It does feel like we are barrelling headfirst into another gaming industry collapse, doesn’t it?

Between the whole soulless, overpriced, MTX-riddled “AAAA” crap crowding out the top, tonnes of AI-slip flooding the bottom-end, and the antagonism towards physical media - it seems like it’ll only be a matter of time.

Especially given how there is a literal lifetime’s backlog of quality titles from half a dozen console generations - gamers could survive an ice-age. Developers and publishers can’t.

You’re not agreeing with her, she’s agreeing with you - as it is her world view that’s changed, while yours has remained consistent.

So animal, mineral AND vegetable?

I’m in a similar situation. My workplace has been heavily pushing implanting AI tools into our daily workload, but I’ve struggled to find a more meaningful use beyond a technical search engine: eg. How can I calculate x in the most resource efficient way?

Renault had seemingly given up on hatchbacks for the Aussie market, it feels like only a few years ago the Megane and Clio were all over our roads.

I can’t particularly blame them, though. We have something like ~5% of the population of Europe in about the same landmass, our regulations (ADRs) quite onerous, we drive on the other side of the road compared to continental Europe, and the logistical costs of sending a finished vehicle from Europe to Oceania makes it quite difficult to compete economically against Chinese, Korean and Japanese brands.

I say this as someone heartbroken, who absolutely adores the designs of European marques like Peugeot, Renault, Alfa Romeo, Abarth and Citroen - they are all undeniably cool.

Did you?

Overnight, Ukraine’s military reported that, without explanation, the Starlink satellite communications system, produced by Musk’s SpaceX but managed by the US government, was no longer working at speeds greater than 100mph.

That effectively rendered most of the drones used by Ukraine to strike behind the frontlines inoperable…

Given it’s a game from 2004, it should be relatively easy to decompile, so if you’re the kind of person happy to tinker - it could be a great project to self-host and try to get done yourself?

That way the only cost is time, and a little bit of electricity.

I only just looked up some of the basic requirements, as it’s piqued my interest in trying to decompile something myself over the Christmas break!

Circling back to thank you for the candid, in-depth response.

Canada and Australia aren’t all too dissimilar, it seems.

Rampant speculation was ultimately responsible for our similar housing bubble here in Australia too. It’s taken a lot of political fortitude to introduce the necessary policies here to try and thread the needle to keep housing affordable for the population, without completely cratering values and destroying millions of owner-occupiers.

We are very lucky that our primary Conservative Party largely self-destructed last election cycle, and is too busy fighting off an insurgent far-right party to lose any threat to our (notionally) left Government.

I truly hope you guys can find your own safe path out of that minefield.

Their ability to bomb* the oil depots is probably related to their starlink/starshield access. 🥺

Yes: Doom (2005)

It’s not a great film by* any stretch of imagination, but it is a guilty pleasure of mine.

With Starbucks, they just need a name - not necessarily yours.

My of my uni friends used to pick ever more ridiculous names just to hear them call it out when his drink was ready.

Aussie here, what’s the primary cause for your house price bubble?

Here it was a stupid LNP policy to funnel investment dollars into land banking via negative gearing coupled with a capital gains discount; we are only now starting to roll back changes from 25 years ago.

We’ve lost an entire generation’s wealth to greed.

Q3 2026 sales were 20% lower than Q3 2025 sales .

Yes, I do? Maybe I did just get lucky - but the lightning cable that came with my 6S just recently died after a decade.

It’s sole purpose was to sit at my computer desk to allow me to charge while working from home, in the end there was no splitting or fraying of the cable - it just stopped charging. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I’ve also still got my Xs and 14 Pro cables, but have largely switched to Qi2 in preparation for upgrading to the 18 Pro.

Oh I understand the comparison - but it begets the question: just how often did you plug and unplug in your RJ11s from your landline phone? Because we’re not really comparing like-for-like here.

I’m also old enough to remember having to do untangle those cords every month or so and they would eventually start crackling whenever you moved, before eventually not working without any obvious signs of physical damage.

I hate to be that that guy - but a lot of this can be boiled down to careless use. If you pull in the cable to disconnect, you’re eventually going to break it. You’re supposed to pull on the hard plastic part of the connector.

The first company that is able to commodify modular drop-in BEV replacements for ICE vehicles would make a fortune:

Battery packs shaped to slot into engine bays, transmission tunnels and fuel tank cavities.

Individual motors directly into your preferred wheel wells (FWD? RWD? AWD? 4WD? whatever you like).

Drop-in ECU to interface with the existing chassis.

The sort of thing that someone mechanically minded could knock out in their own garage over a weekend or two, or you could get done at a professional shop in a day.

Imagine taking your favourite silhouette, and giving it exactly the range and performance you desire - at the fraction of the cost of a new EV.

Weird, that’s just showing up as ******** to me…

Clearly our company has set their own standards…

…this is also on top of 2FA, Zscaler, and a few other secure network requirements I haven’t fully poked around. 🤷🏻‍♂️

We regularly work with a tonne of sensitive and PII data, such that even one leak would be disastrous.

My work has a mandatory password update every ~3 months, seemingly keeps all previous hashes, and some employees have been around for 20+ years.

I feel for the IT security team.