The biggest takeaway that I get from these comments is that HN users seem to either dislike fun hardware or just don't understand what the use case is.
The Playdate is a novel, low-powered, handheld console intended for experiemental indie game design and has been marketed as such.
Comparisons to a Nintendo Switch or a Steam Deck seem very pointless since these consoles are very much not targeting the same end users.
It would be like complaining that you shouldn't buy a Raspberry Pi since a Mac Mini is better for your average user.
I agree that the price is a bit steep, but that is to be expected when you are not producing at a volume.
Also what people keep failing to see in the price tag is it includes 24 games. And the games look pretty decent actually. Nothing on the same level as Mario or Kirby or Tetris in there, of course, but many that I'd like to try and would probably purchase separately anyway knowing me.
For example, over the past two months of owning a Quest 2 I've bought about 40 games for it, to get a good feel for what the current state of VR gaming is like, and spent many hundreds of dollars to do so.
None of the other consoles this gets compared to are offering even a single game with purchase of the hardware, let alone 24. There are other consoles that do, but those are mostly retro mini-consoles that include a bunch of old games that have been resold over and over again.
I think that's an editorialized takeaway. I'd say that some HN users recognize that trying to make something look nice or look fun might not make up for big potential usability problems and questionable pricing. (i.e. a price that will make many people question whether they should buy it. Not necessarily a "bad" price or an "unreasonable" price.) And many others are very emotionally invested in this, and will gladly attack those HN users instead of respectful disagreement.
The author's overall point is that China does not seen to export many cultural works with global appeal (and not just restricted to western tastes). In comparison you could look to Japan with it's global cultural export of manga, anime, and video games and also South Korea with it's global cultural exports of movies and drama. These exports aren't strictly limited in taste to western audiences but have a global appeal while still retaining elements of it's place of origin.
It's unclear to me though if it is deliberate in this way for there not to be many cultural exports like this and if having a strong domestic scene is enough, however purely from a number game I would have expected more (which the author goes onto address later in the essay in the section "Strangling the cultural sector")
I mean, you could choose a different employer with lower expectations or reduced obligations if that's an option where you live. But no employer is required to keep you employed if you don't get your work done. It may be harder to fire people in some places and in some industries, but it's rarely impossible. If you want to be able to have leisure and enjoyment, you probably need money, which means being employed, and to remain employed you need to meet your obligations.
So be unproductive and risk getting fired but go home at a reasonable time. Be unproductive and work long hours to meet the obligations and not get your leisure and enjoyment. Or be efficient and go home at a reasonable hour and have your leisure and enjoyment. I choose the third, because it's sensible. Unlike my 90-hour workweek colleagues who stress about everything.
No, and you raise a good point. Someone with a trust fund or other form of inherited wealth, or just with sufficient passive income, doesn't need to be productive. That person can claim as much leisure time as they want, when they want. So the argument the author of the post makes, that productivity is a necessary precondition for leisure, is really not true at all. In our society we may find that money and income are preconditions, but there's nothing inherent about the need for productivity to have those.
I feel your comment only supports the points in the article.
I would say that YouTube, GMail, and Google Maps are all direct funnels into the Adsense machine.
Android, Chrome, and Chromebooks see success only as instruments to have infrastructure to more efficiently push users to use the Google products to direct data into the Adsense machine.
Any Google product that does not sufficiently funnel user data into the Adsense machine is canned. GCP exists as a covinient way to make some side money on their existing infrastructure.
I think only Waymo is the true outlier in this case, but I think that lives as it's own thing, given that's under Alphabet instead of Google proper.
The argument isn't being technical or practical, it's being mental.
It's acknowledging the fact that if you given humans a different/unfamiliar protocol they will be naturally inclined to treat it's content differently, which is the entire point.
They can still be both! You can flip the general structure of man pages to be examples first while still having all the complete reference material after.
But that is the exact point. Having a human interlock explicitly shifts the dependency. Knowing that you should launch nukes is no longer enough and being able to bring yourself to physically kill someone is the additional requirement that we are _deliberately_ adding to this process despite there not being an obvious logical link between the two actions before.
The Playdate is a novel, low-powered, handheld console intended for experiemental indie game design and has been marketed as such.
Comparisons to a Nintendo Switch or a Steam Deck seem very pointless since these consoles are very much not targeting the same end users. It would be like complaining that you shouldn't buy a Raspberry Pi since a Mac Mini is better for your average user.
I agree that the price is a bit steep, but that is to be expected when you are not producing at a volume.