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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Far Cry 5 is by far my favorite of the franchise. Interesting world, good gameplay, fun mechanics. It doesn’t take itself very seriously, but still has a more serious story. Everything meshes really well and it’s a ton of fun in coop.

    Far Cry 6 was a huge letdown, I hated it. Lots of re-used assets, dumb game mechanics, story very predictable and not interesting. When it released performance was terrible with lots of crashes and bugs. And not the fun kind of jank like in most FC games, the this is annoying my mission is softlocked kind of bugs. Plus it felt like 3 games in 1 which didn’t really have anything to do with each other. Later I found out this was because multiple teams worked on the different parts which didn’t really communicate as much due to covid.







  • Yeah it’s so dumb, like we have amazing technology, yet the software is fucking terrible.

    For example with most keyboard you can have a heat map of where you hit each button. So you can clearly see where the buttons should most comfortable be. However I’ve never seen any keyboard that could ever make use of that data to morph the shape of the buttons to my patterns. It seems so obvious, otherwise why collect that data?

    Instead we keep making the same shitty keyboard over and over again. And big companies monitor all our keypresses because number must go up. And put dumb ass AI powered autocorrect that are trained on all data ever instead of my personal data. I swear that thing “corrects” the right word into the wrong word more often than the other way around.

    Somehow touchscreens and keyboard have also gotten worse. I remember my old IPhone 4 I could type so fast without errors. And that screen was fucking tiny. Maybe I’m just too old but modern phones make my hands hurt and I still have errors all the damn time.




  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoMemes@lemmy.mlBig F'N TV
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    20 days ago

    I remember when I bought an 40MB hard drive back in the day. (Yes, megabyte, not gigabyte) And I labeled it “WOWSOBIG”, because it was huge for me. When I bought a 32" flat screen when those first released I thought that was big. Now even the TV in the bedroom is a 48" and that just the small secondary TV. One of my neighbors across the street has a TV as big as his wall, I can watch his TV from my window.

    Funny how perspectives change over time.







  • Well you’re always limited to what the distributors have selected for a certain region.

    However you can get around this sometimes with so called “grey” import. That’s when you buy something meant for one region in another region, which happens a lot in Europe because the differences don’t really matter. For example something made for Germany is perfectly fine in the countries around Germany, they all use the same plugs, same regulations, the manual is often in every language anyways (plus who reads the manuals). But it can cause trouble when you need warranty as the manufacturer doesn’t like this, so they will refuse service. The EU has gotten on the ass of manufacturers to tell them to just service the customer, but it can be a hassle sometimes. In this case the reason for the different SKU has nothing to do with anything physical to the product, but instead the market it’s meant for. In some countries people are a bit richer and thus prices are higher, but smart people know you can just buy the German product from a shop in Germany and even with a bit more shipping it can still be cheaper. So sometimes it’s worth the effort.

    This is also done for certain shops (for example Saturn/MediaMarkt in Europe) who get special SKUs just for them. These are often just the exact same SKU as available for the general market, but with a different number. They do this because a lot of countries have sites to compare prices at different shops. MediaMarkt had this strategy where they would heavily discount one model and market the shit out of that. This gave the public the idea MediaMarkt always had great deals. While in fact most models they sold were much more expensive than elsewhere. But nerds figured this out and created websites to compare prices between shops. So it would be obvious when the price was good at MediaMarkt and they would all buy that one, but when the price was higher they would know and not buy it. This destroyed the MediaMarkt strategy, so they made a deal with manufacturers to create different SKUs especially for them. This made it harder for the nerds to compare prices, as they used the SKUs to differentiate between different models.

    For the different SKUs available in a region there are often shops available that sell them. Some shops select a certain amount of SKUs to a have a good selection from different manufacturers and have a simple selection for the customers. However other shops just sell everything the distributors have to offer. These often employ systems to automatically enrich and publish products as soon as the distributors lists them. With drop-shipping directly from the distributors, this gets even simpler. So you can recognize these shops as they have a lot of products and often don’t have great filter and search options.

    Another excellent place is for example sites like Ebay, where you can find all sorts of products from all different regions. And they even have shops on there that buy stuff the distributor meant to sell, but for some reason (for example delays in shipping) couldn’t sell. Parties just buy up the entire stock and sell it through places like Ebay.

    But in some cases, the manufacturer had some very weird SKUs that they could technically made, but nobody wanted them, so they never got made. This can lead to hobbyists to having easy modification options. For example a feature could be completely available on the PCB and even in the software, but the parts not populated because that SKUs didn’t include that feature. In that case it’s easy to just populate the parts and get the feature up and running.

    In case you want something like 500 - 1000 parts (depending on the manufacturer and what kind of device it is, could be at least 5000 - 10000) you can often get the manufacturer to create a SKU especially for you. When this is one of the SKUs they initially planned but hadn’t selected, the costs isn’t even that high most of the times. But they can even make completely custom products as long as you are willing to buy enough volume.


  • The number advertised is not actually the name of the product, but the vendor code or manufacturer SKU.

    I’ve had some experience in how these SKUs come to be for large brands. In a lot of cases the people developing the new models have like a whole list of monitors they could create. Out of these a selection is made for which they will create, which capabilities are good etc. This is done per region and even if the capabilities are exactly the same, it will get a different SKU for the different region. This is important because the labeling could be different, often different plugs and manuals are included. Sometimes different paperwork needs to be filed, so it’s important the SKU matches the region. From this list of product SKUs the manufacturer can create for a region local distributors choose which ones they think are good for their market. This can often be hard and different distributors can choose different SKUs (depending on the manufacturer). Out of this list of available SKUs in the channel the shops can select which ones they want to carry. Some shops just carry them all (especially when dropshipping), other shops carefully select which ones they like.

    This leads the shops to have seemingly random SKUs and nonsense numbers. But that’s because those SKUs were figured out all the way back in step one. Those lists can be huge and all the numbers need to be unique. Normally there is some sort of internal structure used to generate the SKUs. But the end result is just a confusing mess of numbers.

    When looking at for example distributor level at what they carry or what is offered, the numbers make a little more sense.

    So it isn’t ideal, but there is reason to the madness.