NamTaf

It will load up many plates for you to spin, don’t worry! Especially with the DLCs, you end up with essentially 5 or 6 maps to simultaneously play.

This game is an incredible time sink; I can lose entire days to it because there’s always “just one more thing” to do.

I used it on my home NAS (4x3TB drives, holding all of my family's backups, etc.) for the data security / checksumming features. IMO it's performant, robust and well-designed in ways that give me reassurance regarding data integrity and help prevent me shooting myself in the foot.

Not at all. It’s about as necessary as owning a metal foundry is for someone who wants to use their cloud-enabled car. They don’t need the base materials, they need a turnkey solution.

It’s a nice-to-have if you could resolve the part about needing to trust some random person picking it up and modifying it, or hosting their own server for you to use. Unlike when you purchase an item from a known legal entity, there’s way less assurance about your data, security, etc.

The lay-consumer isn’t going to spin up a DO droplet to host their own instance. They’d be hard pressed to sign up to ChatGPT and drop in an API key.

These are all very hard problems and I don’t pretend to have any answers.

This is a very hackeresque, blinkers-on response.

Your idea may work for technical systems used by technical users, but in this case (and I'd bet my bottom dollar most cases are similar) that the products are intended for non-technical end users.

How is some random family supposed to take the public repository of source code and set it up so their child's emotional support robot works? How is your middle-aged neighbour supposed to set up their Nest doorbell with someone else's server and establish trust? How is your aunt supposed to set their Alexa speaker to a self-hosted server? These are people who call a desktop computer a 'CPU'. Put yourself in their shoes, their IT skills are basically 0. Where would they host the compiled code? How would they even know where to start?

The intention is certainly good and it would be an improvement, but it would not allow consumers - most of whom are buying an appliance - to continue using their products. Would it really also push investors and managers to pause? It's a non-monetary impact and I can't imagine they'd allocate any effort building systems that package it up so that it's simple to stand up the cloud services. It has no benefit to them.

Most consumers aren't hackers/developers. Most are non-technical. Implicit in the purchase of a cloud-connected appliance is an expectation that some geeks somewhere make everything Just Work for them. They're not looking to have to tweak (digital) knobs and configure parameters - that's the company's job. That's why so many of these sorts of devices are designed with very simple user interfaces.

Your suggestion is good within the narrow window of technical systems for technical consumers, but this is a far tougher nut to crack than that when considering the broader audience.

I've never done AoC but I've done other programming-related challenges before. I come from a non-IT background (mech eng), and I'm currently away for work for the first several days with only their locked-down laptop.

Normally I'd break out Python for this, but given the constraints maybe I should try to see how far I can get through this in Excel. It'd be a fun little challenge :)

Australia's system is similar, albeit the tuition fees are higher (capped depending on the degree and set by the government). You take out a government-backed loan and which is around CPI and then pay it back at an increasing % based on your income, between I think 1.5% above a certain threshold and 10% by a second, higher one.

There's been some issues with it, but no system is perfect and the thrust of it is aligned with the dual public-private structure that Australia seems to prefer (see also: medicare vs private health insurance).

I've set two automations: 1) When airplane mode is activated, lock the screen. 2) When airplane mode is activated, turn it back off. That'll give me the most opportunity to either track it and/or lock it down remotely.

I can remember to disable the shortcut whenever I fly and need to enable it.

If they pop my SIM (my provider doesn't use eSIMs...) then there's a PIN on it to prevent use in another device.

You’re right that it is certainly differentiating for me, but not in a good way.

This is a classic xkcd workflow comic moment: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Tech is not necessary. You just have to make the subjects interesting to learn. Good teachers are way more value than they are valued, and will make the classes interesting to learn.

It really doesn’t, absent a few key games. I’ve just built a new gaming PC and I’ve gone straight with Arch. I was worried the compatibility I experienced with the steam deck may be isolated to the steam deck but it’s shocking how far it’s come.

Is it perfect? No, of course not. But my god it definitely is good enough to cut myself free of MS’s terrible decision-making the last 5ish years.

It's literally a thing people do, sometimes specifically because it forces them to disconnect in their down time outside of work.

What's so strange about that as a concept? As someone who grew up in the 90s, the idea of doing so is totally normal for me. I mean, I don't do it, but I wouldn't blink at someone else saying they did.

How do you think people achieve the goal of 50 books in a year, for example?

Yes, that’s the point the poster is making. They are not the same despite being united by the fact that in both cases the government got involved and said “stop that, it’s wrong”. They explicitly stated their point that there’s a moral spectrum of positions which means it’s not always right to just roll over and find something else to do when the authorities get involved.

For others: I was curious how to do this, so if you put “change windows drag drop sensitivity” into your search engine of choice you’ll find a tutorial for which registry settings to change.

The default is 4 pixels, which I’m inclined to agree is low these days.

One of the first things I did on my Steam Deck was to get Winamp running via Bottles :) it lives on the inbuilt screen when I’ve got it docked in desktop mode on my 2 desktop monitors.

No, it's a pretty straight-forward and understandable ruling. Intent matters, the law is fuzzy.

1 USD = 23.5 CZK. 1b CZK = US$42.5m

This is an article written in Czech, about an incident that occurred in Czechia. Assuming USD makes no sense.

Except the net completely transparent to microscopic organisms like plankton? The section "The System at Sea" on this site [1] goes into detail about the multitude of systems they have to prevent the impact on ocean life. There's some 9 image slides give information about it. With all those considered, am I missing something?

[1]: https://theoceancleanup.com/oceans/

No? I read it as decidedly the opposite.

“Apart from engineering” is doing some seriously heavy lifting here. Writing the actual code is likely just an afterthought by comparison. The engineering - identification of a target weakness, the design of the exploit chain, etc. - is overwhelmingly going to have been the lion’s share of the effort.

They were a UK electronics retailer. There's a wiki article with some info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumbelows

Sadly, it doesn't touch on the symbols of the logo

I interpreted it as literally “remove the capacity (to continue committing crime)”. Incarceration is one means of achieving that, but possibly not the only, and I feel like the OP was trying to draw that distinction.

I don’t think they were meaning incapacitation as in rendered unconscious.

Nope, worked fine for me on 124.0.1 w/ several extensions

I'm not wondering why it's illegal for me to start a fly-by-night taxi business because I understand that the regulation was developed over a long time to avoid dodgy drivers who'd scam passengers or worse.

I can accept an argument where it was not fit-for-purpose for a tech-era reinterpretation of how vetted drivers deliver this service. Despite that, I think you're probably reaching if you were to try to tell me that you don't understand why the prevailing legislation existed in order to ensure passengers were picked up by vetted, known drivers whose identities were known and who could face recourse if they scammed passengers (e.g. by driving them around in circles to inflate fares), held passengers hostage or worse.

It’s not anything to do with AI, but you might like this: https://music.ishkur.com/

Crazy to think it’s been a thing since the 90s when it was built in Flash!

Without negating your idea, I’d add that as a (non-IT) engineer of some 15 years, I’ve found that my first 8-10 years was building my technical capabilities, however beyond that it was really about learning how to navigate (at increasingly more complex levels) the business systems and fit the technical to the business.

Being a principal engineer, my major value is not in my technical capacity, but rather my ability to shape the technical solution to the best fit for the business - be it to do with existing tooling, processes, systems, etc. Though I can do the technical solutions (probably more efficiently, too), my value is much stronger when I steer multiple junior engineers doing the technical work whilst setting the guideposts so they align the solution to what best fits the business.

I would therefore suggest that one major hurdle would be that these self-organising teams might not be able to bring to bear their full capacity insofar as they are not familiar with the businesses to which they pair. Though you can sometimes see parallels between company processes, understanding the nuance and detail that makes them different is where so many consultancy projects fall over. Think about the canonical meme of a team of consultants coming in and spending millions developing a solution that turns out to be a lemon. It’s not for their lack of capability, it’s that it’s devilishly hard to really, truly fully understand a business’s processes, systems and cruft in a sufficient level of detail to truly shape a solution such that it remains maintainable and fit for purpose in a long-term sense.

That’s the real reason why veteran employees are worth their weight in gold. It’s that they are the custodians of the institutional memory and can bring that forward when it is needed.

This of course has the important counterpoint of the necessity of seeding new ideas into a business, and that’s an entirely different essay in itself, however suffice it to say that new ideas need to be integrated in a sustainable and controlled fashion - protected and nurtured from being driven out by the existing ways, but also moulded to integration where it’s necessary. Failure to do either is a speedrun to pain.

Edit to add: If you think that IT is somehow immune from this relative to traditional meatspace engineering disciplines, I’d say two things: 1) tech still goes through this, just sometimes operates on different timescales, and 2) go see if a COBOL greybeard collecting FU consultant wages to maintain old OT systems agrees with you.

In my experience, your numbers are out for this particular example. It'd reduce it to at most a day. You're right that there's a few hours of faff at either end, though I don't believe it's nearly as long as you're cumulatively adding up. However, those things are dwarfed by the 24 hours of in-air time it currently takes (sure, 17.5 if you want to go to Perth). That time in the plane is death for me, as I cannot sleep sitting upright. It means I get off extra-fatigued and that multiplies my jetlag several-fold.

I agree completely with you that the faff at either end needs to reduce, and long-haul travel will always be a time sink, but I still think reducing the in-air duration for those ultra-long journeys would be huge. The faff getting better what with removing liquids limits and not needing to pull electronics out of carry-on. Check-in can sometimes be a pain, but I've found it to be fairly ok both within the UK and AU most of the time. Combining a few things together - BA's 23kg carry-on limit, removed liquids limits, online check-in with etickets - would go a long way to streamlining it. Combine those things with a reduced in-air duration to make it ~8-hour duration event and I think it'd be much more comfortable, more in line with flying east-coast to west-coast AU.

What would I pay for it, and would I opt for it over doing a layover in e.g. SEA if I had the spare time to do so? No idea, honestly.

To expand on and put numbers to this: to escape the solar system from Earth, you need to add about 17 km/s on top of the energy you start with by working from Earth's orbital energy. Earth is going about 30 km/s around the Sun, which helps quite a lot!

However, this also means that to hit the Sun, you need to remove more or less all of the energy that Earth starts you with. This is the key insight - if you do a bit too much or a bit too little, it slingshots around the Sun (getting close to it but not going into it) and stays in orbit rather than landing in the Sun.

Functionally yes, but it’s likely more specifically referring to having one in a temporary structure, e.g.: a demountables.

“Donga” is used commonly within Australian mining and construction industries (and presumably also overseas) to refer to a demountable/transportable structure like you might see on a commercial construction site. Sometimes in FIFO mine sites they’re used to house the workers. I’m guessing the same things are used in Antarctic research stations to house the personnel.

These things: https://dostonhouse.com/office-donga/