A lot of these women are well past their 20s and while I don’t think the result of their work is attractive however in the age of social media (or just regular media) it is better to look like this then to “look old” as a woman.

Many are in their 30s, some in their early 30s even. Most people have the first signs of aging come in their mid-late 30s, laugh lines, first few grey hairs, etc. It depends on the individual but ultimately most people will have minimal visual signs of age in their 30s. This isn’t trying to hide aging, this is something else entirely

I mean defining “active users” is an inherently political choice in any metric. You’re ultimately choosing how to slice the data for analysis, so if you adjust your metrics on customers who only claim free games vs customers who actually spend money on the platform the data can tell completely different stories.

I suppose the point is, collecting the free games probably creates non-negligable costs for Epic, and how that looks on their released metrics is entirely up to how the data gets sliced

I keep a separate savings account for things like that. I just call it “upgrade” in my banking app. Its money specifically earmarked for any kind of entirely-optional big purchases, like computer upgrades, server upgrades, home theatre upgrades, etc. I also have one earmarked for replacing my current cars and one for vacations, plus of course my emergency fund

The only problem with this approach is I tend to hoard my money and want to see my savings account go up, so I really don’t end up spending as much as I could on myself. Like I have an entire computer’s worth in the “upgrade” account right now

That certainly changes the calculation quite a bit, but how many people can be anticipated to claim a given free game is definitely going to be a point of negotiation on how much to pay the publisher to giveaway a given game, so in a roundabout way it does ultimately cost Epic more money if you do claim the games without downloading them

I really think social media algorithms+profit motives are a big part of what did it. Suddenly there’s both the desire and the means to manipulate users into whatever pattern the business wants. Engagement-based algorithms pushed incendiary content creating a feedback loop of more and more extreme and hateful views being normalized, but also engagement-based algorithms plus monetization encouraged new forms of farmed content like brainrot and AI boomer slop which has zero (or realistically net-negative) value to society as a whole.

I’m really hoping the analogue/physical media trend continues because that might actually be what breaks the cycle. Normies may have simply had it with social media platforms owning them…I write on social media at midnight instead of going to bed on time…

except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.

The one niche that they’re probably the biggest is the “I just need a public facing web browser in this spot”

Its really hard to beat a locked down iPad for that usecase, both from a financial perspective (~$250 hardware cost for a lowest-tier iPad was the price I was seeing when ordering and provisioning them for this usecase) and from a management perspective (join it to the MDM and by nature of being an iPad, even if they get out of the browser window its really hard to cause trouble, basically 0 malware risk and iOS has far less obtrusive updates than Windows) plus from a support perspective you can simply walk users through rebooting them and swap the hardware if it needs more than a reboot

Many kids now grow up only interacting with touchscreens and assume they’re the default. I genuinely wonder if the average 18 year old knows how to use a standard PC now, given they’d be interacting with almost exclusively with chromebooks, ipads and smartphones throughout school

Honestly interest rates dropping might be ultimately be a good thing. The job market is so tight and most recession indicators have already been blazing. I doubt they’ll do the same hard drop they did in Q2 of 2020, but I do think more aggressive rate cuts might alleviate a lot of the burden consumers (especially young adults and anyone unfortunate enough to have been/be jobless over the last couple of years) have been feeling. A big chunk of the inflation consumers were seeing on goods in 2024 was just companies making opportunistic price increases, as evidenced by the heavily advertised price drops afterwards.

Additionally there is the statistic that nearly 50% of all retail spending in the United States is made by the top 10% of earners which is a heck of a dangerous tightrope for the economy. I do think that’s the other shoe waiting to drop right this second. If the wealthier Americans get spooked and start to pull back their spending this economy is going to tumble

I thought the idea of a tiny computer that you carry around with you would have taken off more too. Whether a CPU module like with the flopped EOMA68 project (tl;dr for those who don’t want to read the whole mailing list archive, repeated manufacturing challenges caused the project to run out of money before products could ship and the guy running it seemed to have a mental health crisis not long after that) or in the format of the Intel Compute Stick or an all-in-one computer built into a monitor or keyboard.

As a side-note, I briefly worked at an MSP last year that used whatever scavenged computers for employee computers instead of actually spending money on its employees. I was initially given a single 20 year old VGA monitor to work from, and was tasked with pulling drives from computers to prepare them for recycling. I spotted an all-in-one PC with a decent 1080p display (it ran an i3-6100m and only had a single SODIMM slot for memory, so not a very cost-effective option for a Linux PC) and noticed that it had an HDMI input port, so it got a second life as my main computer monitor for the 5 months or so that I worked there. Honestly 6/10 monitor, there’s some really good 1080p displays available for about $100 these days, and being not primarily designed as a monitor, I had to hit the button use the passthrough mode every time I booted my work computer (and after every power loss the embedded computer would try to boot and kick off the passthrough mode), but it was a very acceptable display for the circa ~2016 it hailed from

I thought for sure autonomous war drones would have become way more prolific by now

It just took until recently for a war to break out with the right conditions for drone warfare to actually make sense. I posted this photo in another comment:

This is the city of Lyman following a battle. Those are fiber optic strands, used for long distance wired (therefore can’t be jammed by radio signal) control of the drones by their operators. Every one of those strands had a drone at the end of it.

Ukraine has also made significant headway damaging major military assets via drone, sinking a significant portion of Russia’s navy as well as basically making tanks obsolete in ground offensives. Flame throwing drones, drones that launch other drones to attack drones, etc. The cyberpunk future is here!

I think what drives it is probably the general prices of games on consoles. The prices just don’t really drop from the launch price of $60+ (plus indies are far less prevalent) so the math starts mathing up pretty quickly, especially if you’re one to sell your console when you stop using it

Of all things, the war in Ukraine will probably be the thing that sets the stage for what our drone-filled future might look like. Not something I would’ve predicted 5 years ago!

This is the city of Lyman following a battle. Those are fiber optic strands, used for long distance wired (therefore can’t be jammed by radio signal) control of the drones by their operators. Every one of those strands had a drone at the end of it.

This is what present day warfare looks like now, its all flying buzzing drones attacking people and other drones. And what happens after the peace treaties are signed? A ton of that engineering and tooling for making this tech will get refocused into consumer and commercial products.

Autonomous tractors are already commercial products, reducing the number of people needed to complete a task on a farm. Many new non-autonomous tractors these days already have whats effectively cruise control on steroids, where the tractor will follow a predetermined path with the driver just sitting in the cab to monitor and take over if anything happens. And of course at home the robot vacuum cleaners are available from many brands. I’ve even seen one of those floor mopping machines adapted to run autonomously at my local Menards (which shocked me as I live in a pretty small town with about as low of a cost of living as it gets really) and while visiting family in LA I saw a robot waiter which both (optionally) took orders and would serve as a mobile food/plate tray. I saw a security robot making the rounds at a convention center in Florida while on a business trip. A Coworker told me about a robot working at a hotel he stayed at in San Francisco which would transport ordered/requested items to guests’ rooms. And there’s those dog sized food delivery robots in many cities. The more I think about it, wheeled and legged robots are probably what we will see a lot more of, since many already do exist in real commercial applications, and the legal, logistical and ethical barriers to their integration into our lives is much lower than flying robots.

Samsung even had a feature in their phones copying this. Looks like its still present but was left to rot though

I thought the advent of 4k TVs would push people over to BluRay because with the codecs available a decade ago you needed a good 40mbit+ for a single 4k stream. Turns out I picked the wrong component of streaming to be the thing that would push people back to physical media.

Also all of that broadband investment that was talked about a decade+ ago actually turned into broadband improvements, so now even my in-laws who live on 8 acres in the sticks outside of a tiny town of 400 or so residents have gigabit FTTH service

I remember thinking similarly. Specifically “well duh you’ll just be hitting buttons with your face on calls with those dang touchscreen phones” except it turned out I spend way less time on phonecalls than circa 2006 me could have ever imagined, and also the proximity sensor blanking the screen and blocking input works really good (and even did back in the early 2010s when I got my first smartphone)

A 5 year DRAM shortage is pretty hard to imagine. I have to suspect that’s a projection that assumes no AI bubble popping (which given how insanely over-leveraged basically every company involved in the bubble is, its inevitable. They’re literally spending more building these datacenters than they can ever dream of recouping once built!) The last DRAM shortage (around 2017-2019 by memory) was only really bad for about a year or so, getting gradually better until it became an absolute glut of DRAM supply that lasted until…well about 3 months ago. $60 per terabyte of SSD storage was glorious, and hopefully I can afford to benefit from the next DRAM glut in 2-5 years

I’m left-handed for drawing and writing but everything else its a tossup for which hand I’ll gravitate towards. Some things I just end up equally not-great at no matter how I approach it

Its almost like half-assing a store front that runs like shit, lacks the most basic features and is generally perceived to be user-hostile is a bad way to attract business. When the freaking open source Heroic Game Launcher does a better job hooking into Epic’s servers than their own damn launcher its time to do something. Take one of those millions of dollars you rake in every year and actually invest in the platform for cripes sake!

1. Reduce auto-signouts. This creates friction and forces users to take extra steps to access the game they wish to play. This causes users to go “nah I didn’t really feel like playing that right now anyways”
2. Embed system requirements for games into the launcher. Users want to know if they can even install a game before clicking install
3. Show details about a game that a user has clicked on. Seriously if you’re going to give away a hundred free games a year, folks aren’t going to know jack shit about 90% of the indie titles you’re surfacing. Most of the free titles I’ve actually played I’ve played because the marketing screenshots and description sounded cool, and I don’t want to cross-reference between a web browser and a web-browser-wrapped-into-an-executable-that-runs-like-shit-but-installs-my-games-sometimes
4. SHOW THE GODDAMN DOWNLOAD SIZE AND INSTALL SIZE BEFORE BEGINNING THE DOWNLOAD!!! My god this is not rocket science, its barely even computer science. Its literally the most basic feature of any software installer developed in the last 50 years, show an estimate for about how much hard drive space is needed. If I have 50GB free on a laptop with a 256GB drive in it, its just russian roulette for if I’ll install a game or have to manually sort out my drive being filled to 0 bytes remaining by a game download that never would’ve completed anyways.
5. Stop forcing updates. If someone’s launching a game that needs an update, let them launch it without updating. Also make it easier to force it to check for updates/apply already released updates. The background polling has entirely missed major game updates for my wife’s Fortnite, and since those can be 30+GB downloads we’d really much prefer to run those updates when she isn’t sitting down to play a bit of Fortnite.
6. Actually enable user reviews. Yes this requires moderation which requires workhours and therefore money. This is the kind of thing that that 10% cut of all sales you take is supposed to pay for. Users want to know what they’re getting into before buying a game and committing to installing it and trying it out, let them!
7. Optimize the crap out of your launcher. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it can’t be gestures wildly at everything this. Reduce the filesize of the webpages, run a few fewer javascripts, use better image compression, just most importantly make the launcher not run like its full of molasses

The part that annoys me the most is Epic could simple reduce the free games to bi-weekly and rebudget those same dollars into platform improvements and actually create a viable platform that people don’t hate. Just look at Steam, its got some glaring issues (online DRM, massive illegal gambling problems, cyberbullying, unclear & inconsistent policies on adult content, rampant shovelware, etc. etc.) but by not being a pain in the butt to use, and having some decent company policies that aren’t obviously anti-consumer they have an entire fandom devoted to them. Its just wasted potential. If Tim Sweeney felt like it he could actually build an incredible platform and actually compete with Steam, but instead they just engage in the most disjointed corporate bullshit possible

Nah its the parents of iPad kids. Remember, this is the company that owns the biggest game with kids and teens right now, Fortnite.

My old Chevy Cruze with shitty touring tires was okay until the snow got deep enough that it bottomed out on the snow. Its more driving skill and generally being willing to slow down a little and take it easy than your suspension or drivetrain that get you through the snow