Nuclear Monster

  • A MacRumors forum member, project_2501, has posted this extensive log (via Nick Heer) of his attempt to work with Apple’s support to get a refund for one of the latest MacBook Pro’s after his couldn’t play video at 4K without overheating. Of course that overheating also caused other issues, like the glue holding the glass onto the screen peeling off. It’s an eye-watering account, I really recommend reading the whole post.

    One of the reasons I’ve chosen, and recommended, Apple hardware in the past has been the often incredible customer support.

    When the hardware fails, rarely, they’ve stood by it and repaired it or replaced it with the latest version in case it was a design flaw.

    Their latest laptops seem to be incredibly poorly designed. So many people have written about the keyboards failing due to (what should be) insignificant specks of dust permanently interrupting keys.

    Casey Johnston wrote this article for The Outline last year. Headline: The New MacBook Keyboard is Ruining My Life.

    Perhaps it’s true that less dirt gets under butterfly switched-keys. But therein lies the problem — when dirt does get in, it cannot get out. A piece of dust is capable of rendering a butterfly switch nonfunctional. The key won’t click, and it won’t register whatever command it’s supposed to be typing. It’s effectively dead until someone can either shake loose the debris trapped under it or blow at the upside-down keyboard Nintendo-cartridge style. Meanwhile, Apple quietly put up a page with instructions expressly to try and help people with dead butterfly switch keys.

    Having worked in a computer repair center in the past five years, I’m not likely to recommend Windows laptops, they’re cheap (or sometimes expensive) shit.

    My current laptop is a late-2013 MacBook Pro that was Apple Support’s replacement for a 2011 model that had repeated issues with the GPU. This 2013 model has had issues, the rubber grommet around the screen has been slowly falling apart while the screen flickers at the login screen and takes forever to wake up with the machine after it’s been sleeping. This all started happening after their last repair on it, and their support surprised me by refusing to fix the issues caused by their repair. Instead offering a $700+ repair option. I’m holding onto it until it falls apart.

    I hope that Apple can get their shit together. project_2501 ended up buying one of the 2015 models that Apple still sells for some odd reason, perhaps because the current models aren’t working out so well.

  • One of the few possibly good things to come out of the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008 was a government entity that existed solely to protect people from predatory businesses. It’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it’s new Trump-appointed leader, Mick Mulvaney is unsurprisingly, a real piece of shit.

    ProPublica’s Paul Kiel:

    Last week, it dropped a lawsuit against a group of payday lenders that charged interest rates that touched 950 percent. The companies were associated with a Native American tribe, a common dodge the industry has used because it allows lenders to evade state interest-rate caps.

    […]

    But in an email to CFPB staff today, Mulvaney laid out what the bureau’s new approach should be. He had “no intent in shutting down the Bureau,” he wrote, but said that his leadership would contrast sharply with Cordray’s approach of aggressive enforcement. The CFPB worked for all taxpayers, he wrote, and that includes “those who take loans, and those who make them” and “bringing the full weight of the federal government down on the necks of the people we serve should be something that we do only reluctantly.” Going forward, he wrote, there would be “more formal rulemaking on which financial institutions can rely, and less regulation by enforcement.”

    Mulvaney also received big campaign contributions from the predatory lending industry. Of course.

    If this pisses you off, too, you might consider joining a local DSA chapter.

  • It can be pretty frustrating to find out that something you want to fix is difficult or impossible to repair. Glued-on screens cover batteries that are all custom fit inside small cases that prevent curious people from learning how things work and fixing problems with their devices. Iconoclasts from Joakim Sandberg takes that a step further, it’s a world where a mechanic, Robin, finds that her profession is outlawed. Your mission is to get Robin and her friends together to fix things in what looks like a bit of a metroidvania side-scrolling action-adventure with a Metal Slug-y vibe to the art.

    Andy Kelly likes it:

    Iconoclasts is a fine game, offering both satisfyingly sharp platforming and shooting, and some really smart puzzles. It’s enormous too, packed with secret areas and other stuff to discover. And although I found the humour a little glib and childish at times, it tells its heartfelt story well. A lot of Metroidvania games go for a bleak, downbeat atmosphere, but Iconoclasts is infectiously vibrant and sunny, even if the story does occasionally venture into dark territory.

    Iconoclasts is out now for $20 on Steam on Windows, macOS, and Linux, gog (same platforms), as well as the PlayStation 4 and Vita.

  • Patrick Klepek has a post up on Waypoint, discussing a homophobic game that unsurprisingly managed to get onto Steam. He sums up Valve’s issues with content moderation very well. I’ve trimmed the quote just to remove the name of the game.

    …is a symptom of a larger disease. Steam’s “new releases” tab is full of trash, and while you can be generally sympathetic to Valve wanting to allow all sorts of creators an easy path to publishing on their enormous platform, it doesn’t absolve them of the responsibility to make sure it’s a platform that doesn’t promote hateful speech.

    The MRA garbage I wrote about last year, Dating Lessons, is still up on Steam as well. Anyone working at Valve should be embarrassed to have their salary funded by getting a cut off of sales of this trash.

  • The way Street Fighter V works has always been odd. Anyone who buys this new Arcade Edition gets the first two seasons of characters. Okay, that’s weird. To get access to newer characters coming out this year you can unlock them with the in-game currency, Fight Money, which ends up being kind of expensive in terms of time, or you can just end up paying real money for the whole season of characters.

    Everyone who already owns Street Fighter V gets a bunch of new modes with the free version of the update.

    If the business model doesn’t make you want to throw your stick through the window, Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition is out now for $40 on Steam for Windows and the PlayStation 4, or an eye watering $70 for the version that includes all of this upcoming season’s worth of characters, but not any new stages which also cost Fight Money.