Prior art: I remember a long time ago seeing a video of a Barney (as in purple dinosaur) video game for little kids that would just start playing itself if you didn’t touch the controller for a while. It was a side scroller, probably NES/SNES/Genesis.

I could see them doing fine losing those features if it meant the hardware was compact, light, and cheap. But doing it on giant $1000 phones is not going to do them any favors with the lemmy crowd like I said.

My main original Skyrim play through on desktop was 100 hours.

My Skyrim VR play through was 200 hours. I think in 2019. So fun.

100% agreed. I agreed more with each paragraph.

Your last sentence hit on what I think is a contributing if not primary driving factor in the health crisis you described.

It’s like the goal of modern society is to insulate us from the natural world and from learning subjects or doing tasks that we don’t absolutely have to.

But we are critters that evolved on this planet just like the others. You can’t just live a commoditized life that consists of work, car, screen, sleep, repeat and get the same fulfillment out of life as if you found the unique path that’s optimized for your unique brain.

Not acknowledging that everything jacks with your head to SOME degree only prevents you from trying to defend yourself as best you can!

Over the past several years I have gone through a transition from living life the way I was supposed to, or that I thought I wanted to, to living according to what produces the best outputs from my brain. Once I have the lived experience of an undeniable improvement from some change, it might actually become a habit.

I personally might not use a headphone jack or SD card slot very much, but for the market that a GrapheneOS phone would be targeting they seem like OBVIOUS things to include.

The crowd getting excited about this partnership is pretty much the same crowd that complains about features like those going away.

Then make the machine try to keep people talking for as long as possible…

That’s probably a huge part of it. How many billions of dollars have been spent engineering content on a screen to get its tendrils into people’s minds and attention and not let go?

EnGaGeMent!!!

🎶 Jean-Luc P. Ain’t Nothin’ Ta Fuck Wit! 🎶

That just seems like semantics. It seems pretty fair to call country A bombing the shit out of country B and killing its leader an act of war.

I think a lot of my fellow Americans find it easy to not think of as a “war” because they see no risk of Iran attacking the continental US. They’ll just send their thoughts and prayers to whoever deployed over there catches the bullets.

It’s also very possible that the war is a roudabout consequence of the child rape, assuming Epstein was a Mossad honeypot and Israel really really wants the US to be blowing up Iran right now.

Ohh noooo!

Now my backlog of games that should be shrinking is only going to grow by 10% next year instead of 12% like it could have!

The tech companies haven’t driven me to the point of utter contempt for consoles like they have for phones, but at the same time I have multiple PCs and more games than I will ever play.

My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.

Fortunately we devs are able to “dual boot” to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can’t even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)

All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:

The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don’t write many office-format documents though, so I’m more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.

You know how in media streaming and gaming there’s that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?

Microsoft’s stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I’m not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.

If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren’t entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.

But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I’ll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.

I think it’s more of a way for those of is in the US to hang on to some shred of optimism. Surely somebody somewhere will continue to make nice things for normal people, right?

I’ve spent just a little bit of time in Europe, with most of it in Sweden. I have seen with my own eyes how civilized societies can have nice things in shared spaces!

Ooh, a headline that might get me to pay attention to an upcoming phone. How fun!

Excellent! It’s hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)

I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It’s a target platform at work, and it’s more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.

I might try Garuda on the new PC we’ve been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I’ll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)

Attitudes like that are not how we got a trillion dollars in spare data center infrastructure to find a use for!

Those consumers will be happy owning nothing THIS time!!

Throw a self hosted Jellyfin server in the mix, and you can access your entire FLAC library from any device you want! Your friends can listen at the same time, if you want to give them logins.

“I noticed that those other people exist and and are living their lives, so you must stop shoving them DoWn OuR ThRoAtS!!”

There’s always Goat Simulator 3 if you can be happy with gaming culture satire and way fewer guns.

The tech companies are doing a great job at making me uninterested in the hottest new phones. I used to follow the news about them and know the tech specs and stuff, because I’m a nerd and gadgets are fun and smart phones in particular are the intersection of SO much technology and engineering. Moore’s law was alive and well during all my formative years, so I am even conditioned to expect the excitement.

But lately, not only have I been ignoring what the big players are offering, I have been ignoring the phone I already have! Instead I have a PC at the end of the couch with a monitor on an arm that s swings right over my lap.

I use my phone pretty much just for music, web browser, Voyager (Lemmy on the go), and occasional texting. When I am at home I will sometimes misplace my phone for hours and just not worry about it.

I have already pushed the megacorp phone + social media experience so far out of my daily life, that if future options for open linux phones are rough around the edges and don’t have tap to pay then oh well I don’t think I care.

It’s much easier to live without the shiny new thing once you see how well your brain does when separated from it. (and you have some loved ones who are still hopelessly addicted to the scroll)