Blizzard abandoned anything outside of WoW until 2010. WoW wasn't something I ever grew an interest in, yet I played an absurd amount of SC and WC3. Then SC2 was a huge miss for me, as well as every game after it.

There seems to be a bit of a symmetry between what WoW did to Blizzard and what WH40K did to Games Workshop.

> the end of Blizzard

extremely exaggerated. Recent reports said they are the top game studio at microsoft.

Yes, of course there's the financial performance of a studio and then the identity of a studio that people get attached to.

I didn't get into Blizzard games because they were a financial powerhouse, I got into them because they were fun as hell and the identity of Blizzard at the time gave me faith that their next release would be just as fun. That faith started deteriorating around 2005/6 for me, and was gone within a month or so of SC2 releasing. The identity of Blizzard of the 90s and early 2000s that I fell in love with was gone by 2010.

I can go into more detail about the shortcomings of all of the games from 2010 on (IMO, obviously), but the overall point is that they are fundamentally different than their older games and might as well have been from a different studio.

Similar with Westwood (part of Virgin interactive) and Bioware (parceled up with Pandemic studios, owned by Elevation partners, who sold it to EA)

Blizzard effectively got bought out when they merged with Activision. It wasn't technically a buyout, but Blizzard quality was never the same after that.

Yep, and all these years later, we have lost so much. It may seem like such a small thing, but losing real GMs in WoW makes me really sad.

Blizzard has not been independent since 1994, but people on the internet love picking some arbitrary point in time when "Blizzard died" when in reality the timeline and quality of their releases has almost zero correlation with who they were owned by at the time.

WoW Forever seems like they're at least attempting to try for the brass ring again. But it has such a "been there, done that" feel that I suspect its more to capture revenue from a new generation.

> But it has such a "been there, done that" feel that I suspect its more to capture revenue from a new generation.

The "been there, done that" vibe is their pitch to the older generation who no longer cares as much about technically or ladder climbing and just wants something to do when it's cold outside

Yikes. Stuff of nightmares lol.

I guess LLMs would do a reasonable job making this legible, as long as there can be some tests to validate functionality alongside the migration.

+1. I phased out meat over almost like 6 months before being completely vegetarian. It made the transition much easier when I did this about 12 years ago.

I eliminated types of meat (e.g no more chicken, then no more beef, etc). Slowly adapting my diet over time.

I think that made it easier to stick with it.

Sadly that is not entirely true. Many farms will make such claims.. until secret “inspections” happen and you realize they are skirting around the rules.

In theory yes it’s better, in practice, not always.

+1. Highly recommend people read “Animal Liberation Now” (“Now”) being the 2023 version of “Animal Liberation” from the 70s.

I became vegetarian after reading the original book, and more recently _mostly_ vegan after reading “Now”. (Still a work in progress as it’s only been a few weeks and takes time to adjust my diet).

Factory Farming is definitely horrendous and it’s not only for the animals killed for meat. Animals kept for egg or milk are essentially mistreated during their entire (short) lives.

I’m both somehow.

Coding since 12, pretty introverted as a teenager and went the usual compsci route. Spent a lot of my free time hacking on OSS projects.

Then got into engineering management, similar to you I’d o enjoy mentoring and the more strategic aspects of the role.

But I dislike using AI for coding, it really ruined the fun for me. That fun being entirely eroded made it easier to commit to the management path (I did the IC-Management pendulum for some years).