Many have theorized that the MuskJet Tracker account was the biggest reason he purchased Twitter. Because Twitter refused to ban the tracker, so Musk started rumbling about buying it, in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance. Then that backfired on him when Twitter forced the sale.

There’s a huge difference between a game featuring politics as a sandbox for players to play around with, and featuring political themes as a main story driver.

Civ is a good example of the former; It has politics present in the game, but the politics aren’t presented in a hero/villain way. They’re presented as potential advantages for the player, potential disadvantages for opponents, etc, but the actual policies themselves aren’t central to the system.

The game pulls from historical political systems as a way to present them to the player, but it could just as easily forego that and call the system some made up word besides “political systems”. Because the politics and policies aren’t actually important to the gameplay; All that matters to the player is what potential benefits and drawbacks they provide. You don’t actually care if a particular civ is “democratic” or “totalitarian”, because those titles could just as easily be replaced with “A” and “B”. The only thing that matters to the player is how that particular civ’s political affiliation will affect their actions.

But if a game heavily features political themes and messages as part of a plot line, then it’s not something the player can avoid or ignore. If it’s central to the story, one side (likely the side helping the player) is inevitably going to be presented as the hero, and another side (likely the side working against the player) is going to be presented as a villain. Final Fantasy X, for instance, is a good example of the latter. It heavily features anti-religion themes and messages. It’s impossible to play through the game without receiving “religion bad” messaging, because they’re central to the game’s plot line, with religious leaders as the main villains. We can draw direct parallels to real-world examples. And if you’re someone who is religious, those parallels may make you deeply uncomfortable, because religion is being portrayed negatively no matter how you play the game.

Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

For real though, I have written some truly monstrous operations in Excel.

What do you mean you want to use Excel to manage everyone’s calendars? And now you want to export that horribly built calendar management spreadsheet to Google Calendar? What do you mean you want the Google Calendar entries automatically formatted based on who is working on a particular day? I mean yes it’s possible but-…

And every piece of code you think you write for one-time use is guaranteed to be reused every day for the next 5 years

The scheduling demand thing is referring specifically to the project manager going “we need this for an upcoming major product launch, so you need to fix this before the launch.” It feels like Microsoft cracking the whip to try getting free labor, because it is.

If they truly can’t do without it for their product launch, they can fork it and fix the bug themselves. Surely Microsoft has the resources and brainpower to do so. But the PM didn’t want to do that, because it means they’d be spending their own time and resources on it.

I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a huge fan of the story at first. It took me a few hours and a few quests to actually get into it. It suffers from Kingdom Hearts 2/The Witcher 3 Syndrome: The two hour long intro/tutorial is absolutely the worst part, which is a shame. The game really begins to shine once you get to Meridian, but that’s several hours in.

That copyright thing was never actually tested in court though, because they settled before the trial began. The “copyrighted keys” argument was what Nintendo originally used to bring the lawsuit, but it was never actually tested because it never went to trial. In fact, many legal experts say it likely would have been thrown out in Yuzu’s favor. But Yuzu didn’t have a legal fund, so they couldn’t afford to actually take it to court and fight it.

FWIW, the PlayStation was meant to have the Nintendo button layout too. In Japan, O is synonymous with “yes/good” sort of like a check mark (✅) and X means “no/bad”. So the X and O buttons were meant to be used in that way. But western game devs didn’t know that, and designed their games with X as confirm and O as decline.

Take it a step farther. Why is cheap grain available on the market? Because European import regulations were relaxed to support Ukrainian grain exports.

In case you weren’t aware, grain is one of Ukraine’s largest exports.

It’s primarily meant for people who have slow connections. If you’re downloading a game over DSL or satellite (which is often the only thing available unless you’re in an urban/suburban area) then the 5GB of extra compression could be a huge time difference. It’s also true for metered connections, where you have to pay by the GB, or where you have a data cap.

I mean, she’s never tried to hide the fact that she’s Russian. And she also hasn’t hidden the fact that she dislikes Putin. But lots of Europe is struggling right now. For instance, the farmers protesting across many parts of Europe, as a result of the war and Ukrainian exports.

I mean, the real end solution is to host your own server. Then you can federate/defederate with whoever the hell you want. As long as you don’t do anything to get banned from a specific instance, you’ll be fine.

But that’s more work than most people are willing to put into a Reddit clone.

I mean, that’ll only affect new releases. And even then, it’ll probably only affect new releases that are doing things in radically new ways. Old/current games (and even lots of new releases) will be fine to play.

Here’s a reminder that your neopets haven’t been fed in decades. You left them to starve. You monster.

Just an FYI, DMCA takedown requests will affect forks. If you’re genuinely worried about something getting taken down, you should make offline copies. So even if your fork gets nuked by the DMCA, you still have the files and can rebuild it.

He explains why it’s unlisted in the first few minutes. Basically, he knows it’s too long for the regular viewer, and plans to release a condensed version later. But for the people who may be interested in a deep dive, he made the much longer unlisted version where he has the freedom to ramble and fully explain things.

As for why it’s unlisted, it’s probably so he doesn’t get dinged by the YouTube algorithm for incomplete views. If the algorithm sees that his regular viewers are only watching the first 5 minutes of his hour long video, it’ll stop recommending his videos to them. Unlisting the video is an easy way to get around that, because only the people who are interested in it will seek it out.

Voluntary deletion won’t remove forks, but a DMCA takedown will.

Tesla routes pretty much everything through the center console. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to route the blinkers through it.

It’s because their wiring system basically just daisy chains everything together with network cable. So it’s a lot less cabling, because they aren’t running six wires for six different systems. But it also means that when one system fails, they all fail in a cascade because everything behind that system in the chain is also affected.

That’s why automakers have traditionally used individual wires for each system, because they have prioritized safety over easier wiring; You don’t want your airbags to fail just because your wipers are having an issue, for instance. So each system is essentially isolated to its own wiring.

Tesla is a good example of people not understanding why things are done a certain way. Elon just saw modern wiring harnesses and went “lol that’s dumb just use network cables.” And on the surface it sounds fine, because it’s less wiring. But it fails to understand why each system is wired independently. And now Teslas have frequent issues with cascading system failures.