I mean, they have done it. When I was looking at phones a few years back, it was genuinely a toss up between a Pixel 4a and an iPhone SE. If all you need it to be is a cameraphone, then both were good options.
Even now, the iPhone 16e is a relatively inexpensive phone when considering its featureset, but I would prefer a "mini" or newer SE variant instead.
Interesting effect of this seems to be a brief rush to buy up skins, inflating their prices as a result. My inventory of cheap junk saw a massive spike in market pricing as the price of knives flatlined
PDFs are the scariest file type. They can execute JS, include 3D models, hold hidden fields and metadata you haven't invented yet. Design fillable fields and then format them with CSS. Every page is an image with text that was scanned with OCR instead of just holding text data. You can embed videos for playback or audio to irritate your unfortunate victim. You can apply digital signatures, or encrypt your document.
Who the fuck designed this thing. No document format was ever made for this. It's madness.
That's not really fair, I think. Smaller organizations are especially dispositioned here. Think small businesses, charities, local municipal services, etc. Small IT budgets, low staff (if any) and just enough to pad out a subscription cost to a service provider that fits their needs.
AWS is an incredibly low cost solution, and it's probably where most of these low cost services point themselves at when building platforms at scale. Not everyone can build and maintain a datacentre or home server for their every need.
This isn't to say that there are definitely idiots who pad their resume by chanting a prayer to SaaS and boasting about having moved their company to the "cloud" via a cheap and unreliable AWS rehoster, before failing upwards though.
In my experience, they come in waves. They come either as data centres seek to replace or renew existing drives, but as a result, there aren't as many lower capacity drives available. Lately, I've only seen 10+TB drives under a recertified banner, though you can find lower capacity drives that are "refurbished" instead. They will have the power-on hours to match though, as these are the refuse from those sorts of drive replacements.
You may find better luck with local used marketplaces if you only need cheap storage. Otherwise, they do seem less common if you don't need large capacity drives.
I had completely forgotten this limp puppet corpse of a game had come out at all. I saw 0 marketing for it, saw a ton of bad reviews and then it disappeared into the void.
I'm actually more surprised to see any further news about it, given it felt like the kind of thing that folds a studio in half.
Fair enough. I missed this push amidst every other AI related enshittification tactict at the time I guess. That said, this is how it should work. An organization proposes a change and the change is withdrawn or halted after the userbase is able to weigh in. I'm pleased that they didn't barrel ahead with it despite the outcry.
I feel for the Wikimedia foundation right now. They're under mounting pressure to compete with corporations that hold a monopoly on how people access their sites and subsequently the information on them. The goal is to provide open information, but that information is no less open to the AI that aims to scrape, rehost, and re-use the work of individuals who have volunteered their time to it.
I think it would have been easy for them to effectively do what Reddit did, and lock down the access to the site and its content in order to develop their own AI tools to perform similar tasks trained on their dataset exclusively. Instead, they've listened and I hope they continue to listen to their dedicated members who believe in the foundation's original goals.
Not all AI use is bad, and it sounds to me like you didn't read that article itself. They have no desire or intention to use AI in a way that directly effects the information on the site, how it's presented to visitors or to use it in a way that would manipulate how articles are edited.
The only potential note is translation, but translation is such a massive undertaking that by providing a means to discuss and interact between languages, the information becomes more broadly available and open to correction as needed by native speakers.
Also, Britannica does employ the use of AI within their own system as well, even providing a chatbot by which to ask questions and search for information. It is, in this way, more involved than Wikipedia's goals.
Hardly. If the only thing in the box is a code, then it ends up tied to an account. I know that's not the case with the Switch, but it wasn't what I had really directed the sentiment towards
Oh sure, that was more of an echo of the feeling of being tricked than anything else. Those are usually special/collectors editions anyways, and there's reasons beyond needing/wanting the data that you'd buy that.
Seconding Qobuz. Feels a lot like the best of all of them. Streaming, massive library that captured most of my existing Spotify saved, and I can actually buy music to keep as well when I want an album
It's been interesting, watching the lag here. This feeling was felt by many who played games on PC 15 years ago when DVDs were starting to become less common and games were expanding in size. I distinctly remember buying a game I was excited for only to learn now I had to spend part of my data cap on downloading it. What had even been the point of buying the boxed copy?
I mean, they have done it. When I was looking at phones a few years back, it was genuinely a toss up between a Pixel 4a and an iPhone SE. If all you need it to be is a cameraphone, then both were good options.
Even now, the iPhone 16e is a relatively inexpensive phone when considering its featureset, but I would prefer a "mini" or newer SE variant instead.