utf985

This would have been great if it was introduced 15 years ago when pretty much each phone model had it's own special charger, but not so much know when they're almost all entirely standardized. Except for Apple, of course. They're special.

More like 10 years at most.

Obviously, we're still at very early stages with this tech. It's silly to compare it with smartphones and PCs, since it's a very different class of product. There are some barriers for entry but, as I said they will eventually get ironed out. The price of a full set with a fidelity grade matching the current high end sets shouldn't exceed the price of a games console in a few years.

There has definitely been a huge increase in interest with titles like Boneworks and the upcoming HL Alyx. The Valve index has been sold out almost instantly and there's reportedly a huge backlog of pre-orders for it.

"We've never fallen in love"? Really?

This is he first time for me where an emergent new technology in the gaming world feels like a proper thing with actual potential, and not a just a novelty gimmick like motion controls, 3D and previous attempts at "VR" were. I had the chance to try the new Oculus Rift S and the HTC Vive over the holidays with some Beat Saber and Superhot and it was a really amazing experience. I have honestly never felt such awe for a game since my childhood days where I'd witness a brand new graphics engine like Source for the first time.

There is definitely a bright future for VR as the technology will only get better, cheaper and more accessible with time.

But that's in the Netherlands.

I'm interested in how will WebAssembly affect the functionality of browser addons such as ad and script blockers?

Surely this is better suited for a blog post rather than a series of hard to follow twitter comments.

My experience with this is very different. I used to know a few kazakh fellows and their views on Borat were resentful to say the least. They said Sacha Cohen is a universally hated figure in Kazakhstan, along with the Borat movie itself, to the point where a lot of people genuinely want him dead. I have no doubt some Kazakhstan citizens actually enjoy Borat but to generalize it as being seen as "high comedy" over there is a vast and incorrect exaggeration.

Despite once being my favorite game series and developer and I stopped caring about Half-Life and Valve sometime around when they made it obvious they only care about milking their vapid Dota franchise and they have no interest in developing any of their core IPs. I can't force myself get excited about this even if someone paid me to. The ship has sailed a long time ago.

Where are you getting this data from? 2 years for a new CPU? My gaming pc from 2015 that cost just a little over $1k runs all recent games on ultra just fine.

As a user I am not interested in YT's profits. However, what I am interested in is being able to access useful content. For all intents and purposes, YT has become the central place for people to upload such footage and of course the prospect of its removal is worrying to me. There are vast amounts of indispensable knowledge and information uploaded to YT that is far from being deemed as profitable to Google and as such are under risk of being permanently and irreversibly lost. Hence my confusion at the OP's description of the situation as "a good thing".

So let's say you have an old YT account that you don't use anymore tied you your gmail account and there a few dozen family holiday videos you uploaded years ago to show friends (which was kinda the original purpose of YouTube) and completely forgot about. Does this mean that one day you might wake up with access to your gmail completely blocked off because an algorithm on YT decided that your channel is not profitable?

How is this a good thing? Obscure and/or old archive footage which usually doesnt get that many views is one of the best things about YT.

> I feel like facebookization killed many online communities. What used to be an independent phpbb board with a logical structure, room for customization and some tools for admins to manage it, became an FB group that is impossible to navigate and manage sensibly, with posts ordered by an algorithm, and which spams me with notifications at the least convenient times.

To be honest, I think Reddit is to blame more for that. It killed so many specialized communities and forums.

Again, a very different situation. First of all, these numbers are still very minuscule compared to the total population and territory of the USA - for example the UK alone accepted a little over 200k non-eu immigrants in 2018.

Secondly, these new citizens are truly multicultural, as they literally come from every part of the globe - opposed to the refugees coming into the EU who are mostly from a middle eastern cultural origin. Because of this new immigrants coming into the US rarely have the luxury of arriving in a group of people similar to them so they are pretty much forced to assimilate.

Lastly, the geographical position of the US and their immigration policies allow them to be able to sift through the millions of applicants and pick the cream of the crop. Winning the dv lottery is not unconditional - it's only the first step in a series of screenings and checks one needs to undergo before he's even approved to become an american citizen. This is the polar opposite of the migrant situation in Europe where millions of people are simply passing through county borders without barely any supervision or control.