This is what came to mind for me too.

It is so much fun to play co-op with my kid. Then I can act old and describe all the gaming industry references that only I get.

I’ve also been to Sweden two whole times, so I get to act all sophisticated and worldly while describing the real world Goatenburg.

Yeah. It would be sweet to live in a world that doesn’t keep proving the cynics and doomsayers correct.

That’s kind of an accurate way to describe a lot of society these days though, from doomscrolling to phone addiction to social media disinformation to surveillance and tracking and advertising.

One of the beautiful things about being able to run Linux at work and use Teams in a browser is that my status is decoupled from what I’m doing on my machine. Obviously if I’m in a meeting or chatting with somebody through Teams my status will reflect that.

I bet my most productive days have me away/idle for hours on end, lol.

I’m right there with you, but the OP mentions social media, and that’s all that shit is.

Our society has allowed the way many people keep in touch with one another to be via psychologically manipulative, attention harvesting, advertising machines.

I did already get myself some Surface Shield which is exactly that kind of lanolin based protectant, after also reading about some of the more hardcore stuff like POR-15 that I’d worry could trap water or hide damage.

I’ve used it a bit on my car near where I have some wheels removed to work on the brakes, and tried it on some garden tools.

Impressions are very good and I totally plan to cover the underside of my car with this stuff when finishing up work on it. Just not the exhaust I imagine.

DONE, lol.

I kinda want to get something with a manual transmission again, so it will very likely be a japanese brand.

Somebody found the secret door to the power house of the cell!

I’m in the US where this is coming soon enough. My car is a 2012 which seems like kind of a sweet spot, but it’s not going to last forever especially with our winters and road salt and pot holes.

I didn’t plan to buy a new car any time soon but have been thinking about my eventual next choice. All this BS has me wondering whether it’s better to get something soon without the next level of surveillance, or wait a few years and see how bad it is in practice and how it can be disabled.

That 2012 I mentioned is fun to drive, has low mileage for its age, and is fuel efficient, plus I have renewed my love of working on my own vehicles after not doing so for a decade or two. I’m currently doing work on the brakes. Maybe I’ll just have to try to make it live forever, and not give any more money to the whole damn industry as long as possible. That’s the most economically and environmentally friendly option, after all.

It also makes references to “the before time, in the long long ago” ala South Park / Star Trek a whole lot more relatable.

Going back a little further than “the inauguration,” it just so happened that my kid was born in 2017 very close to the first inauguration that slowly built up the BS until Covid.

2016 and earlier feels like it could legitimately have been a previous life that I can still remember – and my wife and I are living in the same house and drive the same two cars as the few years before that!

It sounds like a lot of good thought and design went into it.

The biggest problem was/is always going to be consumers wary of trusting a tech company not to mess it up because of greed.

I think it’s fairly easy to imagine what that would be like, given the limited examples you can see with a VR headset with pass-through. It could be pretty sweet for people to have the option of a digital overlay on reality that’s under their own control.

What’s missing are the extremely powerful but also extremely miniaturized and efficient hardware (imagine just constant inside-out tracking of some kind with the storage to remember the 3D layout of basically everywhere you go, but also with 12-24 hour battery life and not generating a noticeable amount of heat with a tiny surface area), and the open technologies and/or lack of enshittification. Who is going to sell such a device but won’t stuff it with ads, surveillance, and paywalls?

The closest we’ve seen is Apple’s headset that was still just a high end VR headset with passthrough and was thousands of dollars while still being locked down.

I’d say this is more like the middle of the end, with the beginning of the end being the Meta logo on them.

Useful details, thanks.

I’ll just point out that they/we did not have a system like that, but just promises of it from a tech giant. (except of course for whatever they had designed internally up until that time) So even as somebody who doesn’t really sell games, I get why people weren’t thrilled with the idea of microsoft being the ever-present broker in the transactions.

I specifically remember that their plan was essentially CD Keys. You’d buy a physical game and it would have a code inside, or the discs would have unique identifiers that force linked to your account, or whatever.

So yeah, essentially physical media with a digital license. If you were going to be able to resell your game it was going to have to go through microsoft, or maybe you could lend a friend your disc and that lets them buy their own license for a small discount to play it.

It won’t really affect me, but I understand the appeal of a physical artifact servicing as time game’s license for those who like to lend, sell, trade, library, etc.

And those same benefits are why the corporations can’t wait to do away with it. It’s been quite a while since Microsoft tried the same thing and people freaked out enough that they reversed course.

Oh boy, just what we need, corpo-wars to go along with the nation-wars.

It would be nice to see them hurting each other instead of the general populace, but we all know that they do collateral damage to innocents even when weapons aren’t involved.

You love to see it.

Unfortunately, with the state of this country I could also see aggressive militarized private security getting more popular around this shit.

I wonder if there’s any chance of all the tech speculation helping to fund electrical grid upgrades (including grid scale storage for renewables) that actually benefit regular human society after the bubble pops.