smoothbrain coldtakes

I like “Product Degradation” way better than “enshittification”.

I think it’s prudent to be on an older node, using stock that’s more abundant, even if it’s older - especially if it still performs the duties well enough. You’re 100% on the cost side of things, especially considering that Nintendo has never had any consoles that were crazy expensive. Everything was always supposed to be family friendly and therefore family attainable.

I still think battery life is a higher concern for them than sheer power when in handheld mode though, and that’s a key differentiating factor between a Deck and a Switch, besides the Nintendo first-party library and chip architecture. It’s really cool that the Deck is flexible enough to do both high performance and low performance tasks with toggles for the draw.

The performance was never the consideration for Nintendo. They want a handheld that can last a long time, so they will always clock their chips down. You can’t compare 30 watts all the time to 30 watts plugged in, let alone 5 watts in handheld mode.

Steam Decks are great, but lets be real; when you play a big AAA title, even on moderate settings, you might get two hours out of the machine pushing it to the limit at full TDP.

This is kind of a nothingburger story. We always knew Nintendo were not going to scale their machines up to the level of PC gaming handhelds.

Deleted comment was praising GitHub Copilot.

It’s literally just a glorified autocorrect and suggestion feature.

It also suggests complete stochastic garbage most of the time. When I type “list” sometimes it will try to infer that I am writing a cookbook and try to autofill to “of ingredients” or even further.

I remember it being one of my favored chosen out of the plethora of random third party devices I had laying around. This was a step above Mad Catz for sure, but definitely still below the original controllers.

This is a Nyko Air Flow controller. I had one for the original Xbox. It was supposed to keep you from sweating during long sessions of gameplay, because it was ventilated and had a fan on the back. To be honest, I don’t remember it being excellent at keeping you cool. I think the fan was pretty lousy, but it was a great gimmick none the less.

I had a lot of weird controllers back then. Some good, some bad. Most of them Mad Catz.

I like how part of Meer’s logic is that he’s basically inescapable in the franchise otherwise, since he voices so many NPCs as well as BroShep. He boils it down to listening to him some of the time or all of the time.

It definitely is not an optimized game. It doesn’t run really well on my ROG Ally, so I can’t imagine trying to do it on a Switch.

This article takes a bunch of time to really just say nothing. Like of course if you ask non-techies what brands they can think of they’re going to rattle off Disney and Starbucks before Nvidia.

The average person doesn’t know Nvidia the same way they don’t know other hardware manufacturers down to the component, especially for datacenter scenarios. They’re not going to be able to list things that are driving forces in the tech industry, because it’s not anything they will be able to interact with day-to-day. The average person doesn’t run the LLM themselves. PC gamer knowledge is also pretty peripheral

As the most valued company during a gold rush, does it really matter how much the average person knows your name if all the people with the money already do? It’s not like my mother and my sister are going to be buying graphics cards to run LLMs any time soon. There’s clearly a clientele for this and it’s not the average person. The fact that they produce consumer equipment is literally not at all what’s giving them their new valuation.

If you have a Gen 1 Switch laying around, I would advise you to sell it to somebody who wants to make use of the ability to put CFW on it. They are actually still pretty valuable given the fact that all of the models beyond the first generation are guarded against the exploit that even makes this possible.

If you can only install softmods you will not be able to crack the Switch to install Android on it. If you read the article it goes into detail about how only G1 Switches can actually achieve this because they are not guarded against the Fusée Gelée exploit for Nvidia Tegra processors. It continues to point out how Lites and OLEDs need to have custom soldering done for this to even work.

I have a Lite so I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

If you have an original gen 1 Switch capable of even doing this (eg, not guarded against Fusée Gelée exploit at the hardware level like all subsequent models) you will probably find a better return selling it to somebody who wants to put CFW on it rather than turning it into a hacky android tablet.

I just don’t get what the purpose is though. You’ve lost access to the proprietary primary library, which was the original reason to buy a Switch. If you want an emulation console there are cheaper alternatives as well other than the Deck, I was just using it as the de facto standard handheld.

There’s no benefit to nuking the OS and replacing it on a Switch. At least with something like a ROG Ally, you can make the argument that flipping over to Linux would make the handheld more performant and energy efficient. That cannot be said about flashing Lineage onto a Switch which functionally makes the system considerably less useful.

The Switch OS is already optimized and designed for the hardware. It’s as good as you’re going to get, and it’s also already Linux. I would much rather suggest cracking it to put custom firmware on the device based on the Switch OS; you would get more use out of the device because it could still play the games and be rigged to emulate the older ones.

It’s cool Lineage did this or whatever but it’s kind of a pointless and weird flex.

Why would you want to, though?

It’s not like the Switch is a powerhouse; you’re better off just buying a Deck and emulating.

You can check the md5 hash checksum provided by Microsoft to verify the authenticity. Massgrave gets it from Microsoft, it’s a legit ISO just rehosted.

deleted by creator

They can farm it out to an existing provider like Dropbox or something.

It doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) be proprietary, just like Twitter integration wasn’t.

I tried Citadelum, which is a Roma-era city builder.

It’s a bit janky given that it’s an early demo, but it’s a neat premise given that the last Roman city builder I was aware of was Caesar 3 from '98.

I give it points for concept and setting, but I think Anno 117 is going to be my preferred Roman-era city builder when that drops, because I already know and love the Anno mechanics.

Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.

I wonder what kind of changes they will make to this iteration. I know VI was a big change from V, but eventually I learned to enjoy the different mechanics and have a ton of hours logged.