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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.

    We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.

    So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.

    The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.


  • Honestly, it’s even stupider than that. Everyone who works for me or that o work with is a professional making 6 figures, ranging into the mid-six range. They’re great at their jobs, and prior to Covid we had all kinds of flexibility for who worked where. Now it’s a one size fits all, and I’d honestly be shocked if the company wasn’t losing more money in policing and attrition than it was gaining in some hypothetical bonus of being in the office.



  • I think Nintendo knows it’s market pretty well. I have both a switch and a steam deck andO have a lot of the same games on each. The deck is obviously the higher power unit. I got it just a short time ago to try to play through my backlog, although to be honest I’ve logged more hours on new purchases like Stray and Dredge. It’s a good system.

    The switch outshines it in a couple of places, though. First, they got the form factor - specifically the size and weight - better than steam did. It’s smaller and lighter, and I think the battery lasts longer. More importantly, the games that run on the switch were made for it. There’s no squinting at tiny fonts or trying to figure whether and how to use the trackpad to control the mouse bits. If it’s on the switch, I can be pretty sure it is playable on the switch. I’m still getting used to the issues with scaling down the desktop experience to a deck, but already I’m thinking I won’t be playing a lot of cyberpunk without booking up a mouse, keyboard, and monitor.

    In short, the deck and windows handhelds need to perform at the level of a (low end) desktop (because they’re playing desktop games) as well as worry about scaling and transforming the UI. The switch doesn’t have that problem, and the trade off is a more limited (but still extensive) library.

    The switch is my first Nintendo device since the NES, and the first party content isn’t what made me finally try it. I like playing games like Diablo on it. I think Nintendo, by owning the entire stack, can serve up a better and more curated experience. If I didn’t have a library of a couple hundred steam games that I’ve never played, I’d probably not have considered getting the deck. I am enjoying it, and some games are phenomenal, but from a performance-that-actually-impacts-the-user perspective, Nintendo might just come out on top.