MudMan

I see what you’re saying, but I think sci-fi is in a bit of a different place there. Neuromancer is concerned with what’s coming. It’s not painting a 2000s of the 80s, it’s painting the future of a present.

Predestination is a bit different in that it’s a time travel story. In Neuromancer (or Blade Runner, for that matter) the technology is not about extrapolating technology, it’s about extrapolating society.

It’s not impossible for sci-fi to be coded to a time. I don’t think you could make Strange Days today, it’s so ingrained into the idea of the end of the millenium and the rise of the Internet. It’d be different even if you kept the setting. A nostalgic look back instead of an anxious look forward.

Neuromancer has the same problem, only on top of everything else it’s also just vaguely futuristic, so it’s not like the 80s look and feel is integral to the story (in case the endless rehashes of the stories for the past forty years hadn’t proven that).

We’ll see. The worst case scenario is we’re thinking this through more than the people making the actual thing.

I think that’s itself a bit of a problem. Is Neuromancer futuristic or retrofuturistic? It’s one thing to adapt Dune, which may be from the 60s, but is in such a weird technological tangent it may as well be The Lord of the Rings. Neuromancer is THE FUTURE specifically as seen in the 80s, which now ranges somewhere between nostalgic, prescient and quaint. And actually done right elsewhere in the actual 80s.

I still think it is relevant enough you could get away with making it THE FUTURE as per the 2020s, but then people who envision it like you do (which is legitimate) would feel it’s out of place, I suppose.

Look, it’s not my job to figure it out, but let’s at least agree that if it is doable, it is at least a big, big challenge.

For sure. That said, Batman is on the other end of the spectrum, where a bunch of iterations of THE Batman were already there in the first place. For the most part TAS is conceptually Tim Burton’s Batman: The Cartoon, it just so happens that by 1992 you also could pull from multiple generations of comics and shows as well.

The problem with Neuromancer is it doesn’t have a definitive, iconic iteration, let alone multiple. The closest you get is Johnny Mnemonic, which definitely isn’t it. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix are all more of a definitive iteration of Neuromancer than anything Neuromancer (besides the book, obviously).

I genuinely don’t know enough about the project to know if that tracks. As with anything, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt until it’s an actual thing and see if they figured out something that doesn’t seem obvious.

I’m just… you know, also ready for it to suck for all those reasons, too.

Well, there’s a very meaningful set of differences there. For one thing, by the time Dune first got adapted there weren’t that many derivatives. Some of the imagery landed in Star Wars, but that was about it, by the time Lynch had his shot.

The issue with Neuromancer is that it’s been adapted dozens, hundreds of times in all but name. Every iconic piece of that story has a hundred spins and spins of those spins elsewhere.

So when you do Paul Atreides you maaay have to contend with the fact that you’re doing Luke Skywalker on LSD. When you do Molly you have to choose which pieces of Trinity, the like five iterations of Motoko Kusanagi, Ellen Ripley, Flynne Fisher and a dozen others, including at least one other version of Molly herself you’re embracing or ignoring. You have to choose where you go with Blade Runner, The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Pantheon, Deus Ex, The Peripheral, Cyberpunk 2077, Westworld, Robocop, Shadowrun, Escape from NY, Aeon Flux, System Shock, Minority Report or a bunch of others. There are like four different Keanu Reeves characters you may choose to embrace or dismiss in this process. Just the fact that you’re going to have to work around a bunch of talk about The Matrix and Zion is an issue.

I’m not saying that is or will be the problem with this version specifically. We’ll see what they have when they’re ready to show their homework. I’m saying that would definitely be one of my main anxieties if I had to find the way to do this accurately in 2025.

Yeah, well, I don’t know much about this thing. I will say that you never judge the look of a thing from set stills.

I will also say I don’t know how you do Neuromancer without devolving into self-parody at this point. I’m just going to go back to my corner and go back to not knowing anything about this until it’s out.

Maybe, although I get the feeling that we may not agree on why.

I mean, I wouldn’t have done the lenses at all. You just nod at them with some subtle contacts or something and go on with your day.

Or you could go the Deus Ex way with it, which I suppose is why I was inserting the whole retractable sunglasses thing into the conversation. Either way I don’t know that it’s worth attempting, even if they look better in the final version through some VFX enhancement or whatever.

Wait, they’re actually doing the eye lenses? That’s always been my “would look goofy on film” thing.

I guess they’ll be retractable? I don’t remember if they were supposed to be retractable in the book.

He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.

In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.

It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.

What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

Well, then you don’t need a phone review, do you?

Which is fine. Most people don’t need a phone at any given time. You go check reviews for phones when you need one and when you care about the differences between them. If you just need a phone-ass phone you can just go to your carrier and grab whatever is packed-in, no need to check reviews for that, most phones just fine work out of the box these days.

See, this is the exact process I am trying to describe. I’m sure that made sense in your head, and I’m sure if you think about it for a second you’ll realize that Target will very happily set up an affiliate link, just as Amazon does. And, of course, a whole bunch of the SEO listicles are the SEO hooks of bigger traditional review sites, including RTINGS, IGN or whatever. For the sake of argument, punching in “best bluetooth speaker” on DDG returns SEO listicles from Tom’s Guide, Wired, RTINGS, the New York Times, CNET and The Verge, in that order.

Which is not to say it’s not annoying, affiliate links and SEO have done terrible things to how practical reviews on websites are presented and parceled out. But that’s not to say they aren’t done honestly or lack validity on the sites that do it right, which are also the more successful ones.

I am… unfamiliar with the ecosystem of print newspaper appliance reviews, but I can tell you that having sloppy or obsequious reviews isn’t generally a sign of having taken a bribe or even having any direct influence from the manufacturer. Reviewing things is hard, by definition you are not in the same position as the people who will buy the thing later. It can be difficult to make that shift and appreciate value, particularly when it comes to tech where reviewers are often assessing the cool factor of whatever is new on the market while users just need a tool for everyday life.

Also, good reviews and hostile reviews aren’t the same thing. This depends a lot on what is being reviewed, and it’s not to say extremely protective reviews are bad themselves. This is more true in media reviews than on tech reviews, but even on tech reviews, some of my favorite people working generally provide fairly positive reviews, or very neutral spec reviews with relatively little judgement. Very often I don’t need to be protected from harm, I just need a savvy overview of a thing before I pull the trigger.

But also, let’s be clear, don’t book product placement that looks like a review. And if you do, make it a full on ad and make sure it’s presented as a sponsorship, although even when big names do that while trying to stay honest, or because they genuinely like the thing I don’t particularly like it.

It really isn’t, which is why it’s news when something like that comes out. People sometimes confuse being cynical with knowing how things work.

That said, this one is confusing, because it really does seem like Google is blurring the lines here between an ad spot or a product placement spot and pre-release samples for tech influencers intending to review them.

Honestly, cynicism aside, The Verge does a good job of breaking it down, including clarifying that they are under no such stipulations for their own review, so I’d recommend just reading the article in full.

I genuinely think Linux misses a beat by not having a widely available distro that is a) very closely tied to specific hardware and b) mostly focused on web browsing and media watching. It’s kinda nuts and a knock on Linux devs that Google is running away with that segment through both Android and ChromeOS. My parents aren’t on Windows anymore but for convenience purposes the device that does that for them is a Samsung tablet.

I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I’m afraid that’s still the case.

Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you’re ready, followed by “here’s a bunch of alien concepts you don’t know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it’s all about the app alternatives.”

I understand why this doesn’t read that way to the “community”, but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What’s a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren’t updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What’s the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what’s a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?

Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it’s genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these “switch to Linux, it’s fun!” guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that’s great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that’s not the reason people use Windows.

If you’re on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it’s all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don’t particularly struggle with that). But if you’re out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you’re kinda missing the point of what’s keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.

In fairness, this isn’t the guide’s fault, it’s all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box, the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You’ll get to know whether that’s for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way… at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!

For context, Meta reported 40 billion in revenue during that period, with 24Bn in expenses and made 13bn for the period. All those numbers are up from the same period last year.

So I’m gonna go with “probably, yeah”.

Is the fuel in this case a bunch of damaged 13 and 14th gen CPUs?

Oh, I absolutely could have. It would lose a couple of cores, but the 13th gen is pretty linear, it would have performed more or less the same.

Thing is, I couldn’t have known that then, could I? Chip reviews aren’t aiming at normalizing for temps, everybody is reviewing for moar pahwah. So is there a way for me to know that gimping this chip to run silently basically gets me a slightly overclocked 13600K? Not really. Do I know, even at this point, that getting a 13600K wouldn’t deliver the same performance but require my fans to be back to sounding noticeable? I don’t know that.

Because the actual performance of these is not to a reliable spec other than “run flat out and see how much heat your thermal solution can soak” there is no good way to evaluate these for applications that aren’t just that without buying them and checking. Maybe I could have saved a hundred bucks. Maybe not. Who knows?

This is less of a problem if you buy laptops, but for casual DIY I frankly find the current status quo absurd.

Whoa, that’s even worse. It’s not just the uncertainty of knowing whether Intel will replace your hardware or the cost of jumping ship next time. Intel straight up owes you money. That sucks.