I am surprised at all this shock the decision has garnered.
Is it shitty and consumer-hostile? Yes. Was it inevitable looking at the current trajectory of game distribution logistics? Also yes. Forced digitization should have in no way been surprising.
> But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions
The pirate community does wherever it's possible. We had a blast in college playing Halo MCC LAN parties back when it got launched on PC - by design it needed Xbox accounts for everyone but we worked around it with Goldberg's crack and got the classic experience.
Great thing about Nintendo is unlike its competitors, they don't go around chasing new tech and business models. All their focus is concentrated on the playing experience - interfacing, fun value, guilt-free hooks etc. In many ways they are more a classic toymaker than a tech firm. This is the reason why they have such a strong following, their product at least is not run by MBAs chasing every chance at a point increase in margins.
I wish there were more such successful "craftsman shops" out there than soulless "service providers" that today's video game companies are.
Unironically, ever since generative art tech arrived I have been anticipating full automation of in-betweening. I am rather (pleasantly) surprised it hasn't already been done.
I wonder how much utility of such special-purpose languages will keep getting diminished as AI coding becomes a staple in programming and software engineering.
It's still mostly bad news? Also I don't see that big of a difference than the default NPR website articles, all they add is a bit of text formatting and an image.
This option is what Indians in India largely use, and it is no exaggeration to say it has spelled disaster to the society. Don't believe me? Come to India, and walk through how people live in any random place.
Tolerance is just another word for complacency. I would much rather prefer a brutally progressive system like that of China or Singapore than a society suspended in perpetual lethargy.
All these things presume actual interest and savviness about the topic present in the student beforehand, which is precisely what most students that struggle with studies lack.
Regulatory capture and false AGI hyping, what else? You'd have to be willingly ignoring the writings on the wall if you still haven't identified it yet.
You can straight-up bypass AI mania in schooling altogether by just keeping pen-and-paper as the primary medium, as most Asian countries do. Digitization is a meaningless overcomplication.
Conversations on this topic could be interesting, but this "article" is literally just a word-to-word copy-pasted default-styled AI response to a single prompt.
Pretty sure that's a result of the larger gestalt driven more by your own drive and savviness to seek new ideas on living than the books themselves, as it is for everyone who claims to have benefited. If the books are gone today and only LLMs remain, nothing will change in this front.
Is it shitty and consumer-hostile? Yes. Was it inevitable looking at the current trajectory of game distribution logistics? Also yes. Forced digitization should have in no way been surprising.