Skyrim players: "The mannequins are haunted!"
Bethesda: "Hold my beer and watch this!"
Shurimal
joined 2 years ago
Didn't have time to go into details in my last post. I think the most important traits of technofeudalism are regulatory capture of the government and ubiquitous rent-seeking—"you'll own nothing" (I highly doubt in the "...and be happy" part).
The big corpos have realised that extracting value is easier and more profitable than creating value. Hence subscription everything including heated seats and better acceleration in cars, platform economy (Uber, Air BnB et al.). The latest Unity fiasco is also an example of a company trying to extract as much value from the game developers as possible, and it will not be the last attempt at this.
What makes technofeudalism possible is the IT infrastructure of the world (hence "techno"). Uber-like platforms and subscription services for hardware were not practical half a century ago, but ubiquitous Internet access, smartphones and DRM makes it easy today.
In short, just like the peasants in the old feudal ages had to pay to the lord to have a place to live and make a living off the land (and realistically had nowhere to go to where this was not the case), in technofeudalism you have to pay for your techno-lord corporate middlemen to have a place to live and be able to use the tools (software or hardware) you need to make a living with no realistic alternatives due to regulatory capture.
Technofeudalism is the logical evolution (I'd say end stage, but I'm not sure it can't get even worse) of capitalism. That's what happens when the 0.1% own 90% and decide to turn it up to eleven.
Reinstalling the driver and restarting should fix it, no?
What I don’t get, is why you’re being an apologist for Apple?
I fucking hate Apple, their walled garden and questionable engineering practices. But USB port speed is the last of the reasons to hate them. I really don't give a shit about whether the USB-C port on my phone is USB 2 or 3 or whatever. Be it "normies" or "techies", I can't recall anyone in my social circle who uses the port on the phone for anything other than charging. Cloud storage, whether self-hosted or by some big company, is the norm and way more convenient. Especially considering that properly set up, everything is backed up and synced in real time automagically.
Frankly, who even uses the USB port on their phone for data transfers unless it's an emergency? I just stream media from my NAS using Navidrome and Jellyfin, use Syncthing to back up my photos and sync files I need, and mount the SMB shares I need to access. The eMMC and SD cards are slower than USB 3 speeds, anyway. Most SD cards don't even max out USB 2.
The only sensible real life use case for USB 3 for phones would be external monitors.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/with-nothing-on-joe-biden-republicans-move-toward-impeaching-him-anyway/ a pretty good overview of what's been going on with Hunter Biden (who, frankly, has done some shady things) and why and how republicans have nothing on Joe Biden.
It's a grift, pure and simple.
Home Assistant. If you ever want to do home automation properly, this is the way. Works with pretty much anything—Zigbee, zWave, BT LE, MQTT—while keeping things manufacturer agnostic, local, private and highly responsive (your commands don't need to go through some server 3000 km away and won't have ugly 1 second latency as a result).
DAVx⁵ and Radicale to sync contacts and calendars between devices without snooping middle-men.
Syncthing to sync any files between devices. Works remotely, too, thanks to Syncthing relays.
Navidrome for your personal music streaming service.
Debian, Docker, Docker Compose and Portainer as the backbone to run all your services.
And many others.
Banana plugs? Definitely
Banana plugs are damn good for lab equipment.
As a speaker connector? Fuck banana plugs. Speakon is the only way.
Good studio headphones are around 200€ and you can get decent ones for 100...150€. And generally they are closed back, not open headphones.
I'd take a proper lavalier mic with proper studio headphones over an unwieldy and crappy gaming headset with boom mic any day.
Or better yet, a proper THX reference level capable surround sound system and tactile transducers over any headphones.
Honestly, the best platform to play Bethesda games is PC anyway. What makes Bethesda special is their embracing of modding, and PC being an open platform allows for much, much more in that respect. IIRC, on Playstation one couldn't even use custom assets in mods, and console makers will never allow script extenders, .NET frameworks and ENB series that allow for amazing stuff on PC.