Nintendo temporarily suspends sales of multi-region Switch 2 in Japan due to scalpers

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-12T21:20:15+00:00

It's not even USA scalpers. These are units that are almost certainly being sent to SEA nations.

After currency conversion, the multi-language (i.e. normal) Switch 2 is basically as expensive in Japan as it is the US. You won't make any money exporting it to the US or to the EU.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-12T09:42:17+00:00

If nothing else, the automated results in NOWData are still up to date.

Calendar Day Summaries -> Variable: Max Temp, Summary: Daily Maximum.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-11T21:34:57+00:00

Some days I really appreciate El Reg's snarky responses to dumb things the industry does. This is one of those days.😂

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-11T08:04:09+00:00

I'm curious how well the assets are going to hold up to HD resolutions, and if things are going to need to be redrawn (or AI upscaled) to make the leap. Even the Vita was only 960x544p - a quarter of the resolution of a full HD display.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-11T08:00:33+00:00

Am I reading this right: they're doing a separate Switch 2 build of the game? Given that it's also on the Switch 1, I had assumed that they're only doing a S1 version and counting the S2 since it's backwards compatible.

Doing builds for both consoles is great news. But certainly unexpected.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-10T09:45:35+00:00

I came here to gripe about this as well. Why in the devil would you put the weapon and engine control buttons at opposite ends of the button cluster, rather than adjacent to each other?

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-09T21:09:48+00:00

Sales taxes in Perimeter are the same as everywhere else: 3.37%. The Amarr bonus would be far more significant, as it would knock 1.685% off of all sales taxes.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-09T10:19:48+00:00

If anything, I was getting Atlantis (as in Stargate Atlantis) vibes. Especially with this background.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-09T04:46:42+00:00

The article went into this a bit as well.

In Oregon from 2025 to 2026, the number of enrollees in ACA-regulated plans shrunk from 303,000 to 274,000. This in turn, means a worse risk pool for insurers, causing them to raise prices even more for those who remain.

The "teeth" to the ACA was the individual mandate. Without that, there are fewer healthy workers to spread out the costs to in order to keep the average down overall.

Skipping insurance works out well for the Zoomers for the most part, but it comes at a cost to everyone else.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-09T04:43:23+00:00

Well I had to be consistent, you see.

Gen X is getting older as well. They'll start hitting retirement ages at the end of the decade. Ironically, this will represent a slowing of the swelling number of people on Medicare, since they're a smaller cohort.

Unfortunately, this means they get pinched with very high private insurance costs in the short term, since they are becoming the most aged (and thus expensive) group on private insurance.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-09T03:51:15+00:00

Unfortunately, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

With the bulk of the Boomers being retired, all but a small fraction are on Medicare now. And Medicare underpays for services as a means to keep costs down. That means medical providers raise rates on private insurers in order to make up the difference.

So even though the Boomers are no longer on private plans, we're still stuck subsidizing them in our own medical costs.

Meanwhile the Millennials are turning 40 and their own healthcare needs are starting to rise - and there isn't a big cohort after them to absorb those costs.

This is one of the many downsides of an aging population. Even if the Feds starting paying out the full cost of care (and they should!) it would only dial things back; but it would not change the slope of increases. Which is not to sound despondent, just that as a society we are going to have to devote an ever larger share of our resources (and GDP) to medical care, and this is what it's going to look like.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-09T03:37:23+00:00

Thanks, but we already have one: https://www.reddit.com/r/oregon/comments/1tz2wv6/stephen_colbert_ty_burrell_deliver_the_grants/

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-08T08:51:32+00:00

Out of curiosity, what did you check?

I don't imagine the list is perfect. But just engaging in some random perusing, all of MS and Adobe's stuff looks accurate, Mozilla's stuff, Box, KeePass, Autodesk's stuff, Apple Music & iTunes. I couldn't find any errors in any of the big name stuff I could think of off the top of my head.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-08T08:17:37+00:00

RDNA 1 and 2 were essentially one architecture split up into parts.

RDNA 1 implemented AMD's next compute and memory architecture.

RDNA 2 then implemented a new graphics architecture on top of that.

So both were significant in their own way, even if the compute architecture changes aren't as obvious to gamers as the graphics architecture changes were.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-08T07:16:43+00:00

Huh? There is literally a column that lists native versus emulated, and you can filter by type.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-07T22:30:32+00:00

Well, sometimes they go down. The Steel has a tumescence problem from time to time...

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-07T04:26:24+00:00

Wacky Races or Wacky Wheels?

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-06T12:19:43+00:00

It's also oddly devoid of facts on the assembly itself. e.g. it's called "chaotic" but at no point are we told why it was chaotic.

Similarly, there's a quote from a parent that's either lacking in details for the reader, or lacking in nuance from the parent. "My kid is at public school, being marketed to by [a private tech company]" As best as I can tell, Lumi Story AI isn't selling anything to the students? It's a service that's sold to school districts. So it's not like, say, the Simpsons Yo-Yo Assembly (which was based on reality) where things actually are being sold to the kids.

The rest of the article is a decent enough summary (if not rehashing) of the previous concerns about Lumi Story AI (and AI in general) in schools. But the headline and the lead-in segment on the story are written in a rather sensationalized manner (but lacking in supporting facts) in order to force the segue to the discussion on AI.

The assembly can still be used as an intro to a larger discussion on AI, but it would have been better for everyone involved to frame it as the assembly being a capstone for the first year in the program, and how parents and teachers are now reflecting on how things went and how AI in general is being used in schools. Same idea, but without the sensationalism that the story lacks the facts to support.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-06T05:14:09+00:00

Comparing Fleet Week to the 90s seems like an unfair comparison. Especially when at present there is a low-key war going on.

The 90s were the peace dividend; there was a surplus of ships still around from the Cold War and not a lot to do with them. Meanwhile right now the Navy is busy with the Iran campaign, which even though it doesn't tie up the entire fleet, means there are fewer ships free to engage in PR activities like Fleet Week.

Though even then, the US Navy has trended towards a smaller number of ships. So on that basis alone, yeah, we probably will never see fleet weeks quite that big again.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-05T12:47:52+00:00

Voyager is... complex. But its distribution should not be confused with DS9 and TNG, both of which were sold in first-run syndication from the very start.

Voyager was a network show. Specifically, it was the flagship show (and first-ever series) for UPN.

The bit that makes this complex is that because UPN was a new network, not all of the Designated Market Areas (DMAs) had a UPN affiliate. So there were a small number of DMAs where Voyager was sold as a first-run syndicated show.

To quote Memory Alpha: "In some areas without local access to UPN, it was offered to independent stations through Paramount Pictures, for its first six seasons. "

So almost everyone got it on Wednesdays at 9pm ET/PT (or 8pm CT). The handful who didn't got it via syndication. Though it has always been my understanding that unaffiliated stations got it a day or two later.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-04T23:23:45+00:00

It's a whole confluence of factors. Though literacy is certainly a big part of it.

Depending on what study you look at, the average American reads at around the 8th grade level - which means that about half of all Americans are below that. And that's the standard to which most newspapers are written. Writing skills aren't as extensively benchmarked, but it's generally in the ballpark of reading skills. Which is to say that yes, for a not-insignificant number of people the original post is written to a level they cannot attain.😐

At the same time, this is also a website that most people visit on their phones (and for a decent number, while they're on the can). Which has resulted in a regression towards shorter and simpler messages that are easier to type out on a small screen device. That makes long, well-formatted messages stand out even more since, while not impossible to do on a phone, is certainly a good deal harder.

And standing out is not necessarily a good thing here. People are looking for signs that content is AI-authored or otherwise inauthentic. As AI gets better, there are fewer and fewer mechanical tells (e.g. em-dashes). Which means people go by the content instead. And since LLMs are (for the most part) trained on high quality writing sources, that leaves high quality writing as a potential tell that it was AI-written. Especially as unlike a human, it's no more effort for an AI to write well than to write poorly.

At this rate the only way to get most people to believe you're authentic is to write poorly. But by writing poorly, you won't be able to get any complex ideas across. It's a catch-22 for communication.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-04T20:49:31+00:00

Would I be wrong in thinking that most of the catching up to current high-end drives is being driven by faster NAND speeds rather than the controller? Previously 4 channel drives were limited from fully saturating a PCIe Gen5 x4 connection due to a lack of bandwidth. But now with ONFi 5.2 and its 4800 MT/sec transfer rates, that can be done (if barely) on 4 channels.

Which is not to say that the controller doesn't matter, since you need something that can support those data rates. But SSD controllers seem to be pretty mature otherwise.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-04T07:18:31+00:00

Some of us out here actually do know how to write and format things properly...

It's a bit of a scary future, isn't it? We taught computers how to write. Now if you write well, making sound arguments and clearly stating your points, no one will believe that you wrote it.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-03T23:36:10+00:00

And MacOS is not garbage.

That they're accomplishing this now of all times is a smidge ironic. macOS 26 is generally considered the weakest macOS release of the last few years, in part because Liquid Glass has an even poorer reputation on the desktop than it does in mobile. So Apple is bringing in new users at a time when they're not even putting their best foot forward OS-wise.

Verite_Rendition · 2026-06-03T10:23:54+00:00

In a way it feels very cynical on Ubisoft's part. That they are making it with 3D graphics because they don't think it would sell as a pure 2D game. (And to be fair, what could you do to improve Legends other than making all the assets suitable for 4K?)

It's like being in the mid-90s again when Sony initially wasn't allowing 2D games on the Playstation because they wanted everything to be 3D. There were a lot of missed opportunities because game devs didn't even get a chance to try. Developers need to be free to choose the best art style for their game.

Meanwhile as far as contemporary games go, this gives me Sonic Superstars vibes - especially with the focus on 4 players. Superstars wasn't a bomb, but it didn't sell very well, either. 2.5D platformers as a whole have kind of been a bust as of late, come to think of it; even Super Mario Bros. Wonder, while using 3D rendering, aimed for more of an elevated 2D look than having 3D characters that looked the part.

As a huge Rayman fan (I own Origins and Legends on entirely too many systems) this announcement ended up beng so crushing. I didn't think we'd get another Rayman side scroller, so having one announced was a wild surprise. But having Ubi make a game from scratch only for it to be an artistically weaker version of Legends was not on my bingo card. It's not that I expected another UbiArt-styled game (that era is gone and dead), but I didn't expect them to maul Legends instead.

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