msftgreed

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now?

This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we just start purging sites back and forth?

Battlegrounds end up as torn up, muddy, desolate places. Turning the domain registry into a battleground is a bad idea. Over the long term, no one wins if we choose to fight there.

Well, really, pick your poison I suppose.

We have wide belts of forests in the north that are warming and are potentially at risk for massive fires, which would make the problem significantly worse. So, before the taiga burns.

Or, before species reduction causes ecosystems to collapse, reducing biodiversity and ability to support humans.

Or before temperatures rise high enough that wet bulb temperatures in the summer are fatal to humans, causing parts of the globe to become inhabitable, creating refugee crises and conflict (and presumably mass starvation and death.)

Or before permafrost gets warm enough to start emitting methane, pushing our atmosphere past the point of it's ability to maintain homeostasis, putting us on a path to a Venusian atmosphere.

Or before we lose the beautiful parts of the world to decay due to increased pest pressure, decreased ability for plants and animals to survive, and general reduction in system health.

Or before we lose our ability to have wonderful winter sports in the parts of the world where skiing and snowboarding are popular.

Or before we damage the oceanic currents enough to fundamentally destroy the climate in regions like Europe and England.

Or before raising temperatures cause seafood stocks to plummet, reducing the amount of food we can harvest from the oceans (or leading us to depleting critical stocks entirely), reducing our capacity to feed ourselves as a species.

Or before fresh water becomes scarce enough that wars are fought over it, and people die unnecessarily.

I dunno. Before one of those. Or any of the other easily predictable, innumerable steps along the way to those.

Maybe we should be doing something dramatic about this global warming thing before it's too late, yeah?

CD sales surged 16% to 16.3 million units, soundly outpacing vinyl’s comparatively modest 2.4% growth.

Ok, but the lack of a unit on vinyl makes it very hard to have an apples to apples comparison here. If cds are selling 1000 units and vinyl is selling 1,000,000 units, those 16% and 2.4% numbers are pretty wildly different things.

Also, the huge increase is primarily driven by KPOP (in particular, BTS). CD sales growth was like 6% without them.

I don't know that we can draw a conclusion from that 16% except BTS can move physical media.

You can name the brand... Häagen‑Dazs? Graeters?

In any case, why would you melt and drain it? That makes zero sense. You don't have friends who would take it? Or a food bank? Or a local Food Not Bombs?

It's totally fine to not like a brand, zero objections there, but like, why waste it?

I work in accessibility, yes.

And yet, if someone cannot meaningfully participate in society without their glasses, then yes, they have a disability. Polio paralysis and vision loss are both examples of disability. They do have differences in all those things you mentioned, and yet, are both disability.

15% is from the 2011 WHO report on disability: https://www.who.int/teams/noncommunicable-diseases/sensory-f...

The more recent WHO's Global report on health equity suggests 16%, as populations age: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240063600

The CDC considers this closer to 30%: https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents...

This number is generally considered to be rising for a few reasons. Aging population, wars resulting in higher injuries but fewer deaths, the number of people who are able to survive disease (rather than historically just dying.

You might find the Washington Group's definition, which applies a spectrum, and estimates an approximately 6-12% rate of disability. https://www.washingtongroup-disability.com/wg-blog/post/diff...

I doubt the number would get anywhere close to 15% if the definition only included the kinds of disabilities that are immediately obvious to anyone looking.

Thank god that's not the definition. Deafness/significant hearing impairment isn't immediately visible, and that's estimated at ~5%. Plenty of folks are low vision enough to need assistive technology (like a screenreader) even if they don't have a cane and may be able to navigate. Plenty of people with MS have great days where they can walk, and days where they cannot. There are people who lack the strength in their hands to dress themselves, yet they can go out and about just fine.

Your definition is too narrow. Plenty of people experience impassible barriers that are not visible. Happy to provide some additional educational resources for you if they would be helpful.

Certainly it's not true that 15% of the people I see are in a wheelchair, on crutches, missing a limb, obviously blind (e.g. walking with a cane), and so on.

Are you in a wealthy area? Think globally, do you think your town has better or worse support than other parts of the world for people with disabilities? Do you think your region has better or worse regional conflicts or disease? Think globally.

I work in big tech in accessibility. I guarantee you that you are incorrect.

You've got it. Who makes the decisions? Primarily the folks with the most property.

And they decide that you'll pay a percentage of what they pay each other. Which you also have no say in.

This isn't sustainable. You really want every person who is dealing with this bureaucracy to manage negotiating between their insurance and their EMS? After they've just had a significant accident/health issue?

That seems needlessly cruel to do to people.

Well, here it is often ass AND expensive. I'd take ass and free over ass and expensive.

You know we can have volunteer supported services be very effective, right?

I volunteer to give blood. No one is paying me, and yet, someone's life is saved by that.

Some folks believe (in fact, this is the thesis statement of much of anarchist theory) that people would largely volunteer to care for one another if their basic needs were met.

Not everything has to be transactional, you can have a government setting up a scaffold that supports and encourages and organizes volunteers and run an effective service.

There's still a few brands, you'll just end up paying through the nose for them.

You don't... heat it? Egg yolks change their role in ice cream when heated, increasing their emulsifying power and creating a richer ice cream.

I think that's extremely ungenerous and misses the point of the article.

The article is specific in the mechanisms by which the industry has changed formulae -- adding air, gums, and stabilizers. It also includes information about who the offending companies are (Unilever). It includes information about how many calories per cup indicate a high quality ice cream, as well as the legally required labeling you can use to recognize not-quite-ice cream.

It also specifically addresses the "cream is expensive" concern, and discusses dairy prices which have fluctuated but not spiked.

No, this is greed and "the customer is a fool who won't notice". The products of capitalism run to a point where there's basically no recourse (short of, I suppose, manufacturing the ice cream yourself) because everything's become one giant megacorp who knows you don't really have much of a choice in brands.

And furthermore, ~15% of us are permanently disabled. So the percentages for temporary or situational disability rise even higher than that.

Do you use curb cuts? Closed captions? Difficulty sliders in games? An electric toothbrush? Audible crosswalk signals?

All of those have significant roots in accessibility for people with disabilities. I guarantee you that the people who invented them would be thrilled to see them have widespread adoption for all populations.

If something finds use in addition to its use for disability amelioration, it becomes more widespread and normalized. When it's wider spread and normalized, it becomes easier for people with disabilities to know it's available and to use it without stigma.

So no, you've got it entirely backwards I'm afraid. We do not think about assistive technology as something for people with disabilities. We think about it as something that helps people, and if it helps more people, even better.

Videogames are generally lagging WAY behind the rest of software. I've worked professionally in accessibility and in AAA game studios.

There's a lot of movement in games over the past 5-10 years, so there's a lot more visibility into a11y there, but in general that industry still has catching up to do. What you are seeing is higher interest and velocity there, and given some time they'll definitely catch up with the slower iteration cycles in mobile and web a11y, but I guarantee you the story is much richer on the web (in particular) than it is in games.

This is a great example of the curb cut effect -- a system designed for accessibility needs turns out to be useful in other contexts. Curb cuts were designed for people with disabilities, particularly veterans, and over time have become more and more standard. They help people who use wheelchairs, yes, but also people without disabilities like those with strollers, bikes, luggage, or small kids.

We love to see accessibility features find uses outside their original intent.

It made a claim, brah. If it's going to claim flowing text, then it shows that? Nah, that ain't it.

It can aspire to be whatever it wants to be, don't make claims you can't back up.

Sure, I love a Forza Horizons (I'm not much for mainline Forza), but those games aren't really experiencing the same scope creep as the the rest of the industry.

Call of Duty is, but it's also noteworthy that sales of CoD are slumping. Hard. Like down-by-60% hard. And the gamepass numbers aren't really boosting it back up.

Also, I think you'll find my list absolutely included big games. Gears of War? Zelda? These are not "indie darlings".

This is absolutely a chat UI.

I expected, from the description, it to look like text was being written by hand -- with the letterforms being stroked at roughly human pen speeds. Not just a fancy font over a text box being entered character by character. The description WAY oversells it.

Holy shit this looks tacky. Response speed is WAY too fast for the effect of feeling like something is writing on the other side. Text is very much written in the style of an LLM.

an answer writes itself back in a flowing hand, stroke by stroke, then fades away.

Characters aren't "flowing" at all, it's very much just printing text. Like, I could change my terminal font to a fancy font and get very much the same visual experience.

Also, how are we not over Harry Potter yet? There's a MILLION examples of this phenomena in fiction. Heck, even the Bible has an example of text mysteriously appearing (it's where we get the idiom "The Writing's on the Wall".)

Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming.

That's the thing -- for a while they had figured out gaming. The xbox and 360 were solid consoles with lots of great internal and external games. Halo was incredible.

Then the company did the thing that Amazon did, Blizzard is doing, and all the big tech companies do -- they thought their big war chest meant they should make bigger games. Budgets ballooned, game timelines extended. Now they are stuck with games and studios with 10 year dev cycles trying to create the biggest, the most incredible, the most expensive games.

There's SO many devs out there making incredible games for fractions of the cost. It's a shame Microsoft (and others) keep thinking that reaching for bigger means better outcomes. No one wants "the game only Microsoft can make", everyone wants another great Zelda. Or Gears of War. Or Satisfactory. Or Mina the Hollower. Or UFO 50. Or Animal Well.

Hell, people want a game about shelving 3000 books in an Arcane library. Let games be smaller, more exploratory, more creative experiences. Let your studios get weird with it. Let them explore spaces and take risks. Stop sinking tens of billions into games. Start sinking tens of millions into them.

This is purely greed on Microsoft's point. They absolutely have a profitable business with some great games, and they are sad that their management decisions led to this outcome.

But it's the rank and file who will pay the price for these poor management decisions. Like it always is.

To hear that the new boss wants to increase capitalization on Minecraft, to make it more like a Roblox, is horrifying and truly goes to show Xbox has leadership with near zero understanding of what they have or how to run it.

I wish good landings for all those affected, I hope for the best for all the studios whose future is uncertain now.