Desktop pricing is its own dumpster fire, but when did laptop GPU pricing get so much worse?

Spending $1,100 to get a laptop with an entry-level x060 GPU feels insane, especially with AMD’s integrated GPU technology getting fairly competitive.

I’m sure you are not one of the problem hosts, but his will harm the renters more because they’re the ones already subject to the bigger power imbalance - by definition not near their home and relying on Airbnb to ensure a safe place to stay - and Airbnb is reputed to be pro-host against renters.

For example, there was a trip to Europe where a host physically threatened us in writing, Airbnb kept transferring us around rather than offer any solutions, we left for our safety, the host claimed we didn’t cancel and owed the full stay, Airbnb took the host’s side without evidence despite our evidence of their threat in writing, we did a chargeback, and Airbnb disputed it for 4 months in apparent bad faith.

Anecdotal, but a case study why black-holing renters’ contacts seems more damaging.

Yes! Daydream. I thought it was the same project/ tech that underlied Cardboard. I stand corrected.

So they abandoned the VR platform they used for Google Cardboard in 2014, disbanded, reformed, and now are creating a new platform not based on the old platform, but aren’t planning on talking about it?

Hopefully they already have their Google Graveyard plot picked out. We can get started on the headstone.

They are not charging for local streaming on your network. They are just charging for remote streaming, something that wasn’t part of emby, does use their servers and network bandwidth, and chews up a huge amount of development time.

I’m sorry, what? How does me hosting my content on my server connected to the Internet with a connection I pay for, to a remote client that I own and also connected to the Internet that I pay for, “use their servers and network bandwidth”? How is basic remote streaming functionality that existed for the entire time I’ve used it “chew up a huge amount of development time”?

Their development time - the things they’re bleeding self-hosted users to fund through this change - is entirely focused on their AVOD-hosting, SVOD-hub garbage that every other streaming startup is doing.

Just to respond to the people here resigned to or encouraging the switch to all-digital, I get it. But let me rage against the dying of the light just a bit. There are some still-good reasons for preferring or demanding full-game cards:

• Having a complete release-date-version game on a cartridge, even if it is later (or instantly) patched, is typically 99% percent of the game experience. Yes, there will be fixes and DLC and so on. But in a preservation discussion, looking to 50 years from now, having preserved 99% of the experience versus 0%, the gameplay, the complete original graphics, the original sound, is still functionally the difference between a game being preserved or not.
• Hacking the Switch 2 will be required to independently preserve key-card or digital-only games. Full stop. Hackers have been to some extent been our preservationists since the dawn of DRM, but in the world of game-key-cards that Nintendo has chosen to accelerate, they will be the only preservationists. I have no issue with hacking, but it’s unreliable and eventually may stop being viable when hardware DRM and TPM-style modules are part of the core chip design. Our preservation future is a gamble that hackers will continue to defeat DRM.
• The only preservation alternative is to have era-complete sets of games on physical Switch 2s, which will eventually break down. Repairs will require, again, hacking, because hardware DRM already will never make repairs simple again. The game working on one system, versus 100 million (or whatever Switch 2 will sell) is the difference between it being playable for entire generations of people or not, even if the game is never hacked and dumped.
• Digital-only experiences are not incompatible with game preservation. GOG is the model here. Nintendo is not acting in the only way feasible, they’re acting according to a specific corporate business plan that seeks to enforce scarcity and capitalize on long-term capture of any resale markets.
• Yes, competitors are already doing digital-only, DRM-locked distribution. But resigning to this because of that is an all-or-nothing fallacy. Every bit we can preserve helps.

Closing more philosophically: Games are shared culture. When you grow up with a game, or as an adult have a profound experience, that game becomes a part of you. At a societal level, that game becomes a part of us and of human culture - at that point it doesn’t even “belong” to Nintendo exclusively.

Nintendo (not only, but focusing on them here) is choosing a path where there will be no alternative to re-paying to experience that memory throughout your life. SaaS is capitalism’s most tragic 2000-era “innovation” - tether us to a subscription for our whole lives, if possible, extracting value - and Nintendo already has shown they will lock old games behind their subscription service rather than re-release them. Experiencing these games through museums 50 years from now may only be at corporate behest (if Nintendo still exists, which is less sure than it may feel in this moment).

So this may seem “duh, they’re doing what everyone else is.” But it is actually a bellwether moment. The future we’re pointed, that we enable by treating these key-cards as viable, is re-purchasing or subscribing to access basic parts of ourselves and our culture, even after we’ve paid for it.

And to respond to the “but it’s Nintendo’s property” crowd: That is also actually antithetical to modern copyright law, which is vehemently not an inviolable property grant, but meant (since the Statute of Anne) to only give incentive to make more expression. Broader public good and culture is always the end-game of copyright. These works eventually are supposed to belong to us. These game key-cards are just one step in capturing that long-tail - the long-tail that belonged to preservationists, to museums, and to the public - from us all.

Yes, but they make sure they have a separate account for each category, so the math works out.

Attention is invisible until you take the time to acknowledge it. People will never treat it as a resource of the same value as these companies, because they don’t even recognize it as something being taken away from them (despite that it is actually the most precious resource - our literal lives), and that disparity will always be profitable.

OpenAI recently updated ChatGPT to be able to reproduce images in a specific style, and a lot of people posted Ghibli-style versions of things. So all of a sudden, it’s a big deal.

Oh, that’s definitely how it should be (but pretty much never is). That’s good to hear.

The thing I like about Unraid that’s dead simple, which I’m sure more technically-minded people can do with many solutions, is use drives of different sizes as long as each drive is less than the size of the parity drive(s). Since content shares are automatically distributed across drives, and those drives are different sizes, is that not very similar functionality?

I guess my question is, is the hybrid RAID solution above different only in that the array presents as a single drive to the user, rather than a single (multi-drive-apportioned) share?

I can’t say I understand the reasons for that.

But the flash drive content is very minimal and in 2+ years of using it, anecdotally I haven’t had any problems. The cache drive is separate (I use an SSD for that in addition to my 3.5" HDDs), and once booted my understanding is the entire OS is in memory, so it isn’t a bottleneck. The OS flash drive is small and just settings, and one-click backup, so I don’t have anxiety over data loss.

The future is great!

Interesting, I must have missed it when investigating. It seems a little “Linux power user”-y, though - is that accurate? It says for home office, but is it good for movies/music/etc hosting?

https://www.openmediavault.org/features.html

I can figure out how to get things done when I know the goal (I learned plenty of command-line, docker containers, etc setup with Unraid). So not a beginner. But to be honest, I can’t even understand if the features on this “features” page are things that are important to me because I don’t know enough acronyms and foundational knowledge, so it’s a little imposing.

I don’t regret building my home server with Unraid at all. It’s great, use any drives, don’t even have to be the same sizes.

https://unraid.net/

The pricing is reasonable, but one issue is that they changed their pricing scheme recently to only give a year of updates for all but the costliest license. I was grandfathered in unless I upgrade my license, but it’s something to consider.

They’re still a corporate entity, and they still want access to markets to make money.

Sure, I just mean, look how long BOTW has been sold - it will be a fraction of that length of time before Switches cease being sold. Mostly I was pointing to the system refresh as not only a chance to reissue BOTW, but to reset pricing expectations.

There will be a future where BOTW S2-edition is still being sold and the Switch is not. From them on, BOTW will be a $90 game, since it will be the only way to get it.

Pretty soon you won’t be able to buy a Switch, once manufacturing ceases.

Nintendo famously never discounts. But this is actually Nintendo’s way of not only never discounting, but increasing the price over time.

This is a good list, and to add:

• Consumer sentiment in general is terrible. A large part of the population are stressed and exhausted, and that’s not a “let’s go see something fun” mindset for many, it’s “let’s get through the day and watch comfort content.”

• This is a time of the year in general where studios bury releases they don’t have confidence in.

• Because of that, while many have reasonable Rotten Tomatoes scores, when you do that year after year, audiences start to stop paying attention around this time.

I’m just waiting for a nice breakdown of society that somehow happens with working electricity and no danger or difficulty obtaining food, and then I’m set.