Not since 2020 when Mozilla laid them off. They are now with the Linux Foundation Europe and they accept donations.

We don’t understand all the mechanisms behind obesity in humans but we know that:

• It is often caused by hormonal imbalances (particularly GLP-1) causing the brain to feel more hungry than necessary
  • The causes for those imbalances are not known for sure (!) but GLP-1 agonists counteract them all the same
• Forcing oneself to eat less will work to lose weight but requires a truly disproportionate amount of willpower compared to a healthy adult. The long-standing myth that fat people have purely psychological issues has been extremely damaging, both on a personal and human level but also to the state of research on the matter which for the longest time did not receive funding for that unsubstantiated reason
• Dieting causes side-effects such as slowed metabolism and chronic fatigue as the body mistakenly thinks hungry = need to save energy. On top of the mental strain of feeling hungry all the time for the rest of your life which many formerly obese people can attest to. All of which affects quality of life and can make the side-effects of GLP-1 agonists pale in comparison.

Now I don’t know how well all that translates to cats, but I would not be surprised if the obesity epidemic in humans had environmental causes that were affecting other mammals in similar ways. And it would make sense that for the worst-affected, GLP-1 agonists would be a better way to manage this hormonal imbalance than forcing the poor kitty feel absolutely famished all day long to maintain a barely healthy weight.

I will let professionals decide when an obesity case is better treated with strict portion control vs GLP-1 agonists, but the least we can do is avoid blanket statements on the management of the complex and badly understood mechanisms of hunger control and weight gain.

One thing people who don’t build products tend to imagine is that PMs are constantly doing market research, data analysis, focus groups, etc.

That may be true at some companies, but IME they can be clueless beyond belief because their real job is to be salespeople. They sell dreams to executives. Whether those will actually sell is a much lower concern.

See also: AI being shoved down everyone’s throats.

That’s one area where you can see it is indie despite the large development cost.

They were published by Kepler Interactive and for some markets Bandai Namco. Neither of which have Ubisoft or EA’s marketing budget which normally makes up something like half of the development budget of a game.

They did have some marketing. I know a lot of French streamers were paid to play the game on launch. But yeah not “in your face for 6 months in front of every YouTube video and inside every happy meal box” like a new assassin’s creed or something.

The category is misnamed. It should be best single A game from an independent studio.

Technically Sandfall is an independant studio. A very well privately funded independant studio founded by industry veterans supported by a great publisher. But no-one is arguing that other games published by Kepler Interactive aren’t independant. And with 30-ish full-time employees Sandfall’s scale is that of an SME, not an Ubisoft/EA/Sony.

The award doesn’t feel right because this middleweight AA category was completely abdandoned the previous decade (which legacy studios are now paying a heavy price for), and “indie” came to mean “single A” because if the material conditions of being an independant company.
At the same time though technological advancements enabled small teams to take on larger and larger projects. “Indie” does not mean what it used to, and Clair Obscur is trailblazing this AA renewal. Award shows simply need to adapt and start restricting entry based on team size or something.

Same, and I’m not well-versed into the neurology of it all but I think it’s something way worse than the symptoms of ADHD.

Five seconds is well within my attention span. I forget everything the minute I open a door or open a new tab, but this ain’t that. I can watch something in silence, my brain distracts itself, that’s kind of the whole problem. This though? This is about promising an impending dopamine hit to a restless junkie who was about to scroll down for a quicker hit.

No, scratch that. This is about the video editor constructing a strawman of that restless junkie, pandering to that, followed by a (proto-)fascist algorithm eeking out every last bit of video retention from its users for maximum profit. Even if 95 % of users don’t actually need the countdown to keep watching, and the 5 % remaining really should not be using that app for their mental well-being, the algorithm will mercilessly incentivize creators to put in the countdown.

Since legislating algorithmic attention-hoarding doesn’t sem likely to hit the political docket anytime soon, the only winning move is not to play.

My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.

I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.

So… Cotton/Linen/Wool? The technology is fine, its only downside in most applications is simply cost. Cotton clothes are more comfortable, less stinky, less polluting, and won’t fuse with your skin and disfigure you for life if they accidentally catch on fire. On top of not making microplastics soup every wash cycle.

If we cared to actually solve the problem of plastics in fast fashion we could ban them, with some exceptions for sportswear and shoes where synthetics have some actually useful uses. Hell, we could even make it an easy transition by gradually pulling back the allowable synthetic content for x years.

But it would directly kneecap Shein and H&M’s business model so we have to weigh all the pros against that.

Comparing US statistics to Dutch ones makes no sense. Their roads are several times more deadly than European ones regardless of vehicle.

Furthermore not all of their states have mandatory helmets (!) whereas over here it’s rare to see someone missing something other than pants. Except scooters, scooter riders are under the impression that they don’t ride a motorcycle and that flip-flops are appropriate apparel.

Then there’s a lot you can do as a motorcyclist to mitigate risk. Riding safely is one (not everyone seems capable of that, there’s quite a spread in riding behaviors, but also an obvious bias in which ones you’ll remember seeing on your commute). A strict no-alcohol policy is another, and not riding at night on weekends. You can also wear extra safety gear such as a high-vis airbag.

Also licensing requirements. Oh and American motorcycles don’t have to be equipped with ABS. They be crazy over there.

Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world’s DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren’t aware they were both signing up for it.

That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn’t an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

In my local experience, these are actually just profoundly incompetent. Hanlon’s razor.

They tailgate because they are actually incapable of maintaining a following distance (you know the kind, when the road is empty they alternate between mashing the gas and driving well under the speed limit, and somehow if you’re a passenger they’re totally unaware that they are doing it even if they are not distracted, how it is possible to be this bad at gauging speed and distance I do not understand but these people do exist).

Then as their malfunctioning brain randomly processes that they want to go faster, they overtake, and since the lane is clear they mash the gas.

Then when they are done and they merge back, their brain performs a hard reset and they somehow drive slower than before they passed you. They do not notice. You pass them, and they are not looking distracted; the only explanation is that their brain is doing the simpsons-monkey-cymbals.gif.

1. Buy more dishes so you can go longer between washes
2. Buy a half-height dishwasher. They exist, I owned one that lived on the floor of my bathroom.

I live alone and I fill up my full size dishwashers every few days. If you don’t eat ordered/preprocessed food you can also just chuck pots and pans in the bottom rack.

Dishwashers use a lot less water than hand-washing. Even if there’s a little bit of room left, it’s still a net positive. There’s no reason for anyone to hand-wash unless they live in a tiny NYC broom closet or exclusively eat take-out in disposable containers.

The punishment must fit the crime. Minimum sentence in Canada for a DUI is apparently 1000 rupees and 12 months driving prohibition. That punishment makes sense for the crime of negligently operating heavy machinery that can and does kill thousands every year. Not for operating light low-power electric vehicles where killing a third-party is only a remote (though real) possibility. That minimum sentence being applied equally is not just when the danger posed to society is so unequal. I would also expect a truck driver to have a higher minimum sentence for the same reasons.

On top of the justice concerns, if the punishment is the same for everyone, a drunk college dickhead who would have ridden a bicycle home (still a reprehensible crime mind you) might decide to drive their car instead if they feel like they’re less likely to get caught and it would be punished the same anyway. Especially as cases like this get media attention.

That’s the pitfall with blind and strict rules, if I know I’ll be getting expelled from school for getting punched by a bully, then I’m incentivized to cave their face in before the grown-ups get here.

So happy to see the game is not dead.

Combat and movement look fun and satisfying, graphics look amazing. So many moody areas, from gritty snowscape to colorful caves. Mojang could learn a thing or five from this trailer.

I do hope there will be more breadth of gameplay especially on the creative side so those promising exploration mechanics do not feel stale after a few hours of running around and blasting skeletons. That’s one thing mojang does get right, if anything they have too much breadth and not enough depth.

Not sure about the ease of movement when scaling multiple blocks. Figuring it how to get from point A to point B with the limited movement options is a core part of most Minecraft gameplay loops, especially when caving and/or fighting. Seems they made up for it with good fighting mechanics, but they will have to make up for it in the other gameplay loops as well.

Either way I wish them the best and hope they light a fucking fire underneath mojang’s ass.

EDIT:

This is the original legacy engine from the 2018 trailer, running on a four-year-old build as we push Hytale forward again.

Now hold the fuck up. What do you mean this is the 2018 engine? What the fuck have they been doing the past 7 years? Did they rewrite a whole new engine for no good reason? It looks fucking beautiful and seems to run great! I’m sure they had their reasons, and I don’t think we can draw accurate conclusions by speculating, but the insider perspective on the development cycle must be absolutely wild.

EDIT2: Okay their blog post explains quite a bit more. Seems to paint a picture that Riot wanted the engine to be cross-platform (makes sense for consoles) and they could not make it work with a full rewrite away from their otherwise functional Java/C# engine. Kind of a crazy play on Riot’s part to make Java/C# devs and former minecraft modders write a modern game engine from scratch in C++ if that’s the case. Probably a tough lesson to learn for everyone involved. If only they could learn from an incredibly popular voxel-based building/aventure game that went through the exact same engine rewrite away from a GC VM language and faced similar struggles.

As a PC player, great news that they’re sticking to .NET and Java. It will make modding much easier.

I don’t think that’s really fair. There are cranky contradictarians everywhere, but in my experience that feature has been well received even in the AI-skeptic tech circles that are well educated on the matter.

Besides, the technical “concerns” are only the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that people complaining about AI often fall back to those concerns because they can’t articulate how most AI fucking sucks to use. It’s an eldtritch version of clippy. It’s inhuman and creepy in an uncanny valley kind of way, half the time it doesn’t even fucking work right and even if it does it’s less efficient than having a competent person (usually me) do the work.

Auto translation or live transcription tools are narrowly-focused tools that just work, don’t get in the way, and don’t try to get me to talk to them like they are a person. Who cares whether it’s an LLM. What matters is that it’s a completely different vibe. It’s useful, out of my way when I don’t need it, and isn’t pretending to have a first name. That’s what I want from my computer. And I haven’t seen significant backlash to that sentiment even in very left-wing tech circles.

Honestly, PCs are not ready for local LLMs

The auto-translation LLM runs locally and works fine. Not quite as good as deepl but perfectly competent. That’s the one “AI” feature which is largely uncontroversial because it’s actually useful, unobtrusive, and privacy-enhancing.

Local LLMs (and related transformer-based models) can work, they just need a narrow focus. Unfortunately they’re not getting much love because cloud chatbots can generate a lot of incoherent bullshit really quickly and that’s a party trick that’s got all the CEOs creaming their pants at the ungrounded fantasy of being just another trillion dollars away from AGI.

Game preservation. The fact that Sony is scrambling to DMCA videos of this preservation effort is proof that it is not just a forgettable turd, it’s a historical landmark.

Much like ET for the Atari 2600, Concord is and will remain a case study for the downfall of the big game studios in the 2020s.

For systems programming it makes the most sense out of the languages you mentioned. Languages requiring a runtime (Java/Python) do not fill the bill for system tools IMO. Golang is more arguable, but its memory safety comes through GC which many systems programmers aren’t fans of for a variety of technical and personal reasons.

Rust is meant to be what C++ would be if it were designed today by opiniated system developers and didn’t have to be backwards-compatible.

Those are the technical arguments I would use in a corporate setting.

All that aside, there’s personal preference, and my point is that for FOSS projects that matters too. Rust is fun in a brain-teasy kind of way in the same way that writing C is fun, but without nearly as many footguns. Golang is practical but arguably not as fun. That’s the same logic that draws many programmers to write Haskell projects.

The story of the Fish shell illustrates it quite well; the project gained a lot of development attention and contributions when they decided to rewrite from C++ to Rust, where they achieved a stable release with feature-parity a few months ago. It would have been a remarkably dumb decision for a private company to make, but makes perfect sense when you are trying to attract free talent.

The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.

If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.

[Pop/rock] music has been a formula virtually since its inception. Respectfully, AC/DC put out some bangers but also all their songs kinda sound the same. Thriller was successful because it was written specifically to be the most commercially viable album of all time. Hell even in the '60s the formula was very simply “find out what’s topping the African-American charts and get white artists to copy it”. That’s how we got disco, which became so formulaic by the end that its “downfall” was a Worldwide Cultural Moment. If you think today’s music is bad, go listen to the top 100 disco hits of any random week in 1978… Probably not going to be a particularly great musical experience.

Every successful counter-cultural movement only lasts a few years before only the esthetic remains. Angry young artists “flame out” or sell out, corpos take over, make a safer formula out of it, and only then does the genre go mainstream.

I’d argue things are actually a lot better now than they were in the Disco era. The fragmentation of culture and slow downfall of linear media means that the formulaic stuff can be much more easily avoided, and it doesn’t reach nearly the same level of cultural saturation like it did when the radio was the main way to listen to music. The top charts are still relevant, but nowhere near what they were 20 years ago. Today anyone can pick up a DAW and be their own producer then self-publish to youtube, so who cares if the labels are led by uninspired fuckheads? They’re not in a position to bottleneck music production or audience reach anymore.