Piers

My only input is that any potential migration could be called "Bexit".

He buys companies and lets the actually competent people do the work while claiming credit.

No he doesn't. He meddles and interferes constantly and convinces himself that he's adding value by doing so. That's why Neuralink is dangerous. Meta or Alphabet or Microsoft or whoever can be trusted to let the scientists and the legal team ensure there's very little risk of everything blowing up in their face horribly. Elon's little empire is constantly on the verge of an absolute disaster. I would not be remotely surprised if Neuralink messes everything up so much that it sets back brain implants and BCI's in general by decades. Purely because Elon can't just supply the people at his businesses with the tools they need then get out of their way.

As others have noted proper good quality fresh truffle is really worth it (unlike all the "it's no nicer than regular food but we've served it on a statue, covered it in gold leaf and sprinkled salt onto it off the top of a bald man's head" fancy food you can spend a fortune on.) Freshly shaved truffle is like if Willy Wonka decided to turn his hand to making the perfect savoury food experience. It smells like the most satisfying food ever and then the instant your teeth slightly penetrate the surface of the shaving it somehow seems to instantly fill every space in your head with that scent at double the intensity and your whole mouth is awash with a uniquly rich and warm flavour.

I love single origin chocolate and was once gifted a bar of Amedei Porcelana (sometimes called "the most expensive chocolate in the world.") It was, unsurprisingly, a perfectly executed bar of chocolate. Texture, balance of sugar to cocoa etc were all flawless. The flavour was delicate and perfectly balanced. It was like the most refined expression of the exact central archetype of what chocolate should taste like. I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who would like to experience the most perfectly chocolatey chocolate. Personally I found that while it was a flawless execution of a straight down the middle chocolate and I am very glad to have had it, I prefer a bit more character and so my favourite bar is still the Grenada Chocolate Co 71% (which slaps you in the face with big juicy tropical fruit flavour and is overall not quite as refined as Amedai Porcelana.) Though I've not had the chance to eat either in several years so I suppose it's possible they may have changed since...

Right ear went to working in a call centre. Left ear seems to be trying to decide if it's going to recover or not from some unaware idiot in Tesco suddenly walking up and slamming his stock cart shut right next to me. I really hope I don't end up with stereo EEEEEEEEEEEEE but it feels like an inevitable matter of time at this point. There goes the left one again....

I remember checking out some Ecco shoes at the mall years ago, didn’t pull the trigger as they were almost $300 but the way the construction as described to me it sounds like those could last 5+ years.

It's nearly always a false economy to try to reduce the upfront cost of footware (and a tremendous number of other things)

The Sam Vimes boots theory of socioeconomic inequality is a famous quote about how over time the more "affordable" option is often costs much more than the "expensive" option whilst also being a worse experience.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

– Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

On the day it happend I watched the videos being shared by the people participating amongst each other. There were tremendously more than 200 people.

The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there's an unfun thing to do that wasn't the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn't have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.

Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.

So... Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.

I was trying to explain this to someone a couple of days ago. This article definitely helps! I'm pretty excited to see if this is successfully verified or not and it seems we won't have to wait long! This, plus the confirmation of energy positive cold fusion within the last couple of years could really be the defining moments between our current level of advancement and a big step forward.

I agree. If we're going to lose the headphone port in favour of connecting to a universal connection (either directly or via an adaptor) then it's time we have two of them. As for positioning I gather that there are lots of handheld PC's with the one on top and one on bottom configuration and that it's generally accepted to be the best way (and my on top 3.5mm and on bottom USB-c seems to work pretty well) so I think you're right but it would be nice to see manufacturers try out a few different configurations to see in practise what people prefer.

Bed. That is the "luxury" you should prioritise above anything else.

I've slept in all kinds of qualities of bed (and discussed it with others who have done the same.)

The quality of the bed you sleep in at night is a huge factor in the quality of the you that you are when you're awake. The best sleep I've had on bad beds is still no better than the worst I've had on good ones and when you repeat that day after day, into week after week, into year after year, the cumulative effect on both your quality of life and physical health is immense. You should never make sleeping on a bad bed your long-term plan if you can possibly avoid it.

Every single day of your life is influenced by the quality of sleep you got before you started and therefore the quality and type of bed.

It is a huge gap in privilege between people who have lifestyles that make a good bed a standard expectation that is easily achieved and those who have to make do with what's cheap. The former group will always just be healthier, happier, better rested and more prepared for the challenges in front of them than the other.

I'd recommend a good quality pocket-sprung mattress (you can't really find cheap bad ones) over a sturdy wooden slatted frame although the modern foam mattresses are also very popular now and can be a good choice if you can't easily realistically get a massive heavy inflexible mattress where it needs to go.

Proton actually combines Wine and DXVK iirc (plus some extra bits and pieces.)

This kinda just feels like "what single question would you ask ChatGPT if it was omniscient" so my mind is just getting lost in the arcane and complex structuring and restructuring of the question to get the answer you want rather than one that literally answers the exact question you asked.

Assuming though that you actually do just get the answer to the intent and spirit of your question the only rational one I can think of would have to be some variation of:

"What answer could you give me that would offer me the most peace, contentment and sense of resolution to my life?"

Otherwise I'd spend an eternity (or however long I'd have to consider my question) pondering how to ask that question without getting an accurate and correct response like:

"A really good one."

Failing to attempt to design and impliment an important feature at all is not the same as a bug. Unless I'm missing something they aren't saying "we did have systems in place to prevent people creating accounts with intentionally offensive usernames but we oopsed so it didn't work as intended until we fixed it." They're saying "it either didn't even occur to us our software needed that or we decided we just don't care so we didn't even try to do it until people pointed out that we were missing this important thing at which point we started working on it."

So, either they somehow just missed that this is something they need (which they really shouldn't have and suggests they aren't thinking even slightly about user conduct on their platform) or they did and decided they wanted to see if they could get away with just not doing it.

I understand it's easy to get lost in the core functionality of making the thing go but you can't lose sight of the actual intended outcome like this.

I suspect for most of them it's not even about how much money they have so much as it is about optimising the rate of growth of their wealth. IE, they don't care so much about the total amount they have so much as the amount they have coming in.

To be clear, he did try to make them use his own work instead and it was awful so they pushed him out to protect the company.

I think part of the issue was that there needed to be a well promoted off-site hub for discussion and coordination established before action was taken.

I think they've added a max turn timer from the point you call in the airstrike now.

It looks like Kotick will be leaving after the transition so that's a great start. My dream is that this all somehow leads to the full Overwatch PvE campaign coming back onto the table again (given that their attempts to provide long-term replay ability without doing the work seem to be floundering now, there's a chance right?)

If everyone had this particular issue the world would be very different I think.

Most roguelikes either have no story or keep it out of the way.

I dunno. I think if the response has been a bit enough threat to their long-term goals they could have easily just walked back a bit by changing the pricing for API access and extending a grace period to developers already using the API.

Blizzard are still simultaneously making gross comments about how players are just too stupid to see that they are wrong about wanting to play 6v6 whilst not actually delivering on their previous claim that they would offer it as an alternative mode at some stage.

I can't see how it would be complex for them to do it. They already have a balance patch for multiple tanks and you can enable 6v6 in the workshop. It can't be very difficult for them to spin up a 6v6 quickplay. What do they have to lose if they are convinced that the playerbase doesn't realise how little fun they'd have playing it? Either Blizzard are right, people play it and say "y'know what? Their condescending comments about how 'nostalgia is a powerful drug' when we say we want 6v6 back like they promised were right after all! 6v6 does suck!" and then they can just take it down, or Blizzard are wrong and offering it as an option makes their players happy and excited to play more Overwatch.

It's a win-win so long as you're not making your decisions based on sheltering the ego of the individual developers from having to deal with being wrong about stuff. Multi-billion dollar businesses would never make silly self-destructive decisions based on something like that, right?

This sort of confusion is why I think we need to always define economic and social political positions separately rather than lump them together.

Apparently my lungs are especially healthy for someone my age/demographic.

Because people like to do stuff using a graphical UI but since that varies drastically from one distro to another all the instructions and support is reliant on doing stuff from the command line. That almost was solved by Ubuntu becoming ubiquitous but then they lost the plot.

YouTube music pays artists slightly less badly than most services fwiw.

But we do tend to round to the nearest half degree when discussing temperature in the UK. Do people do that with temps in the US or just round to the nearest degree? If it's the later then the two are similarly granular in practise.

You're not reading it right. The bottom label says 6 feef. Clearly this is some sort of measurement of 4th dimensional movement that accounts for the other measurements.

That can be overcome by handling save and exit and continuing from those saves differently to normal saves (is have normal saves be possible whilst continuing to play and be loadable as many times as you wish until it is overwritten, but have "save and exit" create a seperate save file that is deleted after successfully loaded.) One type of save allows you to undo in game events, the other only allows you to end your session an resume it at another time.

Does mean more work to do to make it work properly though.

Tbf the current CEO has been there less than two months not two years.

Yeah no problem. It gets confusing because Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon and the other big one I currently forget the name of are all their own set of software that people use to make their own instances with that can all talk to each other across the different instances and platforms but also, many of the big instances use the name of the software they use as part of their own name. ie mastodon.cloud (which is how you are presumably accessing this conversation) is a Mastodon instance (or whatever term is used for the Mastodon equivalent of a lemmy instance) but it is not Mastodon itself, just one example of Mastodon in action. Similarly in Lemmy-land you have major instances called beehaw.org (a Lemmy instance that my account is on and through which I am interacting with this post), lemmy.ml (which is the instance this post is actually on and is the oldest Lemmy instance run by the people who started the FOSS Lemmy project) and lemmy.world (the biggest Lemmy instance.) All three of those instances are run by entirely different people for different purposes and they all intercommunicate (to some degree, I think maybe beehaw.org currently is defederated from lemmy.world due to the challenges of moderating users from a large open instance in line with beehaw's goals), they are all Lemmy instances but none of them are actually the Lemmy FOSS itself. However, people often think that either lemmy.ml or lemmy.world is exactly synonymous with Lemmy or that beehaw.org is a seperate thing.

Really imo all the Fediverse stuff should have set a standard that would require consistent clear naming across all instances (IE, perhaps they could all be required to have an actual name independent of the name of the underlying technology and then also include what they actually are, ie beehaw-lemmy.org, beehaw-mastodon.org etc) but we're well past that point now I think.

AFAIK it's a system to let Linux software bundle all of it's dependencies up with it so it just works in a self contained way that doesn't care about what else is and isn't installed.

Advantages is that they are more reliable and user friendly than traditional approaches to Linux software installation.

Disadvantages are that they have bigger footprints where you might have the same dependencies I dependently installed for each app rather than as a single installation that they all utilise and that they need to be updated individually (as part of the flatpak.) IE if basically every app uses the same dependency and it turns out to have a huge security hole, under normal Linux software the developer would patch it, you'd update it and the hole would be filled. With Flatpaks you need each individual Flatpak developer to update the version used by their Flatpak and for you to update all those Flatpaks before the hole is plugged. I think I remember they run in some kind of sandbox to mitigate this though.

The reality is that it's a lot of fuss for a game development company to switch engines but for an experienced individual developer it's not a huge deal to switch engines. If you learn game development and design today using Unity then 100% of the game design knowledge is exactly transferable and 80-99% of the game development knowledge (depending on exactly what you're doing) will transfer to Unreal or Godot or whatever else you might need to use later.

It's like a musician switching from one audio production suite to another. The musical theory stays the same and while the exact details of how to make each bit of software do stuff is different, the actual stuff you're making it do is broadly the same.

You actually posted to a Lemmy instance from your Mastodon one fwiw.

There were a couple of phones HTC made (both under their name and rebadged as early Google Pixel phones) that could detect squeezing the phone as a programmable button press. It seems like it'd be clunky and triggering at the wrong time or not triggering reliably when you needed it but it was just really well implemented so it worked perfectly. Slightly increasing how tightly you're holding the phone is such a tiny thing to do so getting a full extra programmable button out of it was actually really useful for making your day to day phone usage slightly smoother and more efficient.

I'm guessing it just didn't get enough use because people aren't likely to try it intuitively.

There's something wrong with people who are so out of their depth like that who don't just find and hire someone more competent to do this stuff for them. Either just a complete lack of awareness that they are floundering or some weird stubbornness that it's only worth succeeding if they are personally holding the tiller.

Yeah no problem. I actually posted a top level comment fwiw. I think I maybe remember that Google's solution for trimming videos was broken (in a way that is apparently now fixed) in a way that meant it was much easier than it should be to get the data back. Potentially worth googling for a bit to see if I'm right and if it can help you.

In my eyes it's no different than a publisher selling a book that is in the public domain. You're not paying them for their copyright, you're paying them for everything else that goes into putting a physical copy of that text into your hands.

Use shoe trees Don’t wear the same pair two days in a row

People really underestimate how much better your footware lasts if you take care of it by cycling between a few pairs and providing good interior support when isn't in use.

That seems like a bit of a needlessly hostile response to someone who was offering constructive criticism and encouraging others to do the same.