I’ll take it one step further and say that if you absolutely must use Office, O365 works in a browser on any operating system. You literally don’t need Windows anymore for that.

My prediction is that they’ll go full SaaS and make the non-pro version “free”, with a whole raft of features “cloud only” behind a Azure/O365 subscription.

https://youtu.be/1WDW8XKEGgU?t=45

Honest.

Solid list!

but i always felt those two game designs were kissing cousin

I see them as the same genre. You have this “pushing the map’s frontier” mechanic, along with some power or item progression to enable that. The rest is find-and-seek to connect all those dots. IMO, the only major difference is a side vs top-down perspective.

Dear Microsoft CEO and C-suite people.

Push back on your investors now before it’s too late. AI features are ruining your product and its image.

A lot of companies are tied in up this AI bubble and Microsoft is not too big to fail in this regard. Your customer-base has gotten by just fine without AI and invasive screen-capture technology used to support it, for decades at this point. Most people see your product as an operating system: a product designed to support other products. They do not want more capabilities from it, and have come to rely on good support for hardware compatibility, stability updates, performance updates, and most importantly, security updates. It is the darling of OEM PC installs, and government and commercial enterprise continue to renew their site licenses because of it. These are the core features that will continue to bring value and keep people on your platform, not AI.

If you firmly believe that agentic AI is the future, make it an optional installable product or a completely distinct operating system altogether. This is strategic since it has radically different marketing needs than Windows or Windows Professional, and supports a distinct subset of your overall install base. Foisting this feature set on your existing users is doing nothing more than artificially inflate adoption numbers, and you’re risking the entire enterprise to think your investors don’t already know this. It’s not smart, it’s not even brinksmanship or a bold technology decision. It’s reckless.

Exactly. Another lemming made a fantastic quip to this effect, claiming that consoles and windows are performing “SCP level containment” for the rest of us. Let them have CoD.

Malicious compliance writ large.

Also, the number of hurdles you have to clear for this tells volumes about where the site owner priorities lie.

I love that the fox example is probably the very bottom of the “not even remotely related to news, yet true” barrel.

Dear AAA game studios: Just look at Hades II.

LOOK AT IT. A good chunk of the art you see on every playthrough isn’t even animated.

I’m probably going to clear 300+ hours on this thing before I put it down, and I’ll likely tell everyone to buy it because it’s that good. Photorealism is the last thing I care about.

I agree. FWIW, unofficially, fans are already calling it the “GabeCube” which is no less punny.

This raises questions about the opportunity cost of $300/mo. It’s not a huge amount of money, but for some budgets, it might make a car payment or groceries possible. Or, if saved or invested wisely, would it tip things in favor of the 50-year term?

Selinux

Hey, let’s not get crazy. I still want to use it for practical things, too. /s

It’s also a very Paulie take on things: so close, yet so far.

IMO, peak Sopranos is Tony’s reaction to his voice while in a coma. We finally get an idea of how he really comes across after many seasons.

The real tragedy is how stale that bread is; Subway^™ crust isn’t supposed to do that. Is it too late to rescue the lunchmeat and start over?

Paging Mr. Munroe…

It would sit well with my conscience that I likely prevented a worse fate for exponentially more people, and prevented another person from having to make a worse choice. Which they themselves would likely only make twice as worse, and so on. I could live with that.

What I’m not sure of is how I would handle being a deicision-maker N steps down the line. Being the first guy, sure. The 16th? I dunno.

2³² is roughly four billion. We’ll need one or two more doublings to get every last person alive on the tracks.

This introduces a new wrinkle in the experiment: all the switch operators are also tied to the track. Somewhere.

It’s exactly the same game.

This is what kills me. There’s so much squandered potential in AC with this kind of thinking. Instead, Ubisoft just wants to be EA by re-selling the same game every year, but doesn’t have the sports licenses to pull it off.

After the initial couple of hours I started to feel like everything is a chore.

Exactly. I don’t know what I expected, but that was my experience as well. The game more or less told me this:

“Hey, did you enjoy the first chapter? Well guess what? We’re going to throw that at you x20 with the occasional plot beat thrown in for variety. Have fun!”

For the obvious boatload of cash poured into Odyssey’s development, I feel like half as much game done twice as well would have been a better experience. Instead, we get something that is seemingly padded for play-time, in the same way a 4th grader adds extra blank lines to hit the required page count on a book report.