GenderNeutralBro

Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That's my first stop for ebooks.

why aren’t the consoles cheaper everywhere outside the US?

Prices are rarely the same across regions to begin with.

For example, the original Switch launched at $299 in the US and €329 in Europe (or ~350 USD at 2017 exchange rates).

Probably. Even Switch 1 uses naive upscaling a lot of the time. I don't think Nvidia makes any chip that don't support DLSS at this point.

I just hope we get decent frame rates in general. I don't want to deal with 30fps fake-4K.

just let me play the old version of the game on the new console.

I don't think you need to buy any upgrades to play the original Switch versions on Switch 2. It's supposed to be almost 100% backwards-compatible with Switch games, with a few exceptions for games that rely on specific hardware features (like IR).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the original BotW and TotK will play just fine on Switch 2 without upgrading.

Considering how poor the performance was in TotK, I really think Nintendo should have made it a free update. That's fairly common on the PlayStation side. Lots of PS4 games got free updates with PS5 optimizations, for example (and even more free updates for PS5 Pro).

I dropped TotK due partly to the performance issues. At this point I might rather play it on an emulator than buy it again for Switch 2.

This is the clearest sign to me that Apple has jumped the shark.

Apple has a long history of waiting until they could do something right rather than rushing to market with some fad. And here they are tripping over themselves to ship something that is obviously half-baked (at best). There's no vision, there's no attention to detail, there's no careful UX design. It's just "oh shit we need AI right?"

I've never tested this hypothesis, but I would guess that a big-ass battery would remain useful after years of wear while a normal battery would need to be almost constantly plugged in. It's one thing to plug in a power bank now and then, but if it effectively becomes a wired device that's too much of a pain.

I hate to say it, but the idea is doomed to failure from the start.

Both human writing and AI writing are moving targets, and you have no real visibility into the mechanics of either one. By the time you test and validate any detector, it will be obsolete. You will never have the opportunity to test an individual validator's effectiveness over time, because major new models are released every month or two. And the prevalence of AI writing is already influencing how real people write (especially young people who are only learning to write in the age of AI).

I'm not sure what the answer is here. But pouring time and money into a bad idea just because you don't have a good idea is not a winning strategy.

Non-Transitory Computer-Readable Storage Medium Having Game Program Stored Therein, Game System, Game Processing Method, and Game Apparatus

Why does their patent title sound like it's an Amazon listing from a company with an alphabet-soup name like BRENGSTAR?

Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.

People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.

Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.

Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I'm in have thousands.

Many channels are default for all users in the server.

Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can't handle this is no alternative at all.

If we're talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.

I'm not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don't think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.

I set up their accounts

Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I'll bet you're going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That's fine for your family, but it's hardly going to scale.

The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that's what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.

Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it's still bad.

I mean, it's great that it works for you, but be honest: isn't your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear's? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.

I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it's too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they'd never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.