Wow, I totally missed the part where Microsoft had a gun to your head.

Yes. Microsoft is good at hiding that part until it’s too late to do much about it.

There’s no industry pressure to be on Gamepass, yet.

Microsoft doesn’t willingly lose money on something unless they think they can make it into a market distorting rent extraction hellscape. something very profitable later.

Many firms are now slashing their number of new hires.

Yes. This sucks.

The main cause of this is artificial intelligence

Unlikely.

The main cause for a chill in hiring tends to be uncertainty about the future. And we know that folks are feeling high uncertainty about the future, right now. (Gestures broadly at current headlines in general and “Not The Onion”, in particular.)

Historically, uncertainty about the future is particularly high when the people have low confidence that existing and new laws will be applied in a predictable manner.

I’ll leave exactly what changed on that front as a thought exercise.

AI is interesting, but it is not the primary cause of the chill in hiring new graduates.

and the internet (in the current form) never gets developed.

based on my recent online shopping experiences, we may get there, soon.

It feels like nobody knows how to Java a Script anymore.

Tablet pornography must be nice.

That seems like someone who made a plan, and then lived out their best evening.

I imagine those tablet Pornhub users probably prepared themselves a nice mixed drink, set out some snacks, and got all cozy in a bathrobe first.

Tablet pornhub sounds like some kind of intentional self care.

Haha!

But uh…I would watch that. That sounds pretty hot.

It can be hard to guess who to bribe, or how big each bribe should be?

There’s been some great ideas here, but I like yours the best.

Bill Burr complaining about being forced to be the pope would be amazing.

“I’m not going to lead mass. Leading mass is Charlie Work!”

Huh. Pope Joan?

Does anyone have any clue?

My best guess would be some relatively passive notification stealing focus.

As reddeadhead mentioned, there’s specific “don’t steal focus” settings. I’ve had good luck with them.

I don’t know enough about it to confidently say they’re going to lose all their money

It happened to my relative. They didn’t lose everything, but they lost enough that they’re shopping for a mobile home for retirement, when they previously could have bought a small house.

Plausible explanation.

This was really helpful. Thank you.

I remember those days, as well!

I’m with you.

Thankfully, corporate bullahit isn’t the only way to create a discovery algorithm.

I expect that we will have a diverse set of discovery algorithms available to opt into here, in a few years.

I always wonder about the people who drop off just before finishing the game.

That’s me. It used to be common for games to have a sharp ramp up in challenge at the end boss, and I often don’t have the time to get through that.

So I habitatually abandon games when I feel close to the end, and I watch the ending on a stream, instead of playing it.

I realize that minimal research could tell me which games are which, but even less research finds me a decent stream of the game ending.

I’m partial to RetroPi or Batocera, so I end up with a retro game console and media player in one. This build works with anything compatible with Kodi. Excellent for home media, but paid and free streaming services are hit and miss.

There’s also builds of Android Open Source Protect for Raspberry Pi, which have much better support for streaming apps, since anything that works on an Android Phone works, as long as the streaming service developer hasn’t done anything stupid.

Edit: A warning though - Android on Raspberry Pi is still very new. Think Alpha/Beta test. I think that Android on ARM chips, in general, is new. It’ll get good, but your mileage may vary, for now.

Thanks!

There’s various builds for Raspberry Pi that make decent media centers.