Government "micromanaging" technology is why you can actually plug things into the phone network. Things like modems. For the internet. Before the government slapped AT&T, you leased the phone and it was wired into the wall and they could take you to court for connecting anything "unauthorized" into the wall.
It's also why PC compatibles ever happened at all.
It's also why Apple phones finally have a standard port. Which you admit.
Interoperability is not natural, and IP laws make it trivial for companies to utterly block as we are dealing with today. Interoperability often requires regulation to force companies to allow people to interact with "their" standards.
The government can manage interfaces in a way that enables standardization and interoperability without limiting capabilities.
You are conflating so many things. I was speaking about the "government" (there are hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of them) regulating battery standards for power tools - you address none of that. Yes I made a broad statement about government micromanaging which I stick by even as a staunch pro-regulation power to the people type of person.
Even if the EU (a specific government entity) hadn't stepped in over the USB C thing it would have been figured out eventually we just didn't want to wait.
I don't see how you can use AT&T as an example for your point. AT&T was our US government forcing us under threat of state violence to use what technology they deemed was allowed.
Of course I am spoiled by Dolphin and their meticulous work, and the leap in N64 emulation, and PS3 emulation is way farther than I thought it could ever be.
But PCSX2 is mediocre. It reports the vast majority of the library in "green" emulation state, but that usually means there are glaring issues that someone is choosing to overlook, like shadows that are broken.
The Ace Combat games for example are all broken with the hardware accelerated renderer. Things run like garbage in the software renderer for a lot of games. Multiplayer functionality is spotty and hard to set up and poorly documented.
The state of emulation of that console generation is not up to snuff, save for Dolphin. It's still very much in the "Shut up, it works fine for Super Mario 64 so it works" mindset it seems.
This is true even of official emulators! The Xbox emulator that ran on the Xbox 360 has many games that are "officially supported" with serious issues. Forza Motorsport 1 has weird slowdowns on key tracks. I understand the serious hardware difficulties but I still wish emulation accuracy was an option.
>Yes, bad old games exist. But there were literally dozens of genre-defining games that would go on to shape how games continued to be made in the decades since
The N64 had one of the smallest videogame libraries ever. It had less than 400 titles. How many of those were "Super great" vs how many were utter garbage?
The SNES had 1749!
The vast vast majority were slop.
A lot of the "great" ones are only really great in context, ie no preceding works to draw from and with the technological limits of the time.
Is Pilotwings good? As someone who grew up with similar age flight simulators but not pilot wings, it is extremely mediocre. Same for StarFox and StuntRaceFX even though both were dramatic at the time, but they do not hold up in the slightest. 12fps is not that fun.
>Games that are so good they define or reshape genres are few and far between nowadays.
Yes, this is called a new domain maturing. This is the expected outcome in all new domains. You pick all the low hanging fruit and explore most of the solution space.
Scroll through this list and tell me things were better back then
Not only were electric cars available since the very beginning of cars, but they've always been available as niche options. There are tens of electric cars that postdate the EV1 and predate the Tesla. Do you even know their names?
We have stupidly cheap gas. An electric car has only ever been a curiosity for America. Even now, the primary driver of people buying electric cars is ideological, and a mild convenience of never having to go to a gas station.
Pre-lithium battery electric cars are a huge hassle, for very little gain, even outside the US. The history of cars is a global one, and no amount of conspiracy theory about GM can counter the fact that nobody else made electric cars either, even in places with drastically more expensive and unreliable gasoline.
They have always been a novelty, like hydrogen and LPG and compressed gas engines.
Hybrids were the closest anyone got to making older battery chemistries meaningful for car-style transportation, and even that was extremely limited.
Cheap gas, car culture and the incredibly long distances makes America a very different place from the urban centres of the Netherlands, China and Korea.
Asteroid mining in our current economy is about pointing at the market price of an extremely low supply element that isn't that high demand in the first place and forgetting to talk about what a supply glut does to price.
Everyone is laboring under this subtle belief that space industry will be just like scifi speculated, but scifi stories always treated space like the ocean, with lots of interplanetary trade and easy travel and no consideration of energy (because it makes for good storytelling) but the actual energy budgeting and consideration of gravity wells is the exact opposite of ocean transport.
Global trade works at all because buoyancy and fluid physics make ocean vessels stupidly efficient at transport.
Moving any matter through space is stupidly inefficient.
The tyranny of the rocket equation constrains everything.
It is definitely striking that a 2L bottle of local municipal water plus caramel color and a pinch of aspartame costs $2.65
Fucking insane. Coke has a higher label tax than Apple.
The other infuriating part is that the generic brand soda is also expensive for some reason. What an efficient market, when generic water can maintain an insane profit margin.
Remember when HN had an entire year of articles about how we should all be on microdoses of various hallucinogenic and psychoactive substances for "peak performance"?
Good times.
HN is as bad at medicine as it is at everything else.
No, I was here just for the year in which they ended COVID with vitamin D. With the weekly (n=5) articles garnered with blog posts from randos swearing by it...
It's also why PC compatibles ever happened at all.
It's also why Apple phones finally have a standard port. Which you admit.
Interoperability is not natural, and IP laws make it trivial for companies to utterly block as we are dealing with today. Interoperability often requires regulation to force companies to allow people to interact with "their" standards.
The government can manage interfaces in a way that enables standardization and interoperability without limiting capabilities.
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