Contact is amazing. there’s no way it could be considered a “shitty lil movie”

It’s science fiction done properly.

Yeah. Soft furnishings like carpet, rugs, sofas and beds all feel a lot more “natural” to cats, as if they are outside on the grass, so they prefer to do it there.

Unlucky for us it’s the absolute last place we want them to be doing it.

VSCode is by far and away the best thing Microsoft has ever done. (I’m sure therefore they will ruin it eventually, but that’s a separate issue)

Its good for two main reasons IMO:

1. It is plugin-based

2. It is (therefore) language-agnostic

Plugins mean the DE starts as a very lightweight thing that is basically nothing more than a text editor. You can then add as much or as little as you want to get the level of features you are comfortable with but without being too bloated.

And then, because it’s all plugins, you can work with any language and still stay within the same editor. Divine.

I personally love how lightweight it is compared to a full IDE because I don’t like it when IDEs hide the magic behind UI. Press the button and it compiles huh? But how? What’s going on there? What toolchain and commands are being executed?

I much prefer a good MAKEFILE where you know what your entry points are and what is going on, because it makes everything so much more portable and also improves your own knowledge and understanding.

Wireguard doesn’t necessarily need to have those limitations, but it will depend in part how your VPN profile is set up.

If you configured your wireguard profile to always route all traffic over the VPN then yeah, you won’t be able to access local networks. And maybe that’s what you want, in which case fine :)

But you can also set the profile to only route traffic that is destined for an address on the target network (I.e your home network) and the rest will route as normal.

This second type of routing only works properly however when there are no address conflicts between the network you are on (i.e. someone else’s WiFi) and your home network.

For this reason if you want to do this it’s best to avoid on your own home network the common ranges almost everyone uses as default, i.e. 192.168.0.* and 10.0.0.*

I reconfigured my home network to 192.168.22.* for that reason. Now I never hit conflicts and VPN can stay on all the time but only traversed when needed :)

I guess some of us just like to think the search bar and the address bar are conceptually different interface elements with different reasons to exist.

Beacon Pines was a quite lovely game.

I love how the top two points, “Choose how you search, right from the address bar” and “Keep your original search visible” are things that we always had by default in the old days with the separate search bar, until Firefox blindly copied Chrome and went to the unified bar.

And now it’s back as if it’s some kind of revolutionary feature, rather than they made it worse and now they’re making it better again.

Not that I ever stopped using the separate search field, I always turn that on.

I guess this means Microsoft’s similar recent move with Office worked out for them financially, even though it caused a lot of backlash.

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I like this a lot.

I don’t have any physical accessibility needs (unless you count my low skill level, git gud scrub) but accessibility options are something I really appreciate seeing in games.

I love being able to adjuat how I experience the game to match my needs, and making this visible and searchable on the store is only going to encourage more games to include good accessibility features :)

This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.

When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of “content” right in people’s faces where they don’t have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.

From Netflix’s perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s a failure which they will optimise away.

The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.

Didn’t ingest any, but it’s still there somehow

Same logic, the bra itself as a whole is a chest covering, so like a shirt it’s not a “pair”

Not that there always has to be logic in these things, etymology sometimes defies that.

A bra does have a “pair of cups”, though!

For some items like glasses it’s very clear why they are pairs; if you can have a reading glass (which is an antiquated way to refer to a handheld magnifying lens, for example) then you can certainly have a pair of reading glasses because it’s the two pieces of glass which are plural.

For trousers there are no certain answers, but I’d suggest it’s very much with with how we conceptualise their function. For 90% of their height trousers are split and cover the legs, of which we have two, only joining right at the top.

For shirts you might think it’s the same (two arms right?) but it’s a completely different story because the primary function of a shirt isn’t to cover the arms but to cover the torso. So it’s singular. And gloves of course are distinct, so it’s back to pairs.

It’s just not fun anymore.

It used to be kinda humorous in an irreverent way back in the 2000s when Google used April Fools to announce things like the Google Romance search engine, or a facility to archive all your Gmails on printed paper. It was tech making fun of itself.

But these days when the mask is fully off, and we recognise that big tech and social media has been one of the greatest problems the world has ever faced, we’re not laughing any longer.

Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.

When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.

Fair enough :)

I can totally agree that games should prioritise being fun above having pretty graphics.

Yes, its real

https://slashdot.org/story/438631

We don’t know exactly what they are spending the time on.

The article says “more time to create the world of Albion” but that’s the article paraphrasing - the source video simply states “more time” - and doesn’t specify for what.

I’m sure world design is a part of it, but quests, characters, optimisations, bugfixes and all of that are surely a part too.

Personly I’m very glad that the studio are being given the time they need instead of rushing out some rubbish.

One could argue that Tado should have had more certainty about their business model before they started selling promises they couldn’t keep, but that’s business I suppose.

Presumably Tado anticipated they could capture customers on a free tier and upsell later, but it turns out that when customers have a fully functional basic tier, they generally don’t want to pay money for extras they don’t care about.

And so now, Tado are left with an online service that costs them money to run, but no ongoing revenue. So of course they will try to monetise the subscription.

Of course, part of the problem is that customers have almost been conditioned to expect cloud stuff to be free. And so that’s the price Tado tried to aim for, and now that is causing problems.

Either way though, what they are doing now represents “changing the deal” Darth Vader style - the product previously was a one time purchase and then free after, and they are now trying to make it paid after selling it as free. And that is bad.