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

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a bit of low-hanging fruit, you may be able to reduce the length of the diffs in an MR by marking generated files with -diff in a .gitattributes file. This is at least supported by GitLab (not sure about others): https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes#_marking_files_as_binary

To be honest, it doesn’t seem that bad. With clean architecture, you are going to end up with extra types and mappers. I would argue that what you have isn’t coupled, because a change in one place doesn’t have unexpected side effects elsewhere.

I haven’t used Goa or Gorm. Writing SQL by hand gets old quick so I get why you’d use Gorm - just less code to write in the end. I’ve used sqlc as it’s more a library than a framework, and it’s fine, but it can’t fulfill every use case. Goa looks too opinionated for me, on the face of it.

I’ve used wire. It takes some understanding but it’s definitely a lot to understand just to add a dependency. At work we’ve got our own template for doing dependency injection and although I was skeptical at first it strikes a really good balance between being understandable and abstracting away DI. If this is your pain point, I’d consider going back to basics and get rid of the framework.

If you decide to go with a framework like Laravel, Rails or Next.js and build everything around the framework, you will deliver quickly at first, but you won’t have type safety and it particular point it will stop scaling because these frameworks have no consideration for clean architecture. You won’t necessarily be better off.

The redesign is literally pointless and currently achieves nothing. I find that the user’s profile button having moved to the bottom-left so goddamned weird, as is the “Activity” button moving to the no-mans-land of middle of the sidebar.

If I wanted to use YT Music I’d already be using it. Podcasts and music are not the same thing. Anyway…

There are some good alternatives out there, like Antennapod.

This is a brain dead decision and nothing short of a complete 180 will perhaps save them, but even then the reputational damage is severe.

It’s a great base for general desktop use as well as server. Been using it on my PC for years now, and aside from a few 3rd party repositories it has everything I need. It just works and continues to work.