I agree. After all, they are still selling it, and people are still happily buying it. A friend got one about 3 months ago and he’s been very pleased.

The Steam Deck is still under four years old, let’s remember. The Nintendo Switch is over eight! Of course that’s not an apples-to-oranges comparison as the Steam Deck aims to run any game, not just specifically optomised titles. But it’s an indicator.

On the subject of being old, we get way more life out of PC hardware right now than we did back in the early 2000s. Nowadays if you buy a high end GPU you might get a decade of gaming out of it. Back then you’d get 2-3 years and it would be obsolete, because graphics tech was just evolving so fast. (Of course, cards now cost ten times what they did back then, but that’s another story…)

Point is, there’s plenty of life left in the steam deck yet :)

The ship was one of the best parts for sure. Once you are competent it feels super liberating how nimbly you can zip around a planet.

The other good parts of that game were progression, and death.

I love that knowledge is the only thing retained between loops - the only currency of value. And I loved the feeling of making new discoveries.

And with death as an expected mechanic, the game doesn’t have to put up any guiderails to save you from it. There are no training wheels. You want to go outside without a spacesuit? Bad idea but we’ll let you. You want to literally lose your ship so you can never get it back? Sure, go for it. You want to fall into a space anomaly and see what happens? Be our guest.

Masterpiece game honestly.

You’re not wrong, but I only came here to try and explain the meme.

Three quarters of a century ago, a different society than ours suggested flying cars as a possibility for the world, and now we make funny pictures about it.

Whether that was at the time objectively right or wrong for them to believe is a whole new topic that I’m not equipped to get into.

Well yes it’s unrealistic.

It was an imagined future based on boundless optimism that things would keep getting better and better, both technically and socially.

Inventions and discoveries at that time were happening so rapidly it surely felt like some revolutionary new thing was always just around the corner. We’d probably invent some amazing new levitation technology that would let things hover without making any sound, and it would all be powered by individual nuclear generators in every car, because why not right, nuclear is the future!

It was a dream from a time of optimism that never came to pass. The current day meme isn’t about literal flying cars, it’s about the contrast between this imagined world - no matter how realistic or not - and the reality we actually got.

When the 1950s thought flying cars would be real they didn’t mean military VTOLs or expensive and noisy helicopters.

They meant flying cars that are efficient, quiet and affordable. Flying cars that are so ubiquitous they are parked on every driveway in the country. Flying cars where you go to the showroom and test-fly one in your favourite colour, and it only costs as much as an SUV does today.

More importantly, it’s not really the car itself that matters for the meme, it’s the idea of the society that goes along with it. The imagined future where we have flying cars on every driveway is one where we also have robots doing all the menial labour, one of utopian prosperity, where everyone is educated, happy, and spends their days in fulfilment of personal pursuits.

That’s what “flying cars” alludes to, and it’s a long way from a society where people have to be warned not to eat a sandwich wrapper.

The classic example we already have of this is when you are stopped at a side road about to enter the main road, and a car coming towards you on the main road signals to turn in.

Many people take the fact the other car has their turn signal on as a guarantee that it’s safe to emerge, but any good driving instructor will tell you to wait until the car actually begins to turn before you yourself emerge.

They had their signal on but that doesn’t mean they’re actually going to DO what the signal said they would.

Same with the front brake light. It would be like “Well their front brake light came on, so I assumed it was safe to step into the crosswalk” NO. They could have just tapped the brake a second, doesn’t mean they saw you, or they will actually stop.

Those meme email chains were annoying at the time, but kinda endearing to look back on in retrospect.

I kept getting added onto ones my mum and dad were getting from a bunch of their friends that had people’s random corporate/work email addresses included and stuff…

It was a simpler time, when boomers hadn’t discovered social media yet, and were making their own fun without Facebook and without the algorithm.

If someone offered me a chance to magic social media away like it never happened, and the price I had to pay was unfunny memes spamming my inbox, it’s a price I’d pay gladly.

Execs aren’t hell-bent on anything apart from making money.

If they could replace every job in the world with AI (except their own) then of course they would, but they can’t because AI cannot do every job.

AI cannot stack supermarket shelves. AI cannot make coffee. AI cannot wait tables.

But AI certainly can produce pictures and text and music - to some questionable degree of “quality” - and so it’s these creative jobs which are being stolen.

And that’s exactly the irony the comic is pointing out. The creative things are what humans actually want to do, but those are the very things we are being replaced in.

I’d suggest not moving towards even more consolidation on the biggest instance. It rather defeats the point of decentralisation.

I myself am a lemm.ee refugee (just registered this new account today) and I specifically ruled world out because it benefits the health of Lemmy more to spread users and communities around.

I’m dumbfounded there are people out there who will tolerate spending upwards of $1,000 on a phone which then pushes ads at you on your lock screen.