DavidNielsen

I really enjoy The Diplomat, which is also widely praised for the acting and writing. Aside that there are a number of great cooking and foodie shows on Netflix.

Add to this that double glazing and isolation are non-existent, then a lot of energy is wasted.

They are pretty to look at and help prevent soil erosion, so by all means, plant more trees, preferably native species, just don’t claim it will solve climate change.

I feel like the magnificent Frank Krueger’s recent effort to use ML for the purpose of translating cuneiform are relevant in this context.

https://praeclarum.org/2023/06/09/cuneiform.html

If you are doing flood control, given the somewhat swampy nature of the surroundings, then having a lot of trees would make sense to keep things dry. They would also help keep things cool during the height of summer, so it is not unthinkable that they would have nurtured a lot of them as part of the city.

Knowing Apple, it is likely to only work on certain devices, especially if they are aiming to be on device, as is their preference for privacy and likely latency reasons, so it will likely be Siri Pro or Siri+

Both games are classics, Indy 4 is one of my favorite games of all time.

Absolutely, but precision was also a bit of a problem for the text based games. I remember Space Quest was the king of this, requiring frequent saving to make it past certain sections where a single accidental button press could cause you to fall off a ledge or step on something that just killed you.

If you, say have a movement disorder, this happens all too often.

Still I have so many great memories of Sierra’s games from my childhood that I can’t bring myself to hate all the foibles.

And that will teach me to proof read, if I recall correctly then this was Larry 3 and it accepted both putting an air sick bag inside a spray can and the can inside the bag, the latter being the correct answer. It has been more than 2 decades since I last played the old Sierra games, so I might be misremembering, but it was all part of a really worrying suitcase bomb disposal puzzle near the end.

Don’t ask me how Larry stuffed the bag inside the can, but there was the same animation and everything. I remember being extremely frustrated with that, since the Sierra games are otherwise quite flexible in terms of accepting input. This was also why it was useful for learning English, since you could tell it things like ‘look item’ rather than requiring it to be “look at item’ and so on.

So I really loathed those cases where you had to be super precise, since they felt immediately off compared to the rest of the game.

Regardless good times, I think the best Sierra game of that era is Space Quest 3, which had some decent puzzles, a fun story and a hero I really liked.

I learned English playing Leisure Suit Larry when I was about 6, with a dictionary next to me, painstakingly translating everything. This turned into a lifelong love of adventure games, with the Space Quest games being an especially fond memory. This was also how I learned the difference between ‘make knife sharp’ and ‘sharpen knife’, or ‘put can in bag’ versus ‘put can in bag’ (the latter of which actually worked if I recall correctly, with Larry stuffing the spray can and then dying, which frustrated me to no end for ages. I always kinda thought that this is more in the style of what an educational game should be like, exploring with aids and the tasks being somewhat unforgiving, at least that worked really well for me.

Something proudly declaring itself powered by Malwarize, that sounds comforting.

He had 99 problems, but an heir ain’t one?

Bird Bash QA engineering.

You magnificent beast, I nearly spewed my tea halfway across the room. That is just chef’s kiss perfection.

I feared the same thing but Panic assured me via Twitter that Coda for iOS isn’t dead. Of course this might not mean that they are not abandoning the old app rather than bringing the new one to iOS. I remain hopeful.

https://twitter.com/panic/status/1105999898208419840

Upgrade to GNOME 3.32 which shipped fractional scaling

https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.32/

I’d be sad if Apple stopped selling their chargers, primarily because with their engineering I’m pretty sure I get a safe well engineered product, whereas 3rd parties can display both lower quality and some really concerning cost cutting measures.

http://www.righto.com/2016/03/counterfeit-macbook-charger-te... http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pr...

Sure one could then find reputable vendors, the Apple ecosystem has quite a few but most people would more than likely get the cheapest one from Amazon and sadly some of those products carry some serious safety risks.

I like that Apple has their own offering which one can feel confident in using. It is also nice to see that they will walk away from a design such as AirPower if they realize they cannot ship it to the standard which should be required for power delivery. At it’s base such a product should at least be easy to use and safe.

To the point of less wear. My iPhone 5’s Lightening port still works just fine but the phone itself needs replacing. My perfectly usable iPad Air however now has a Lightening port which is so worn out that I need to engage in a voodoo ritual of supporting the cable with a matchbox to ensure sufficient contact and _just_ the right angle to get it charging... then walk away carefully so as to not disturb the tech spirits.

I’ve warmed significantly to wireless charging just because of that, and the lowered charging speed wouldn’t be a problem since I could leave devices overnight on the AirPower mat. I was especially excited about the proposed design of AirPower because precise placement wasn’t needed. I could easily imagine that making it much more handy than precisely aligning everything in the dark when putting away my iPad.

I rather enjoyed reading the adventure of hitting a problem in a large system, and then working towards narrowing down the specific bug or set of bugs.

Such posts have in the past been super helpful for me personally (and to others I imagine), in going from plain weeping that stuff just randomly breaks, to learning to enjoy examining the possible causes and understanding how to explain the problem concisely and with enough detail to make it useful to a developer.

He’ll be able to reuse much of his blog post in an great bug report with easy steps to reproduce the problem, excepted and actual outcomes of following those steps, and a scenario where it will happen in real deployments as well as a providing a workaround.

I suspect it’s more that Carmack isn’t one to reminisce to the same degree as Romero. Romero clearly makes games because he loves playing them, whereas Carmack does so as a technical challenge. For Romero, Doom is a highlight of his life for emotional reasons, Carmack, on the other hand, mostly seems to view a game being fun as an unnecessary side effect of it being technically impressive.

They are different types of people, and they both are probably adults at this point, at least sufficiently to acknowledge that their common ground is having a beer and discussing cool new stuff once in a while rather than the style of friendship which would involve being willing to take a bullet for one another. If their interests intersect then they can talk and be excited but those points are too fewer to call it a deep friendship. It is mutual appreciation of technology and cool stuff.

I would not read into it that they are unfriendly though, just that the type of friendship is bounded by interests and passions and I doubt either one has hard feelings about the past.

People tend to be deeply attached to seeing their family and friends, so the mere hint that the reality of such laws could be purposely weaponizing those emotions is nothing shy of vicious. As a Dane who lives in Brazil I’d be devastated if I had to choose between the ability to see my family once a year or my ideals. It would tear me apart. To not be 100% sure I could go to my parents should one of them fall gravely ill e.g. would be heartbreaking.

I mean I love you people and I believe you are entitled to freedom, privacy and security but that is not a choice I’d make lightly. I do not envy Australian developers right now, not only is their marketability severely reduced, the emotional cost of taking a stand can be downright crushing to the spirit.

This is just.. evil. There is no other word for it.

The husband of noted game developer Brenda Romero is doing fine. By all accounts, he is selling his old treasures mostly for nostalgia reasons. He has fond memories of those times developing Doom and he wants to share those pieces of gaming history. Plus at a certain age you just realize that you have stuff cluttering up your attic which is doing you no good but still has value to others.

His company Romero Games Ltd. has had at least one big hit in recent years, Gunman Taco Truck, which by all accounts made a nice little profit. I believe he also occasionally lectures in Ireland on game design.

From everything I gather, John is happy, healthy and wealthy enough to be able to devote the odd few hours to a passion project which is dear to his heart. He loves Doom something fierce and given both the impact it had on society and the period of his life developing it took place it, it is hard imagine how he wouldn’t have it occupy a special place.

In fairness to Apple they are these days quite the Open Source company. Their main language is fully open source in every sense the word. You can get large parts of their base OS under an acceptable license as well as their stack, much of which is developed in the open or work is open sourced as Apple is able to. Of course they will keep back OSS code if it means making a big splash at a presentation but I don’t think that is a bad thing as such, who would deny them a bit of theatre.

They also do a lot of tech blogging on their Open source code, especially the Safari and WebKit team have some excellent posts regularly.

Sure they have proprietary magic in there but it is not as big a part of the pie as people imagine, and certainly less than in years past.

The same is true for Microsoft, who now famously aims to be the biggest Open Source company in the world (having acquired GitHub, Xamarin and many others, as well as made partners and friends out of enemies of the past, to help them on that journey).

In fact I can’t think of a single major company in the business which hasn’t embraced Open Source to some degree. I don’t think that the Apple strategy of controlling the entire experience means what it used to anymore. It doesn’t mean locking you in to just one way of doing things, we now know that we need the compiler, tools and stack to be available and truly free, as a bare minimum for this to work and experience shows that the more work we share, in general, the better an experience we can present to users and developer.

Open Source has won, all these companies taking on designing their own chips, datacenters, OSes, languages and so on, they would not be possible without that commonly shared mass of work.

Famously FaceTime was supposed to be an open standard, until someone threatened to sue them for damages to the tunes of X times infinity, which is a fairly large dollar amount for any given value of X.

To be honest “eco friend” sounds a lot more like what I’d want my children to be involved with than “shotgun shooting”. According to the website the requirements for “Eco Friend” are essentially doing no harm to the environment, making a safe campfire and attempting to be kind. All worthwhile skills but perhaps it could be rebranded to sound cooler, like “Ecosystem management engineer”.

Also if the Girl Scouts could see their way to making merit badges for “fighting the man”, “radical feminism” and “understanding white privilege”, I think their members would be better armed to understand the world in a useful manner. I’d be happy to sew on those to any piece of clothing.

Maybe some Boy Scout badges for “non fire related cooking”, “hanging pictures straight” and “basic household budgeting” would also improve the world and give their members useful skills.

I’d certainly not mind helping fund development in some form, if there is some discomfort with charging for the app I’d be happy to see an IAP tip jar.

I like the wood, I think it is nice to see someone go a different route than copying Apple’s all metal, clean look. It’s a warm and organic look which feels fresh. I also suspect that the wood might help the machine dampen noise which would be welcome.

They also copied a page from Apple’s eco playbook and will plant a tree for every machine sold which is nice to see. A solid move given the company’s size and reach. I wish more IT companies would use that as a marketing move, it has good signaling value and helps drive change.

I’d like them to do even more with the wooden look and feel, but their cases are still not far removed from a typical desktop. I think it would be great to see them do something really small, in the Mac Mini style, but with that warm wood look. That would look great on any desk.

I’d also like to see someone Hackintosh those machines just for fun.

Except for their desktops models, the base models of even the 5K iMac still ship with a Fusion Drive, and we only just got support for APFS on those configurations with macOS 10.14. As the base models are typically all authorized Apple Resellers and pop up stores get they must sell a bunch of those especially in regions where there aren’t a lot of Apple Stores (and where people don’t want to pay full price for a year old system).

They are going to need to support and perform well on non-SSD systems for quite a while.

I’d posit that such a setup will lead to users with low speed connection or connections which aren’t online constantly to be banned or required to buy a pardon from the site when not fulfilling the seeding requirement (as every site policy I’ve seen required maintaining a ratio over time).

This happens because users with high speed connections are incentivized to seed well beyond 1:1 and thus there is rarely any demand for seeding. Downloading is super fast which just exasperates the problem as your share ratio drops below the acceptable rate quickly.

Thus such sites tend to make their money off the people who can likely afford it the least, while rewarding people with the disposable income required to live in a neighborhood with unlimited high speed internet and pay for said service.

There’s also the matter of keeping content alive to consider. I’d consider it much more valuable to keep content with no or relatively few seeders alive than incentivizing seeders to add additional bandwidth to already popular torrents. I has not seen an site policy which encourages this, rather it likely punishes such activities as it bans users who are trying to reach a required share ratio without constant demand thus taking the content offline rather than keeping it available.

Whether or not Project Atlas will enable incentives for all users and multiple scenarios or if it will simply perpetuate a similar system to what is seen in the private torrenting communities remains to be seen.

And yet we also gained a lot of value we did not expect, such as the World Wide Web.

You cannot predict the true value of basic research in a straight forward manner so let’s just stop. This is about extending our understanding of the universe. We will find ways to use that knowledge and ways to enrich our lives because of it in due course of time.

People cite Law of Jante to be anti exceptionalism when in reality it is meant and generally used as a means of reminding high and low alike that we are in this together.

We are different, but do not think that your view point on our difference makes you inherently better than me.

We are both human, we both share this place called Earth, could we be productive and not turn life into a weirdly specific genitalia measurement contest.. por favor?

You are allowed and encouraged to be exceptional, just like everybody else. You should just recognize how you got there and how other people got where they are. In essence, Jante, is a teaching tool regarding inequality.

Denmark is a lovely place, in part, because of a general adherence to following those guidelines. Therefore as a Dane it pains me to see it cited as a bad thing and as justification for actions and behaviors Law of Jante which are in direct opposition to how it is de facto taught and applied in Danish society.