I mean, the optical fingerprint sensors they’ve been using on the Pixels are absolutely garbage, so I will never use this feature.

No no, it’s move fast and break things, silly. ☺️

In the UK at least there’s a persistent cost-of-living battle being fought, so we’re not spending as much as we were, and large game production has reached a tipping point where the number of purchasers aren’t growing but costs are increasing, so: studios contract; or games are taking longer to make; or games are made with a smaller scope. So basically, there’s less to upgrade your console for.

I mean, for me personally, everytime I think of upgrading from a Series S I find it hard to justify because most games run quite well.

I worked with Perl for years, and I don’t recommend it for a beginner. There are just too many idiosyncrasies that belong specifically to the language that you’d be better off with Python for learning the basics.

I’m also not really sold on that book, which from the code samples looks really old. I’d recommend two books: Modern Perl and Perl Best Practices.

Edit: I’d also recommend working in Go but potentially the way i/o intersects with interfaces makes it a bit more challenging.

All sounds pretty sensible. I do think it might feel annoying waiting minutes to download a model for the sake of generating a line of alt text the first time, though. It would probably be quicker to write the alt text.

Nationalise the lot of them. They had their chance.

It also didn’t release as a physical copy. New digital releases in the UK at least are always pretty expensive, whereas with physical copies there’s at least a chance of a small discount from a retailer.

More or less. Either Excalidraw for your quick and dirty diagrams or I’ve used PlantUML + C4 Plug-in for your larger, more long lived diagrams with some success.

Diagrams. Loads and loads of diagrams. One for each use-case.

Then I’d have one diagram to draw out dependencies between each service at the broadest level. Although depending on how messy your architecture is it can be very difficult to read, in my experience.

It’s really quite bad imo, but it’s surprising considering how the consoles are basically the same, hardware-wise - the Xbox on paper might even be technically more powerful.

I think that if they’d been able to get out there with a couple of great 1st party games early in the generation it might have helped swing the market in their direction but they didn’t and now it doesn’t matter.

Sony is also encountering similar issues in terms of the cost of games being unsustainable and Moore’s Law kicking in. The difference is that they’re making games that move consoles and Microsoft just aren’t.

At this point, I don’t know what strategy Microsoft has at this point. If you say “Xbox everywhere”, what does Xbox even mean any more for the enthusiast? I don’t think Xbox is done, but if they were looking to be HBO before, they are now going for the Netflix approach - high quantity content, mediocre product - and possibly alienate the existing audience they have.

I say this as an Xbox Series S owner, I’m happy with my purchase, but as a consumer I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my console to anything Microsoft ship any time soon.

I think if you read through this and take it at face value, there is a pretty clear picture of what happened: https://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2024/03/30/a-microcosm-of-the-interactions-in-open-source-projects/

Ngl, I honestly thought this was a bit of satire.

I can imagine them carrying on making consoles this generation but long-term Microsoft is a services company and over successive generations they have failed to recapture the lead from Sony since the 360. Ultimately, they just want to make more money and struggling in the hardware business is not an exciting place for them to be in.

I say this as a Series S owner: the writing is on the wall. I will likely not be purchasing another Microsoft console after this, though I’m not sure they’d be interested in releasing one. I want to buy and own games I can play locally on a piece of hardware, which probably means I have to return to Sony or go back to the humble PC. For anyone currently on the fence seeing this news, I don’t know why they’d consider buying into the Xbox platform and tying in all their gaming purchases.

A lot of it has reinforced my understanding around distributed databases and transactions. In my day-to-day, I’ve not really had need to use this knowledge as pretty much all our data stores are hosted in cloud platforms and we’re operating on low datasets and traffic.

I’ve been reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications and it really is a great book, specifically for backend engineers.

I know it’s vastly underpowered compared to even the Xbox Series S but I still think there’s something magical about the way you can have these fully fledged gaming experiences in front of your TV or in your hands while on holiday using the same hardware. Of all the consoles I’ve owned, it’s probably my favourite.