Agreed, a lot of people were expecting a bump in processing power in the OLED refresh, but it's pretty clear now that they were saving that for the Switch 2.
The thumbstick was super shoddy and was prone to mechanical failures, the ridiculously tiny d-pad was literally made for ants. The N64 was a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who's giving out accolades for the controller design.
The GC controller (outside of the HUGE shoulder bumpers that were used as analog in a grand total of like 4 racing games) was a vast improvement on it, and I would say that the Switch Pro Controller ranks up there as one of Nintendo's best though the cost of $60/$70 kind of stung.
There was an iOS app from practically a decade ago that did something very similar, but you could customize with RSS feeds, and it would turn it into a traditional looking newspaper.
Sadly, I can't remember the name of it but it was pretty great.
EDIT: Well maybe not, this one seems more like a replacement for ReadLater/GetPocket whereas the one I used was purely based off RSS feeds. I used it on the original iPad 1st gen so it's probably long gone. I give up.
A fun evolution would be to format it into a newspaper format, complete with headlines, front page, and "continue reading on page N", then print it out on large paper, fold it, and mail it to you.
There's probably no money in it, but a physical weekly customized RSS feed highlights newspaper would be neat.
I don't know what this phenomenon is by which humans take personal experiences and attempt to extrapolate broad, sweeping generalizations and/or present anecdotal data as objective fact, but it's far too prevalent for my liking.
I'm sorry that your experiences differed from mine, but some of my best friends are connections that I organically grew in ostensibly white-collar jobs (in the education and tech sectors).
Many of the engineers I know are some of the most eclectic goofballs you'll ever meet.
I've worked a fair bit in both environments. Maybe I've somehow missed out on 'the mean', but that's my experience. I've met the eclectic goofballs in tech too, but they're far from the norm.
They're being purposely coy though on what this actually means. Backwards compatibility with digital/e-games, or backwards compatible with the physical carts?
I'd be shocked if it doesn't support physical carts, given Nintendo's history with backwards compatibility. And given the rough equivalence of digital games and carts on the Switch, I'm hoping that means digital purchases transfer too - but that would be a first for Nintendo, I think. Fingers crossed!
From what I understand, people are much more into physical media in Japan. Nintendo also actually finishes their games and gets a working build ready before release so the carts actually have a game on them that don't require a patch, which is unfortunately not standard across the industry.
There isn't a technical reason to change the cartridge format. I don't see why they wouldn't just use the same carts if backwards compatibility is the goal.
The carts are already plenty small. Yes, they could be smaller, but any smaller (without being downloads only) and they'd be difficult to handle.
For cost, they could likely reduce the pincount for new cartridges, by changing the number of data pins, but that doesn't preclude using the same slot. Reducing cost of cartridges is more effective than reducing the cost of the console. Reducing pin count would probably save more money than shrinking the small amount of plastic case.
For energy efficiency, maybe they can eliminate 3.3v and only keep 1.8v for new carts, maybe redesign the insertion detection pins to detect old and new.
The carts are shockingly big compared to Vita carts. The plastic housing with a PCB sliding around underneath always felt cheap to me compared to any cart from the late 80s to current.
they could have made them smaller the first time around, but I have to imagine they intentionally chose not to — we have to remember that they're also optimizing these things for children... so smaller isn't always better for things like swallowing (which is why they add a bitterant to the current cards)
There are now cart dumpers that can copy and store multiple Switch games on an SD card. If the same form factor is used its likely these will still work for original Switch games.
I would be unsurprised if the cartridge has the same form factor but has internal differences for Switch2-only games. If they want to try to lock Switch2 cartridges down more, there's plenty of ways to do that while maintaining a similar enough form factor for Switch1 compatibility.
NDS and 3DS cartridges had a similar form factor but operated by a completely different protocol. I expect Switch 2 to do something like that, given that piracy-enabling cartridge emulators for the Switch 1 currently exist.
I don't game nearly as much anymore but my understanding is that Nintendo may be the last console maker to regularly produce physical games. Newest Xbox doesn't even have an optical disk drive, I believe?
Nintendo also seems to be the least price gouge-y, in terms of lootboxes and microtransactions and other bullshit. Now I wish that didn't come with the tradeoff of them being completely anal when it comes to people posting OSTs online but I guess I'll take it.
The newest Xbox model doesn't have any new features; they stripped the drive so they could offer a lower-cost model. And while the newest PlayStation model doesn't have a drive, they sell one separately. So physical games are still alive and well for all three competitors.
You may want to check your numbers again - these figures firmly put you in the red with only 60K post tax, and additionally, you're not putting away any significant amount in savings and investments.
"We are different. This is how my family built the wealth"
Followed by
"Granted, we are not contributing to retirement but this won't be forever situation"
By your own admission, you aren't contributing to retirement. This is the exact opposite of "building wealth". Furthermore stating that this isn't a "forever situation" is tantamount to admitting that this COL is untenable long-term. You seem to accidentally being arguing against the very point you're trying to make.
In general, emergency savings should be able to sustain your current cost of living from between 3 and 6 months.
Your margins are razor thin and unless you have some kind of extended family that can help bail you out financially, you have almost no safety net.
I find this style changes the way I think about and write code transformations.
It's also in shell pipelines, R's magrittr, and Clojure's thread macros, and can be emulated in some OO languages with methods that return the transformed object itself.
I wish there was a linter that could limit it though. It's like coders' subconsciouses say "the feature exists, so I have to use it to the greatest extent possible". Or, "assigning intermediate values is now an anti-pattern", and we end up with things that are like 20 straight pipes, with more pipes inside lambdas of those pipes, etc., that result in a function that is totally incomprehensible. All it really saves us from is this:
let x1 = one(x);
let x2 = two(x1);
let x3 = three(x2);
The other advantage of being explicit is you can set breakpoints and see the intermediate values when debugging.
Granted, the same could be said about `three(two(one(X)))`, so it's not specifically a pipe operator problem. It's just that I see it a lot more ever since pipe operators (or their cousins "streams", "extension methods", etc) have been popularized.
My guess is it's because `three(two(one(X)))` across multiple lines would need indentation on each nested function, and end up looking obviously obtuse with too many levels of nesting. Pipes make it look cleaner, which is great at some level, but also more tempting to get caught up in "expression golf" leading to extremely concise but incomprehensible code.
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