Idk if anyone had a similar problem before, but I live in EU by the countryside, at first there were only a few but now it happens more and more often to see drones passing over my house, I am sure they are civilian drones because law enforcement has no reason to use them since the area is quiet (and honestly I doubt they would...
The affect of the microwave would fall off exponentially with distance. So like if it has X power at Y feet away, and you go out to 2Y feet away, the affect would be quartered. The affect on a drone isn’t going to do much, even if it really messes with your wifi close up.
Flavored tobacco was literally marketed to children, to get them addicted to cigarettes from an early age. The “protect the children” arguments are often used to ban things that made no impact or even positive impact in children’s lives (DnD, sexual equality). Or it’s used to justify surveillance and overreach (porn bans and she verification laws)
I would question the efficiency claim. Uber and the like claimed incredible market dominance, driving local food delivery and taxi services out of business. They’re only now really being forced to find profitability.
I wonder if AI is going to be similar. The powerful models right now, as I understand it, have ludicrous power requirements. I don’t know their balance sheets, but in the current race to market share, I’m skeptical that most of these services are in the green.
What that ultimately says about the future I don’t really know. Like it could be we reach some point where the models get better, or more specialized, or something and profit arrive. Or maybe theres a point of diminishing returns where the profit just can’t be made, and once the hype falls off (and investors stop clamoring for AI) these companies will ask what they’re getting for the money spent.
(And of course I could just be straight up wrong about profits today not being there.)
It comes from the case against Henry Ford after he saw his company was making gobs of cash and decided to give some of that to his employees. Shareholders successfully sued him to stop this on the grounds that he has a fiduciary duty to shareholders.
Might be worth spoofing your user agent! I mostly just make it look exactly like the user agent my windows machine sends, so I’ll still look like a Firefox user. But by default, Firefox will note that it’s the Linux build in the user agent.
“Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.”
Also, it’s cheap to speak total bullshit, but it takes time, effort, and energy, to dispel it. I can say the moon is made of cheese, you can’t disprove that. And you can go out and look up an article about the samples of moon rock we have and the composition, talk about the atmosphere required to give rise to dairy producing animals and thus cheese.
And I can just come up with some further bullshit that’ll take another 30 minutes to an hour to debunk.
If we gave equal weight to every argument, we’d spend our lives mired in fact-checking hell holes. Sometimes, you can just dismiss someone’s crap.
Hate it hate it. This game is so good, and it’s like I’m playing my old favorite again. The fact that they marred my baby with MTX like this is just gross. DD1 should be more popular, and what they did to DD2 may keep it from being the powerhouse it could because people will see the “mixed” ratings and second guess. Or they’ll open the store page and see a wall of MTX and get the wrong idea.
But that’s just part of it of course. If this works for them, it’ll explode. And it will work for them. And everyone will get these fucking MTX in their full priced AAA games. And then once sales on MTX aren’t up to snuff – or if they are up to snuff, but in a few quarters when sales are merely consistent rather than continuing to grow – they’ll start pushing it. Just like they did with Shadow of Mordor where the gameplay gave you a nasty grind and a quick “buy your way past it” option.
I’ll never buy the “it doesn’t effect you in a single player game” argument. It will, because the market incentives a worse experience for those less willing to buy in.
Here’s someone corroborating you, but it’s impossible to Google at the moment for obvious reasons. I have 0 recollection of any MTX, though. FWIW, it wouldn’t be any less bad if they did it before too.
To be clear though, it didn’t ruin it. I said it “marred” the game. It is a mark that affects how the game is perceived and I hate that. The game itself is fun, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
As with DD1, DD2 is fun and I don’t mean to say it isn’t. The MTX just provides a barrier to entry for folks turned off by it, and I wish it wasn’t there.
Do you? Genuinely, not trying to snark. I see this point lots, but Im skeptical that people actually do.
As a dev, I read plenty of commits, and the idea of voluntarily prodding through commits on a FOSS project is just not happening. I’d rather just trust the dev, and the community to pick through the code in my place. The obvious issue being, what if everyone also does that.
I just want to ask the question, will Biden actually improve things once he isn’t worried about burning the good will of voters? Can we only ever vote for genocide, or genocide with an apology tacked on to the end of it?
Honestly I’m wondering if that ends up being much different than Biden? It’s not like we’re doing much right now to stop things. Maybe it takes four years of Biden to wipe out Gaza. Maybe it takes 4 months of Trump. The end result is genocide no matter what I do. At least then the democratic party might understand that you can’t play this game of lesser evils forever.
Yeah. The “lesser of two evils” used to be about a republican being republican, and a Democrat at least pretending to be left of center. It wasn’t genocide or genocide.
And people wonder why younger voters don’t engage with the system.
They were never giving it away. They included wordpad with your purchase of windows. They no longer do. I don’t think anyone is saying that windows is not “within their rights”, they’re saying that this degrades the product we already pay for. That is worth complaining about, even if our ultimate recourse primarily ends up being to find an OS that better serves our needs.
Honestly though I’m struggling to understand why you’d think that’s about Microsoft’s rights to begin with??
I can’t speak for the original commented, but I’m personally quite tired of the thin veneer that’s slapped into these statements. I would prefer a company just be honest and talk about the profit incentives. They want people using the free version to please pay for the expensive one.
For my experience, I still retain the general irritation at product quality going down regardless of how they word it. But now I’m also annoyed that MS isn’t being straightforward about it.
Despite Bethesda being kinda weird and shitty, I remain excited about the game myself. It still blows me away they decided to release without modding tools. But I’m looking forward to that quite a bit
I’ve only watched recently without trying to build much myself for ML. I have the hardware but idk if I want to leave my bulky gaming machine on regularly just to run ML operations. Having a more dedicated piece of hardware to handle it makes the idea much more attractive to me.
Now I just have to learn everything. And then learn how to integrate a locally hosted TPU into the process.
The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s...
The scam part notwithstanding, Apple products are designed to stop working. Or, at least, degrade more quickly than they might otherwise. That’s just planned obsolescence though, and Apple certainly isn’t the only one.
Mind that I’m not the person you originally responded to. I don’t think Apple installs a time bomb that bricks your device at a certain point.
But it’s disingenuous to say they aren’t intentionally reducing product life spans, and degrading the experience in the meantime. I don’t necessarily mean support either!
You’re free to decide if you take their statements on this at face value. But it’s really not just Apple. It’s everyone. Cars today have a shorter lifespan than they used to. Fridges. Laptops. Competitor phones.
Like are you saying planned obsolescence isn’t a thing generally, isn’t a thing for Apple, or just that it isn’t that bad with them?
This does suck though. To start, a counter-offer-based model begs discrimination. You should be getting yearly raises commensurate with (at absolute bare minimum, not even necessarily accounting for inflation) the increase in productivity from year to year.
This is to say nothing of work environments. Unions could reduce or end crunch. Not just as hard blockers, but mandating the kind of project management that doesn’t require crunch.
What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?...
US software devs are generally paid a lot more than other countries. Keep in mind we still have to pay for our own health insurance/medical bills, but I don’t know how Germany handles their healthcare and the bills won’t matter for everyone.
Health insurance is largely a benefit. It’s largely cost-prohibitive to do otherwise, and I believe coverage can often be better from your employer than what’s available on the open market.
You still pay for employer-provided coverage, but with your employer covering some portion of the cost. I think my out-of-pocket insurance is ~$300/mo as well, but most insurances will also come with a low-deductable plan that is sometimes, but not always, cheaper depending on how you use your insurance. Insurance only covers some part of a medical bill, and the lower price covers less. There’s a ton of caveats on all of that though.
If you’re unemployed, there are options. You can just go to the hospital without coverage, and apply for income-based relief once you have the bill. You can’t apply before you go though, and you may or may not have your costs covered. Not paying at all of course impacts your credit, but like 90% (number pulled from my ass) of the US has medical debt, and I’ve had landlords for instance straight up tell me that ignore medical debt on the credit report.
There’s some kinda public insurance available. I think it’s largely for retired folks? Idk, I’ve never heard of anyone actually able to use it. You also keep your employers coverage for about a year after you leave, but you have to pay for it still.
I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
I hate anything that stops me from playing the game. Stun mechanics, usually, but I also include quick time events.
The one that sticks in my mind was those dumb water mages in genshin impact. They trap you in a bubble and hold you there for a few seconds. If it’s an intense enough fight, a few seconds is an incredibly long time, and you’re just sitting there watching the game happen and you’ve lost your agency. It’s worse for me because I had built shields and healing into my team to shore up my shortcomings with dodging. It felt clever, but them the game sends in this mechanic which invalidates my solution.
With quick time events, I just get annoyed at the genre switch. Don’t get me wrong, there are cool enough cinematics out there… It’s just… Like usually I’m watching these and thinking, “wow, that would’ve been fun to do, you know, myself.”
Nevermind that I’m too ADHD. Like I have cats and a partner and a phone. If I get a buzz or whatever else, I might miss the prompt. Or if I ignore the buzz, whatever that might have been can sometimes get discarded in my brain.
I love team building. The interplay of abilities, the hard choices with limited slots and opportunity cost. Finding unintentional synergies, or even stumbling on them. Its all a dream, and it’s part of why I love ttrpgs so much.
I can sometimes get so bogged down (positive) with team building I never make it amywhere in the game itself.
Also love me a good physics engine. God knows how many hours I spent building stupid shit in Garry’s Mod. I learned to code before I played that game, so it was delightful to put those skills to use with wiremod as a little kid. LoZ: ToTK I have like 1000 hrs logged just fucking around in the builder spot at the base of Tarry Town.
Microsoft tried to kill borrowing and lending, and this just seems like ankther attempt. Someone with a real presence on other sites (and is good at social media) should stir up a backlash.
Drones trespassing in my property
Idk if anyone had a similar problem before, but I live in EU by the countryside, at first there were only a few but now it happens more and more often to see drones passing over my house, I am sure they are civilian drones because law enforcement has no reason to use them since the area is quiet (and honestly I doubt they would...
NDP says it's considering options about support for much-criticized Senate porn bill (www.ctvnews.ca)
Meanwhile the LPC oppose the bill while the CPC would work to amend it.
ChatGPT has caused a massive drop in demand for online digital freelancers — here is what you can do to protect yourself (www.techradar.com)
Raspberry Pi is now a public company (techcrunch.com)
PSA: Twitch Shadowbans Users on VPN + Linux
If you notice your chat messages show up in the chat feed but don’t appear on the streamers in-screen chat, you have been shadowbanned....
Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract (www.nbcnews.com)
“Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.”
Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions (mbin.grits.dev)
Credit to @bontchev
DuckDuckAssitant is back! (media.kbin.social)
Dragon's Dogma 2 MTX
So there’s obviously been a lot of existing discourse on DD2’s micro transactions, and I’m curious to get the thoughts of people here....
Floorp, a Firefox Fork with an awful name, has moved some components inside a private submodule. (github.com)
See also https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/floorp-going-closed-source/52783...
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Microsoft phases out WordPad (and Cortana) after 28 years of duty (alternativeto.net)
WordPad got into the shadow of MS Office and Notepad anyways.
Starfield will be getting a bunch of fresh features including "new ways of traveling" next year (www.vg247.com)
Bethesda has confirmed that it plans to add a number of new features to Starfield in 2024.
GTA 6 trailer coming Tuesday, Rockstar announces (www.eurogamer.net)
ChatGPT subscribers may get a ‘GPT builder’ option soon (www.theverge.com)
Twitter's lost 13% of its daily users and its rebrand has failed (www.bigtechnology.com)
The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s...
CD Projekt Red devs unionise after its third round of layoffs in three months (www.eurogamer.net)
What are some games that "spin" failure states?
What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?...
Starfield's Numbers Surge in Early Access - Insider Gaming (insider-gaming.com)
Starfield's numbers have swollen in early access on streaming and gaming platforms - and the global release is yet to take place.
SAG-AFTRA Seeks Approval for Second Strike Against Video Game Companies (variety.com)
Archive link: archive.today/Z5F3X...
Why did Baldur's Gate 3 blow up? Larian lead writer says it's thanks to "a big gamble" with CRPG standards (www.gamesradar.com)
"We believe RPGs are big ... So we always believed the audience was there," says Adam Smith
What game mechanics do you love and hate?
I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
Starfield physical release won't include physical disc (szmer.info)
Phil doing what Don couldn't