ascagnel_

There's something about the image quality of Cyberpunk that looks off to me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe the hair rendering? Shadowing?

It's clearly going for photo realism, but it somehow looks worse to me than older, lower-fidelity games.

At one point, your Counter-Strike guns.

One significant difference between WW1 and WW2, at least in the US -- the country realigned itself for wartime in a way it did not the first time around. You had women entering the workforce in ways they did not during WW1, which meant you had some families earning dual incomes. At the same time, the US instituted a rationing scheme, so even though households were earning more money, they couldn't spend as much.

Two other significant differences: the GI bill for returning vets (which made it significantly easier for them to get higher education) and the rise of automobiles (which in turn unlocked suburbs and mass home ownership) gave households somewhere useful to put their money.

Speak of, it's been wild over the past 12-18 months to start seeing full-fat modern console games starting to hit phones.

I'd say the pendulum is swinging in the other direction -- Fortnite is bigger than most everything on Steam, and everything in that game feels like it's designed around you making progress through its battle pass in some incremental way. The world map has puzzles, there's a fishing mechanic, and it comes with a suite of non-combat alternate modes.

That's my point -- the onward march of technology means that not only can I continue playing U7, the work of passionate fans has made it so that I can play an improved version (higher perceptual frame rate, higher resolution, better and more consistent sound, etc) that takes advantage of the improved hardware on a device I bring with me everywhere.

Games are now infinitely more complex -- I can run an improved version of Ultima VII (1992) on a device that fits in my pocket, while the original wouldn't have run on this (it required a 486 and even the latest possible Tandy systems maxed out at the 386), and that's not even getting into stuff like Factorio or Satisfactory.

I ended up running coax to my network cabinet and put the HDHR there, because my attic gets significantly hotter than the maximum rated operating temperature of the HDHR.

I'm also long-term concerned about how Plex as a company is moving away from its server product and towards FAST (free, ad-supported TV), a feature I almost never use. I'd love to see Jellyfin get some equivalent features.

I agree, it was the right call to make -- a temporarily-impaired device is always better than a temporarily-failed device, especially when you're talking about something you may need in an emergency situation.

That said, Apple _significantly_ erred in not over-communicating what they were doing. At that point, the OS would pop warnings to users if the phone had to thermal throttle, and adding a similar notification that led the user to a FAQ page explaining the battery dynamics wouldn't have been technically hard to do.

What about "it could be a good idea, but when it's done haphazardly it's bad"? Both sentences describe the situation accurately.

I was talking about this with a friend recently -- Romans flaunted their wealth by improving shared social infrastructure (open market spaces, parks, etc), and the robber barons of the 19th century flaunted their wealth by building cultural institutions (eg Carnegie libraries).

It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.

> Many US soldiers returned home from war and they needed a job

It was a combination of US soldiers returning home after drawing government pay while fighting abroad, rationing limiting what could be purchased by those who remained home, and the one-two-three punch of the GI bill subsidizing land purchases, the interstate highway system effectively creating the American suburb, and process improvements from the war making automobiles drastically cheaper.

> If I were Trump, I instead would have pushed congress to take away the power of tariffs back from the presidency and make something like the Fed to manage them instead, with some checks added in. I normally don't like unelected officials making policy like that but in this case I don't see what else would work. As we've seen, broad tariffs are very unpopular even if they might be necessary, and we'd need them to have the potential to stick around much longer for them to be effective.

The power of the tariff is typically reserved for Congress; the executive has declared an emergency giving itself that power, while Congress (specifically the House) has abdicated its responsibility by redefining "legislative days" to extend the length of the emergency.

> That said, I'm willing to bet this will finally put the nail in the inflation coffin. Taking money away from consumers and "burning it" by returning it to the government is the best way to deal with inflation.

Long term, maybe; short term, it'll spike inflation as the price of both raw materials and finished goods will rise to account for the tariffs.

> I might agree with that, although part of me is glad that there's at least one major platform that Chrome hasn't taken over.

> Five years ago, I'd have agreed. Today Chrome seems like the King of Dark Patterns because it can get away with it. It's the one single app on my Mac that makes me specially configure cmd-Q to quit it. Manifest v3. Web Integrity API. Etc., etc., etc. Google does this because they can. They haven't been the better actor in ages.

One of my biggest fears with the EU coming down on Apple is that they'll force Apple to allow "real" Blink-powered Chrome (vs. the current shell around WebKit), and that we'll wind up with another late-90s/early-00s browser monopoly. Blink is already at something like 90% market share on desktop and 60% on mobile (basically everything not iOS/macOS), and Google is already acting near-unilaterally on new features.

It's open-source in the same way TiVo was "open-source" back in the day: yeah, you get the code, but you can't do anything with it in a practical sense.

Also, that article was published in 2013 and only received light updates in 2018 -- and its core arguments haven't really aged even with the additional five years.

It was -- and it's so blatantly anti-competitive and letter-of-the-law (at least in the US) abuse of a monopoly position that Microsoft stopped it almost as soon as they were challenged on it.

"Blade Runner" was taken from a 1974 Alan E. Nourse novel called "The Bladerunner"; the name's relation to PKD is tangential at best.

Even people that know how to manage a network may not want to manage their home network.

I would also argue, regardless of what mobile OS you're on, quieting, delaying, or disabling notifications on a regular basis (and taking stock of what you let through) is prudent.

You need fiber for that -- I have a pair of them (100' to my desk, 30' to my TV), and they've been rock-solid for 4 years.

It's the same if you go west -- Hudson County, NJ, is mostly neighborhoods that were designed as streetcar suburbs if you measure by land area.

While it's not a direct continuation, the Yakuza (and later Like a Dragon) series is a spiritual successor in some ways.

It's only a short stretch, running the length of I-495, but the XBL in the Lincoln Tunnel is a huge reason why people bother with the bus in northern NJ.

When I was commuting by bus, the inbound morning trip (with XBL) was 20-30 minutes, and the outbound evening trip (without XBL) was 30-45 minutes.

https://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/en/lincoln-tunnel/xbl...

The NHL[0] and NBA[1] have already done officially-sanctioned cartoonified simulcasts.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCupuTnNmQ0

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE68Q4oPcPs

They do, at least in the US, as viewership has dropped and leagues have struggled to attract younger viewers.

- The NFL provided a SpongeBob-themed alt-cast for a game last weekend -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcHIfPERX0s

- F1 has a similar graphics package+commentary for kids -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xUBfP2-BEA

- The NHL used their new-ish player position tracking tech to produce a real-time (or at least near-real-time) game themed to Big City Greens last year, and is set to do another in a few weeks -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCupuTnNmQ0

- The NBA has similar position-tracking tech, and used to animate a game on Christmas, with Mickey Mouse watching -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE68Q4oPcPs

I think Ebert didn't grasp what Lynch was going for with the Dorothy character, because I don't think anyone else in Hollywood was thinking like Lynch at the time.

Blue Velvet challenges you as a viewer to look at the abuse Dorothy suffers and to be a witness -- and that's hard to do as a viewer because it is ugly. Ebert did what a lot of people did and attempted to defend Isabella Rossellini, who had signed on to the movie knowing full well what would be required.

Lynch made two other movies in that same "the audience needs to bear witness and empathize" theme (Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway) before Ebert caught on with Mulholland Dr.

Just start with the pilot first -- as it is, the US pilot is basically a feature-length film (it runs 1h25m), and features enough of Lynch's trademark juxtaposition of horrible and mundane, and piles on the warmth and love for his characters that set his works apart. The European cut of the pilot adds a few minutes to the end and originally aired as a TV movie, and may be worth it if you're not otherwise hooked by the show, since it features a definitive ending as well as the first appearance of the show's trademark "red room" (footage from the sequence was included in a later episode in the US).

For me, the second step would either be The Elephant Man or Mulholland Dr. -- many of his works tackle very dark subject matter and include sexualized violence that can be downright disturbing to watch, but those two omit those elements. The Straight Story is much lighter, but largely lacks the surrealism Lynch is known for.

It's a jump scare that works incredibly well, yet it's shot in slow-motion and lit to full daylight, two things anathema to jump scares.

YouTube is a private entity; as long as they comply with the DMCA, they're under no obligation to take content down or even make content available (outside of contracts they enter into voluntarily). The DMCA doesn't provide strict timelines (just that the initial takedown requires the provider to "act expeditiously", and nothing for restoration).

The bigger issue is that Content ID has always been a way for YouTube to side-step the DMCA in a way that's beneficial to big copyright holders -- channel operators assume risk fighting a takedown in a way that was never a part of the DMCA.

It makes me wonder, is it possible to write something this complex in assembly today, given modern security features.

Not that you'd want to, given that OpenTTD has networked features and you'd want something that makes it easy to validate/isolate remote payloads.