Just use Intel CPUs and you’ll understand, as they seem to invent a new incompatible socket every five minutes requiring a new mobo.

Mumbling “Hey google, turn the lights off” from bed and the entire house going dark is pretty nice though.

Few of them also could be open, but just don’t advertise it.
IKEA stuff was all ZigBee, now upgrading to add matter support, so you could mix and match them with Philips Hue, Agara, Nedis and quite a few others. Main issue is always software support on the hub or app - Ikea has no smart thermostats, so even though it can connect to them, they don’t show up properly. That’s where Home Assistant shines, as it supports basically everything imaginable.

But you are right, most are proprietary because they want to lock you to their ecosystems. Exactly like cordless power tools and their batteries.

HomeAssistant is the answer.

Or if you want a simple & cheap off the shelf solution, IKEA stuff has being online as an option, not a requirement, and all the devices are ZigBee or matter compatible and not locked to some proprietary WiFi cloud bullshit.

All bicycles are velocipedes, but not all velocipedes are bicycles.

Maybe? I do kinda doubt that as the original addon was benign and did exactly what it said on the tin to fix a problem one of the founders had themselves - finding and applying coupons automatically, and there isn’t an obvious way or need to monetise that.
But they gained a massive userbase very quickly, which attracted investors like vultures ready to tear profits from those users. So even if they originally didn’t plan to do much more than scan for coupons, after a few years of venture capital greed and tens of millions of investor money, they definitely were chasing profits by any means necessary. Money corrupts, after all.

And by the time Paypal was willing to pay $4 billion for them in 2020, it was blatantly obvious they were doing a lot of shady shit because there just isn’t a way to monetise free users that well while staying above the board.

All of which is a damn shame, because the idea of an addon that scans and tries coupons for you is really simple and very useful :/

But are you sure it means two wheels, and not every other wheel? Maybe we should call them twicecyles to avoid the confusion.

We already have a term for “true” AI, it’s AGI - Artifcial General Intelligence.

Both AGI and LLMs are types of artificial intelligence, as are things like OCR, speech to text systems, or chess engines, and a ton of other things, it’s a vast field of computer science.

Honey is a great example of corporate greed and enshittification turned to 11. It started as a simple free extension for collecting and trying discount coupons, and turned to a massive greedy scam with enough financial backing to start blackmailing webshops for profit.

The unofficial one was leaked a month ago :p

GTA 6 is developed and being published by Rockstar Games. BG3 was developed and published by Larian. If you want to be that strict about the difference between CD project and CD project Red, we can ignore it for now.

Blue Prince was developed by Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury. It has a 3rd party publisher, therefore it’s not indie by your very clear definition, no?

As if having a visa or even being a citizen would somehow guarantee they won’t kidnap and send you to El Salvador anyway.

Which means Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3 and GTA 6 are indie titles, while the majority of the indie game award nominees and winners are not because they have 3rd party publishers.

Well defined indeed.

Here are the permissions used by a calculator app Android tells me has “No permissions granted”.

You can’t deny any of those.

Agreed :)

And no matter how they do it, it’s clear they need to make changes; “everything is an Xbox controller and now just works” actually was pretty nice solution 20 years ago to fix the complicated mess that was PC gamepads with DirectInput, but it is very much outdated idea today.

Thankfully it appears changes are happening that might solve the issue in the near future, and all we can really do is wait and see.

Should companies using computers in general pay a tax for it, a computer used to mean a human that calculated - computed - things by hand, after all?
But alarm clocks replaced knockeruppers, light bulbs replaced lamplighters, cars replaced coachmen, industrial robots replaced blacksmiths, we have no elevator operators, phone switch boards, traffic conductors, pin boys, link boys, ice cutters, scribes - the list of jobs made obsolete by technology during human history is massive.

Generative AI, while widespread and disruptive, is just one more to the long list.

They could expand the Xbox controller API feature set tomorrow

No, they couldn’t. There’s over 20 years of legacy hardware and software that expects Xinput data to be returned exactly in this format:

typedef struct _XINPUT_GAMEPAD {
  WORD  wButtons;
  BYTE  bLeftTrigger;
  BYTE  bRightTrigger;
  SHORT sThumbLX;
  SHORT sThumbLY;
  SHORT sThumbRX;
  SHORT sThumbRY;
} XINPUT_GAMEPAD, *PXINPUT_GAMEPAD;

Changing any of that would break every single xinput controller and game made in the last 20 years. Modifications require a new API, which is exactly what GameInput is.

Researching this a bit more, there is an answer in the making already - GameInput. How long that will take to take over from every game using xinput is left to be seen.

Used Pebble is one option.
If you can handle soldering in a battery, you can usually buy a Pebble or Pebble Steel for really cheap (just make sure it isn’t a first batch glued shut model). Don’t get a Round, batteries are really hard to find. Pebble 2 and Pebble 2 Duo will also need replacement side buttons, they disintegrate quickly.

Obviously they will have zero days of warranty though :p

It’s not possible as xinput doesn’t support gyroscopes, the controller simply doesn’t report that data. The “Switch” mode is setting it to be a mostly standard HID/DirectInput device so that all of those inputs can be accessed, but that requires something (Steam Input) to sit between the controller and the game to map the inputs together, and the game has to also support non-xinput controllers - otherwise you are just mapping them back to xbox inputs. The exception is a game that support directinput… well, directly. Like sim racers etc.

There is now the option of going “hardware” Steam Input as well, as is done by the HORIPAD for Steam, but it is something the controller has to do.