That’s such garbage!

From tiny companies of five people, to huge companies of five hundred thousand, I have never worked in an office where you couldn’t get a brew.

But then, I am British. Take the tea away and it’s riots (or at the least some quiet complaining)

Of course they do, but let’s unpack that.

When people buy a new car who already have one, they generally do it because either 1. they think it will bring some material benefit over their old car, or 2. they want a new car simply for vanity reasons.

Looking at the PS5 Pro, there will absolutely be people who think “I want to upgrade to the Pro just for bragging rights” but I’m pretty sure the majority of consumers wil simply think “This doesn’t play any games my PS5 can’t already” and pass on it.

Not if they already have a PS5, though.

Haha yeah. People are so accustomed to short TLDs that ‘smith.technology’ just intuitively feels kinda wrong, and it still feels that way to me, even as a tech person who knows it is perfectly valid.

You’re thinking like “smith dot technology dot what?”

Another reason is brand identity.

Using ‘.tech’ or ‘.flights’ or .sports’ for your site feels too “on the nose” and gives vibes of like browsing some directory where things are categorised and sorted. Even worse it implies there are other sites under the same category, and those other sites may be competitors, and this dilutes strength of brand.

lt also suggests strongly what the business does, and while that might seem desirable at first it actually isn’t from a corporate perspective because it means the company becomes tied to their business area and can’t expand and grow out of it into other things.

I think this is a major part of why descriptive TLDs continue to be less preferred over ‘meaningless’ two letter TLDs, because companies want the focus to be on the main part of the domain, not the TLD.

Japan is like this too, and I loved to see that when I was living there.

The bus drivers often wear nice uniforms and white gloves, and clearly take a lot of care in their appearance and work. And people give them respect.

I wish it was like that everywhere, because being able to have pride in what you do and be respected for it is such an important thing that everyone deserves to have - regardless of what your job is.

I feel trypophobia quite strongly with some triggers, even things like budding plants pushing through the ground can make my akin crawl. But for some reason crumpets are okay.

I guess my brain just sees the crumpet texture as being like a macro bread texture, which is okay because it’s kinda bready.

In English too, the colloquial name for tardigrades is “water bears” :D

There are some ways in which the newer shows like Discovery are realistic, but there are also ways in which they are stupid.

For example, two federation officers in a life or death situation where they have two minutes to solve an urgent crisis, and they decide to spend 60 seconds of that having an emotional heart-to-heart.

If that was in TNG, they’d have got the job done like professionals, and then had the friends chat later in ten forward. Because that’s how people with jobs get their jobs done.

TNG era was quite cheesy in some ways, but it kept characters real in that they always acted appropriately for their role and position, not just like a bunch of emotional oddballs who get to be in charge of a spaceship for some reason.

I agree with all of that, pretty much.

If Asus or whoever else dropped a “steam deck killer” I’m pretty sure Valve wouldn’t even blink.

Valve didn’t make the deck because they wanted to make money on hardware. I expect very much they made it specifically because they wanted to encourage the move of steam gaming from the PC to the couch, and they needed some hardware to prove their point with - like with the Steam Link where they tried this before, and that time failed.

If it later ends up being other companies in the long run who make the hardware then no worries, the mission was already accomplished.

This is a tricky one, honestly, because the steam deck straddles the line between PC and console.

If you were a Sony fan, you’d be rightfully upset if Sony released a new PlayStstion every year, and made new games only for the new hardware. It’s just not long enough to feel the hardware has ran its lifespan, and you feel cheated.

Conversely in PCs, the expectation is that the hardware slowly improves constantly, and new hardware doesn’t stop you playing all the latest games on your old hardware; the only limiting factor is how far your old hardware can be pushed before the performance is too poor. And that is YOUR choice as a user, not an artificial choice imposed on you.

I’d expect that any Steam Deck 2 is going to be more like the PC model - it won’t create exclusives or stop people playing the new games on their old deck, it will simply be better and faster.

So on that basis I wouldn’t personally have a problem if Valve put out a deck every year.

All that said however, I think waiting several years is the smart business move. People have longer to enjoy their hardware while still feeling like they have the “latest model” - it’s psychologically better from the consumer perspective.

There may also be an argument that longer release cycles makes things less complicated for devs (less devices to test on) and also keeps the hardware going for longer, because devs will be incentivised to optimise performance for the current deck (which they might not be as much after a new one comes along)

I appreciate your point, but I still believe spelled-out numbers work better.

In prose, especially fiction writing, the ideal case is that the words themselves slide neatly out of the way and become invisible, leaving only a picture in the reader’s mind. Generally speaking, anything distracting is therefore counter-productive for fiction. Strange fonts and strange typesetting, while interesting, take the reader out of the prose. There’s a reason almost every fiction book you pick up from the shelf uses Garamond.

In an engineering context, remembering exactly “12 eggs, 6 toast” is probably the most important thing, and numeric digits assist in that. In fiction however it doesn’t matter if, by the next page, the reader has forgotten exactly how many eggs there were; the important aspect is to convey the sense of a large and chaotic family, and the overall impression is more important than the detail.

Thats why although the numbers are important for setting the scene, we really don’t want them to jump out and steal attention. We don’t want anything at all to have undue prominence, because the reader needs to process the paragraph as a cohesive whole, and see the scene, not the specific numbers.

Cooking is just applied chemistry, after all.

Context is everything, IMO.

In engineering work, numbers should always be digits. In prose, numbers should be spelled out.

Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; 12 eggs and 6 rounds of toast for their 3 sets of boistrous twins.

Compared to

Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; twelve eggs and six rounds of toast for their three sets of boistrous twins.

To me it’s pretty clear which of those reads better and more naturally as prose; digits really ‘jump out’ on the page, and while that is great for engineering texts, it is incongruent and distracting for prose.

Proper massive innit

Doctor Evil didn’t go to Evil Medical School for six years to be put in the section with no training, thank you very much!

One thing that works is finding ways to make achieving small tasks part of your routine. I have a to-do list and in my lunch break at work I often pick off one or two things and decide okay, that’s what I’ll do when I get home. And so that way the selecting of the tasks and the doing of the tasks are things that have their own specific times and the decision is already made.

What also works is to create some external motivation.

I might not feel like cleaning the house, for example, but if I have friends coming over then I’ll enthusiastically clean everything because I want it to be nice for them.

And so sometimes I intentionally weaponise that by inviting a friend over just to give myself that extrinsic motivation.

Not what you had in mind when you said ‘fake’, but how about an AI-generated mushroom identification book that landed people in hospital for eating poisonous stuff the book said was safe

This is it for me too. I’m not going to allow companies to monetise me or my data any more than the absolute minimum I have to.

One thing I try hard at is making sure that I never have to see a single advert in my own home. I don’t have TV, I don’t watch any streaming services if they have ads, and I adblock everything. I don’t care how good a product is, how cheap or free, if it has advertisements I’m out.

To me it’s about having sufficient self-respect to not let companies live in my head rent-free.