MudMan

Yeah, that number went up pretty fast during the 2010s and 20s. Honestly, I think at this point it’s a cost/manufacturing reliability thing. There aren’t that many panel manufacturers, and these days a 65 inch OLED can be found for like a grand and a LED one for half of that. That’s sort of been “what a TV costs” for most of this century, so cheaper panels at scale in that price range probably means people go for the bigger one they can get in that price range unless they have some hard space limitations.

Yes.

I mean, for one thing, that’s a misrepresentation. You don’t need a behavioral scientist to figure out that “come back tomorrow for another reward” is a good engagement tool. For another, it’s a misnomer, because that’s not a dark pattern, it’s a deliberate, out-in-the-open design that is transparent about how it works.

But do I think that people freaking out about engagement tools they don’t like while giving functionally similar ones they do like a pass is a moral panic?

100%, absolutely yes.

There’s a reason why the PEGI rep talking to Eurogamer clarifies that this specific wording would absolutely have unintended consequences and they’re limiting the age ratings impact and leaning on content descriptors instead:

“There was some discussion here,” he added. “Some people pointed out that these are features that make the game engaging and fun - this is enriching the game experience similar to a cliffhanger in a Netflix series. So we mostly want to inform parents about this, because there’s no reason why we should give Animal Crossing a very high rating. So this is going to stick to a PEGI 7 but it will have a descriptor that explains this. The exact language of the descriptors still needs to be figured out.”

So yes. Slippery slope, moral panic, will somebody thing of the children stuff.

Hah. You do you. I get how it’d be obnoxious to be called out, but man, it’s not my fault that you chose the worst possible example for this. Like, literally the worst iteration of Windows for the specific metric you called out, in a clearly demonstrable way that a ton of people measured because it was such a meme.

You can block me, but “they are what they are” indeed.

Incidentally, this is a classic opportunity to remind people that blocking on AP applications sucks ass and the only effect it has is for the blocker to stop being able to see what the blockee is saying about them while everybody else still gets access to both. Speaking of software degradation, somebody should look into that.

Myyyyyeeeeh. A lightweight distro or a conemporaneous distro sure.

If I’m running GPU accelerated Steam, tons of tabs on Firefox and the same highly customized KDE desktop full of translucent components and extra animations I am willing to bet they’d both chug.

Which is what the conversation is about: new software doesn’t suck, it’s doing more stuff.

For sure, all things being equal Linux does run ligher on RAM and VRAM, so if you’re using something that is speficially memory-limited so Windows and Linux fall on opposite sides of overflowing the available memory you’ll definitely see better performance on Linux, but that’s not an inherent issue with poorly made software having a huge performance overhead.

Myeh. I think they mostly do fine, but they’re certainly not perfect. These are reasonable, but some of the stuff they’re saying about it is factually incorrect, too (like I said, there ARE age-based commerce lockouts in games already despite their statements).

All they need to do to be functional is have a modicum of consistency and at least be reactive to feedback. The Balatro thing sucked, but they did correct it. Some of these changes seem to be specifically a reaction to the Balatro thing, in fact.

See, I have a real issue with the “12 year olds (or anyone, really)” bit there in juxtaposition to all the pushback on OS age verification.

The gaming community has spent the past decade and change doing the exact same moral panic routine that anti-game violence crusaders did in the 90s and are in the process of finding out why it’s a bad idea.

Age ratings and content warnings? Awesome. Gating content and design concepts on moral grounds? Not that.

It doesn’t need to be too specific, in that PEGI actually reviews the products it rates. You get to send them a preview and then talk to them about the rating.

I also think some of the stuff Eurogamer is reporting is weird, or maybe PEGI is just not aware of some tools? For instance, null

A game will be able to reduce this PEGI rating to 7 if it contains in-game controls that allow you to turn spending off by default. As Bosmans noted, these systems don’t really exist yet, but the hope is this change will incentivise them to be developed.

Is not actually true. Many games do include turning spending off based on the user’s reported age or whether they’re on a child account (Nintendo and Sony both support this as a feature, I believe).

So there is some confusing stuff going on here, but it all seems mostly reasonable to me.

Then you’re either lying about it or haven’t booted a newer PC. Fast Boot was a back of the box feature for Windows 8 for a reason. It was becoming a huge meme at the time how slow Win7 was to boot.

If your 2020s PC with Windows 11 is taking 45 seconds to boot on the Windows logo like Win 7 does (as seen in the benchmarks above) then you need some tech support because something is clearly not working as expected. I don’t think even my weaker Win11 machines take longer than 10 secs from boot starting to the password screen.

That may be true anyway, because the tiny hybrid laptop I’m using to write this is reporting 2-5% CPU utilization even with a literal hundred tabs open in this browser. So… yeah, either you have a knack for hyperbole or something broken.

Well, cool, then. It’s a genuine struggle to find a 32 inch TV of any decent quality these days.

But by far the most popular TV size today is 65 inch, which as far as I know isn’t available as a PC monitor at all, and even 32/40 inch PC monitors with a similar feature set can be as expensive or significantly more expensive than an equivalent-sized TV. That’s probably partially due to the focus on speed and responsiveness and partially due to the whole… you know, monetizing your data and selling ads thing.

The difference is the LG TV has a computer already in it. Otherwise the panels are pretty similar.

But some types (and especially sizes) of panels are hard to find in “dumb” PC monitors and vice versa. You can (maybe) find a 42 inch TV, but I’m not aware of a 65 inch display without TV features, let alone any larger sizes.

Yes.

This is not it. Not only is there a microinverter and a breaker there to address that issue, but my understanding as a layman is the load in the circuit is down to how much you’re drawing (i.e. if you’re generating 1200 behind the microinverter and pulling 1500 you’re pulling 1500 through the circuit, not 2700).

The bigger fire hazard here is the battery many of these come with for storage, honestly.

That’s not to say there isn’t a bit of a risk. You need to be careful if you need to do something in the installation that you disable both the grid breaker and the microinverter. Otherwise it’s entirely possible for the grid safety to blow and the inverter to keep pumping power into your house. But as the previous poster says, there’s a reason these are legal to install in apartments all over Europe, and it’s not just European grids being set for higher amps. FWIW, most of these kits come with 800W max out. My understanding is they’re perfectly fine to use as a cost mitigation and they’ll keep your fridge going in a blackout but no, they won’t be constantly tripping your fuse.

Except the Linux userbase has been saying that exact thing for the past ten years, so again, has Linux also degraded in sync or, hear me out here, is this mostly a nostalgia thing that makes you forget the cludgy performance issues of the software you used when you were younger and things have mostly gotten snappier over time across the board?

As a current dual booter I’ll say that Windows and Linux don’t feel fundamentally different these days, for good and ill. Windows has a remarkably crappy and entirely self-inflicted issue with their online-search-in-Start-menu feature, which sucks but is toggleable at least. Otherwise I have KDE and Win11 set up the same way and they both work pretty much the same. And both measurably better than their respective iterations 10, let alone 15 or 20 years ago.

I mean… good luck finding a 65 inch PC monitor.

That does seem like a bit of a downside.

That’s… not really true, and not what that link shows. Those latency tests still show then-modern devices topping the list. They’re arguing that some then-modern low end devices have more button-to-screen latency than older hardware (which they would, given he’s comparing to single-threaded, single-tasking bare metal stuff from the 80s spitting signals out to a CRT to laptops with integrated graphics). And they’re saying that at the time (I presume the post dates from 2017, when the testing ends), this wasn’t well understood because people were benching the hardware and not the end to end latency factoring the I/O… which was kinda true at the time but absolutely not anymore.

I’d get in the weeds about how much or little sense it makes to compare an apple 2 drawing text on a CRT to typing on a powershell/Linux terminal window inside a desktop environment, but that’d be kind of unfair. Ten years ago this wasn’t a terrible observation to make with the limited tools the guy had available, and this sort of post made it popular to think about latency and made manufacturers on controllers, monitors and GPUs focus on it more.

What it does not show, though, is that an apple 2 was faster than a modern gaming PC by any metric. Not in 2017, and sure as hell not in 2026, when 240Hz monitors are popular, 120Hz TVs are industry-standard, VRR is widely supported and keyboards, controllers, monitors and GPU manufacturers are obsessed with latency measurements. It’s not just fallacious, it’s wrong.

When was the last time you booted a 2011 machine? Because man, is that not true.

And that’s a 2016-2017 era PC.

Windows 7 didn’t even have fast boot support at all. I actively remember recommending people to let their PCs sit for a couple of minutes after booting so that Windows could finish whatever the hell it was trying to do in the background faster instead of clogging up whatever else you were trying to do.

Keeping my old hardware around compulsively really impacts my perception of this whole “things were better when I was a teenager” stuff.

That’s some nonsense, though.

For one thing, it’s one of those tropes that people have been saying for 30 years, so it kinda stops making sense after a while. For another, the reason it doesn’t make sense is it doesn’t account for modern computers doing more now than they did then.

In 2016 I had a 970 that’s still in an old computer I use as a retro rocket, and I can promise you that wonderful as that thing was, I couldn’t have been playing Resident Evil this week on that thing. So yeah, I notice.

And I had a Galaxy S7 then, which is still in use as a bit of a display and I assure you my current phone is VERY noticeably faster, even discounting the fact that its displaying 120fps rather than 60.

Old people have been going “things were better when I was a kid” for millennia. I’m not assuming we’re gonna stop now, but… maybe we should.

But… 2016 was a decade ago. If it feels quick and snappy that way that means the post is right.

Which it kinda isn’t but hey.

The Xenoblade Chronicles series and maybe FFXII.

Xenoblade Chronicles X in particular feels like it was meant to be a MMO and then they just kinda… gave up on the multiplayer part.

That’d be me.

For the record, I disagree with nothing that Gerstmann is saying on this one, in case the more upbeat tone makes it more palatable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHrYhUOqZ7c

I just sound angrier because he’s checking it out and seeing it moving in the right direction while I’m trying to main. All the speedbumps are actually annoying if you’re not just tinkering for fun.