[–] 28 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Xbox has been my primary platform for most of my life. Parents didn't like video games so I didn't play much until I was an adult and secondhand stuff was really cheap and accessible.

After switching to Stadia, which was phenomenal for a casual-new-dad gamer and I loved it, before it was unsurprisingly killed, coming back was entirely different. Everything was digital, there is no secondhand market for games, and consoles are increasingly expensive.

Making Xbox less accessible and more restrictive may have pushed me to a windows PC a few years ago... But making Windows 11 such a shit show made me switch everything to Linux.

I'd love to stay but they seem determined to suck everything that was great out of it.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (9 children)

    I don't feel like the companies are concerned about it costing more right now as much as they are betting that it will be cheaper in the long run. The cost of labor isn't unlikely to decrease drastically while the technology is likely to become cheaper.

    While I would love to believe Microsoft is being burned by spending on AI, I think they don't mind spending more now so long as they can trade the cost labor for the costs of technology and maintain similar productivity.

    Feels like they hope this will be to white collar jobs what Uber was for taxi drivers. Current profitability isn't really the goal as much as being able to reproduce similar outputs.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    Pretty sure many of the cars sold now have a SIM card or something similar which the manufacturer pays for up front. I don't think it takes much for them to ping periodically with the information they'd like to track and this ensures they get the data.

    Still, don't connect your car to the Internet, as that could give them way more data but I doubt that that doing that alone will completely stop the tracking.

    Edit: typo

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