Foundation is currently airing on Apple TV right now, they're five episodes in.

It looks gorgeous and has decent enough world building, excellent performances, some good ideas (the cloned Cleons featuring Lee Pace might be the best part of the show), and Jared Harris is always wonderful. That being said, they're pretty much just inventing everything, so if you're expecting to recognize stuff from the book there's not much.

I can sympathize with the attempt at least... the books as written are kinda the definition of unfilmable. I know they said that about LotR (and Dune) but I think Foundation really is... Asimov was a brilliant ideas guy, but the books are largely paper-thin characters spewing pages of exposition at each other, spaced across hundreds of years. Not really any characters for a TV audience to connect with and hold on to over the long term. So the show features a ton of completely made up elements to keep certain characters around longer, flesh out more backstories, etc.

A lot of reviews have said the first 4 episodes are decent world building but it nosedives after that and doesn't really do the story in the books justice. I've been able to enjoy it for what it is so far, but it feels like it's teetering on the edge of becoming generic action sci-fi driven by big setpieces and invented character drama.

Incompetence certainly abounds too. It's rather disheartening.

But even places with solid talent dance to the whims of business needs.

Oh ok. Developers just wake up and decide to add bloat for no reason. Because they're "evil" (not your word, but the person I was originally replying to). Please tell me you don't actually believe in such an absurd reductionism?

Yes of course there are all sorts of techniques to defer things. But at the end of the day it's still a bloated page consuming way more bandwidth and CPU than necessary.

Code only gets you so far, truly slimming down a page requires a multi-pronged approach.

First of all, don't blame the developers. You think they choose to add bloat? No, it's marketing adding the forty-seventh fucking analytics script, or yet another giant banner carousel. Developers just execute business requirements, they don't come up with them. Sure they can push back on technical grounds to a certain extent, but at the end of the day the stakeholders call the shots, not the devs.

That being said, believe it or not, this is all changing. Right now. Web performance is now being taken very seriously at major companies.

Why is that? Because as of a couple of months ago, performance ("Core Web Vitals") now directly affects your google page ranking, and that's huge: https://www.sodawebmedia.com/b...

Everyone is scrambling to make their shit faster now that it directly impacts their search ranking.

He just asked a simple question. A perfectly reasonable one that a lot of people would be wondering. "Won't stuff in LEO experience drag?". He even asked to be corrected if he was mistaken.

You could have just civilly answered his question like an adult, but you decided to be an insulting and insufferable asshole for no reason at all instead. A "true slashdotter" indeed.

-1 Flamebait.

I use this Disable Javascript plugin: https://chrome.google.com/webs...

I primarily got it for development purposes, but have found it's wonderful at bypassing all sorts of paywalls these days. Obviously you're out of luck if it's a proper server-side solution, but a lot of them don't seem to be.

On the other hand, that's probably miles DRIVEN. Like, having your car shipped across the ocean wouldn't incur mileage for insurance purposes.

The lab leak idea WAS ignored, because Trump said it. And Trump is literally The Boy Who Cried Wolf. He said crazy shit literally every day and so him promoting the theory immediately tainted it.

As for "no real evidence", that describes the "wet-market theory" too. Lab leak is frankly the stronger theory at this point. Just my opinion of course.

For AAA stuff sure, but there's plenty of great smaller games out there.

Like... Valheim is only 2GB. Surviving Mars is 6GB. Civ VI is 16GB.

If they didn't offer it this small, there'd be people complaining they don't want to pay for a bunch of space they're not going to use.

Yeah, first thing I noticed too.

The fact that he pretends dissent was patriotic under "you're either with us or with the terrorists" Dubya but racist under Obama tells you everything you need to know about his worldview.

I dunno, I think Sexchange Overflow has a nicer ring to it. Make a good band name too.

Yup. I held my nose when Facebook bought Oculus and still got one (they did have the best touch controllers), but the day they announced a Facebook login requirement to USE FUCKING GAMING HARDWARE is the day I swore the Rift CV1 would be my one and only Oculus product.

I know you couldn't be bothered to RTFA in your breathless rush to tell everyone how unimpressed you are, but it mentions Topaz:

I have tried some of the Topaz AI software options, like Topaz Gigapixel AI, but I have not seen it work this well.

Nobody is claiming Adobe invented AI image upscaling (and nobody used the word 'historic' except you). But Photoshop is THE industry standard, and them launching a best-in-class implementation of this feature WILL cause a major shift and mass adoption of this as standard practice.

Sadly, it gets gamed like everything else. Amazon reviews are harder to trust than they used to be.

Amazon flooded with thousands of fake reviews

Independent site ReviewMeta – which examines reviews on Amazon – said in the report that it believed every unverified five-star review on the top ten pairs of headphones was fake.

/r/wallstreetbets has (at time of writing) over 6 million subscribers.

100,000 is only ~1.5% of that. Not hard to believe at all, why do you find that so implausible?

There's certainly an argument to be made that it qualifies as "coordinated effort to manipulate an app's rating", but I don't know why you would assume that it must be a bot farm.