Since a thief will be warned if they've just stolen an AirTag along with whatever else they were after.

I don't think the burn lasted 65 minutes, it just happened 65 minutes after launch. Too bad the English language can be so ambiguous.

Interesting, I think your definition requires that visual effects be added in post-production, since criteria (a) precludes anything that's actually captured while shooting. Common special effects like explosions, squibs, moving lights and lasers wouldn't be visual effects, since they would be observable to someone who's on set during shooting. Using wires wouldn't be a visual effect, unless you count the fact that they have to be painted out in post. I'm not sure what you mean by criteria (b) :)

I submit that all visual effects are storytelling devices. Some are done better than others, and some are more believable than others, but in the end the visuals are telling a lot of the story, and visual effects support that. I don't think you can separate effects from storytelling that easily. Or at least I can't.

Note: I'm ignoring anything having to do with the quality or amount of effects used. Acting can be good, bad, understated or completely hammed up. Effects can be screwed up in a number of ways, from just doing them badly to using them too much. They're still storytelling devices, but they may not be very good ones.

That's not so. The scene that made the nickname had parts captured from a camera array, and parts that were computer generated. There also were no actual bullets, those were CGI.

The ground-breaking thing they did was in the software that (a) generated a list of key positions to place the cameras, so they would have enough visual information (e.g. textures) to generate the scene with a minimum number of cameras and (b) software to create realistic scenes that were matched with the live action. The entire city and sky in that scene were CG by the way, they shot the actors on a green stage.

There were already camera arrays out there (I know this because I co-designed one of them in 1996), so the multi-camera thing wasn't the new trick here.

Um, everything was fake, except for Keanu Reeves leaning backwards. In fact, they didn't even shoot that in real-time - he was on wires so that he could fall slowly. Their camera system didn't have the synchronization to be able to capture "simultaneously enough" to stop his motion if he had been falling at full speed.

Your second comment begs the question - what do you call a visual effect? Colored lights, arranging individual frames from several cameras as a motion sequence, fade to black, strobes, spotlights, filters? In my book, those are all visual effects. Some are more exciting than others, but they all affect the visuals.

If you're running a website or some other web service (like a shopping cart or payment system), then using the cloud probably makes sense for you. The cloud, or more properly "managed servers and services", is a good solution for those who need it.

The problem is that "the cloud" is used in lots of places where it isn't necessary. Anything that doesn't need to be connected to a web service is, by definition, more complex and fragile if it's made dependent on the cloud. TFS mentions robot vacuums not working because of some outage - it's hard to argue that a vacuum cleaner should ever be reliant on a cloud server regardless of how "smart" it is.

The cloud doesn't make internet services more fragile. Reliance on internet services makes a lot of devices more fragile, especially when there's no need for it and when there's no fallback in case of connection issues.

Wow, that's amazing.

You, and several others who commented above, missed the actual number of registrations in the summary. For reference, there were 110,864 new car registrations, of which 9.66 percent were gas or diesel.

That works out to about 10700 ICE cars, with the other 100K and change being electric.

I swear, the self-awareness code was deleted before we pushed out the release candidate build! /OG AoE Dev

They did. Our letter arrived yesterday.

It doesn't say anything about parking 50 feet from other cars, but that may be because we have a 2020 model. Others may have received that suggestion.

They don't have parts available to fix it yet, so they just reiterated the suggestions that have already been circulating (charge to 90%, don't discharge below ~70 miles range, don't charge inside overnight, move the car outside after charging).

The answer for FAQ question 2 says that it will run on Steam, so presumably that means it will work in Linux.

Of course, it also means you need a Steam subscription. Note: I don't have a Steam subscription, so I don't know for sure if "Steam for PC" actually means that it will work on Steam for Linux.

I have an LG OLED TV from 2016 or 2017, and I can't see any degradation in the image. There's definitely no noticeable color shift, which I would expect if blue were "wearing out" faster than the other colors.

My wife got a Chevy Bolt for around $30K last year. It's been a great car (potential battery recall notwithstanding). A friend currently leases a 2021 Bolt, for $208/month. Electric cars can be expensive, but they don't have to be.

Solar isn't necessary for BEVs to be cost-effective. Where I live, electricity is about $0.16/kWh. There are lower rates for off-peak vehicle charging, something around $0.11/kWh. Since the Bolt gets around 4 miles/kWh, we pay no more than $0.04 per mile. You'd need to get 75 MPG with an ICE car for an equivalent per-mile cost, and that's without factoring in other fluids and services that just aren't needed for BEVs.

That said, we have solar panels on our roof, and I've never heard of the aggregators you're talking about. Our utility does net metering directly (it's a state law actually). We pay a customer charge to be connected to the grid, and we then pay the difference between what we generate and what we use. There are typically credits, which are held for up to 12 months, and are applied as needed if usage is higher than generation. Aside from one bill this spring, after a particularly snowy winter, I haven't had to pay a cent for electricity in the last 5 years.

I'm not sure where you get your information, or if things are actually as you describe where you live, but it's certainly not that bad everywhere.

Thank you. I wasn't sure if anyone else noticed that all this complaining is about a higher performance CPU being put into a phone.

I'll agree that I did some conflating. But it also destroyed discoverability, especially when some things are only findable in certain contexts, and the shift was forced down user's throats.

To hear it from couple people that were on the office team at the time (as I did), the overriding driving force for the change was political, not end user needs. Not saying you can't have a win-win scenario, but often it's caught up in an attempt to keep sales and upgrade revenue flowing (which is why we've seen the shift to subscriptions for mature software).

> No PM in history has ever said "This seems to be working pretty well, let's leave it the way it is." Because that's not bold. That's not visionary. That doesn't get you promoted.

This has been the case with operating systems and many significant pieces of software for a long time now. From Windows and OSX to Office to less widespread software like quicken. UI and UX changes being pushed in virtually every release as the "great new thing" that will make your life better to the point where it has become like the fashion industry where everyone is looking for this year's "new style" and follows the seasonal trends (dark mode! light mode! flat icons! raised icons! whee!).

Once most software reached a level of functionality that satisfied 99+% of its users, such as Office did 20 years, for any subsequent changes to seem significant they had to violate many of the rules of good UI and UX design - like how Office 2007's ribbon was a step back in terms of explorability/discoverability. As a programmer, I am well aware that the menus and UI built up over the previous 2 decades could have been retained, or kept as an alternate mode, but I'm also aware that most people would have stuck with what they already had invested hundreds if not thousands of hours invested in learning, and the resulting low adoption rate would have meant the person responsible didn't get her promotion and bonuses. Priorities you know, the good of the one outweighs the good of the masses. And how many times are disruptive UI/UX changes made to promote something someone paid for (Looking at you Mozilla/Firefox)?

> It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is.

While the PMs may dream, their customers curse the day they were born and wish nothing but ill-fortune upon them.

Most of the software and devices we have are tools to us. And now that we live in a world where they are auto-updated whether or not we want them to be, it is now a regular occurrence to go to use our phones or PCs to do something we have done numerous times before and be startled to discover that something has changed and it's made doing the task we wish to do more confusing, difficult, or that it started doing something completely unintended. No one likes going into the garage to get a hammer, only to discover that they have to relearn how to hold and wield it, but that's pretty much the norm today for many pieces of software.

I can remember one day when it started that I would pull my phone out of my pocket and there would be a half completed reply email sitting there. Apparently after a recent update my phone added a "shake to reply" option that it defaulted to on, and it interpreted the action of my putting it in my pants pocket as a 'shake' and launched a reply as it was disappearing into my jeans pocket. With no warning to it, I had to eventually puzzle out what had changed and was going on. A waste of my time and comfort.

Phone OS updates happen all the time, and we are trained to install them without a second thought (patch latest security holes, etc), but they don't come with (nor do we usually want) a nice tutorial spelling out ALL of the changes we didn't ask for and had no choice in. Desktop OSs are no better. Too many times I boot up my PC to find new widgets added, and my custom UI and registry settings have been reset.

This is false.

The SEC specifies no timeline in the rule stating that corporations must "maximize shareholder return". (or whatever the exact wording is) It's often greedy executives (whose bonuses may be tied to quarterly earnings), or greedy shareholders (people who just want a quick buck, and don't care about the future health of the company), who push for quarterly profits above all else.

Even extremely experimental projects, that never turn a profit, would be difficult to prosecute by activist shareholders - there's a burden of proof that company management willfully squandered assets on something that had no chance of working. You'd probably have to prove that the executives materially benefited from the activity as well, e.g. by showing that major contracts went to other companies owned by the execs.

For most companies, the best way to maximize returns "this quarter" is to sell off all assets and fire everyone. Clearly, that won't do anything for next quarter (in most cases), and it's also clear that most companies don't do this. Obviously, there's some part of the business management and planning process that takes time horizons greater than 3 months into account.