Sure, and maybe he does. I think there's a difference between Epic doing it as a company, for which they would likely expect to extract some value from the contribution, and Sweeney doing it as an individual.
This is an opinion piece embodying a meme that willed itself into existence this year, mostly through social media and Youtube influencers. It was interesting to observe (and tedious as a friend watched dozens of hours of these videos and breathlessly repeated their contents to me.) At some point an Xbox executive had to respond to it to assure that they are working on the next Xbox console, which should've been obvious to players given where we are in the cycle.
The will to manifest the meme into reality came from a convergence of trends. Neophyte linux enthusiasts in gaming drove a lot of it, I suspect.
I'd be more impressed if an Xbox executive said that they weren't working on a new console, I mean I can't see how it can work as a business unless they change their attitude 200%. I trust those YouTubers more than I trust mainstream game journalists.
In the current market for electronics I can't imagine a quantum leap in consoles at a sub-$1000 price point, it is not like NVIDIA or AMD gives a damn about gaming in this environment where it is all about selling as many GPU for AI as they can while they can.
Steam Deck is long in the tooth. I think PS and XBOX portables could muscle into that space, XBOX is already licensing their name, but balancing size-cost-performance-power does not look easy but the PS Vita was my favorite dedicated game system I ever owned. I like my Deck but it is too big and I have to think long and hard if I want to pack it in my t̴a̴i̴l̴ backpack on any given day or pack something else.
A realistic plan is shut down most of Activision and sell the rest to Tencent, take an $80 billion goodwill loss so they won't pay tax for half a decade, Wall St won't care so long as they keep making noises about AI, do right by Azure, Windows, Office and the enterprise stuff. Keep Windows great for gaming and keep the brand alive as part of that and if they want to sell XBOX branded body wash or something, bully for them. Set free from Activision those developers will be able to make good games again.
What do you think of mid-tier Android handhelds like the Odin 3? I think these things are starting to look very interesting, especially when you factor in things like Winlator, Moonlight streaming, etc.
I think that's part of the convergence, too. A perceived war between scrappy honest influencers and legacy journalism, some long fallout from game journalism controversies a decade ago. Why would someone read a mainstream games journalist about this story, either? Same for tying a hardware console's fortunes to whatever Microsoft is doing with Activision.
All three (four counting Steam) consoles update every several years. A quick Wikipedia skim tells you almost everything you need to know about that. They're all packaging the AMD and Nvidia hardware available along some price-performance point (they all have access to the same tradeoffs) and releasing developer SDKs. Each one has a store, some deals and a slightly different take on how they integrate streaming and retro games.
I have trouble seeing how attitude affects executing any of this. The attitude only comes into play because Xbox has to respond to this meme in a way that placates gamers.
I don’t see what the point is for consoles that aren’t PCs. Pair an XBOX ONE controller with a decent PC and install Steam and it is not the sweaty experience that PC gaming was in the 1990s, but a lean-back “just works” experience, you can play the same games with the same controller. Instead of waiting for the upgrade cycle you can get the latest hardware from AMD, Intel or even Apple. If you want to spend more and get a top flight graphics card you can get high frame rates at 4k. And it’s a PC, you can hook up a keyboard and a mouse and do all your PC stuff too so it better justifies the price.
The PS5 has sold a respectable number of units but when I needed a mostly media box to sit next to a TV I got a used PS4 Pro because the PS5 was much more expensive, I have Steam on a few machines. There are only 15 exclusives for the PS 5, one is a remake of my favorite game from the early 2010s but that’s not worth it to me.
Microsoft should come out with XBOX gaming PCs, whether it is own-brand like the Surface or are licensed through partners like ASUS and Dell.
That said, my kids got a Switch 2 for Christmas and we just got done with a super fun session of Mario Party Jamboree and boy are Mario, Bowser, and the gang looking GREAT! Super fun, everyone was laughing and having a great time. They’ve always operated in a different universe than the other console makers.
If we want to play the sorts of games XBOX and PlayStation offer, we’ll just load up the Steam Deck, or if it’s a super graphically intensive game we’ll use my RTX 5090 I use for local LLMs anyway. With a few console commands and config hacking, I was able to get Portal 2 to run split screen across 2 full screens for each player, which was super fun!
Imo it is just a matter of time until linux replaces Windows as the primary gaming OS. What ripple effects that will have idk, but I def think Windows will primarily become a casual computing OS
It's because Microsoft hasn't been inspiring confidence when their five year old Xbox Series X is more expensive than last year's better performing PS5 Pro - which runs an increasing library of Microsoft's own games at better resolutions and framerates. Microsoft didn't even have a Black Friday discount for their hardware this year.
That's not the playbook of a company actively invested in a market.
Yes, they're still popular for drinks and snacks in areas where people congregate. C-stores do provide more of this functionality though and are omnipresent. You still see automat-style machines (sandwiches etc.) in places like airports and larger company rec rooms. These require more regular restocking for freshness.
There are also some restaurant startups that are trying to reduce restaurants to vending machines or autonomous restaurants. Slightly different, but it does have a downstream effect on vending machine technology and restocking logistics.
What country are you in where you don't see vending machines? Did you used to have them?
I'm in USA - New York area - I rarely see vending machines - it's entirely possible I just don't visit the kinds of buildings that would have them like hospitals tho
I walked into a Fred Meyer yesterday and saw probably ten vending machines. The Redbox DVD rental machine outside, then capsule toy, Pokemon card and key duplication vending machines, filtered water and lottery ticket machines, Coinstar coin counting machine...
Ah, interesting. I’m sure you have a high density of c-stores and they’re more walkable, so maybe less need. I’m in the rust belt and you would have to typically drive from, for example, a gym to get something. So there’s typically one or two machines in gyms.
It greatly depends on your job, and it doesn’t have to be a glamorous job, just one where people request things of you or you of them. For example, a friend is a corporate buyer, somewhat low in his organization, and receives about 120 emails from humans each workday. (His strategy is to select all the emails he will handle that day, put them in a folder, and call himself done when that folder is empty. I.e., he almost never sends a same day response.)
At Starbucks, I usually just get a cup of black coffee. Often the barista dispenses it as I'm paying, skipping the queue of orders to be made. However, sometimes I get my coffee cup put into the queue. When this happens, starting this year, it seems they'll carry it out to my table. Before that, they'd put it into the queue of orders which could take awhile. It seems partially barista dependent and partially whether they need to rebrew. I've found that asking for "whatever's brewed" doesn't help; they don't want to pick a blend.
Interesting to think about. Local coffee shop baristas are more transparent about what's brewed and enjoy taking the opportunity to recommend a certain roast or origin if I'm not picky. However, their systems fall down when they're unexpectedly busy.
My local cafe that does both coffee and sandwiches (dine-in, to go and catering) is possibly the worst, not taking orders until they feel caught up on the sandwiches. You can end up waiting 10+ minutes just to get a cup of coffee. From a queueing/distribution perspective, they should be taking those orders constantly and letting them pile up so they have more information about what they need to make and they can reduce the mean wait time. On the other hand, their baffling system is charming and the people placing large orders love the attention and spend way more money than I do. :)
The Starbucks locations near me recently replaced their brewed coffee with on-demand coffee machines for each flavor, so I guess we are all destined to wait in the queue for coffee.
If they've pivoted to using those Wawa/7-11-style "latte" dispensers that sound like someone's blowing their nose while keeping the Starbucks pricing, I'm not surprised they're struggling and closing locations.
In our coming cyberpunk future, Starbucks will just be a brand of vending machines known for burnt coffee and LCD screens displaying scantily clad mermaids
Those are Clover machines from a company they acquired like 15 years ago. They're very good and in my opinion a big improvement over their traditional batch brew-and-store coffee. There are more roasts available to order, the coffee is guaranteed to be fresh, and most of the time they still "skip queue" and hand you your coffee at the register.
That wasn’t what you were saying but they’re good observations. This behavior of Americans was observed by Tocqueville’s observations about newspapers and the role that discussing them played in our political outcomes in allowing certain types of populist candidates to bubble up. There are analogues in English politics. The article had a continental example but it was just an analogy. That said, it’s reasonable for Americans to want to understand and adjust their strategies for quirks in their culture and political process; they can’t simply transplant Chinese government and culture here to please you, can they?
The thesis of the article would mean that if people are not allowed to express the views in the 60 Minutes story, it would create an opportunity for an ungated, stronger expression of those views in the future.
That's actually an interesting argument. I wonder if it helps explain the growing support for the far right political party in Germany (ADL?), considering that they've been effectively blacklisted by the other political parties.
This is an ignorant question, but, what is the benefit of this if you also have your project open in an editor or IDE (presuming they integrate language server?)
If you're vibe coding without an editor, would this have any benefits to code quality over a test suite and the standard linter for a language?
But what is the benefit for Claude Code? You don't write code in Claude Code so why would I need autocomplete or jump to definition? Does Claude itself use them instead of e.g. grepping? Struggling to understand how it helps.
I'd like to know what more of the use cases are too, but one would be for doing renaming operations where the LSP understands the code and will tell the caller exactly what edits to make to which files. So I assume with LSP integration you could then ask Claude Code to do the rename, and it would do it per LSP instructions rather than itself having to understand the source code and maybe doing a worse job.
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