evan's thoughts

Why I Game On My PC Less (I'm Old Now)

I’ve been working on a much larger post for the past few months that’s an in-depth analysis of a game I have been playing, but I had some thoughts on another subject meanwhile that I figured I’d jot down in between builds.

Recently, I have fallen off PC gaming. I started my life playing games on computers as I didn’t have access to a gaming console like my friends, and it became a core part of how I interfaced with the medium until I was almost a teenager. For me, the cost benefit analysis of PC gaming just started to make less sense as I entered a post college stage in my life where I had less time to fiddle with and tweak things on my computer. First off, I prefer my Mac as my dominant computing interface, which means I need to have a separate gaming computer if I want to play basically anything. Second, I prefer playing most single player games on my 4K OLED TV, sitting on my couch with a controller in hand. Third, I have less tolerance for things that just don’t work regarding my entertainment. When I am finished at the end of the workday, I want to click a button and have the thing I intend to enjoy start with no issues. Any friction here is intolerable for me! I have very little time between work, socializing, going to the gym, cleaning my apartment, shopping for / preparing food, and the days I am traveling to / from the office. I have many thoughts about the subject, as usual, so I figured I’d jot them down below.

Something I have internalized regarding technology is that you spend either your time or your money on things, and all products you can buy exist somewhere on that spectrum. For PC gaming, you spend a lot more money and a bit more time to ensure your games work and play properly, but the advantage is that they run “better” (nicer visuals, higher frame rates, better resolutions) with more configuration options than anywhere else. When I was younger, I had a lot of time and very little money. I asked my parents to let me build a gaming PC and hoarded up steam gift cards for sales to buy games there. That leisure time was my currency, and in exchange of fixing the multitude of issues present, I could use it to get what was a fundamentally better playing experience than what was available on a console. Obviously, that calculus has changed for me, but so has the technology surrounding it.

The image quality gap between consoles and PCs is a lot smaller than it used to be, but the financial gap remains the same. This is due to technology which allows less powerful hardware to upscale the image displayed by essentially guessing the missing pixels, which it’s able to do with incredible accuracy. This allows my PS5 to upscale Final Fantasy 16 to a near 4K image, and will likely allow the successor to the Nintendo Switch to do the same when it is docked to a TV. This makes the game render at only 30 frames per second on a good day, but most games this generation allow me to choose to prioritize frame rate instead, which was a major reason I preferred a PC most of the time. My go-to shooter of the year, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2) allows me to even play the game at 120 fps on my television! This eliminated a major reason I preferred my gaming experience on PC.

Steam has also been a factor in this decision. Steam was a revolutionary platform in gaming. It was the first one to deliver full AAA games over the internet, it allowed gaming PCs to have the ecosystem and platform benefits of their console benefits such as achievements, friends lists, and more. It completely reshaped the industry to the point where both major consoles have options without a disc drive and no longer allow physical only games to be sold. Over the past decade, though, the platform has languished in relation to its console counterparts. Steam, while being a good platform in many respects, seems to go off on tangents it never really fulfills. Steam Machines, the Steam Controller, Steam Link / Streaming, and Steam VR all languished once they were met with anything less than critical acclaim and massive financial success. Their biggest foray into expanding the ecosystem, the Steam Deck, competes with the Switch well in every regard, withholding its portability and battery life, which are the parts of the Switch I value most.

These days, Steam seems to only improve the product in direct response to complete financial pressure from their competitors, rather than pushing boundaries. They only deliver the bare minimum product to ensure that users don’t leave the platform (which, users can’t anyway, as Steam owns your games). Fun fact, I tried setting up a second account on my Windows computer for my dad the other day so he can get work done while he is visiting. When I tried to open Steam on it, it opened my steam account on his brand new Windows account without any form of authentication on my end. Seems like a pretty big account security issue if you ask me! Turns out this has been broken for over a year. Guess fixing it won’t help sell more Dota skins, ya know. In addition, Steam’s remote play equivalent pales in comparison to my PS5, and their cloud offering against Xbox is non-existent. There’s no way I can play my games on a phone without coughing up money to Nvidia in exchange for access to 15% of my library. Their sales are still fine, but Xbox and Playstation have mostly caught up there too. Every time I open these consoles I see sales for upwards of 80% off games, and it’s been cheap for me to build my library of digital (and older physical!) games up for these systems.

Cost and accessibility is another major factor. Three years ago to the month I moved to Seattle, a city I have loved since I was a teenager and a place I am proud to call my home. My parents live across the country on the east coast in various different states, and I am obligated to visit them often, so many of my vacations involve spending time with them. I enjoy playing games regardless, especially on vacation, and with my newfound satisfaction for the PS5 I realized I can just buy the digital consoles for both places for less than the price of a single new gaming PC. This alone shook me, I never thought about how cheap these consoles are with relation to a PC, but unlike PC hardware they’re sold at a loss as software / services revenue generate most of the profit. It’s hard to justify buying or building a gaming PC when you can buy a PS5 for a third of the price, and it is just going to run games better on a 4k TV unless you spend thousands of dollars. The “cheaper” calculus that drove my decision to move to PC gaming as a teenager is no longer relevant here, either.

This is not to say I don’t ever play games on a PC or use it! I love my PC, and I enjoy playing certain games there. I play multiplayer coop games with some friends from college, get really frustrated at League of Legends because I refuse to absorb how that game functions or works, languish in high silver Overwatch, and of course play Minecraft there. However, PC used to be my default in a way it no longer is. I would buy major releases on PC, I would play new games on PC first, and my console would exist only for exclusive games. Ironically, real console exclusivity seems to be a thing of the past outside of Nintendo. Xbox releases games simultaneously on PC, even on the Steam store, and PlayStation usually launches games on PC within 2 years of their release on the Console. It’s never been a better time to play PC games! However ultimately, I realized its just not for me, and that’s ok! I think the thing I am trying to get across with this post though, is I don’t think its for the overwhelming majority of people. If you want to play a PC only game like Valorant, just get a mid range Windows laptop (and never a “gaming laptop”) and just buy a console instead. I realized I don’t need a gaming PC, and I don’t think you really do either. They’re not really good deals anymore, or a “master race” (maybe think more about the connotations of that term before using it you weird ass redditors) but just another way to play. I can buy three PS5’s for the price of this years second most expensive Nvidia GPU, and its time the industry changed their calculus too.

Back to Web 1

I am fully convinced that the total breakdown of centralized social networking websites at every level is going to push us back to an online social architecture similar to the one which existed in the late 90’s / early to mid 2000’s. The failure of Twitter, Reddit, (looking further back) Facebook, and probably within the next few years, Discord, will all accelerate movement off centralized networking platforms into smaller more intimate ones. Reddit’s complete and total failure to monetize its users in a meaningful way turned into a complete disaster when its CEO had a temper tantrum online for the world to see because other developers made a product worth paying for off his platform. This in turn has made thousands of subreddits lock themselves as private, ensuring they can’t be discovered by anyone outside their community. I would be shocked if this sort of major user revolt didn’t happen to another major platform before end of year.

My theory: Web 2 was seen as the birthplace of the centralized network, and the beginning of the internet as a place synonymous with modern life. People moved from myspace to facebook, from forums to subreddits, from blogs to twitter. I think that what is going to happen is that we’re going to see movement backwards. Forums become smaller somewhat interconnected spaces, Meta takes over what Twitter used to have, Reddit as a whole either undoes their recent changes or gets destroyed by the most anal people on the internet who they’ve rightfully managed to piss off. This anger is going to cause many communities to move back to a sort of middle ground between Web 1 and Web 2, where there’s large networks and small platforms.

My take: This is bad. At least for quite a while. Instead of Twitter and 8chan, you now have dozens of unregulated smaller spaces without fact checking, misinformation reporting, centralized moderation or CSAM scanning. This is going to make the internet worse for the vast majority of people who do not want to put in the work to deal with these things. The view that this migration off centralized platforms to decentralized ones is a net benefit for all is rooted in a crypto libertarianism that stems from free market capitalism. This isn’t how it works, any community strong enough to sustain itself (and with new protocols to seed content across platforms this can be any community) has the ability to self regulate and exist with a small congregation in perpetuity. This will lead to a much larger conspiracy / misinformation problem than we ever had on Web 2 media, especially with the automated ML powered discovery engines which spread those conspiracies in the first place still existing on these smaller networks. Makeshift agreements such as Mastodon’s covenant are great until these smaller networks which were forsaken for ignoring it continue to federate amongst themselves unchecked and spread whatever the hell they want.

Reddit has made me realize that what happened to Twitter will happen to your favorite website / platform, not because of some shadowy billionaire who wants to get back with his wife, but because the pressures of modern capitalism are finally demanding it to happen. The SVB closure has prompted companies dependent on fundraising in the past to button up the hatches and try to find the quarters buried in their couch. It’s going to happen to the place you love next, and whatever replacement you attempt to scramble to just will not be as nice. Get ready.

Observations (sleep deprived ramblings) on the first wave of LLM based products

For the past few months I have spent a lot of time using the first wave of LLM products from OpenAI, Microsoft (disclaimer: is my employer, who my views here do not represent), and Google. My motivation for this twofold, first, that these are cool as hell. Ever since Alexa / the Google assistant, the dream of the Star Trek computer seemed in reach, and it’s obvious that LLM’s are the next step in the path towards being able to query machines using natural human language. Second, I have ADHD so the more digestible information is and the closer in temporal proximity it is to my desire to learn it, the easier it is for me to absorb. The rest I don’t have to justify as much, but I just wanted to jot some observations I have had down and see what the feedback from everyone is.

Additionally: I am writing this on an 11 inch iPad Pro, on airplane wifi, with 3.5 hours of sleep, a grande size Americano from the Starbucks in Newark Terminal B (the shittiest airport terminal in existence now that they renovated Terminal A), and a dream. So, might repeat myself. Might forget how to write a sentence. Who knows.

The closest UX to the OS wins

In the past 8 months I have used (in no particular order) OpenAI Playground, ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo, Google Bard, Bing Chat on the Web, Bing Chat on iPhone, Generative AI on Google Search, Raycast AI, Short Circuit, Petey for iPhone / Apple Watch, ChatGPT plugin for Raycast, Discord Clyde, Notion AI, ChatGPT for iPhone, etc. The one that was the stickiest and that I see myself using on a regular basis is… Raycast AI. Might seem weird, after all every app besides the ones with Google in the name is actually OpenAI under the hood. Some are even free, and Raycast is making me pay 10 bucks a month, so what’s the deal here? Well I noticed a few trends in my habits. First, I found myself rarely using these products if they involved more effort than a Google search. Having to open a browser, than a website, then type a query was too much effort to get an unreliable answer, especially when a normal search often surfaced what I was looking for. With Raycast, I don’t even have to deal with that first step! I just hit cmd + tab and type, then tab, and the query is on my screen + in a chat window. The convenience of this is worth the tradeoff of the model being restricted to GPT 3.5 Turbo and with no search functionality 99% of the time, and the times its not, I prefer to search anyways. This made me realize that the race for the dominant model + system will depend on who can get theirs bundled with the iPhone first.

Windows Copilot was revealed at Microsoft Build this week (disclaimer part 2: so was the product I work on, Microsoft Fabric, check it out it’s very cool) and it’s obvious that this sort of OS level integration is the next frontier for these models after they’ve been integrated into search engines. Android will likely get some form of integration with a LamDA / PALM based model sometime in the next year or two, same with Chrome / ChromeOS, so the question is what Apple is going to do to keep up. Siri has for years lagged behind its competition, and I think that a future in which Android has the equivalent of Windows Copilot and Siri can’t even surface basic questions on my HomePod is going to be a genuine risk for them. If I had to place a bet, the obvious / safe one is that Apple is going to wait until they can feasibly do this on device, either by training their own LLM (unlikely) or partnering with / utilizing an open source project as the foundation for it.

Nothing is free (except some things are)

The other thing I noticed is that every single one of the above products not from Google, OpenAI, or Microsoft, cost money. This is because OpenAI’s API costs money. Every query you send to Raycast AI, they need to pay for, and since they can’t predict how many queries you’ll send they need to charge subscription revenue up front. Some products like Short Circuit and Petey, both of which were ChatGPT wrappers I used before the official iPhone app was released last week, allow you to just give them your OpenAI API key so you can pay for what you actually use. This type of payment was the only way I could use multiple of these products at the same time, and it made me realize that the cost of API requests is a problem for centralized LLM platforms. A Google employee’s fascinating memo titled We Have No Moat reframed the entire way I thought of this new competitive space forming. My takeaway from reading the memo was that open source on device models are going to catch up pretty soon, and if we’re truly going to plug this tech into many different products, I expect that you’re going to see future implementations rely on local / FOSS models a lot more as a way to get around subscription bloat. You can’t compete with free, unless you’re Adobe, in which yeah, GIMP sort of sucks and i’m willing to sell my soul to never use it. The point is, people aren’t willing to pay 5 bucks a month for you to meet them where they are for every product on the planet. It’s either gotta be free or included in the price of the product.

They sort of suck!

I don’t think there’s getting around how much relying on these things as your primary source of information feels like shit. Not because of any ethical concerns, but because the way in which the information is presented is so sterile and generic that I start to go a little crazy after reading too much of them. It’s the mental equivalent of only drinking Soylent forever. After enough time, your body starts to revolt and ask for real food. I also started to feel like I was going mental after a while, as while they don’t hallucinate often, they do enough to where you really can’t trust them for anything serious. I use them for grabbing bash commands I forgot, which was a task I used to use Stack Overflow / Google for. The nice thing about the later is you could usually use intuition to tell when something you saw was wrong, based on either the age of the information, the amount of upvotes, etc. Here it’s a total crapshoot and it makes you feel like a paranoid nutcase when something breaks. If you are asking a LLM for information on a subject you are unfamiliar with you are flying blind. Products with search like ChatGPT Plus don’t even fix this problem, as they can hallucinate just as easily.

My crystal ball predictions

Alright so it’s time to make my predictions. My predictions / takes will be a simple bulleted list so I do not have to remember how the english language works anymore because the caffeine is wearing off and i’ll be honest it’s starting to slip from me.

Predictions:

Okay that’s enough thinking for the day.

Bird Down

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft on Azure. Nothing I state here reflects any views my employer holds. These opinions are mine and mine alone, unless they’re also yours, in which case, hell yeah. Additionally, I am not an author. Grammar is going to be all over the place. Thanks.

Over the past few months my favorite place on the internet has been dying. You know why. An insurmountable amount of horrific decisions were made by its new owner who essentially determined himself the primary class of user to be catered to. He decided to crusade against bots on the site, an occurrence less frequent and annoying to me than the spam I receive in my email inbox. He allowed everyone to purchase a blue verification badge for 8 dollars without actually verifying their real identity (the previous point of the badge), devaluing the entire concept of the badge and ensuring that Tweets actually convey far less information than they ever used to. Last week he ultimately removed them from everyone who was “legacy verified” before giving them all his new blue service for free, a thing he promised he would never do. This has turned the badge into a mark of shame, something that all the previous verified users such as Stephen King are ensuring their followers they did not pay for of their own free will, and has resulted in Twitter no longer being a place that makes news and moves markets.

Imagine being so absolutely horrific at marketing and branding, that not only does no one want your product, you have managed to make every fucking influencer on the planet actively state they would never pay for it in the first place and do everything in their power to remove it. If that’s not enough, the new users he has “verified” for paying 8 bucks a month are generally produce the worst drivel i’ve seen in my almost 14 years using this website, and you have to now wade through them at the top of all replies like you’re traversing marshland in order to see anything worth actually reading. They constantly obsess over views and metrics, complaining when their paid for algorithmic boosting doesn’t compensate enough for their sheer inability to post. Those are just the things as a direct result of his product decisions too! This doesn’t take into account the horrific security concerns that have arisen since he found himself in charge, including giving journalists behind the scenes “god mode” screenshots and accidentally allowing private “Circle” tweets to show up in algorithmic feeds for all users, a bafflingly massive security violation.

Outside of Twitter, his leadership of Tesla in recent years has been a mixed bag at best, unable to deliver on product categories like the pickup truck in a timely manner due to absolutely baffling design decisions, resulting in them being eclipsed by Rivian / Ford in terms of both quality and sales. His leadership of SpaceX isn’t even worth commenting on because effectively Shotwell actually runs that shop. Even if you see his stewardship of the former corporations favorably, by comparison his time at Twitter has been nothing short of amateur. You don’t even have to take it from me, the venture capitalists and conservatives who supported him initially are dunking on him in the replies after he banned them for zero good reason.

The only reason the site still draws a pulse is that there hasn’t been a suitable alternative for an exodus yet. Mastodon is a cool proof of concept but ironically is far too centralized around the concept of the instance, with every decision of your experience dictated by the administrator of said instance. It’s Twitter if it was hosted in the panopticon. BlueSky is a far more promising alternative in terms of functionality (quote posts! recommendations!) but has a long way to go in terms of UX polish, isn’t open to the public yet, currently lacks the functionality to block someone, and it’s up in the air whether the main instance will even suspend the accounts of Nazis. If I had to put my money down on a winner amidst all this, I think that Meta/Facebook’s P92 is the closest bet. They’re hovering over the Twitter bird’s dying carcass like a vulture waiting to feast. They have the motivation too, their failed short term metaverse pivot fundamentally requires them to own text communication on the internet and appease investors in the short term with growth outside of that space. To compete against Twitter their product will integrate with Instagram, likely allowing celebrities to bring over their followings and verification, and newcomers like Mastodon as it’ll be decentralized and support activitypub. The later concession alone is enough to show me that they understand how to win in this new void Elon has built.

Four years ago, Twitter was one of the most influential websites in the world. The 45th president of the united states was an absolute addict. It drove almost every news cycle. After years of trying, Facebook couldn’t compete or keep up, outside the real time celebrity tabloid that is Instagram. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, hundreds internally are working to build P92, a product which did not exist a year ago. It’s because Elon is a weak leader with zero understanding of consumer business strategy who is incapable of building products with user needs that don’t align with his own, and everyone with half a brain in silicon valley understands that there is money to be made off his narcissistic ignorance. His leadership has effectively caused a 9% drop in daily active users of his platform year over year, caused a total advertiser meltdown, and have caused famous celebrities to announce they are not paying for his subscription service which he has now turned into a mark of shame. He’s so scared of competition he banned even talking about them, before being scared he is going to lose his users he reversed course on that policy within days. Regardless of users he’s also continuing to lose advertisers, and most importantly he is losing his sense of product direction, ruining the entire appeal of the network to suit his whims. Twitter will “survive” much in the same way every dead network never stops working, like Tumblr, LiveJournal, and MySpace, before it, it’ll die a slow death, fading out of relevance until its user acquisition stream ultimately goes bust. It will never stop working entirely, but stop being useful. To me, it’s already almost there. It’s less a question of whether it’s happening, and more about who will replace it. On that topic, we’ll just have to wait and see which vulture swoops down first.

The iPad Pro and the Studio Display

Last year I decided to splurge on a bunch of technology that I figured would improve my work life. As someone who predominantly works from my home office, I am of the belief that an expensive purchase that greatly impacts my enjoyment of the way I spend many of my waking hours was worth it. I purchased two Studio Displays from Apple, and while I have my issues with them, they do exactly what I wanted them to do and I adore the sheer fidelity / color accuracy of the screens. I use them with my 16 inch MacBook Pro, with one plugged into each Thunderbolt 4 port and the actual laptop in a closed position.

Another device I purchased last year is a new 11 inch iPad Pro with a M2 SOC. Originally I was let down by the announcement of the M2 model, as my dominant use case of the iPad (outside of being an expensive chromebook / travel computer) is watching videos, so I was holding out for it to get the MicroLED display of its larger counterpart. However my old iPad Pro was the original “all screen” 11 inch from 2018, and it was starting to show its age in battery life. Additionally I was waiting for years to get a version with cellular compatibility, so I purchased it regardless. The one thing I wanted to try with this though, was Stage Manager.

Stage Manager is on the iPad Pro 2018 as well, but I never liked it much there. It felt laggy, slow, and on the small 11 inch screen its often more of a pain to deal with to get what you want out of it versus the traditional split view multitasking. The new iPad Pro added a few additional features though, such as the Thunderbolt port and multi monitor support, which I felt would be perfect for the device. I figured that an iPad Pro, combined with my existing mac setup, would be a fantastic combination, especially when I am visiting my parents. So i’ve been attempting to use the iPad with my Studio Display for casual use, and there’s a few problems. Figured i’d post them here so they can be emailed around Apple HQ and have a few tickets opened. I know this is the most first world of first world rants, but this is the stuff I love to talk / think about so please excuse me but here goes

1. The iPad does not support external cameras, at all

If you plug an iPad into a Studio Display, you are stuck using the iPad Pro’s integrated camera for all purposes. This includes FaceTime, Zoom, Teams, and any other video conferencing app you can think of. There is no way to use any other camera besides what exists on the physical hardware of the device. This is wild because when you plug the iPad in to the Studio Display, it automatically switches to its speakers and microphone! This is a somewhat baffling decision, a huge oversight, and something I hope is fixed in the next version of iPadOS or a future software update of the studio display. Oh right, the display gets updates, we’ll talk about that in a bit.

2. The iPad is always the primary monitor

In modern computer operating systems there is the concept of the “primary” monitor, which is where your taskbar lives and is usually your main point of focus when interacting with your computer. On iPadOS, the primary monitor is always the display of the iPad. It is where your apps live, your widgets, etc. The monitor is required to be on, and if you have the (fantastic, product changing) magic keyboard for the device you are unable to operate it in any fashion when it is closed and plugged into an external display. This is silly, as with a laptop open and plugged into a larger monitor I almost never default to the laptop as the “primary” display, and looking back from a 27 inch screen to a 11 inch one to open an app is just unintuitive for long periods. It gets even sillier when you try to either open control center or view your notifications on an external display. With the former, if you click the control center on the display it opens it on the ipad screen instead.

The later doesn’t even work on the display. It won’t let you do it. You need to move your mouse over to the iPad screen to do it, and then move the mouse to the top, and then keep moving it upward as if there’s more display above it. Right, speaking of, you cant unlock the device from the studio display either. The password, lock screen, etc, is all permanently on the iPad display. I can keep going on but i’ll be honest, I haven’t discovered all the problems yet.

3. Stage Manager is still limited

This is a shorter one than many might expect because I don’t actually dislike stage manager. I think its a pretty solid compromise, and I applaud apple for building a window manager with a touch interface as a primary input mechanism that doesn’t feel terrible to use at all times. I had no idea if it could be done. My issue with it comes less from its functionality and more its interface. So here’s a list of nitpicks inside a list of nitpicks. When you open a new app, by default it closes the old one. You need to drag an app / window on top of an old window stack in order to get two windows and there’s no way to change that default. 4 windows are the maximum you’re allowed to have in a single Stage Manager “stack” or whatever its called, which makes total sense for an 11 inch screen but is hilariously sparse for a 27 inch one. When you drag a new window onto a stack, it automatically jettisons the first one you put there in a FIFO format, which means you have to continuously cycle to get the stack you want, or have the foresight to move one of your other windows to the iPad or just close it.

This would be the least busy desktop UX ive ever seen. but this is the most Stage Manager lets you do.

The thing about stage manager is there’s a ton of potential there. I see it. Its so obvious. They just fix a few problems with it and they’ve built an excellent way for power users to handle multitasking.

4. You can’t update the display

The Studio Display is a weird gizmo because it has a CPU inside. Seriously! The thing comes bundled with a SOC, specifically an A13, which I assume is used for handling features such as the webcam’s Center Stage feature, and probably some form of audio processing for the speakers / microphone. Updates happen sparingly, but in the past 8 months of ownership I received 3 updates. The problem is that those updates happen through macOS. iPadOS, as far as I can tell, has no mechanism to deliver updates to the display. This is a shame, as although the Studio Display is an expensive device its also one that will last decades, and I was hoping I could grab one for my mother (who doesnt need a full computer) so she’d have a big display / keyboard to do light work on, as well as a place for me to dock my macbook when I need to visit for the week and get some work done.

I wrote this entire article using the two products together, and its obvious that the potential for this to be a fantastic experience is there, but since Apple moved the Mac line to Apple Silicon its something I care about a lot less. My iPad has since moved from an essential part of my computing lineup to a second fiddle to my Mac, with only a few features I wish my laptop had (such as an integrated cellular modem). My ReMarkable 2 has replaced it as far as reading articles / writing goes, and my Mac has caught up to it in battery life and portability. This is a shame, because I adore the iPad Pro line and want it to fit somewhere in my life, as well as for it to become the only computer my parents utilize due to its simplicity and security. Hopefully they can fix the above issues because otherwise this is a really cool experience that I would recommend towards those looking for a light / secure computing surface.

The End of Computing

Disclaimer: These thoughts are my own and not representative of my employer. These ramblings would have gone to a discord server i’m in but instead all of you get to see them. Lucky you! I didn’t edit or proofread this so expect it to sound like a long winded rant.

There’s this infamous concept called the end of history. it was proposed by Francis Fukuyama, and the main concept is that we have reached a point in human history in which we have gone through all major changes. Change would still happen of course but at a smaller rate. There would be no more walls falling, no further world wars. Regardless of how I personally feel about this concept in its original application (I am not a fan) I keep thinking about how it applies to the tech industry. I can’t stop myself from thinking that we’ve hit a similar point with computing. The revolutions of the personal computer, internet, and modern smartphone have had me wondering for years what the next evolution of technology would be. Smart glasses? Smart watches? Virtual reality? The Metaverse? Self driving? Crypto? AI? Every year this focus changes and changes again. All trends which materialized into nothing.

I am decently optimistic about the possibility of VR / LLM’s, but I used to be optimistic about smart glasses and crypto many years ago so I probably shouldn’t be trusted when it comes to that. Even now I find myself often more pessimistic about the technologies I used to be optimistic towards, as I find their implementations lacking / incomplete. Regardless, I think we’ve reached the end of computing. The big shifts already happened with the mac / windows, ios / android, and even if every one of the aforementioned trends actually do materialize into the next computing platform they arent going to transform society any more than the personal computer, internet, or smartphone did.

Even though I see myself optimistic about LLM’s such as OpenAI’s GPT, I see their potential implementations less as instruments of creation but instead refinement. I have been fascinated with how the tech industry specifically got self driving so very wrong, with its expanding problem space. While that never materialized into anything actually useful, its became a lodestar which led to the creation of new crash detection technologies. Assistance, not autonomy. I see LLM’s as destined for a similar path. They can write emails, but those emails are boring and lack personality. However I actually expect them to exist as a copilot to enhance and critique your writing, rather than simply replace it. Imagine a word processor with a built in copilot to your right, telling you that you need to improve your conclusion or that you’re rambling about LLM’s in the middle of a blog post that was supposed to be about phones or whatever.

I think while there’s new exciting technologies and new possibility, even if LLM’s materialize into the AGI that twitter grifters are foaming at the mouth to predict the timetable of, they won’t matter. We’ve already got a device in our pocket that connects us with everyone and can access the entirety of human knowledge. The best case outcome of this technology is just a mathematical model that reads summarizes search results for you. It’s transformative, but not world changing. Same with Smartwatches, its just a phone on your wrist. Virtual Reality, for as much as I adore it, has a massive fight ahead of it as long as their biggest friction is people who own these headsets not even wanting to put them on. The Metaverse as a concept already exists and is Discord, and anyone trying to build 3D virtual spaces is missing that 2D ones are better. Crypto? Can go on for hours about why that wont work.

A quote I keep thinking about is something Nilay Patel said on the vergecast once, paraphrasing here, “The iPhone was such a successful product that it reshaped society around it”. He’s right. The iPhone and Android reshaped society. The internet reshaped society. Personal computers reshaped society. LLM’s write essays and recombines information. I’m impressed, but not floored yet. I think it can finally be the foundational technology people have been waiting for years to build a new generation of products on… but i’ve been wrong before.

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The Tech That Made My Year

I have been obsessed with tech products my whole life, and I can’t imagine a world without them. Tech products are the first thing I think of when I wake up, and usually what I am thinking about when I fall asleep. My day job is my passion, and i’m so grateful to the world that this is something I get to spend the rest of my life thinking about and living in. That being said, I buy and consume a lot of tech stuff throughout the year. So I want to create a list of my favorite things that I was introduced to in 2022. From hardware, to software, to operating systems, to services, these are the products that made my year.

The Apple Studio Display

It’s sort of become a joke amongst my friends that I’m pretty obsessed with screens. I don’t know why this started. Probably during the pandemic, when I just blindly bought a TV and wondered why there was this white glow behind black text. I then looked at my phone and back to the cheap gaming monitors on my desk, and wondered why the color white on those monitors was either too pink or too blue. I also hated how pixelated everything looked on those monitors compared to my phone. Not for video editing, or anything, but for reading text! As a software engineer all you do all day is read text, and it might be placebo but blurry text had a horrible effect on my eyes while reading. I had to strain more often, and at the end of the day all I wanted to do was close my eyes and lay down. The studio display is pretty damn expensive compared to other monitors, even ones that are similarly specced and priced. They lack a bunch of features (limited to 60hz, single dimming zone / no HDR) that make many monitors better on a technical level. But despite this, they remain gorgeous. The color on the 5K screen always looks correct, regardless of whether you use a Mac with true tone or a Windows PC connected to it. The thunderbolt ports have yet to fail. The speakers sound phenomenal for a display. I can’t comment on the webcam much, as I use an Opal C1 instead, but half the time FaceTime uses the integrated one instead of my Opal and it takes longer than you’d think for me to realize that. It’s perfectly adequate now for video calls. As someone who predominantly works from home, this was the best quality of life upgrade I have ever bought, so much that I bought a second one.

BeReal

I never much loved photo based social networks. I wasn’t popular enough in HS for snapchat to be fun, and I became hot long after the Instagram grid became something people cared about. For me though, I just want a way that I can keep up with what my friends are doing. BeReal is the first social network that actually allows me to keep up with the people I care about on a regular basis.

1Password 8

1Password was always known for being a product that put the apple ecosystem first. It had apps for other platforms, of course, but the apps on the iPhone / Mac were always created with the upmost care. When they announced their switch to an Electron UX on macOS, many people were rightfully upset. They stated this would allow them to move faster and build a better product, which I was skeptical was true. Turns out that was true. I’ve told people for years that if they want to spend money on their digital security, 1Password was the best thing to spend that money on. This is especially true this year. The addition of secret key support has once again shot them years ahead of their competition, including the native password managers bundled with the operating system. I still prefer to use enclave keys for SSH into sensitive systems, but its once again become an indispensable product for me.

Arc

Arc has become so essential to my daily life I genuinely forgot about it when writing this list. It’s not something I think about as a product anymore. At first I was a skeptic, but it has since come to be my daily driver for both my work and personal web needs. I think it’s the right paradigm to move towards in web computing, combining the concepts of favorites with tabs, forcing ephemerality of opened tabs, and making web apps a prominent part of the ux. The team behind it are friendly and responsive, and I have gotten to a point where I greatly look forward to their patch notes each week. I can’t wait until it arrives on Windows so that I can recommend it to all of my friends, and especially until it arrives on iOS / iPadOS so it can be my complete daily driver.

The Steam Deck

I have had quite a few differing opinions on this device over the past 8 months I’ve had one. Let’s start with the bad stuff. Its giant, the size of 3 nintendo switches. In its carrying case it will take up an overwhelming amount of space in the front pocket of a backpack, and only meets the definition of handheld in so much as you can hold it in your hand. It is certainly not easy to transport, and find myself sliding my laptop in my backpack to bring to a coffee shop far easier than I place my deck in my case to bring on a plane. Deck verified games are not “fuss free” like they are on a switch. Not only do you need to fiddle with the performance settings to get a battery estimation above 2 hours on almost all new games, but the verification status is sometimes a lie as it doesn’t take into account updates which screw up the Proton compatibility layer. I downloaded Wolfenstein II to play on a flight, a Deck Verified game, and couldn’t get past the second level due to a GPU bug which made it so I couldn’t see unless I was facing in a single specific direction. The screen is also pretty poor given the price. Many will complain about the 720p max resolution, but that’s actually the only way games on it are playable, and I don’t really mind. What I do mind, is that the Switch OLED, a device that is 50 dollars cheaper than the lowest end Deck model, comes with a dock and wireless controllers, has a gorgeous OLED screen while my Deck sits with its outdated LCD display. This often makes the decision of where to buy games a lot harder than it should be, especially between the deck as a hardware beast and the Switch being a glorified android tablet that was out of date when it was launched almost six years ago. However, and this is a big however, from a hardware perspective, this is one of the most impressive and well designed products i’ve ever seen in my life. It’s giant, but it never feels giant when you hold it. The buttons are in the perfect place. The touchpads work incredibly. The fact that it can run Elden Ring in my hands is nothing short of a miracle. I booted up Final Fantasy 14, a game I will never actually get fully into, on both my PS5 and my Deck and after fiddling with the controls a bit, I preferred how it played on my Deck. I love that the Deck is an open handheld I can do anything on, including play the best sonic game ever made. For years I often said that the Switch is a “kindle for video games”, but I think the Steam Deck, with its massive backlog and library, fits this bill even more. I played Doom 2016 perfectly on a plane. I played Deus Ex while on a vacation. If the new MW2 ran on this thing, it would probably be the only handheld gaming device I ever used. This is not a device to get someone who is frustrated tinkering with software or even a person who is unfamiliar with Linux, but for those who are this is one of the greatest things you can buy.

The MacBook Pro (16 Inch, 2021)

This is, without a doubt, the greatest computer I have ever owned in my entire life. I’ve both owned and used a great many computers and absolutely none have consistently smashed my expectations as much as this machine has. It has redefined what a laptop is and can be. It has more CPU power than the desktop I use in my office at work, it has more power than the gaming PC I use at home. It has a better screen than anything else on the market which isn’t OLED. It has fantastic speakers. It has a great keyboard. It has a trackpad that puts every other laptop to shame. It has a battery life that absolutely smashes every other computer on the market. All of that alone would be incredible by itself, but even on top of that, i’ve never heard the fan run once. I’ve owned many MacBooks over my life, being an apple customer for close to 20 years, but this is the first time I splurged on one of the more expensive models and even then it is worth every single penny. It’s put my iPad to shame. It’s put every other computer I used to shame. It’s hard to recommend anything else.

Favorite Shows of 2022

I watch a lot of TV, mostly in the background while doing other things. Usually ill make a list of my favorite shows of the year and send it to my friends, but this year I have this blog, so I figured why not post it? Anyway, the rules are to be a “current year” show the first episode of that season / batch had to air in that year, so if episode 1 of a show premiers on December 31st 2022, it counts. I don’t count direct to streaming / tv films on here, so if you want my opinions on those, I’ve got a Letterboxd like every other zillenial struggling with their fading cultural relevance.

The List

1.) The Bear

Season 1, Hulu

The Bear came out of nowhere. My friend recommended I check out this show many times, but I didn’t listen until she sent me a tweet that compared it to Uncut Gems. It’s probably the most unique writing voice I heard in 2022 as far as television goes. It’s pretty par for the course to write a show about found family and belonging, but The Bear nails the mess of that in a way I haven’t seen before. Every actor is perfect. The music is perfect. The directing is perfect. Really nothing else I can say about this one.

2.) Andor

Season 1, Disney+

As someone who genuinely does not care about this franchise in the slightest anymore, I can’t believe that a Star Wars show is this high on my list this year. The Mandalorian Season 1 was fun TV reminiscent of a classic western, but this is on an entirely different level. Andor is a phenomenally written piece that focuses directly on the fascism that has been ever present in the franchise but used mostly as fodder for the protagonists to overcome. It’s enough for me to see something produced that’s so overtly anti-fascist, but the writing and characterization is some of the best on TV in years.

3.) Severance

Season 1, Apple TV+

Brilliant television. One of the most brilliantly written and best directed dramas in years. this feels like it was algorithmically cooked up in a vat of every science fiction show from the 2010’s that I fell in love with. It has the ambiance and visual design of Counterpart, the mind bending writing of Mr. Robot / Homecoming, and the mystery / world building of early Westworld. It’s been a long time since a cliffhanger of a show has hit me this hard. I can’t wait for season 2.

4.) Barry

Season 3, HBO

This show has wonderfully evolved from its primarily comedic origins into one of the best dramas still on television, while still having phenomenal wit. An incredible drama, and probably the first real spiritual successor I’ve seen to the crime drama of Breaking Bad, which unlike Barry quickly dropped its dark comedic roots in the second season. It also has the sharp critique of Hollywood of Bojack Horseman.

5.) Better Call Saul

Season 6, AMC

This show is better than Breaking Bad. I prefer Saul as a main character to Walter, I prefer the focus on the legal crime and love that I get to spend more time to explore my favorite characters from Breaking Bad. This season ends things wonderfully, and I highly recommend this series to everyone who enjoyed Breaking Bad.

6.) The White Lotus

Season 2, HBO

While the satire of the rich isnt as sharp as the first season it’s still the funniest show on TV. I’d argue its even funnier than the first, because Jennifer Coolidge gets the time she needs to shine here and delivers some of my favorite comedic performances of the year.

7. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

Miniseries, Netflix

I’m obviously a sucker for science fiction, specifically well done cyberpunk settings. One of my favorite films is Blade Runner 2049 because of this. I was interested in the Cyberpunk game but didn’t pick it up on account of it looking like trash. This show on the other hand, is so excellent, it made me buy the game on steam at half price (still not worth it imo) just to experience the world and these characters more.

8. Harley Quinn

Season 3, HBO Max

Comedies in the modern age of TV have changed. Modern shows such as Dramas are almost 10 hour films, so the transition to linear narratives fit them like a glove. Sitcoms stories were serialized though, and that format benefitted them pretty well because they could just focus entirely on situational humor without dealing with character development. Upon watching it for the first time last year its pretty apparent that the show which changed everything was The Good Place, a sitcom so incredibly brilliant it left reverberations on the whole industry. Anyways, Harley Quinn focuses more on plot and character development than ever before in this season, and while that results in the rapid nonstop pace of incredible jokes from 1/2 slowing down, it ultimately benefits the longevity of the show and works a lot better than it did for What We Do In The Shadows.

9. Peacemaker

Season 1, HBO Max

The first breakout hit of the year. Genuinely didn’t expect peacemaker to be as good as it was, but James Gunn just knows how to frame these stories. They’re funny and not to be taken super seriously, but unlike the Whedon style of writing which dominated Marvel for the past decade, actually focuses on the characters and their personal stories. Gunn’s films (such as the excellent Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2) usually focus on relationships, parents, siblings, and found family. Cena is also the star of the show, and this would not work in the slightest if it wasn’t for his absolute charisma as an actor here. I’d love to see him try a more dramatic role in the future, because there were some hints here that he might be up to the task.

10. Smiling Friends

Season 1, Adult Swim

the renaissance men are coming to town

11.) Righteous Gemstones

Season 2, HBO

Not as tightly written / clever as the first season but still a great and funny show. Eric Andre was born for this role and I adored him in it.

12.) Wednesday

Season 1, Netflix

A fun show about a magical boarding school that isn’t written by piece of shit TERF.

13.) What We Do in the Shadows

Season 4, FX

This show has teetered off from its incredible first two seasons and moved towards something thats slightly more narrative driven. I understand why it made that choice, but the first two seasons were the funniest show on television and it has recently been relegated to only one of the funniest.

14.) His Dark Materials

Season 3, HBO / BBC

Great finale! Pretty well done adaptation to an excellent series. I can’t believe that this was a book they tried to market to kids, and I wish I read it when I was younger.

15.) Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon

Season 1, HBO

I honestly went into this one sort of expecting nothing amazing, and until the last few episodes it really wasn’t. It had great acting and of course incredible production values, but was generally a snooze. When it finally reaches the conflict its building towards, it finally piqued my interest though. Solid watch if you enjoyed Game of Thrones in the past.

16.) Stranger Things

Season 4, Netflix

Season 1 of stranger things was a masterpiece of lightning in a bottle season of television. Stranger Things Season 4 isn’t. It’s still worth the watch if you’ve got a netflix subscription though, especially before they kick us all off password sharing.

17.) Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Season 1, Paramount+

Not the best Trek show I’ve seen. But it’s a real Trek show, unlike everything else with the name on Paramount+. It understands the core of what Trek should be, at least a semi-optimistic show focused on exploration, philosophy, and the betterment of humanity. My main issue with it is that it is not unique or original in its setting or characters. I’d vastly prefer a new ship with a new crew over nostalgia baiting the enterprise again, but if they had to do this concept I think they’ve managed to pull it off as well as you can. If you’re a fan of the pre Kurtzman shows, you’ll like this at least a bit more than the other stuff he’s put out.

18.) The Boys

Season 3, Amazon Prime Video

I don’t really love this show as much as everyone else seems to. It’s good! but something about it has always irked me. I don’t love the acting (besides the notable exception of Starr as Homelander), I don’t like how the main guy keeps making the Tucker Carlson face every time a superhero has a weird fetish or their genitals explode, and more importantly I don’t actually care about any of “The Boys”, of whom are supposedly the focus of the show. They never grow, they never develop, and every season they sit in a basement somewhere and yell at each other while the actual plot is happening around them, usually independently of their Discord server like spats. I found myself just skipping those sections entirely or scrolling on my phone waiting for them to end. The show’s excellent political views are never explored more than the absolute bare minimum that’d allow them to market the show as a politically minded without being sued for false advertising, and without actually saying anything with more depth than a half length tweet. Regardless its still worth watching because its fine and you probably can watch it free anyways.

Penalty Box

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