As a percentage of global revenue, sure, it's not much. But as a percentage of what that company is likely to make in the Australian market, it can be significant.
I think this is similar to how buying books is a related but different hobby to reading books, or buying board games is a related but different hobby to playing board games. I know people who have hundreds of board games, thousands of dollars worth, but rarely get to actually play them (for various reasons but mostly involving children).
The hobby of optimising your gaming desktop is a related but different hobby to actually playing games.
Completely agreed, I think most hobbies have this perverse side aspect that is just themed consumerism. And it's so easy to get sucked in to watching youtube videos about the latest board games that you just need to buy, while the reality is you aren't even playing the ones you already have.
It's much harder to step back and realise you don't need the new thing most of the time. Sure if you have a 15+ year old desktop and you can't run the new games at all then an upgrade could be good, but I'd guess most hardware purchases come from people who already have great hardware.
It’s a bizzare assumption to make that because people happen to have different preferences or needs than you do it must be “consumerism.”
I have very specific requirements for motion clarity in games on modern displays. Older display technologies like CRTs and plasmas achieved this naturally through the way they operated. Most modern sample-and-hold displays do not.
You may not notice or be affected by that difference, which is fine. Couldn’t be more thrilled for you, however I am affected. Anything below 120Hz on a sample-and-hold display causes noticeable discomfort for me, and for a long time I stopped gaming entirely because I couldn’t work out why playing anything had seemingly overnight become so bad to play from a comfort perspective. Eventually I realised the issue started when I moved away from CRTs and plasma TVs to modern sample and hold displays.
I was only able to comfortably return to gaming by using very fast displays at 120Hz minimum, preferably 240Hz, because that gets closer to the motion quality I was used to from years of using PC CRTs. For games locked to 60Hz or below, I still prefer playing them on a CRT for exactly that reason and I own a number of CRTs for this reason.
This. I understand that getting your desktop fps to ridiculous heights is a hobby in and of itself, an obsession that I don't share at all, and good luck to them that do. But I'm colourblind and have the reaction speed of a slug. Anything over 25fps is wasted on me.
After building a few PCs over the years something I've noticed is every time I've bought the highest end new part I feel bad about the money spent, and then I feel bad every time there's a delayed frame or feature missing, and then I feel bad when the next model comes out.
Every time I get something mid range or second hand I feel good about what a good deal I got, and how I'm getting 98% of the features for 40% of the price, and how realistically as soon as you stop pixel peeping screenshots, you won't even notice your settings are on High instead of Ultra. You just take in the story, the sound design, and the actual game.
This is my experience too, but with all other aspects of the application. If you only loosely describe it, it comes out as a mess. You have to know what you're building to get the LLM to actually build something decent. I don't think this is purely a visual or design constraint.
When I'm using agents for programming, I can have a AGENTS.md outlining exactly what requirements, guidelines and constraints all the code need to follow, and the agent (codex in my case) will pretty much nail that.
I've tried doing the same for design work, just really outlining exactly how the UI and UX needs to look and work, but for some reason it struggles a whole bunch with it, regardless of how clear I am. Maybe it's I'm just worse at explaining and describing what UI and UX I'm actually after though, I suppose.
I once worked at a startup where the CEO was originally a designer. He once spent two days huddled with the main designer for the product, trying to pick exactly the right font for the product. I have no idea how you'd have that kind of discussion with an LLM.
But then, I would not spend more than five minutes on this decision, so I'm probably the wrong audience for this ;)
Used to work in a designer-heavy company doing frontend work, one of the founders could spot by naked eye if you got the alignment of something wrong by 2-3 pixels during the reviews.
The UI and UX of the product was amazing, and took some time to get used to actually delivering pixel-perfect designs across three different browsers, but fun times regardless :) Probably takes a certain individual to enjoy that sort of experience though.
Unfortunately that is also how luck works as well.
You are lucky if you think you are, start on this path you are likely to increasing make choices that tend towards increasing your chances of success(i.e luck).
I upgraded from the 3 to the 5, and had some great experiences with it. My Ender 3 was such a Printer of Theseus; I think I'd replaced everything except the extruded aluminium frame by the time I upgraded.
But that's part of the hobby, surely? Like, just having a printer and having it print things first time, and never taking it apart or replacing chunks of it to see if that would work better, seems kinda dull to me ;)
Maybe it's a hobby for some, for me it's just a tool.
It's like bikes - someone rebuilds theirs in their garage, I take mine to the dealership for the service. For me, mine just works. I don't have endless hours for tinkering with everything I'm using.
Surprisingly for me I have only replaced the magnetic mat and the hot end - mat was magnetized the wrong way so I had to cut it with a razor but yeah
I'm bad though, I have the nozzle run into the bed as there is noticeable sag/difference at the middle of the bed, but it's good enough for me there is some elephants foot going on but not crazy
yeah I had that, and got the auto-levelling kit to fix it, which worked. Luckily the Ender 5 didn't have that problem (it had others!) so I now have an auto-levelling kit sitting in the bits box. I'm sure I'll end up using it for something :)
I use Kagi to search, and claude to help me find things. These are different tasks.
If I know what I'm looking for, Kagi is much easier.
If I don't know what I'm looking for (I have hobbies that involve learning new techniques, and my method for learning a new technique seems to involve getting inspired by short-form videos, which don't come with a glossary of terms or a dictionary of tool names, so I often don't know what I'm looking for) then I can describe it to claude who can usually come up with a name for the thing, some useful advice about it, and where to start looking.
Last time, as an example, was all about enamalling and cloisonne, which was quite a rabbit-hole. And yes, I could search for beginner guides for the thing. But that is going to land me at a YouTube video which has 5 minutes of "hi welcome to my show, hit the like and subscribe" and then 15 minutes of waffle before finally getting to "the thing you want is called a trivet". I can read way, way, faster than people on YouTube can get to the point, so I prefer talking to claude.
I wonder if LLMs will actually kill Youtube for those who are like you (and me)? I am curious to see if anything happens to earnings from Youtube over the next few years as people increasingly do not need to sit through whole videos.
I used YouTube extensively when getting into 3D printing a few years ago, though it drove me to distraction because of all the wasted time waiting for them to get to the point, even at 3x playback.
So yeah, I can see YouTube content creator revenue drying up around this. Though I also had ad-blockers and had perfected the art of skipping through product placements, so I doubt they were making much revenue from me anyway.
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