BariumBlue

I was bored and tried playing FF14 about a year ago. You need to do the usual download a launcher to download the game, fine. It asks you to log in before it'll download, fine. It crashes ~10% of the way through downloading the game. Not great but you can make it by restarting the launcher and trying again. And again and again, about a dozen times. It does eventually finish though, and I did almost successfully make a character. Except after making my character you have to choose a server instance - and every single instance in the NA server I could find was "full". I don't know if it was actually full or erroring but I gave up at that point.

The buttonology is cryptic. Like you asked tasked enterprise java devs to write frontend in jquery.

At least that's how I remember it. Game might be fun, but I'll never know.

What's the subset of games that A) can be played offline, and B) aren't already single player with no microtransactions?

Free mobile games paid by ads?

Tldr: Poland shot down Russian drones that entered polish airspace. Not the first time they've entered, but first time they've been shot down by Poland.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is deliberate by Russia.

Gray zone warfare in part does small little practically deniable actions, to create a new normal and establish small precedents that can be escalated into larger precedents. Slowly boil the lobster alive - create messaging that conflict in Poland is usual and nothing to wake up about.

> When researchers attempt(opens a new tab) to recover [something like] a coherent computational representation of an Othello game board they instead find [bags of heuristics]

Humans don't exactly have a full representation of board space in their head either. Notably, chess masters and amateurs can memorize completely random board positions as well as the other. I'd think neither could memorize 64 chess pieces in random positions on a board.

I really like the phone/desktop convergence concept. Mostly I think because I want the freedom / open experience of my desktop on my phone though, I think.

But I think most folks interested enough in the concept are also rich enough to afford a phone and a laptop, and if you want a keyboard for your phone you might as well just use a laptop.

I still think conceptually it's the right direction for tech that our devices should be so flexible, but it's hard enough in practice that it's not generally done.

Lack of types is one thing that turned me away from Elixir when I was trying to learn it.

I didn't know how to think about the types so I wanted some way to annotate them to help think through it, but went through it. And then the compiler complained at me I was passing in the wrong type to a function. I mean yes thanks? But also give me a way to figure that out BEFORE I try running the code.

True that's a good point - if publishers were OK with micro purchases for their articles, we'd see some publishers try that out. Nothing's stopping the NYT and similar from trying a "pay as you go model".

The fact that publishers haven't experimented with that implies they're not interested, which dooms any project like this from the start.

I use my USB-C port to listen to my wired headphones all the time, no problem. Phone jack is now redundant now that USB-C can output audio

Good point in the post about confidence - most people equate confidence with accuracy - and since AIs always sound confident, they always sound correct

Strange - I would expect a workplace that doesn't allow mics to also disallow bluetooth

By that logic a one party system is the most superior system, since by definition everyone is on the same page.

We got Trump in part because people felt unable to fully express their opinion - they felt it was either the status quo person or the anti status quo person, with no nuance in between.

And there are still divisions - the freedom caucus, the progressive "squad", the swing politicians. Those politicians should be in parties that reflect them rather than Frankenstein's monsters of parties.

Coalitions are made to enable things like voting on government budgets before funding runs out .... But that problem does not seem solved in the US

My lens is that the military is a federal agency, and our soldiers are federal employees.

This EO combined with the "he who saves his country breaks no law" quote points towards an eventual attempt at a coupe or similar use of force to retain power. Thankfully there are currently no partisan militias in the DOD, but I could see an attempt at a Saddam-style seizing of Congress

It's a way to add emphasis on "They did a good job". We could translate it as

"I'm somewhat biased against BlueOrigin, but BlueOrigin managed to overcome my personal bias with how impressive their launch was".

It's similar to saying "I normally don't like country music, but that was a good song". In that sentence the intended message isn't "I don't like country music", instead it's "I liked that song"

I know we've got cuprates, superconductors formed with copper oxide, useful up to 133Kelvin, higher than Nitrogen cooling's capability of 77K.

I've read of them being used in wind turbines and particle accelerators, as well as concepts for fusion reactors.

Your comment makes it sound like they have insufficient field tolerance / current characteristics though. I don't think I've heard about Cuprates at all recently.

Ehh the issue is features tacked on w/out regards to existing ones. Lotta apps like that end up with multiple ways to do the exact same thing but with very slightly different use cases

> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure

This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.

There was a study investigating people's preferences for living type ... I don't remember whether it was 40/60 or 60/40, but the preference for SFH or for apartments is not universal.

Honestly it's weird that people decide they know how other people want to live, both ways. Obv it stems from folks assuming that their values and wants are universal therefore anything derived from those is obvious, but some folks have some pretty extreme confidence in knowing other people's preferences.

Good point actually - when teaching absolute newbs, I found they'd often confuse the point of a while with a for with an if block.

GOTO is super unambiguous and probably a better introduction to program control flow while they get used to manipulating and juggling variables around

The Malthusian argument is incorrect and I disagree with the concept of physical infrastructure being the end-all-be-all. Japan, South Korea, Germany, as well as the USSR had explosive growth after WW2 not because they had massive existing infrastructure, but because of social systems & processes that enable a reliable, stable, productive society.

If the societies are fragile (vulnerable to drought, markets, or violence), or rotting (corruption, superstition, tribalism), even great infrastructure can make for subpar growth.

An analogy I always think of are Wadis (dry riverbeds); in very dry places with little rainfall (like Hudaydah in Yemen / Saudi Arabia), when it DOES rain, the dry dirt riverbeds don't soak up any water and transport it all out in flash floods - but it IS possible (and has been done) to invest in the land's ability to hold that water rather than purge it. Similarly, in a "always-developing" society, there'd have to be a investment in the people to ensure they can benefit from solutions to their issues.

My 2c is correlation with exercise. I'd expect that the study would control for a known factor like exercise, but I would imagine those who perceive themselves as being less on the phone would value and participate in more active activities.

Wasn't there analysis that company performance is inversely correlated to CEO compensation?

I remember seeing a chart, though I don't remember whether the analysis was well done & researched or not

Ahh, I think I get what you're saying now.

For "This proposition suggests that we should give concessions to developers in areas where there is a need for more development."

Development is a good thing. Maintaining your house or property, improving it, developing businesses are all good things. I'm not sure we should restrict these things to "areas where there is a need for more development". I don't want to live next to someone who has a rotting ruin of a house, who didn't maintain their place in order to pay less in taxes.

Someone maintaining their roof isn't a developer, and isn't going to be making money from their investment but they still pay more in taxes because they do it. They always won't get any government concessions or subsidies to do it (in general).

Similarly, a small business owner usually does not get concessions for starting their business. Usually they instead have to pay extra for permitting and such.

The parking lot owner next the skyscraper, however, gets FREE value from the skyscraper construction - essentially leaching off of another's productivity.

As for the argument how we SHOULD be taxing assets ... every tax takes money from the economy, and some ways of doing that are "better" than others, in that they result in more desired outcomes. LVT seems to provide better outcomes than other ways of taxation.

Property tax: The more of your money you invest into your property, the more you pay for taxes (punishing investment)

Land value tax: Your tax is unchanged on how much you invest in your properties. A rundown parking lot pays the same amount of tax as the next door skyscraper (encouraging development of limited, high value land, and punishing lazy speculation).

Land value tax is a simple, elegant way to incentivize more (and more efficient) economic development.

I personally think Unity suffered from success - I suspect they grew to match their fairly outsized success, found out they were fairly large and needed more revenue to sustain themselves, and so they increasingly looked to and focused on pushing advertising to make up shortfalls, while the game engine was increasingly turned into a vehicle for profitably integrating advertising into games.

My suggestion: Personally, Unity really needs to go lean, embrace their developer experience more, and cut costs. There are 7703 staff (as per wikipedia) - and I don't wish this upon the employees, but they can probably afford to cut some fat.

You can actually design roads to encourage attentiveness - by using road trees, narrower lanes, roundabouts, non-straight roads, or obstacles like bollards or similar. These aren't popular though because people want generally want to zone out and move fast.

Courteousness is a bit more difficult to address with just road / public space design, but designing to encourage more driver / non-driver interaction can help.

edit: a very non-american way to force people to pay attention on country roads is to make them BARELY wide enough to accommodate two cars. This forces attentiveness, because you don't want a head-on collision. Sounds problematic, but actually kinda nice in practice.

self-driving cars are also much worse at handling the ambiguity of mixed vehicle-human spaces. They work best when the infrastructure is specifically dedicated to them - a place designed for cars.

There can be harm, as piracy can theoretically reduce demand for the premium non-pirated products

Reduced demand leads to reduced income/revenue. If someone did some action that directly definitively reduced your income, bringing you from say 130k to 110k, that would 100% qualify as "harm or deprivation".

I got into an MRI once, a while ago. Iirc the most alarming aspect of the sounds was that they gave the impression of massive objects spinning, whirring, and moving rather fast around you.

If an LLM was trained to always say "I don't know", that'd be a useless LLM, so they're trained to NOT say that, even when they don't actually know.

The LLM was happy to give you 'happy' but incorrect answers because it thought it'd make you the most satisfied. Kinda like a psychopath car salesman who just wants to make a sale.

Is Assange a journalist? I would argue that there's a difference between someone who just dumps documents on the internet, and one who tries to inform and bring attention to issues. I don't consider folks who leak documents on discord or wargame forums to be journalists either.

From the article: In an interview with the UK TV station, Channel 4, Assange once said: “Other journalists try to verify sources. We don't do that, we verify documents. We don't care where it came from."

Just sharing information does not make one a journalist, Trump is not a journalist for sharing classified info, and I think it's disingenuous to pretend that Assange is wanted for violations against free speech or something.