Just a mistake I think. Americans are so steeped in gun culture that when they hear calibur, their brain goes immediately to gun calibers. Autocorrect also might play a role.

Might be talking about the United States specifically. IIRC the constitution denies individual states the right to mint coin or issue bills of credit, that is a prerogative of the federal government.

The numbers are different because the site doesn’t naively count every line but merges some as a single package. For example, at the very top of the Debian list we have 0ad, 0ad-data, 0ad-data-common. These are all counted as one single “package.”

One might argue that doing the comparison in that way is more useful to an average user asking “which distribution has more software available.”

They say that because https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/total says so. Debian unstable has 38k packages according to that page.

Come on. The way humans behave in groups is certainly part of human nature. And when we’re talking about solving problems of a society, it is the most relevant part.

What I’m hearing you say is, we can solve our own problems, we just need human nature to be different. Which, well… Good luck.

This isn’t about phones. It’s mainly about cameras recording 4k/8k video, and devices such as the steamdeck storing lots of games.

Written on 1 April 1998. definitely a joke, though it does work.

The result is that you buy either Honey or Syrup, you know what you get, and you get what you pay for.

You would think so, but the EU did an investigation back in 2022 and found that almost half of all honey imported into the EU is (illegally) blended with sugar syrup. If you’re buying honey labeled as a blend of EU and non-EU honey (which is almost all honey available on supermarket shelves) there’s a large chance you’re buying a sugar blend.

Current officially sanctioned honey tests are not capable of detecting fake honey. New testing methodology has been agreed upon as a result, but it will take a few years until those are internationally recognised.

If you want to be certain that what you’re buying is real honey, the only real option is to buy directly from a local producer.

at some point some proto-chicken ancestor laid an egg that was different enough genetically that it counts as a chicken. In other words, a non-chicken laid a chicken egg

This is incorrect. If I take an ostrich egg, empty it out through a small hole, then put a chicken fetus inside, it does not suddenly become a chicken egg. We must therefore conclude that “chicken egg” can only reasonably be defined as an egg laid by a chicken.

The proto-chicken ancestor can never lay a chicken egg, it can at most lay a proto-chicken egg which by some mutation contains a chicken. Therefore the chicken came first.

Shin Ramyun black is a superior instant noodle IMO. Though personally I really like Samyang buldak hot chicken noodle.

I like to add a soft boiled egg and some sliced spring onion.

This is called a tray bake, and it’s great. I recommend chucking some (chopped) vegetables in with it: tomatoes on the vine, carrots, broccoli, asparagus, Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, onion, garlic… Limitless possibilities.

You can also do this with salmon (gotta be a bit more careful with timing on that). Or bacon. Or do sweet potato, or pumpkin.

The number varies a little bit (I’ve seen estimates 600-1200 kWh) but this is well within an order of magnitude of being correct. It’s the nature of the competitive mining network and the proof of work system: if you can spend more computing power (i.e. energy) than everyone else there are lucrative mining rewards to be had. At the same time adding more computing power to the network doesn’t add more transaction processing power, because mining difficulty is constantly adjusted to keep the speed more or less constant.

This naturally leads to exorbitant power consumption per transaction. Note that most of this power is not being purchased at EU exchange prices (mining naturally moves to where electricity can be had for cheap to maximize profits).

Firefox has the same problem with V3, it has nothing to do with the browser, adblocker V2 will stop working, because are the advertising companies wich will use V3 scripts.

What the hell are you talking about? This has nothing to do with what advertising companies do.

The main reason adblockers don’t like manifest V3 is that the webRequest API is gone. The proposed replacement, declarativeNetRequest, does not have the same functionality.

It’s not that deep. Here’s the two main critiques leveled towards the game in the article.

• you don’t always know the consequences of your actions, and they’re not always predictable: a seemingly sensible choice sometimes ends badly, and a seemingly dumb choice could get you a reward
• you can load a save and redo your things whenever you want, i.e. save-scum

These are both somewhat obvious just from the structure of the game. Ultimately the conclusion the author is shooting for is that this makes Baldur’s Gate 3 a bad game but a good piece of interactive fiction.

The author uses the mechanics of chess often as sort of an example of the pinnacle of game design which to me is telling. Video Games are much broader than that. Insisting that people should not call the thing you don’t like a game but instead “interactive fiction” is pedantry at best, and gatekeeping at worst.

Sure, if you view the game through the lens of chess you will come away with these flaws. But for example, if you always knew the consequences of every choice the narrative tension would be destroyed. Of course chess has no such concern, so if we’re looking at games through that lens then narrative tension is of no value. Ultimately I think this is just a very narrow viewpoint of what games should be.

I think there’s a group of people who are just going to avoid quality completely and have entire factories running at normal quality only. Kinda similar to how some people don’t really do nuclear.

If you don’t like the concept of going into space though maybe this expansion is not for you. I think the base game will get the bot upgrades for free anyways.

Sony and Microsoft do this yeah, but I’m pretty sure Nintendo consoles are sold at a profit.

At will employment is really the crux that erodes all other possibilities of strong worker rights. In most European nations, firing employees functions on a sort of whitelist principle. You may not fire your employee except in one of this specific set of situations. This also puts a burden of proof on the company to demonstrate cause for dismissal. The situation in (most of) the US is more like a blacklist: all reasons for firing an employee are valid except for this specific set of situations. Now the burden of proof is on the employee, to show his situation was part of the blacklist.

If any (or) no reason for dismissal is a valid reason, it takes the tooth out of any worker’s rights law you might seek to enforce. If you cause trouble for the company you can simply be fired (for “no reason” of course). Yes, that’s technically illegal, and you can sue and/or contact the department of labor. They now have to investigate and find proof that you were fired for an illegal reason. Whether you get justice now depends on whether the department of labor is adequately funded, how good (expensive) your lawyer is, how well the company covered their tracks…

This is why many people in the US complain that “they have labor laws, the main problem is lack of enforcement!” The structure of the system is such that good enforcement is required for workers to benefit, but businesses benefit from bad enforcement.

How could you learn anything about what people think of microtransactions from the success of a game that doesn’t have them? If a beloved franchise added a sequel with microtransactions in it and that sequel tanked, then maybe you’d have a case. From the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 the most you could conclude is “people will still buy a game that doesn’t have microtransactions,” which is not particularly revelatory.

A bunch of AAA games that heavily feature microtransactions are smash hits and made millions of dollars. Sure, people complain about it, but they also purchase tons of them (may not be the same people, mind you). I’m pretty sure we can conclude that not all people hate microtransactions. Hell, publishers will look at Baldur’s Gate 3 and probably go “man, this game is good but if they put some paid cosmetics in there they could have made even more money.”

And it’s probably true.

If a great game like Elden ring would’ve had cosmetic sets you could buy, would it have undermined the “greatness” of the game? I really don’t see it happening.

I agree with you that people mainly care about the game being good. However a game’s budget is more or less fixed. If From had made a bunch of cosmetic sets it would be taking away resources from making the “main” game, and it may not have been as great and polished as it is.

Also, once you have microtransactions in a game, there’s going to be a temptation to maximize the revenue gained from them, which can lead to the aggressive strategies you mention.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to do mtx without ruining the game, but it’s difficult. Without mtx, the only thing you have to maximize your revenue is to make the game as good as possible, and so everyone involved in the game’s development is aligned towards that goal.

Once you add mtx, there will be people involved whose main goal is to maximize revenue from the mtx (and I’m not saying those people are evil or want the game to be bad; they’re just doing their job). And so a sort of tug of war starts to happen between devoting resources and design decisions to make the game better, or getting people to buy your cosmetics. Finding the right balance through that mess is difficult.