Pxtl

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Wasn’t there an official branded pokemon dotalike for a while? I mean, they tried the approach of “let’s make a conventional PC genre game but with Pokemon” and it didn’t stick.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

C++, but a very ugly and oldschool dialect of it.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

It’s funny, the thing that bugs me the most in this is the over-expressivism of Threepio’s movements. He bulges and wobbles exactly like Anthony Daniels’ character doesn’t. Giving him more restrained motions would likely be easier animation.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

What do you do for water heating?

Pxtl, 4 months ago

I’m aware but I haven’t heard people’s experiences with them. I ask because I’m shopping for water heating right now and debating the expense of getting 240 run to the water heater for a heat pump.

Electric tankless sounds impossible (yes, I know they exist, I just mean they don’t sound like something that should be able to), since the amount of BTUs required to run a gas tankless at peak is absolutely nuts – tankless gas water-heaters run on 3/4" pipe instead of the normal 1/2" since they need to have so much burst heat. That doesn’t sound possible for electric.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Holy crap like 24000W of juice on tap. That is not screwing around. Awesome. A neat option but sounds like something for new builds not retrofitting an older home.

Pxtl, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Yeah I love his videos but I hadn’t seen anything about the whole home issue of “omg this is way more power hosue-wide”.

The idea of smart switching sounds neat - that would basically mean “you can’t run your dryer and have hot water and charge your car at the same time”, right? But, like, in an automated way not just “it throws the breaker”.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Lock screen widgets were a neat idea but the original implementation was ugly as hell.

Just let me put read-only widgets on the lock screen.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Civ Beyond Earth has the neat approach that it replaces the old “build a spaceship to alpha Centauri” with three different technological endings each with different moral implications. The game is about human transcendence so any ending is going to be about changing humanity.

The problem is that the game itself is not one of the better entries in the Civ series otherwise.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Yes, many many many years ago. Beyond Earth is the palest of pale imitation.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Trial balloon.

This character is the thin edge of a very large wedge.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Honestly, as somebody who really loved the early era of Android gaming, I’m really disappointed how ephemeral it all was between the Play Store delistings and the absolutely atrocious approach to backwards compatibility in the Android OS.

Pxtl, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I just wish Google would release some kind of 32-bit Android 4.4 sandboxed compatibility layer for old games. Android 4.4 was the standard Android version for a super long time for a zillion devices, and I’d bet 99% of the dead .APK games out there would run on that version.

Give me a tool with a crapload of slow, clumsy emulation wrappers covered in tedious config options and a launcher any time I want to run an app through this compatibility layer and let me play Amazing Alex again.

edit: it occurs to me I basically want an Android emulator for Android. Or like, a psuedo-emulator that’s not really an emulator like WINE/Proton.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

I’m so annoyed that all my 32-bit Humble APKs don’t run on my Pixel.

Also, would it kill them to rename their .zips to .apks before I download? I know the Humble .apks are basically abandonware but at least rename the files for Pete’s sake!

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Ahh, you know, it’s about the convenience of not having to juggle another device. I still have an old Galaxy Tab kicking around the house that plays all that stuff pretty well, but it’s not the same as being able to pull it out of my pocket on the bus.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event.

This feature is underutilized because I could never get it to work.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Quiet quitting after Floyd protests hurt their feelings.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Even Twitter agrees, NFT stands for No Fuckin’ Thanks.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Bring back copper pipes.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

I can’t be the only person noticing that somebody is posting a comic about mushrooms with the handle “stamets”.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Regardless of which party you think is (4), they’re either not nationwide or not major.

And regardless of how you feel about “signalling”, that’s not the problem with the NDP. You might agree or disagree with their opinions on social justice, but it’s not their social justice platform that’s ruining them, it’s their inability to come up with any decent ideas or get any real traction on bread-and-butter issues.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

Oh, I’m not “both sidesing” because I think myself an iconoclast that’s better than everybody. I think NDP are dumb because I strongly support market-based solutions to policy problems and the NDP tends to come up with dumb populist solutions for policy problems. Like, I’m firmly a deregulation/YIMBYist guy when it comes to the housing crisis, and the NDP has the closest relationship with the left-NIMBYs in city councils that are trying their damnedest to worsen the problem by blocking market-based construction.

The only good and inventive NDP policy ideas (not just their typical “expand the social safety net” stuff like pharmacare – which is good! But not really innovative) is pushing for more taxes on wealth accumulation, like a wealth tax or a lower capital gains exclusion.

When it comes to hard problems like housing? They tend to come up with dumb, knee-jerk solutions instead of enabling the public to solve problems bottom-up.

Like, if unions didn’t exist and somebody invented unions today and the Liberals proposed modern union laws? The NDP would be out there screaming “wait, you want to take a cut of our paychecks”? Because any level of indirection or systems-thinking in policy solutions is too abstract. The NDP worship at the political altar of “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” and so they always come up withe dumbest and most populist solutions to every problem.

My dream political party would be “What the NDP and the Conservatives think the Liberals are”. Like, if we had a party of woke neoliberals that want to tax-and-spend on providing a strong social safety net but also want to use free market globalist solutions to implement policy (eg. carbon taxes, YIMBYist housing, open borders)? That would get all my votes. I would volunteer for them.

But instead, the liberals are bumbling, flat-footed and low-energy.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

I love what the BC NDP is doing on housing, but the BC NDP is a special case because they’re shifted to the centre compared to other NDP parties since there is no BC provincial Liberal party to speak of. Same as AB (although I’m not fond of their necessary oil-boosting, but that’s the reality of AB).

And nowhere did I support the Conservative attitude on “free market”. My ideal “free market” solution to a problem is the Carbon Tax, where we use pricing signals to internalize an externality and make the free market solve the problem instead of causing it.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

For example, Singh wants to subsidize mortgages of people facing rising payments. This encourages rising prices since it’s feeding demand instead of supply. That’s trying to douse a fire with gasoline. And likewise, there are many affordable-housing builders who will tell you that the chief problem isn’t funding but rather the extreme requirements city halls have made to prevent construction. You can’t build public or co-op housing if City Hall says you need every building to be narrow 3-storey mayan step pyramid set back 60% from all sides of the lot.

And when we talk about that period of “like they used to”? Most of that rental housing was market-rate. A big “subsidy” was tax benefits on private landlording. The idea that Canada can build housing top-down instead of empowering the market to do it bottom-up is ridiculous since our governments’ capacity to get anything done top-down has absolutely cratered.

Pxtl, 4 months ago

My dream approach: LVT but only for non-principal residences, as an alternative to property taxes: you pay whichever one’s more. Target the LVT so it’s a bit less than property tax in a reasonable use (highrises downtown, detached homes in exurbs) but otherwise it punishes landlords that don’t invest into scaling up their properties.

And we don’t have the nightmare of throwing Widow Grandma out of her family home befause her detached home downtown just quintupled in taxes. But grandma’s student rental property? Hell yes sell that crap and turn it into a midrise.