loupol

> Now, Scotland is hoping to see similar outcomes when it pilots the scheme for some of its civil servants, The Times reported Sunday.

> The move, set to be unveiled by First Minister Humza Yousaf, will impact a range of departments and will reportedly run for about 12 months, the outlet said—without citing sources.

So there is no official confirmation for this yet. This would supposedly run for a year on a subset of gov workers, I guess it'll be interesting data if the scale is wide enough.

As an aside, this article only rehashes another news article[0]. Perhaps it would be better to have that as the main source instead.

[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/civil-servants-to-switch-...

It wouldn't surprise me if after an email telling them to lower their consumption, consumers would anticipate the worst and instead decide to recharge any electrical appliances reliant on batteries (Power banks, EVs, etc...) "just in case".

Bank/toilet paper rush style.

But we are a part of nature as well, and have no choice but to interact with it. There is no such thing as a perfect ecosystem equilibrium (If only because of entropy), life is constantly evolving, whether there are humans involved or not.

I understand your point and frustration though, as striving to preserve diversity (of species and ecosystems) is good because they are a valuable source of knowledge and resilience. And as a species we've done rather poorly in that regard, especially in the last century.

I feel compelled to mention the still very relevant xkcd on voting software:

https://xkcd.com/2030

Last post was made in 2019. (If you click on the name of the post it shows the timestamp at the bottom)

Blog author stated on Reddit in 2021 that he wasn't maintaining it anymore[0].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jdylxs/acciden...

PFAS non-sticking cookware is quite deadly for pet birds[0].

Teflon themselves have an article acknowledging it[1].

Now I know that our respiratory systems are much more resilient than those of birds, but out of precaution I'd still rather not be the one to test the long-term effects of cooking with those on humans.

[0] https://www.allaboutparrots.com/cookware-parrot-safe/

[1] https://www.teflon.com/en/consumers/teflon-coatings-cookware...

The dynamics at play at play are definitely similar, but not completely so.

In the prisoner's dilemma, the highest theoretical yield for each prisoner is achieved by everyone "cooperating", but that isn't really the case here.

The fixed patent fees and inadequate institutions granting them mean big companies are disproportionately able to rack up on patents and increase their yield as they "defect" and play the game. They could lobby to strongly restrict or even abolish certain types of patents but they don't have much of an interest to do so, since patents solidify their already strong position in the market.

This feels like an extremely dangerous slippery slope. The more patents on gameplay are granted, the more they'll be applied for by big companies who will eventually end up with big patent portfolios they can use to shut down other games from reusing cool mechanics, whether from big companies or indie studios.

The potential for killing off novelty entirely (or slowing it down to a trickle) in game development is definitely there long term.

This reminds of Cory Doctorow's recent essay on the trend towards owning and extracting rent on things rather than actually producing them[0].

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/

> The French had invented a new acronym: GAFA. GAFA stood for “Google Apple Facebook Amazon” and if you were a member of this group you weren’t to be trusted.

Author seems to characterize this as an unreasonable stance to have, but I personally feel like not trusting <Insert Megacorp of choice> is a pretty good default even if it's not necessary the best for all situations.

Having also used both for several months each, I feel the same way overall.

I will say that Unity has better documentation and more learning resources due to the much bigger community around it, but I still found myself reimplementing several things that felt really basic on top of the various APIs.

Unreal's documentation can be really lackluster here and there and it can be difficult to find forum posts regarding specific topics, but after digging you often a function or component that is just the thing for your needs.

Also managers that think "time spent with butt on a chair where I can see him" is a good metric for estimated productivity. But yeah you've got a ton of competing dynamics which make the problem hard.

In French, the way the word "bit" is pronounced sounds the exact same as the French word for cock (not the rooster).

I can assure you that French CS programming students get over it quickly. There's noone really asking for it to be renamed because it's understood that it's a commonly used foreign word. I'm not sure why an English professional scientist or programmer would be unable to take the same stance for a programming language invented in another country.

If I recall properly, Minetest started out as an open-source Minecraft clone hence the aesthetics.

Best looking modern voxel games I know of are Teardown[0] and Shadows of Doubt[1].

[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt/

Cosmopolitan[0] is indeed worth mentioning here. It's an amazing project.

[0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

I've definitely seen the same model used. Small company also.

From the first result I skimmed through searching Mounjaro, I would assume GP meant switching away from metformin to Mounjaro :

"...Mounjaro can be used on its own in patients who cannot take metformin (another diabetes medicine)..."

Bookmarking that for later use. It can be hard to be certain an image is truly public domain. Museum collections are nice because you're generally certain of the origin of the image.

I also found the following section ("Clearance FAQ") quite entertaining by the way.

Very comprehensive resource for someone trying to get into rom hacking in general.

The GBATEK specification [0] mentioned several times in the guide (not limited to the GBA, it also covers Nintendo DS, DSi and 3DS) feels like a real treasure trove of technical data.

[0] https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm

This is a really long read. If you want a summary the Factual rebuttal at the end and the TL;DR are good.

Really damning account regarding Id's management and Marty Stratton in particular, and it seems like he's got a rather thorough paper trail to back it up. The worst I feel is him not being paid for half the music used in game that he produced and then discredited by lies on social media, and those are things he can clearly prove with the payments that were made and legal contracts he signed.

An actual contractor horror story, this will probably make future composers be very careful when signing anything with Id Software as long as management remains the same there.

There's a 1959 Asimov short story where a futuristic government overrelying on automation realizes they can replace expensive computers driving ships and missiles with humans to save on expenditures.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

I personally understood GP comment as vindicating in favor of the law by implicitly trying to preempt those who might argue that this used to be (and should remain) private information. The counterargument it makes is that it isn't private and that the information asymmetry creates a power imbalance that would be curbed by this law. My interpretation may be wrong though, English is not my native language.

This is amazing, some of the images have an incredible sci-fi feeling to them. Current link doesn't show all of the photos, the photographer's website has some more : https://www.charlesbrooks.info/

Cool article. An excellent resource for grids of all kinds is Red Blob Games' site. It's mentioned in the article, but only with a link leading to a somewhat empty page and not this very useful one : https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/parts/

Also the blog from the book author, with visualizations and separate blog posts for several different maze generation algorithms: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorit...