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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’m unfamiliar with the Meross device, but the webpage for the MSG100 mentions that along with being compatible with SmartThings and other apps, it also may work with generic opener remotes. Am I understanding this correctly?

    Is there amy reason you can’t simply attach a generic opener on your bars right next to your other controls, and once in range, reach over and press the button? Again if this isn’t possible I apologize. It just seems like it’d be much simpler (if a bit less slick and automatic) than using your SmartThings setup.







  • That’s not why it was made. Data collection is a titanically large industry. Why just collect data from specific programs when you can literally just set up a screen recorder to collect all data?

    This is what happens when people are flippant about data collection. First, data collection isn’t even there. Next, it’s there, but is off by default, then it’s on by default but you can opt out, then only certain aspects are opt out, flash forward 10 years and here we are.

    This stuff isn’t coming out of nowhere, it’s a slow build because consumers consistently allow more and more egregious privacy violations to slip past because they “don’t care, the big corporations already have the data”


  • That’s the thing though, they really were never as rabid as Nintendo. Bleem wasn’t the first PS1 emulator, it was just the fact that it was a commercial product that Sony took issue with, honestly understandably so.

    There are actually PS1 emulators from the pre-Bleem era that are still available. Sony did nothing to shut those ones down because they were being offered freely.

    Piracy is a totally different deal. I’m not delusional, any company that owns an IP is completely within their rights to aggressively stomp piracy at every turn, and I think it’s silly to criticize a company for trying to protect one of their main sources of income (I mean really, do people expect a company to spend billions on a product, then just be okay with the theft of that product?).

    That’s not to say I’ve never sailed the high seas, or think it’s objectively wrong to do so no matter what, but I tend to save it for times where I really wouldn’t be able to enjoy the product otherwise (abandonware, or in Nintendo’s case, games they stubbornly lock behind ridiculous paywalls).


  • What IP does Sony hang its hat on?

    Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Killzone, Sackboy, inFamous, God of War, The Last of Us, and if you want to go older, SOCOM, Syphon Filter, Spyro, Sly Cooper, I could go on.

    I mean, I get what you’re saying, they don’t have something as iconic as Mario, but to say you’re hard pressed I think is a bit of hyperbole. Sony has had a really well rounded line of exclusives for decades. Sure, some are on PC now, but they’re expressly “PlayStation ports” not console ports.

    There are other platforms and franchises to mod on

    I personally disagree with that attitude. If every consumer went along with that set of ideals, every studio, firm and corporation would be free to jerk us around willy nilly because we’d just move on to the next thing. There are people out there who really don’t care about modding Skyrim, they want to mod BOTW.





  • I’d agree with you, except Sony, another massive Japanese company operating in the same industry as Nintendo, doesn’t lash out this aggressively at their own community that is just desperately trying to enjoy games in their own way.

    Sony has left basically all emulation projects alone as well as modding projects like 60FPS patches (there was one emulator that they took to court in the 90s, Bleem, but Bleem was charging money for the emulator. Funnily enough, Bleem won the case and was allowed to continue existing, but the company went under due to the cost of the legal battle) .

    Nintendo doesn’t have to act out like this. They actively choose to stifle such products so that they themselves can offer tightly curated versions on their own schedule and at their own price. This isn’t an IP protection strategy, it’s an agressive cornering of their own market.



  • Especially on PC. Also, people forget that Indie doesn’t necessarily mean “made by a small team/low budget”. It just means it was produced by a studio that isn’t at the behest of some massive corperation/faceless number crunching shareholders. CD Projekt Red is an independant studio, as is Valve.

    Also, some games are developed independently by small studios, but then marketed and published by a larger company. Devolver is an example of a publishing house with an excellent track record of just letting the indie dev teams they work with do whatever they want.






  • If you look into PlayStation from a software angle, it makes perfect sense. Sony has always been pretty pro-unix.

    They had an official Linux kit for the PS2 (came with a custom Linux distro on a CD, a HDD, and a KB+M).

    OtherOS was also a selling point on the PS3, and was only ditched when they realized it opened the door to major security risks.

    Further, CellOS, the operating system for the PS3, and OrbisOS, which is the base operating system for the PS4 and PS5, are all based on FreeBSD.

    So, a lot of their hardware is designed around Unix systems already. I know all their controllers since the Dualshock 3 are natively supported by the Linux kernel (no dongles or drivers needed in theory).