I think this is the real problem with the gaming industry. Development studios are treated as if they're sources of IP when in fact it's more about the people working for them.
A good dev team is the people who made the games. A team gets bought out by a big publishing giant and it seems they inevitably lose the people who made them great.
That's not to say big publsiher owned studios can't make great games but I'd argue the best games are coming from the indy studies whether that by one man bands like ConcernedApe or big independent studios like CD Projekt Red.
Also CD Projekt Red was highly motivated to fix Cyberpunk as it's a smaller studio, and pretty much their entire future business needed it to be fixed and work. They need and want to make more Cyberpunk games. Microsoft has zero motivation to fix Redfall - it was a commercial failure in a big coroportation; they will just dump it and move on but also be more averse to trying to make new IP.
Yeah as someone outside Australia I've been surprised at how biased and simplified the reporting has been. A complex constitutional issue is being painted as a simple "good people, bad people".
When I read about the changes myself (after having to go hunting for some actual detail - the reporting is pretty poor on this) it honestly seems more like virtue signalling rather than useful or meaningful reform.
This is a link aggregator website and he's posting links, I don't understand the issue? The links are to legitimate news sites.
Everyone has a selection bias in what they post, but maybe you need to think about your own biases of you find it so offensive?
As for this specific link, it's a legitimate news source and this is an actual news story which has not happened in isolation. There are multiple news stories about the social media claim and that Biden seems to have confirmed them just now seems to be walking back from that claim.
Part of it comes down to trust. I just don't trust Brave Inc long term - it may well be a private browser now but I don't trust that in to the future. I don't trust a company that Peter Thiel invests in. I don't trust a company that has already been shady and caught redirecting traffic secretly for referrer codes. But I also don't trust Google or Microsoft either.
I trust Firefox and Mozilla. I don't like that they are dependent on Google revenue but I trust that they're open and transparent about what they do, and not motivated or compromised by a desire to maximise profits for their venture capitalist investors.
I have wondered many times how a human would fare if the kidneys dumped urine into the start of the large intestines somewhere about the appendix instead of into a bladder to be sprayed out. I’m assuming water would be reabsorbed and slower to process out, primarily through sweat and evaporation from the lungs, and maybe...
So the way evolution works, the design we have works well enough that it doesn't cause problems. It might be the best possible design or it might not, all that mattered is that whenever it arose in evolutionary history it was either an advantage over what camebefore in terms of survival so propagated or it was not detrimental and paired with something else genetically that propagated.
We can't definitively answer your question but we can speculate on why it's a good idea to separate urine and faecal matter. Urine is a reasonable medium for growing bacteria. That wouldn't matter in the colon but would matter if bacteria from the colon could ascend into the kidneys and diarupt it's function. Valves could help or a bladder that drains into the colon, but complete separation may just be better.
It may also be that the acidic nature of urine would disrupt the helpful bacteria we rely on to colonise our guts to help digest foods.
Another possibility is the constant flow of urine would mean our faecal matter would never dry out. It'd be like having diarrhoea all the time and we'd need to poop constantly. The colon retrieves enough water - but not all water - that's why poop isn't hard as rock. If it was flooded with fluid it may not need to retrieve fluid.
The fluid might even be stuck in a cycle between the colon and the kidneys and make it harder for the body to keep homeostasis - as the kidneys excrete more fluid to try and regulate fluid volume the the colon could just resorb it. Basically the colon could end up working against the kidneys and cause even more work for thenl body. It may just be less efficient than discarding water as needed.
Drier faecal matter in the colon and a reservoir of fluid in the bladder does also give us freedom to release when it is safe to do so, which may protect us from predators (having to stop to poop even a few times a day is dangerous compared to only going when you know it's safe to as there are more opportunities to be attacked by a predator). It would also be very easy to track an animal that leaves a constant trail of poop and urine uncontrollably behind it.
All or none of these may be reasons why we have separate urinary and alimentary tracts; it's impossible to know and would always be speculation. But regardless these do seem like reasonable reasons why we may have separate tracts.
The film and book share themes but are quite different.
In the film, people live in one city and believe the outside is poisonous. The plot is very different including how people die, why, what happens to runners, what sanctuary is and the ending. Despite the significant differences from the book, it's a good film and worth watching in it's own right.
I used Ubuntu once a few years ago but had compatability issues so I went back to windows. Not a great programmer but I’d like to learn. I’m not looking to do much gaming beyond DOOM2 and factorio. Mostly looking for privacy and a way to get back into programming (I have this pipe dream of learning Assembly). I’m not to...
Bob* was riding across the Kurilpa Bridge into the city on a quiet school holiday Friday morning, also coincidentally World Car-Free Day, when … BAM, he was $464 poorer.
Yeah. This basically sounds like you're supposed to dismount and walk across the bridge. The pictures in the article show a walkway shared between pedestrians and cyclists going in both directions. It doesn't look wide enough to be doing 26km/h if there are pedestrians and cyclists about going in both directions.
So been moving around a lot with browsers, waterfox, librewolf and very recently degoogle chromium, figured id look at Firefox and holy theres less than half the option in setting then there were afew years back but I gotta say the biggest sin is that adding custom search engine is obfuscated, and the chooses of engines are...
I am confused by this post, there are 4 ways to add search engines to Firefox:
From the settings page via "add search engine" button, to pick on from the Firefox add-ons site. This is the "main" route for most users as it ensures you're adding links from a trusted source (so you won't add a fake version of a popular search engine by accident that scrapes your data).
Via the address bar. Any website that supports OpenSearch can be added by right clicking the address bar and selecting "add search engine name".
Via the Mycroft project website, where almost any search engine in the directory can be added to Firefox.
Via bookmarks and keywords. This is slightly more involved but almost any engine can be added this way.
Android Firefox offers slightly different routes but again any search engine can be added. It is a bit more involved though.
Firefox includes certain search engines by default as it gets revenue from the search engine providers for doing so, and Mozilla is transparent about this. Although Mozilla is independent, the Google search engine deal remains one of its biggest sources of income. That's how it survives.
The default add-ons site meanwhile is a compromise between security and convenience for the majority of users, but people are not locked in to it and other search providers are not locked out of it.
The Mullvad browser is modified Firefox btw, as is the Tor Browser it is itself based off. I don't know how much either contribute to the Mozilla foundation. Tor is an open source project but Mullvad is a commercial enterprise.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. With the repairability of the steam deck and the power available to it, it seems like a no brainer to use it for a bit of school work or casual browsing, Discord etc. Like you would a normal desktop....
Its usefulness as a laptop replacement may be limited. Remember it's a locked down read-only version of Linux. The steam deck uses an a/b model to update. Basically there are two separate versions of the OS on the machine - when it updates it replaces one copy and makes that the default, and uses the other as the backup. Next system update it replaces the other copy and switches to that. It switches back and forth that way, putting a stock image on with each update. So you'd probably want to go down the route of running your own OS on it.
Without that it does limit a little in how useful it is as a laptop like device. It depends what you want to do on it of course, and your Flatpak apps and personal files will stay but any other customisation you do to the device will get wiped each time it does a major update. That would include any installed software outside the Flatpak route if you unlock Pacman.
It seems like a capable machine though. I have mine hooked up to my TV at 4K when at home. I use it to stream 4K game content from my desktop to my living room, but I've also played with the desktop mode in 4k and it's been good. It renders 4k video well, and we know it's capable of playing video games at 720p directly which is still generally intensive.
I can't see why it wouldn't be able to do basic graphics work, but no idea about more intensive work like 3D modelling and video encoding.
Personally I'd get a dedicated device for work but if you can't afford that or you dont want to carry more than one device around then I guess it's worth a try?
Just remember if you do use it for work that also entails setting it up to back up your personal data. Your game data is largely backed up by Steam but if you put your work stuff on there then you'll need to be protecting yourself in case of damage or theft.
Yeah we had this in the UK for a time when minimum wage was introduced. Up until about 2008-2009 when it was finally changed so that employees had to have minimum wage regardless of tips the hospitality industry didn't collapse despite the noise made in the right wing press.
However we now have issues with employers stealing tips from employees via various dodgy practices. The law is likely to change again here to protect tips too.
Chicago are making a step in the right direction but employees will still lose out of tips aren't protected too
Because Republicans are such firm believers in benevolence toward political foes, they are furious with Democrats for failing to save Kevin McCarthy. After Democrats voted en masse this week to remove the California Republican as House speaker, his fellow Republicans responded by revoking some of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol...
I agree but I think ultimately this shows how broken the US electoral system is.
The two parties have such control over the electoral apperatus that no other party can conceivably get a look in. Instead the two parties have broken down to form parties within parties but the overall bi-partisan set up makes it so unstable
Effectively the MAGA republicans get disproportionate power - 8 representatives can cause chaos because the republican party cannot do anything but work with them.
The debate is always about Republicans or Democrats when it really should be about electoral reform to break the duopoly. A dose of proportional representation even at local and state levels would be a huge step in the right direction in breaking the hold the two big parties have over the US.
The first step for the candidates running in next year’s California Senate race is to quietly try to spook newly appointed Sen. Laphonza Butler into not running at all.
Yeah I found the article a bizarre read. It talks about ActovityPub and Mastodon but fails to mention the fediverse at all. Instead it talks about the "pluriverse", some random new term pulled from some paper, and paints a vision of people spread across various commercial social media platforms.
Either it's a blind spot In their research or an agenda so deliberate omission, but regardless it seems strange to talk about the disintegration of social media and even Mastodon but not what Mastodon is a part of.
But I agree the general themes are there - it's basically talking about the impact of enshittification but without using the term.
Well the way you tell it you blame her for your financial problems but you don't seem to take that much responsibility. You didn't ask about the costs of the home rebuild? You didn't want to know and be involved?
I'd you want to save your marriage I think other advice in this thread is valid - sell the house, downsize the debt and your lifestyles. You'll have to sell it anyway of you get divorced so you might as well try and save your marriage first by removing the financial pressures as much as possible.
Except Steam scores a binary - like it or don't - and the overall score is just what percentage is positive vs negative. You can't rate one or other, just whether you liked each game.
But Gamespot have gone too soon with their reporting, picking a time when the scores are still in flux. Fallout 76 is 72% positive, while Starfield is 75%. And Fallout 76 certainly wasn;t 72% positive at launch. It's not a fair comparison and is a nonsense story.
A well-funded group of anti-Trump conservatives has sent its donors a remarkably candid memo that reveals how resilient former President Donald J. Trump has been against millions of dollars of negative ads the group deployed against him in two early-voting states....
Sounds like the journalist didn't understand the memo.
The key messages that I'm seeing flagged up are that they did find a method which basically involves former trump supporters giving their reasons for disavowing him, and that trumps share of the vote dropped 4 points where they ran ads versus a 5 point growth where they did not. That's a 9 point swing against trump by running ads - that sounds pretty effective.
That they found things that don't work are also positives as it means they've refining their method. We remain early in the primary process nota single vote has been cast yet and there are still 3 months until the the first vote.
The problem is a 9 ppoitn swing against a candidate doesn't mean much when there isn't a viable alternative for that to benefit. What they really need is a candidate to coalesce republican opposition behind. At the moment none of the candidates seem up to it.
To be clear, I’m not complaining that we don’t have these aforementioned applications on the Linux desktop. That’s not the point. The point is “we” still don’t have a robust way for developers to monetise their application development work....
The real "problem" is how you make it work without a monopoly system like Google's or Apple's or Steam or Microsoft. They have to varying extents made monopolies where app makers want to list in their store, and accept they take 30% of the revenue because they are the sole gatekeeper to a large number of users. That model doesn't work in Linux because you can't create a monopoly to force someone to use your store.
Microsoft keeps trying in Windows via sheer scale but UWA's are not a monopoly so people currently largely bypass it. Microsoft even now lets App makers keep every penny of money generated "in-app" (except for games) as it's desperate to try and grow. Canonical has tried it with Linux and has also failed because ultimately it isn't a monopoly and it's method of Debs as the article said didn't really work. Steam works cross platform because of sheer size and it's managed to make a convenient cross platform library which gradually locks users in to an extent, and also forces publishers to list it's game there. It's very difficult to get to that kind of scale to be compelling.
For an "App store" to work in Linux under the currently "accepted" business model, you'd need to find some way of making it a monopoly or compelling somehow so that users will buy in and the 30% price tag to App makers becomes impossible to ignore due to the scale. I can't see that happening. Google did it with Android by forking Linux and making it an entirely walled garden it controlled; the free route into that garden is there but is very marginal and you have to bypass security measures to get to it.
The only way I can see it working in a limited fashion in Linux is if someone makes an "at cost" model where the share of revenue taken by the app store is purely to maintain the store (including the payment system, any "drm" that might be needed etc). That sounds like the Flathub route. But I can't see it growing rapidly or being compelling for App makers to take a risk on - it'll probably take a long time to gradually grow and prove itself as a reliable way of monetising apps.
Whether or not we need monetised Apps in linux is a whole other question. For me personally, aside from Games, all the software I use on Windows and Linux is free OR a subscription service (such as Office paid for by work, or my Email, Password manager and Backup software which I pay for). On my phone, the only software I've ever bought has been low level - like a music player or a theme app; and that has been an engineered demand because Google has a monopoly, which largely keeps out the opensource community allowing app makers to step in. I bypass that now with F-droid. I accept I'm part of the exception in Android, but most users have that expectation in Linux and Windows.
I don't see a substantial "app store" type eco-system growing in those environments. If someone is willing to give it away for free as FOSS, then it leaves little room for App makers for low level software. The only route to make money is then the "premium" or value added models, and a lot of that is going subscription model - software as a service. App stores are largely the result of closed eco-systems; in an open eco-system like Linux and even Windows it just doesn't make much sense.
In the US it'd be attacked as un-American and as part of the "culture wars" the US right wing seem to imagine. The government would be attacked for taking away "freedom units".
Electoral reform with proportional representation would be better priority so government can reflect the majority, and not the noisy fringes.
This is the problem with believing too much in models. A model can show you anything you want - it's output is only as good as the parameters and algorithms you set it.
Modelling the climate in the next 50-100 years is already extremely difficult and fraught with inaccuracies but we have lots of models and data to extrapolate from, so we do have a crude idea where we're going. But we can't model next years weather with accuracy, just the base trend. Crucially important warning for climate change but limited otherwise.
Modelling out to 250 million years is basically a crock of shit. The tectonic movements are predictable and gross predictions that a pangea arrangement might be warmer may have some validity but modelling the climate and evolution and status of mammals is pure conjecture.
Good thing about modelling that far is you will never have see you model's accuracy being tested. Publish a paper, play into current fears around climate change with an irrelevant prediction about 250million years away, get an article published in the New York times and egos massaged all round.
If I was laid off by a company I wouldn't go back unless I had no other choice. If a company didn't see your value previously and now it supposedly does, what is to say it will not change again in the future and fire you again? A lot of companies do a last-in first-out approach and are cyclical about hiring and firing to please shareholders. That's where these tech companies are at now.
Also who wants the potential of a CV where you were laid off twice by the same company? It'd be like them taking your CV and wiping their arse with it before handing to back to you as security escorts you out of the building.
Former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said Monday she thinks former first lady Michelle Obama will be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, adding that President Biden is “out.” …
Redfall can be the next Cyberpunk 2077, if Microsoft wants it to be. (www.pcgamesn.com)
I’m really hoping MS can get this game back on track. It has so much potential.
Indigenous Voice: Australians reject historic Indigenous referendum - BBC News (bbc.in)
Australian national broadcaster ABC has projected three states voted No, effectively defeating the referendum.
The White House is walking back Biden's statement that he saw photographic evidence of beheaded children (www.businessinsider.com)
Is Brave Browser currently as privacy disrespecting as some say?
I care about my privacy, though I like it’s UI. Is it really as bad as some say?
What if urine was reprocessed by large intestines?
I have wondered many times how a human would fare if the kidneys dumped urine into the start of the large intestines somewhere about the appendix instead of into a bladder to be sprayed out. I’m assuming water would be reabsorbed and slower to process out, primarily through sweat and evaporation from the lungs, and maybe...
I just finished Logan's run(1967) and have a few questions
I loved the book, it was a very fun fever dream. Do the sequels have that same sort of frenetic energy?...
I had a dream about windows and have decided to setup Linux on my laptop. What distro should I use?
I used Ubuntu once a few years ago but had compatability issues so I went back to windows. Not a great programmer but I’d like to learn. I’m not looking to do much gaming beyond DOOM2 and factorio. Mostly looking for privacy and a way to get back into programming (I have this pipe dream of learning Assembly). I’m not to...
‘Absurd’ speed limit lands $460 fines for cyclists. Even joggers overtook them (www.brisbanetimes.com.au)
Bob* was riding across the Kurilpa Bridge into the city on a quiet school holiday Friday morning, also coincidentally World Car-Free Day, when … BAM, he was $464 poorer.
After Axing Headlines, Elon Musk To Hide Retweet, Like Buttons On Twitter (www.pcmag.com)
Since when did Firefox make it so difficult to set custom search engine?
So been moving around a lot with browsers, waterfox, librewolf and very recently degoogle chromium, figured id look at Firefox and holy theres less than half the option in setting then there were afew years back but I gotta say the biggest sin is that adding custom search engine is obfuscated, and the chooses of engines are...
“Tip of the iceberg”: Experts sound the alarm after Trump blabbed nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago (www.salon.com)
Steam Deck as a laptop replacement?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. With the repairability of the steam deck and the power available to it, it seems like a no brainer to use it for a bit of school work or casual browsing, Discord etc. Like you would a normal desktop....
Historic change for tipped workers: Subminimum wage to end in Chicago restaurants, bars (www.usatoday.com)
Tipped restaurant and bar workers in Chicago will make $15.80 per hour through raises over the next few years as subminimum wages are banned.
Opinion | The GOP’s revenge plot against Pelosi is unhinged — but revealing (www.washingtonpost.com)
Because Republicans are such firm believers in benevolence toward political foes, they are furious with Democrats for failing to save Kevin McCarthy. After Democrats voted en masse this week to remove the California Republican as House speaker, his fellow Republicans responded by revoking some of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol...
Political forces begin to move on new California Sen. Butler as she mulls a run (www.cnn.com)
The first step for the candidates running in next year’s California Senate race is to quietly try to spook newly appointed Sen. Laphonza Butler into not running at all.
Great news — social media is falling apart (www.businessinsider.com)
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Starfield Is Bethesda's Lowest-Rated Game On Steam (sh.itjust.works)
By Claire Lewis on September 27, 2023 at 3:28PM PDT...
Republican Group Running Anti-Trump Ads Finds Little Is Working (www.nytimes.com)
A well-funded group of anti-Trump conservatives has sent its donors a remarkably candid memo that reveals how resilient former President Donald J. Trump has been against millions of dollars of negative ads the group deployed against him in two early-voting states....
There is still no Linux app store (popey.com)
To be clear, I’m not complaining that we don’t have these aforementioned applications on the Linux desktop. That’s not the point. The point is “we” still don’t have a robust way for developers to monetise their application development work....
The Many Times The US Tried To Go Metric (youtu.be)
Mammals’ Time on Earth Is Half Over, Scientists Predict (www.nytimes.com)
Meta and Salesforce are looking to rehire some workers they just laid off. It's putting those people in an awkward spot. (www.businessinsider.com)
It’s not the call you’d expect to get: The company that laid you off wants you back....
Sarah Palin says Michelle Obama will be Dem nominee in 2024 (thehill.com)
Former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said Monday she thinks former first lady Michelle Obama will be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, adding that President Biden is “out.” …