No, but it’s the only reason for HDMI (along with AV receivers) because it’s all the manufacturers support, so all of us home theater nerds that do care about this stuff have no real* choice but to keep up with the HDMI world. Yes, you can set up a media server that streams 4K video, but you’re not going to find a DisplayPort 4K UHD player, or a 7.2 AVR that plugs into your 77” OLED and supports all of your game consoles. HDMI is just the unfortunate reality there.

That said, the tech that actually takes advantage of the new cable specs tends to lag behind significantly, and new gaming consoles that support HDMI 2.2 likely will in a limited (ultimately disappointing) capacity for years, just like previous versions.

(Also the top comment in this thread doesn’t really seem to reflect modern reality for most people I know. Most people are using their TV to stream at 1080p - 4K, not watching broadcast TV - in which case, yeah, get a $60 720p LCD or whatever, HDMI specs won’t matter to that kind of viewer. Still, subscription streaming quality definitely doesn’t take full advantage of your expensive shiny new TV the way physical media - or a media server - might, but that’s another conversation).

4K discs are so niche that this just isn’t really true, since they simply don’t bother to add that stuff anymore with the money all going to streaming. Almost every 4K disc I have just loads right into a bland generic menu with only a skippable logo for universal or whatever at the beginning. On top of that, they’re all region free. Odd that when the consumer base for physical media is smaller than it used to be, the consumer experience is better.

Now most of these 4K discs also come with a regular (often older) Blu-ray which contains the features from previous releases or whatever, and THAT’S where the bullshit you’re talking about is - lots of trailers (with it being a crapshoot whether you can skip straight to the menu, need to skip one at a time, or have to actually fast forward them), and, worst of all, defunct BD-Live stuff that in some cases you have no way to skip loading at all, even if you completely disable network connectivity in the player. None of this junk is in any of my 4Ks. Sometimes the features are even on the 4K too, if you’re really lucky.

But yeah, modern 4K discs are mostly great and still absolutely way better video and audio quality than any streaming service I’ve used - the worst thing you usually get is maybe one dumb copyright notice. (LG’s 4K players were terrible anyway though making the experience bad for consumers for a different reason, but that’s for another comment).

Some people can’t hear the dog whistles until they become bullhorns.

Yeah if the point of the statue wasn’t clear, the blatant sarcasm of the writing on the plaque on it gives it away.

Kinda says a lot about this country when someone can make a statue of a turd on a desk and people aren’t sure if it supports the desk poopers. Honestly if that plaque wasn’t on the side of it I would bet a lot of January 6’ers would share it thinking it was made by their team. Hell a lot of them probably still will on account of not being able to read.

I had that happen (an empty, sealed box with nothing inside) and started a chat and they refunded me right away without question. I think you just gotta get lucky with the right support rep.

I still have two stuffed monkeys I “won” from that site, from when I was young and stupid and didn’t realize I was probably paying for them with my personal data.

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I’ve got a high credit score and I’ve never not paid it off in full. It’s only really ever went up over the years, with the occasional tiny 1-3 digit drop. I’d never pay interest I don’t need to in exchange for a higher rating; they’ve got enough money.

I played it on the PS5 but I’ve seen performance comparisons. The Switch version runs at 60 FPS and the game was apparently built with that platform in mind, so it definitely seems like a safe bet! I’ve been burned by split-platform releases having a terrible Switch version before, but this one seems basically as good as any other version where it counts.

It’s really weird how with gaming reviews in particular, people seem to demand uniformity. You’re a shill if you positively review a game that’s mostly reviewing poorly, and a hack if you give a game that’s reviewing well a number that isn’t high enough.

It’s probably sacrilege to say (especially considering what a mess Ubisoft is as a company), but I think it’s even better than Metroid Dread. They really took every lesson from the best games in the genre to make something great. Biggest surprise of the year for me so far.

Yeah, I used “send to kindle” for a long time and it’s perfectly fine for just getting stuff on the device easily (especially since you’ve got multiple devices and might want to use the Amazon cloud), but there were a couple things about it that annoyed me and got me to switch. The first is obviously that it converts everything to a “document” pdoc file instead of a book (which is obviously more of a psychological thing to make anything not from Amazon seem like “the other”), but the second issue is that the mandatory conversion would seriously screw with the formatting of the book and they just looked worse than their “native” Kindle versions, with weird spacing and big margins on some books and no way to fix it.

Calibre is admittedly kind of a pain at first (not only do you have to plug in your device to a PC, the software is often unintuitive and confusing), but I think it’s worth checking out if you’re not buying books from Amazon but still want to get the best e-reader functionality out of the device possible (and it’s a nice way to see your non-Amazon ebook collection separate from the device). I convert all books to the AZW3 format with it, then use a plug-in called Quality Fix (specifically a function in it called “fix ASIN for Kindle”) and it makes all books pretty much indistinguishable from their Amazon counterparts.

Outside of buying stuff directly via the OS on the device, you’re not locked into Amazon’s store. I upload stuff to my Kindle with Calibre all the time (which works much better than the “send to kindle” function Amazon would prefer you use).

I set up a ton of overcomplicated functions to control my home theater. Entirely replaced an old Harmony remote with my phone.

Only real downside (apart from the time sink and occasional Siri weirdness) is that it relies on a couple of apps and one in particular (which I use for changing the input) the dev likes to break on updates.

This got a 9/10 - the 7 was for the previous version.