aljungberg

At the time only amateurs were allowed to compete. Taking money made you a professional.

I don’t think there’s any dispute that he did make money as a player. However, the wikipedia page says that disqualifications had to be made within 30 days of the close of the games. His occurred 6 months later. So that sounds like grounds to disqualify the disqualification itself, so to speak. It was invalid under the rules.

I can’t tell what the buyers of Apple products voted for exactly, but neither can you tell me what EU voters voted for when choosing their rep.

I mean here we have a law proposed by an unelected body (the European Commission), now being ratified by the European Parliament. The EP is elected (with ~50% turnout) but decides numerous issues (thousands? Tens of thousands?) in an election cycle. When voters elected their representatives how much thought did they spare to walled garden app stores?

Although both are indirect expressions of opinion, buying an Apple product seems to be a clearer endorsement for their model than voting in EU elections by a long shot.

> This legislation is the result of democratic process - i.e. decided by the "common people", if indirectly.

Do you know that for a fact? The EU is famously opaque to its voters. What is being done in the name of the voters is likely for the most part entirely unknown to said voters. Very likely many more EU citizens have “voted” on this issue in a more direct fashion by buying Apple products. Should we disregard their opinion in favour of the opinion of a few bureaucrats four levels removed from the common people?

> shall we also decide to only buy from companies that don't use child labor, and don't put toxic chemicals in food, and don't pollute, or are those areas something where legislation is legitimate, while reigning in anti-competitive practices for some reason is not okay?

Ehr, yes? Shouldn’t we decide to avoid bad companies? Reminder that this subthread is about not infantilising people. I do believe people make such choices all the time, to avoid child labour and what not. What’s more democratic than a vast majority of people making such choices without coercion?

Can us common people get to decide what the common good is, or is that exclusively your choice?

Censorship is something governments do, not private companies selling an optional product.

If the greater good is a free for all app store, then let the greater populace decide that by choosing that product, not by outlawing the alternatives.

So many people in this thread seem to be arguing I should not be allowed to choose Apple’s model as it is today, “for my own good”. The article is about explicitly outlawing parts of their model.

How’s that for personal agency and not infantilising me?

Far would it be for a government to describe censoring opposing viewpoints as “blocking content for the greater good”, right?

Hide my email services are a dime a dozen, but for a “hide my phone number” service you need deeper pockets because phone numbers cost money.

Apple could complement their existing “hide my email” with a “hide my number” feature that makes it easy to create disposable tracking protected phone numbers. This would help counteract the “oh something about your account is suspicious so give us your phone number” dark pattern.

This is good to keep in mind although should you ever find yourself in such a situation know that you can still put your feet in a bucket of water. We usually get water from rivers our underground reservoirs so it tends to be cool enough even during heatwaves. It’s perhaps not the most convenient way to cool down but beats death.

The parallel to Guillan Barré Syndrome seems intuitive. MS and GBS are both autoimmune disorders which damage myelin. MS is slower and chronic while GBS is acute and rarely relapses. What if MS is a low grade persistent immune response to a chronic viral infection such that those bad antibodies are created in small amounts indefinitely?

To me semiweekly sounds like “somewhat” weekly (the same interpretation as in “semiconscious”). With that reading, semiweekly would mean it’s basically weekly but not quite. Maybe it’s not every week, there could be some exceptions.

I like there rationale of using this prefix though. In the same vein, perhaps hemiweekly? Like in hemisphere. Same logic applied but the hemi- prefix is less overloaded.

The news article makes it sound like causation has been determined beyond a doubt but the actual study abstract does not detail why the authors think this. Is it impossible to imagine that more brain “damage” leads to more drinking in some cases? Do people who are developing Alzheimer’s sometimes drink more to feel better?

Also not clear is the selection criteria. Are these people who were going to have an MRI and incidentally were offered a chance to participate in this study? In that case it could have biased the sample - there could be a large group of people drinking alcohol and being just fine but they wouldn’t be seen in this study for the very reason that they are doing fine and weren’t getting MRIs.

Certainly the presented hypothesis could be true but the article would be more convincing if it was more critical of its source material. Correlations are easy, they’re a dime a dozen. Proving causation is the real work.

Unfortunately savepoints only work for a non-transactional single connection test. E.g. you can only set a savepoint within a transaction. If the code under test, like an integration test, uses transactions itself, or multiple connections, savepoints won't help you. I would love to be able to globally revert all committed changes to a point in time.

  SUPER SAVEPOINT A;
  <NO HOLDS BARRED CODE USING MULTIPLE CONNECTIONS, TRANSACTIONS, NORMAL SAVEPOINTS ETC>
  SUPER RESTORE A;

It could be implemented by playing the WAL logs backwards, I imagine.

Alternatively, just making CREATE DATABASE WITH TEMPLATE fast would be nice. Even on tmpfs and no fsync this operation takes about 300 ms on my (fast) workstation. Then you could consider the template database a savepoint in itself.

Creating these vaccines is hard as we see from Merck failing to make any at all and J&J still not having gotten significant deliveries out. Let’s recognise that AstraZeneca are in a minority succeeding at all. When this is all over they may have contributed billions of doses. We need more companies like that, not fewer.

> Regarding the "no company would do this type of deal again": good! We don't need companies that get free expansion and IP with the promises of delivery, just to find out they won't deliver.

We don’t need companies that save lives? Regardless of who got the AZ vaccine first, millions did get it and for some it saved their lives. Anger about a contract dispute seems disproportionate reason to wish AstraZeneca didn’t even exist.

It would be cool if the DOM was exposed. Then you could write one liner bash scripts to do simple tasks like “download all images” or “delete script tags referencing spammyads.js”, all with nothing more advanced than find, cp, rm and mv in the shell. E.g.

cp html/body/*/img/.hero-img/hello.png ~Downloads/

You would need some clever way to express the DOM with ids and classes etc but it could be done with some subdirectory structure and long names, sometimes having multiple names for the same thing.

Haven't testing rates increased significantly? A natural outcome would be that we see more mild cases which previously would have flown under the radar.

I don't buy the article's hypothesis of social distancing being a factor. Social distancing has been ongoing for a long time, and if anything it's happening less now as people fear the virus less with dropping fatalities. So why would social distancing suddenly now begin to have a greater effect?

Mask usage could play a role. If you're infected while wearing a mask your initial viral load is likely significantly reduced. And at least here in England masks were not mandatory until recently.

At the point of comparison in 2016, both games were in early access, and, I think, both games were enjoyable. Factorio had a more complex late game in terms of available structures and they had liquid pipes which is a major feature. But Satisfactory also had some things Factorio did not like varied terrain, automated trucks and some interesting first person elements.

You're right about the early funding. Factorio started out with just €21,626 of crowd funding. But after a while they do seem to have reached similar levels given the comparable staffing levels they have now.

I'm not sure how one could measure the complexity in terms of game mechanics, but there is definitely a large amount of overlap in that complexity I would say. Both games have machines to mine, assemblers of increasing complexity, belts to connect them, a variety of possible inputs and outputs. There are things in Satisfactory that's not in Factorio and vice versa -- Satisfactory has a space elevator, Factorio has rockets. I'm no expert on these games but from the outside it doesn't look like one is twice as complex as the other in terms of mechanics.

Great game. Without being critical of the team's awesome accomplishment, I do wonder if there's something to be learnt here about software development productivity. How did the Coffee Stain guys develop Satisfactory apparently so much faster than the Factorio guys?

Factorio started in 2013. Satisfactory started development in 2016 and released 2019. At the time Satisfactory was released it seemed already more advanced than Factorio -- and after only having been developed for half as long. (The visual complexity of Coffee Stain's game is off the charts compared to Factorio. Factorio has a board game style whereas Satisfactory is a modern 3D game. Look at the launch trailers.)

Coffee Stain has about 25 employees working on 2 games (Goat Simulator and Satisfactory), Wube Software has 15 employees working on 1 game (Factorio).

Having read Factorio's dev blogs I feel like there might have been a bit of not invented here syndrome. They wrote their own UI toolkit for instance. Maybe they kept inventing technologies while Coffee Stain found ways to reuse existing tools?

Voting can be helpful, but not always. For a long time the voting majority in some places thought treating black people as lesser human beings was fair. In those cases, having the option to easily choose a different government would be useful.

In a way, having states in the US is that idea. E.g. moving from a deeply racist southern state during the height of equal but separate era to a more progressive state would have given you far better results than voting in terms of how you were treated by the local government.

That does not contradict anything the government said. All else being equal, of course smaller groups, in the sense of people seeing fewer other people, is better. That’s not the argument. Nobody is saying “we should see more people”.

All else is not equal. You pull the quarantine lever, you increase social distancing but you also increase local mixing. Costs and benefits. The right choice at any given time depends on the disease spread. Computer modelling and simulation tells us when there is a net benefit.

Of course it will in time spread. By having a quarantine right now, that time would be shorter, not longer. That’s the point being made.

Of course, reducing the frequency of contact with other people in general is good. I don’t think anyone is arguing against that. What I’m saying is that quarantine can cause more novel contacts.

Statistically speaking there is a good chance no-one at your work place has the virus yet. We are still counting infections in the hundreds or the thousands in populations of millions. If all you do is to spend time at home and at work, there are good odds you’re just switching between two disease free spheres. You can’t get sick without meeting sick people. The only thing that will change that steady state is contact with new people (by yourself or your coworkers/family).

The point the government was making in this case, I believe, is that quarantine can in fact cause more novel connections, faster, and perversely increase the velocity of the spread. The people who are at home will not just sit there. They will meet other people and those people may be from outside of their ordinary, currently disease free social sphere. Thus new vectors of infection spread are introduced that would not have existed without the quarantine.

A quarantine can certainly help down the road, it’s a numbers game. But right now they’re doing the math and think it would be a net negative.

It’s not the size of the pool but the novelty of the configuration of people. Every time an infected individual meets a healthy one that’s a new chance to spread the infection. But you can only spread it once to each person, so if you meet the same people over and over that’s okay. When you ask people to change their routines, you also encourage new “lateral” disease spread.

I don’t think hospitals have “emergency daycare” available generally speaking. If it does come down to quarantine, I’m sure efforts will be made. It is still a cost and a negative outcome of the quarantine so my point remains: when the benefit is very small, the costs easily outweigh the benefits.

Sweden is making the same decision and they explained it quite well. A quarantine means children stay home from nurseries, daycare and school. This increases the stress on the medical system because some doctors and nurses have to stay home to take care of their children.

In addition, new constellations of people gathering become likely. E.g. children from different schools may play together more in the neighborhoods, opening new pathways for the disease to spread.

So when a quarantine is not expected to help in most cases (because most people are not infected), the drawbacks easily outweigh the benefits.

Even the smallest nuclear power plant in the states generates 582 MW — enough for 95 000 homes.

I’m not saying this isn’t a cool membrane. I’m making the point here that the comparison to 2000 nuclear power plants seems arbitrary.

One wonders how quickly these pores will become clogged over time. If the membrane deteriorates fast, the energy cost of producing more membranes continuously needs to be factored in.

The article headline is pretty weird, by the way. So this technology can generate “thousands of nuclear power plants worth of energy”? But then in the third paragraph it sounds like they mean to say if you installed this membrane in every estuary in the world, then it’d beat 2000 nuclear plants.

It’s like saying there’s more water in a cup than in a bathtub, as long as the cup is the size of a car.

If we are still talking about rsync.net, and an attacker gains access to your account and deletes your borg archive, you can still restore your backup from the rsync.net ZFS snapshots.

The snapshots are not deletable even with your full credentials.

This may become another example of a good company catering well to a specific niche, then taking on money until they are unable to cater well to their original niche anymore.

Solving a specific problem well in a market worth $X is not compatible with taking 10 * $X in funding — you will be forced to start doing something else so you can make ROI. Along the way you’ll probably alienate your existing market by price gouging (like switching to a subscription based service model for a simple app), so there won’t be any turning back either.