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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2023

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  • The Joycons were an absolute disaster and ruined the portable experience. I got 4 of them repaired. When they inevitably broke again, I gave up and bought a pro controller. Precariously balancing the Switch on your lap or setting it on furniture so you can use a pro controller is not a handheld. Still had lots of fun with the games on it, but the experience should have been better. Nintendo has building controllers for decades, you would think they could at least begin to approach competency.





  • You spent 2 billion dollars developing a cure for x? I reverse engineered your cure for $30k (or just looked up your formula in your regulatory filings for free), so I can sell the same product for much cheaper than you since I don’t have any development costs to recoup. If you can’t protect your investment, you won’t make the investment.

    The problem here is not the patent system. The problem is relying on private for-profit industry to develop drugs. Not enough people get your ailment for a cure to be profitable? Sorry, you are SOL. Also, the current system incentivises developing maintenance drugs over cures. That’s one of the big reasons Type 2 diabetes has met metformin, janumet, glipizide, farxiga, ozempic, etc. All of those drugs are symptom management rather than treatments. A treatment would be a financial disaster for big pharma.


  • Patents literally are a government granted time-limited monopoly. There are a number of reasons why the government grants these monopolies. Perhaps, the ethics of medical patents should be debated, but if we collectively don’t grant patents on vital medical technologies, then I think it is unlikely that corporations are going to invest billions developing and testing life saving drugs. (Another debate: are private corporations the best stewards of developing this technology.)

    For now, this is the system we’ve engineered ourselves into a corner with.

    I don’t really care about some blood oxygen monitor in a smart watch, but inadvertently destroying the pharmaceutical industry over it probably ought to be carefully considered.



  • I had an HP laptop in the early 2000s, the hard drive crashed (my wife set some mail on top of it and the mail had a large advertising magnet in it). I bought a replacement. When I opened it up, the hard drive connector was HP proprietary. A replacement drive from HP was $475 for the same size that I paid $80 for an industry standard drive. I bought a replacement laptop instead and have been warning people against HP for the last 20 years. Many people come to me for IT help (entire extended family), so I am sure I have hurt HP some. Their printer drivers are the biggest bloatware crap too. Absolutely scum company.