f1refly

Not according to my experiences. Most of my tooling is high end and the company I work for lets us order from brands of our choice, which lead to a fairly broad range of competing products across the workbenches here. I have never seen even once a case where a chinese high end product surpasses or even comes close to its japanese counterpart.

Again, you say that like it's a fact. Gentlemens agreements can be broken with everyone. Low key bullying or lying about is not acceptable for anyone for gentlemen. You seem to have a misunderstanding what "gentlemen agreement" means. It's not limited to upper class men, or men at all. Everyone can have gentlemens agreements with anyone, it means "two or more people who implicitly agree on a thing".

> Those "gentleman's agreements" were not that great if you happened to be a woman, gay or any other minority.

You just say that like it's a fact, but... why would that be the case?

There shouldn't be any reason for on-demand to be bad for the swarm, given that the downloading node continues to seed afterwards, no? If the user can watch the content because it's downloaded on-demand and automatically lets it stay on the drive until a ratio has been reached, isn't it win-win for both sides?

If you are too weak to admit this is important to you, just go the "it's broken" route.

> but I can imagine how frustrating it would be if someone called and I didn't have my headset.

"Sorry, I don't have a headset right now, we'll have to talk later". It's not that "frustrating", really.

> My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me.

I think this is a common sensation to many who have trained playing an instrument enough. I get into that state every now and then when playing something on my guitar, it's like I can curiously observe my fingers pick out the melody I want to play, without thinking about or taking much conscious action in it.

>Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you cannot alter?

Hmmmm

> there wasn't even anything of note found out because they were either shit at documenting "experiments" or the "experiments" were just the personal dreams of sadistic "doctors".

As far as I know pretty much all we know about the effects of exposure to cold temperatures from frostbite to eventual death was found in Japanese and German prison camps in WW2. Quite reasonably so, I imagine it to be hard to find volunteering participants for a study where the proposal is "we'll freeze you to death".

I've used android phones since I've had modern smartphones and I've had a similar experience. The built in keyboard by google/aosp was always flaky and, especially on small screens, a pain to use. I'll describe my keyboard journey and what ups and owns I experienced on android here:

After using the built in keyboard for a while came swipe-typing and it was a lot better, but still limiting. To this day I believe that swipe-typing still hasn't reached its full potential, but the keyboards that focused on it seem to gravitate back towards hybrid regular typing and swiping which in my opinion removes many advantages it had before, making continuous use somewhat awkward.

The next step in my keyboard journey was fleksy. Fleksy was built much like the apple keyboard, in that the keyboard would look where exactly you pressed (not only the key you actually hit) and try to correlate the most likely word from that, powered by a a personal word frequency statistic lookup. It worked so well that they introduced an "invisible keyboard" mode which did exactly what it said on the box, and even without visible keyboard it would work almost perfectly, that's how good their system was. The other controls where designed around their algorithm, it was highly encouraged to, instead of correct something inside of a word, just delete everything and re-write, much like you'd do on a computer where it's much faster to just ^w^w^w^w then to go back and correct that one letter. In addition, they had gestures to cycle through the other likely predicted words their engine determined from your touches.

Unfortunately, fleksy had trouble raking in money and so the nice thing they had went the way every piece of venture capital software goes, which is down the drain. They began adding ever more things that began nagging away at their core competency until at some point they ventured to a joint ios/android app, a total rewrite. At that point they also introduced machine learning and made away with their previous engine, lowering the prediction quality noticably.

It was at that point that I decided to switch to another app and went f-droid only, because if fleksy would've been free software I could've just taken the source and maintain it myself whenever google decided to break an api it uses.

Currently I use florisboard, a fork of the aosp keyboard with some changes like the swipe behaviour of the space bar and selective deletion using backspace swiping. It's not fancy, typing hurts sometimes, but at least it doesn't try to be smart. Software that tries to be smart and fails is much worse than software that doesn't try.

So suppose you go out and about and a Microsoft representative punches you in the face. Now, the Microsoft representative has a billion dollar corporation backing him, willing to defend him at all cost through every institution, while you're just John Doe who went on a trip.

If you ever went on a hike but never intended to sue anyone. Why did you go out in the first place?

If you did and someone is able to punch you in the face without any lasting damage, without reputation loss, and via a way they have access to the myriad legal defenses you couldn't come up with if you tried, after you sued them.

How is that game over?

Just because someone corporation is, because of its sheer size, over the law (as far as a John Doe is concerned anyways), does that make it a right? We could probably do away with laws at that point and just accept getting punched in the face by Microsoft whenever they feel like it as the new reality.

I just got a license because it improved my life tremendously, but I can see that 70$ is a hefty price for individuals.

You'd usually look up stuff like that with a shot in the dark into the fuzzy-searching command bar, I believe it's available with ctrl+shift+p? It's been a while since I've used sublime.

I highly doubt that the average mac can play half life alyx at acceptable performance levels. Aren't most of them laptops with integrated gpu?

It should be that easy, I myself went from Debian to Arch in the past an it just worked. The Arch install process will probably take more like 20 minutes if you do it for the first time though.

In the city? Maybe. In rural areas you'll get nowhere without a car, it's highly desirable.

I think you're getting downvoted because the solution to your issue was one "why does my bluray look grainy" search away, yet you chose to stay uninformed on purpose and complained about it in a public forum without understanding the mechanics.

Anything to do with nvidia is a pain and that's nvidias fault.

I don't understand why you'd think requiring a phone number would fix any of this. The incentives are still against you. I still play games occasionally and I deeply understand the frustration when the two hours you can afford to play in a week are utterly ruined intentionally by a thirteen year old child not getting his way. Your misjudgement is that the game company would eventually ban those accounts or at least only let you play against nice players after you've accumulated enough trust. Riot, for example, once said that they have all the data to only match the horrible, toxic people against each other and let everyone else have a great time, but they will never implement it in their system. All of those toxic players have a massive amount of value to them because of the money they spent, pooling them against each other would tank engagement and thus sales. So while you might be disincentived to play their game because of your past experiences, you're worth less to the company than the 10% ruining every other game for you.

In my opinion valve fixed this problem a lot better with their counter strike lobby system. In that game, you can mark yourself "searching" like in other competitve games, but you have the option to not be thrown into a round directly but to have other players invite you to their team. You can then check their profiles and chat with them a bit to see what kind of people they are. Games that where ruined by my own team have become so rare that they can neglected when planning my evening, which has become the most important reason for me to start counter strike instead of other competitive games.

There might be other options to improve the average match experience that I'm not aware of, but essentially outsourcing the player base moderation to the players in question seems like the best option I've encountered yet.

Get a different machine. Any will do. Go to a recycling center and buy one for twenty bucks. Check whatever the equivalent of craigslist is in your area. Ask if someone has a computer in the basement he discarded in 2005. Then take that machine and experiment with it. In my opinion it's important that you don't have any fears while tinkering, which you'll inevitably have when risking the ruin of your work manchine and the loss of your data. When you installed the distro you wanted to try, use the machine as a media box. When you run into issues, fix them. Then repeat. You'll figure out the system naturally.

My local game store began hosting Pauper games, which is an eternal format where only common cards are allowed. Due to the age of some of the legal cards it can still get "expensive", but top meta decks can be bought for about 50€ including sleeves. It's a great way to make the game accessible for everyone.

So it's the best kind of laptop available on the market!

How is is not illegal? The details are basically "PII EU resident data cannot be given to companies falling under legislation of governments not following due process regarding access of PII belonging to those residents" + "The US government regards itself above anything else and does not follow due process when accessing PII of EU citicens stored on premise of companies falling under its legislation" => "EU law does not allow transfer of EU residents PII to US companies". There's no "proper procedures" when it comes to protecting data stored by US companies from the US government.

It's illegal to transfer PII to microsoft under GDPR though, so wouldn't it be like setting up a minefield for your employees to consciously choose ms teams for daily communications?

Two other examples I can think of are Pokémon (the fifth edition I believe?) on the Nintendo Gameboy where the game will blend the low hp warning beeps into the music when it gets into the critical zone, but then quickly fade it into the background so it won't be annoying. In Nitronic Rush, the predecessor to Distance, the music will adapt to how cut down the players car is and in what mode it is. Flying, driving upside down and on walls will all introduce their own instrument mix.

Disappointingly, the successors of both games didn't feature those mechanics.

> they could try innovation and producing consumer hostile stalking conglomarates of their own

yes, they could do that. The core business is illegal though, so I imagine it to be rather hard.

Spying on every living being without repercussion?

Lower decks is okayish in the sense that it can only be watched if you enjoy (or tolerate, for that matter) high school humor. I'm regularly meeting with friends, we currently watch Voyager and sometimes shove in an episode of lower decks here and there when it's getting late. It's alienating everyone enough to take a long break afterwards. The characters are all hyperactive and constantly screaming, including the senior officers, most episodes feature or are about shit, piss or sex in some way. It's good in the sense that it doesn't throw away everything you like about the older series and try to ruin them retroacticely like Picard did. That doesn't make it a good series though.

I threw away all dedicated presentation software during trade school and now use LaTeX with the beamer class for everything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)

It's simply amazing not to think about layouts anymore. I write what comes to my mind, include figures like I'd do with every other document and get a sleek presentation in minutes.

A classic United States moment.