ascagnel_

> though if Apple suddenly took gaming seriously, like extending Rosetta to act as a translation layer for Windows games a la Proton, I’d gladly throw down for an M5 Ultra when it’s released

No joke, if I could run my Steam library on my phone, I'd probably buy a new phone every year (and might need to, given what the thermals and rapid charge/discharge cycles would do to battery longevity). But Apple's current strategy is to provide a tool, then let developers do the work themselves; compare to Valve's efforts (and occasionally stepping on rakes when games update themselves).

For a first run-through, I'd recommend the "Zero Rando" edition of the [Deus Ex Randomizer](https://github.com/Die4Ever/deus-ex-randomizer/) mod, since that's strictly limited to quality-of-life and bug fixes. If you're playing on a Steam Deck or with a controller, it integrates a radial menu for augmentations, which will help a ton when mapping the mouse-and-keyboard controls onto a gamepad.

> It keeps nagging me to upgrade to the family plan or plus or whatever. And if I ignore it enough it enrolls me in a free trial of the family plan without me even asking every once it a while. The amount of up-selling they try to push on you now is so annoying.

Is this through their own storefront, or through a mobile storefront (Apple/Google)? While it's bad either way, Apple and Google specific styling around their subscription confirmation prompts, so I hope they haven't circumvented those somehow.

Also, "waste" doesn't have a singular definition: a contract with Honeywell (just picking a big government contractor at random) with the DOD/DOW to develop a new weapon could easily be seen as wasteful by one taxpayer, while another could see a different contract with Honeywell with the DOE or EPA to develop green energy tech as equally valid waste. The solution to this isn't to have one person run roughshod over already-signed contracts and commitments; the fix is for Congress either to not enter into them in the first place, or to use the CRA to override an agency's decision.

> The F1 guys are probably as fit as a top footballer. They're dealing with black out levels of lateral G forces whilst slamming on the brakes within a fraction of a second of loser times or crashing out.

I don't think it ever got to that point in F1, but CART (now IndyCar, but that's a different discussion) had to cancel a race because drivers were blacking out due to sustained G forces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5dsuYZCZJ0

It's because the leagues (and therefore the teams) make significantly more money when the rights are shared vs. when they're owned by a single entity. For example, the National Hockey League is in the middle of a seven-year, $4.5B deal with ESPN/Disney and Turner/Warner; their prior deal with NBC/Universal was a ten-year, $2B deal. Even adjusting for inflation, it's a huge increase from $200M/year to $640M/year over that decade -- an increase that happened despite cord-cutting accelerating significantly over the decade of the prior deal.

On the other hand, the MLS went to basically a single provider (all matches air on Apple's streaming service, with select on terrestrial TV and/or cable), and the numbers on that are still reportedly somewhat soft if you ignore the skewing presence of Lionel Messi (but that's a whole other discussion, because Apple was also trying to do something different and overpaid for the rights to do so, and that overpay was a part of bringing in Messi).

Only a handful of scenes were shot in the Bay Area:

- https://filminglocations.fandom.com/wiki/Sneakers

- https://www.set-jetter.com/ontheset/sneakers

I'm thinking of the scene where they talk about the corrupting influence of money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifJMFqSV7ic

They're not on the roof for that scene; they're in his office, using the computer room's air conditioning as a sound mask (and using a Cray Y-MP as a bench). While the movie takes some very early-90s liberties with technology (especially the scene where they use the chip), it's remarkably respectful of hacking -- there's a stronger emphasis on social engineering then the purely technical, and my "head canon" is that the chip itself is a quantum chip capable of breaking any then-known encryption.

I've found that creators and channels I've subscribed to don't always appear in the subscriptions feed. Thankfully, YouTube still posts an RSS feed for every channel, and following a bunch of them in my reader app reliably captures all the output. I'll dip in and out, only watching what I want, and it's harder to do that when a chunk of the feed is silently hidden from view.

They exist, but in New Jersey -- most of the "cities" (with the exception of downtown Jersey City and downtown Newark) would be called streetcar suburbs in an earlier time. I live in one of them, and it's great: I have a small, private backyard, but I'm also <15 minutes on foot from multiple public parks, restaurants, shops, etc.

Sadly, it's illegal to build streetcar suburbs in most of the US today, because outfitting every house with a private driveway, setbacks, etc., would move everything far apart enough to significantly hurt walkability.

I would argue that a public transportation network is a requirement, maybe even a prerequisite, for high density. Manhattan simply could not work without the various public transportation methods -- if everyone commuting in from CT, LI, NJ, upstate NY, etc., had to drive in, would there even be enough space for all those cars on the island?

To me, it's a big reason why Americans love Disney World: you can drive to your local airport, fly to Florida, take a shuttle bus to your resort (that handles your luggage for you), and then rely on Disney's private network of bus routes, monorails, gondolas, boats, etc., instead of having to drive yourself.

In fact, if you use their transportation network, you actually get somewhat better treatment: in all of the parks, there's a shorter walk to/from the transit terminal than to your car, and in one of them (Magic Kingdom), you are required to park a distance from the park and take a connecting ferry.

The problem for America is that moneyed interests (big car manufacturers) would frequently sabotage or otherwise salt the earth for public transportation projects.

One immediate one off the top of my head is the Long Island Expressway: when it was constructed, it was built in mostly-undeveloped or under-developed land, and space could have been reserved for a rail line running parallel to the highway.

Another is less obvious: the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line in northern NJ was constructed in the late 90s and early 00s, including a disused rail right-of-way that went from the southern part of Jersey City to the southern tip of Bayonne, near the Bayonne Bridge that connects to Staten Island (a notorious transit desert). While there were plans to extend the light rail line when the bridge was raised in the late 00s, it was decided against, even though it would've been a boon to all three cities/boroughs.

Caro has a way with words; one of my favorite turns was when Moses declared traffic a problem "solved for a generation", only for Caro to begin the next paragraph with a description of the traffic jams that began to develop a few weeks after that particular road (I believe the Bronx River Parkway) opened.

> secretaries who took dictation (with a typewriter, of course) to write those documents

Complete aside, just because you brought up this thought and I like the concept of it:

My mom trained professionally as a secretary in the 1970s and worked in a law office in the 1980s; at that point, if you were taking dictation, you were generally doing longhand stenography to capture dictation, and then you'd type it up later. A stenotype would've been a rarity in a pre-computer office because of the cost of the machine; after all, if you need a secretary for all these other tasks, it's cheaper to give them a $2 notebook than it is a $1,500+ machine.

It's not a bug or issue with those phones, it's how batteries behave -- over time, they lose both their capacity and the power they output. Apple decided to throttle their phones via software instead of letting them crash.

I've said this before, but it was the right idea executed the wrong way. iPhones give you a warning when they overheat, and this throttling should have gotten a similar warning with a link to an FAQ explaining the battery dynamics.

> These days I use VSCode and IntelliJ (depending on language) because they do so many things out of the box.

While I don't appreciate the weight of an IDE, the time commitment to create (and maintain!) a config for vim/nvim with LSP, agents, etc., loses out to the relative ease of adding vim-style modal editing to the IDE.

Apple handles it cleanly in Safari (you get a list of the accounts you're registered with on macOS, and iOS gives you the two most-recently-used accounts for that website with a button to reveal more).

The implementation in Chromium browsers (I use Arc, so I can't speak to Chrome itself) is basically a chunkier-looking 1Password.

Valve goes one step beyond loot boxes with their marketplace: you get a loot box, pay to open it (basically a slot machine spin), and you get an item in a "game of chance" -- but that item is a "thing of value" that can be sold on Valve's official, first-party marketplace.

Every definition of gambling I've seen includes some variation of "winning a thing of value from a game of chance", and while loot boxes for in-game rewards skirt that (the thing you're getting is typically described in the fine-print as having no monetary value), Valve's user-driven marketplace is setting a real-world value.

Put another way: EA FC's card packs or Genshin Impact's gacha spins are worth nothing outside of those games, but I've sold Counter-Strike skins to pay for a decent chunk of my Steam Deck.

The way Google handles the Chromium source (one big Git monorepo that's undergoing near-constant refactoring) means anything that doesn't want to hard fork is limited to bolting on a new UI and features around the core rendering engine -- but anything inside that core rendering engine won't be long-lasting.

So Brave, Arc, Dia, Edge, et al., all add their own sauce on top of Chromium, but none of them can make changes like back-porting Manifest V2 back into their Chromium.

Normally, I'd agree with you -- defaults are a very, _very_ powerful thing.

But if you're using Google's web tools, they make it (too) easy to download their apps and push you in that direction in a million little ways. For example, GMail's native iOS app will either open a link in a WKWebView or Chrome (if it's not installed, it'll prompt you to install it), but you have to jump through some hoops if you want to open a link in the system's default browser. Similarly, if you're searching for something via google.com, they'll put up a prompt to download their search app, with the default "Continue" option taking you to the store rather than continuing with your current task (and then click-jack the back button).

In a world where people need both fiat and crypto, the volatility of crypto precludes returns.

On the other hand, I'm absolutely amazed some US states hasn't yet gone after Valve for running an unlicensed casino with no age verification.

Marijuana sales, at least in the US, are a whole different can of worms, because marijuana exists as kind of a Schroedinger's illicit substance: its legal at a state level in most US states, while simultaneously illegal at the federal level. Anyone with a multi-state footprint that exists in that transaction chain could be held liable.

Debit cards still go through MasterCard and/or Visa. They could take crypto, but crypto is far too volatile for the types of transactions Valve wants to be handling.

The problem with the Supreme Court is the handshake-agreement to limit the court's size in combination with lifetime appointments and the Senate majority leader's pocket veto. Going back to 1992 (eight Presidential terms, three served by Republicans and five by Democrats), Republican presidents have successfully nominated six justices while Democrats only five (including a no-vote for Merrick Garland).

The better thing to do, in my mind, is to limit the term length of a justice and eliminate the pocket veto, but I can't think of any way in which the elimination of a pocket veto also can't be exploited in some way (eg: with a 6-3 court, if a Republican-aligned justice stepped down, a Republican president can knowingly put forward a candidate they know won't get approved to keep the margin 5-3 vs. 5-4).

Then it becomes an organization dominated by those who donate the most -- and there have already been cases where a PBS affiliate self-censored and modified its editorial in an attempt to placate a potential donor[0].

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/a-word-from-ou...

Valve has done a lot, but until you start getting the big "forever" games to support Linux, it'll never be an acceptable substitute for most home users. Doubly so for anyone with kids.

I think it's more that Nintendo's choice of hardware (and its relative lack of horsepower) force them into more stylized visuals because it means photo-realism is basically off the table to start with. We the audience tend not to care, because Nintendo has capable artists who can create something aesthetically pleasing outside of "realistic" graphics.