floundy

They're phoning it in, coasting on old IP and goodwill earned decades ago. Animal Crossing had less dialogue options than the Gamecube version that preceded it by two decades. Smash at mid-high levels is still plagued by lag switching cheaters. BOTW was okay, but clearly overrated by people who had never played any sort of open world game before. TOTK being lauded as a 10/10 (fine, 9.5/10 on MetaCritic) was laughable given how empty the game world was, how janky the construction mechanics were for those silly machines, and how boring and childish the puzzles were. I stopped playing Pokemon 15+ years ago but come on, the graphics of the Switch games looking worse than some of the DS editions...

TOTK was the final nail for me, I vowed to never purchase another Nintendo game or piece of hardware and I haven't. I just couldn't square my actual player experience of a janky, boring game with the rabid fanboys crowing about Nintendo doing it again.

Nintendo really has no incentive to improve. They make money hand over fist selling half-baked titles to their combined market of actual undiscerning children, and rabid fanboy manchildren who will praise any first party Nintendo title as a 10/10 every single time.

I’m assuming the author was thinking Minecraft with the kid’s friends would be Peer2Peer or something. I doubt Switch has the power to host a Minecraft server, but I might be wrong.

See Smash, which is entirely Peer2Peer for the main gameplay, but requires a Switch Online membership to play for… what exactly? Hosting a database of player ratings and using it for matchmaking? There’s probably one server rack on each continent running the entirety of Smash online.

Rhode Island is trying this. The gantries have been up for years, but it was challenged in court by the trucking lobby. The state prevailed with some concessions, and is planning to reinstate the truck tolls soon.

Probably, due to the small size of RI, it will just cause goods not bound directly for RI to divert along I-395 up through CT and MA, and I-290 and I-495 in MA.

Stuff like this is common in states with no income tax. If public services in two states are equivalent and one has income tax but one doesn’t, the latter state residents pay the same total tax burden through property tax, tolls, and sales tax.

In the northeast I regularly see idiots slowing down for the high speed toll lanes that have explicit signage not to slow down. People going 65-70MPH, then as the toll approaches one car brakes down to 45MPH because they’re afraid their transponder won’t be read or something.

Walkable cities are a luxury good. Care to share what multiple of the median annual household income a home costs wherever you live? 10x? 20x?

a bunch of internet pages containing things that are blatantly wrong

So Reddit?

I’d imagine the AI companies have all the “pre AI internet” data they scraped very carefully catalogued.

Apple’s most interesting value proposition was ignoring all this AI junk and letting users click “not interested” on Apple Intelligence and never see it again.

From a business perspective it’s a smart move (inasmuch as “integrating AI” is the default which I fundamentally disagree with) since Apple won’t be left holding the bag on a bunch of AI datacenters when/if the AI bubble pops.

I don’t want to lose trust in Apple, but I literally moved away from Google/Android to try and retain control over my data and now they’re taking me… right back to Google. Guess I’ll retreat further into self-hosting.

Because topics like these always attract some Very Smart People to comment and engage in order to share their Very Correct Opinions on macroeconomics and politics.

Laughing aloud at the thought of the average paycheck to paycheck consumerist blowing a gasket when they see a $24k tax bill for their $80k pickup truck.

The quality of discourse on HN has been nearing the bottom of the barrel (read: mostly indistinguishable from Reddit) since the pandemic. It’s very rare these days to see citations or even arguments that explain personal reasoning. Just like Reddit and Facebook, commenters mostly write what they think or feel as if it were unyielding fact, and the most common denominator (read: boring, derivative, often oversimplified assumptions) rise to the top via the voting system.

Just turn it upside down then. At best some “Good Samaritan” turns it right side up at some point but the food arrives late, cold, and spilled all over the inside of the robot.

If these "greedy utility companies" were such good monopolists or duopolists wouldn't it reflect in some pretty insane stock performance?

Eversource (NYSE: ES) is my local electric/natural gas provider in Massachusetts that I hear these same arguments about. Their stock is down 21% over the past 5 years. (To contrast, the S&P500 is up 91% over this same timeframe).)

Either cargo pants, or their waist size is much larger than average.

Average German lifespan is about 80 years. What if it was 70 years for an 80th percentile drinker and 90 years for a 20th percentile drinker, I assume that changes your conclusion? These are of course entirely made up numbers, and the data doesn't even exist as far as I'm aware, but goes to show how useless averages may be.

As for the other countries: 56% of French either "don't drink" or "only on special occasions", 43.5% of Spaniards never drink or less than 2x per week, and 35% of Italians do not drink compared to 12% who drink daily.

Like it or not the median data point in these population sets are those of people who drink very little.

Of course there is no "hard evidence" unless someone leaves evidence of the prompt or AI response in their blog post. There are certain clues and syntax. Your comment seems like it would fit in much better on Reddit than on HN.

Genuinely, why? More people than ever are using LLMs to flood the internet with textual slop far faster than humans who have respect for the craft of writing can generate their own text.

I checked Jared Hecht (the author of this piece’s blog) at jared.xyz and the oldest piece is from March 2023. Why should we give someone who has no evidence of writing anything before the release of ChatGPT the benefit of the doubt that their work is all human written, when all signs point to otherwise?

I didn’t know who this author was previously (Jared Hecht) but I looked up pictures of him and he definitely does not look like he exercises regularly. He’s skinny (e.g. not overweight) but if I passed by him on the street I would not peg him for someone who exercises seriously.

“Alcoholism” is outdated and has been widely replaced by AUD (Alcohol Use Disorder).

I looked at Germany, according to Wikipedia the average consumption of pure ethanol per person per year in Germany as of 2019 was 12.2 liters. This was the 5th highest in the world, and equivalent to 686 standard 5% beers per year.

According to the WHO “moderate drinking” is 1 drink per day for women and 2 drinks per day for men, so the average German is already consuming above WHO guidelines.

It gets worse when you consider that about 1/4 of Germans don’t consume alcohol at all, and another 1/4 barely consume any, suggesting that the “average” isn’t really telling us much and the 70th, 80th, and 90th percentiles have very concerning consumption numbers. I assume most of those people consider themselves “social drinkers” but statistically they cannot be.

It absolutely does, do you even use Google Search Console? For just one of my websites, I have 223 pages of queries I can look through from the past 28 days to see what users typed in that were provided impressions of my site or clicked on it.

No. Pro rata is Latin for “in proportion.” It’s one dollar for one dollar. If you add $7k to your tIRA to do the backdoor Roth, you also must convert $7k of existing funds which becomes taxable income. So you pay your marginal tax rate, on half the amount.

IMO not that big of a deal to contribute $7k, convert $7k, and pay $2-3k in taxes to get $14k in the Roth space that will grow tax free forever. Most people are too pre-tax heavy in their retirement strategies anyway.

Sheesh, are you a Redditor?

I'm still setting up my own home server, adding one functionality at a time. I wanted to like Nextcloud but it's just too bloated.

Radicale is a good calendar replacement. I'd rather have single-function apps at this point.

Because I'm an engineer, who both does and sits for technical interviews.

I don’t work in tech.

Most departments at companies run on zero to two good engineers anyway. The rest are personality and nepotism hires limping along some half-baked project or sustainment effort.

Most people in my engineering program didn’t deserve their engineering degrees. Where do you think all these people go? Most of them get engineering jobs.

So the process is now:

1. Embellish your resume with AI (or have it outright lie and create fictional work history) to get past the AI screening bots.

2. Have a voice-to-text AI running to cheat your way past the HR screen and first round interview.

3. Show up for in-person interview with all the other liars and unscrupulous cheats.

No matter who gets hired, chances are the company loses and honest people lose. Lame system.

You write like AI

It’s been my experience that when people are talking about some future sum of money without specifying real or nominal they are referring to a real sum, based on their current day concept of monetary value.