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Comment Why? I don't get it. Seriously. (Score 1) 65

What's wrong with "Yeah, there are some kinks that we overlooked. It's because the studio had to get the release out before bladiblah. We're working on a patch that addresses the issue. Anyone who bought the game until yesterday will get skin/pet/neat-fun-little-soapbubblegun as a bonus DLC for the inconvenience."

It costs like nothing to do this and you'll be portrayed the cool gaming company dude.

Borderlands is a beloved franchise, it's not that the fans will get all worked up about this. Why insult your customer base with bullshit for no reason what-so-ever? And claiming they build UE5 or that UE5 is a sub-par engine is just being silly. A move that anyone who knows a bit about gaming will see right through. .... With minimal social skill you could turn a buggy release like this into a PR win with a slice of self-deprecating humor, a little DLC fluff as a token apology and some community chat to calm the waters and grow connection. If I were in his place I'd even ride the wave and call it the special "Buggy as Fuck!" release, "Only for a limited time!". I'm pretty sure that would've gotten the game even extra attention. Especially the Borderlands fanbase is into this kind of humor.

I fundamentally don't get it.

These pretentious douchebags need some basic PR training above anything else.

Comment This may actually be the case. No joke. (Score 1) 64

Many PFAS/Forever Chemicals have a structure and effect similar to estrogen, which makes men less manly. It also appears that there are environmental effects lowering testosterone, some researchers Link this to PFAS as well. Low sperm count has also been linked to PFAS.

So, yeah, they literally make your more trans. If you're a man that is.

Comment Roundabouts. (Score 1) 181

They are slowly gaining in Germany too and have been for the last two decades or so, also due to some EU funding while back. Some German towns even exploited this a little by stringing roundabouts together. They make you dizzy driving through them. That aside, roundabouts are a surefire way to slow down traffic to reasonable speeds, remove breaking and waiting at traffic lights and are low-maintenance intersections.

They'd be the default intersection if I were in charge.

Sadly, quite a few of my fellow German citizens whine like crybabies about them and would rather wait at traffic-lights. I don't quite get it, but this is Germany where people are similarly crazy about cars as some are about guns and gun regulations in the US. Go figure.

Comment It never was an "industry". (Score 1) 44

Narrative podcast is a media format, not an industry. Conflating those two like some silly dimwit is very likely to lose you big amounts of money. QED.

"Serial" was a podcast that helped kicked off the craze. It was new, had the true-crime pull that fascinates women and men alike, produced with a fairly low budget, available for free download asynchronously (unlike radio shows), covered a current controversy (which it helped hype up, partly out of self interest in the attention economy) and had enough cliff-hangers to string people along and have people around the world awaiting the next episode.

There is one "problem" with this sort of format though: It takes time to consume, very much like a streaming series. And there is only so much time that shows like this can eat up. I jumped on the "Serial" bandwagon right after a close friend of mine got all hyped up about it. I listened to a few episodes but quickly noticed the cliff-hanger shtick on keeping people on edge wether the convict was guilty or not. IMHO the trick was somewhat transparent and it became less compelling after I noticed it.

I'm pretty sure the format is still out there and used by podcasts, but it never was an industry, since every regular person with a cheap-ass laptop and a free installation of reaper or ardour has everything they need to get going and producing their own narrative podcast.

Thinking that this is an "industry" in itself was quite silly from the beginning. Sort of like calling "cooking spagetti" an industry.

Comment It's not interest rates (Score 1) 35

>> In 1999, the median age of IPOs was five years. In 2022, it was eight years, and today, the median age of IPOs has increased to 14 years.

>> The rise in the age of companies going public is not only a result of the Fed raising interest rates in 2022, but also the consequence of more companies wanting to stay private for longer to avoid the burdens of being public.

Interest rates were a bit higher in 1999 than they are now. Other policies and tax rates have changed since then, but everyone keeps demanding interest rates need to be lower to "fix" things. Honestly the 90's were a pretty good decade for the economy. We even had a balanced budget by the end of the decade. I feel like that period should be a sort of benchmark.

Comment Late-stage civilization? (Score 3, Interesting) 129

Looking around tells me that computer skills are becoming less relevant and closer-to-basic survival skills are becoming more important. Most computer devices are way too complex for most people and true value-add to these devices and their app-space these days is a very rare thing I would argue. It's about a non-retarded digital culture 95%+ of the time and I doubt regular Gen-Z folks are more suitable for this than any other generation besides my type of Gen-X 80ies computer kid who grew up in lockstep with the development and general adoption of microcomputers. That's the reason anyone older or younger than us is often completely out of their depth when doing anything but the simplest tasks on a smartphone or computer.

AFAICT (and some other people too) there is solid indication that key aspects of a high-culture based on digital devices and their educated use is increasingly degrading and has been in the last decade or two. And once that happens you don't need or neither afford too many people sitting at a desk and operating a computer. Wether with AI or not.

Comment Well, I guess M$ was going ... (Score 4, Interesting) 63

... to screw this one up eventually.

What really surprises me about Nadellas M$ is that is actually pretty decent, by M$ standards that is. VS Code is a really neat contribution to the FOSS community and to open standards, as is TypeScript. Some neat surprises on that front in the last decade, I have to admit.

The silver lining is that this is Git. Building your own Github replacement borders on the trivial, as is changing your upstream SPoT repo.

What I absolutely love about Git is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting in the fact that migrating your upstream Git Repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.

Comment You forget how "random" ... (Score 2) 90

... the forming of life and its subsequent evolution is. Yes, you need very specific circumstances for life to form in the first place and - apparently - a quite specific sequence of evolutionary happenstances for intelligent life like us to form, but other than that what happens along the way and where it leads is pretty random. Example: We have some solid evidence that todays birds are the successors to dinosaurs because they are vertebrae with a circular system that runs counter to that of all other vertebrae. Left- and right turning circular systems of blood can co-exist because they are "meta" enough to basic life, just as we can (sort of) get along with todays hornets that only come in pocket-size (unlike some of those cambrian monsters that apparently were around at some point), _but_ when it comes to cells and bacteria we're talking the very basic fundamentals of life-forms.

And unless someone discovers some organism that has internal cell-systems "spinning the other way" and has some solid research indicating and perhaps proving that both types of lifeforms can exist and evolve without significantly endangering the other it is totally prudent for molecular biologists to tread very carefully in this field. It's an epic threat, quite similar to AI or some accidental super-virus. We only have to get this wrong once and humanity, or in this case even life itself as we know it, is done for. And we wouldn't want that to happen, do we?

Cudos to the biologist talking precautions here.

Comment Correctly done today's code ... (Score 1) 57

... is little more than a formalized model and API description anyways, so I don't see this as too much of a big deal. Well established systems use CASE tools and code generation regularly. So much so that using AI may even be a superfluous intermediate step.

That AI is likely to take over the grunt work and bulk of coding shouldn't be news anymore to anyone paying attention.

Comment My observations (Score 3, Insightful) 108

Here comes a data-point of one, which makes this simply an anecdote...

When I work out hard (resistance training to beyond failure) I find that consuming protein at around 1.6-1.8g per kilo of body weight significantly improves my recovery time -- perhaps because of the effect on muscle-protein synthesis which seems to be optimal at this level.

Working out hard with lower levels of protein intake adds at least a day to my recovery so it's easy to see why, given the fixation on strength and fitness that abounds right now, many people are consuming more protein than they might actually need if their goal is simply to remain healthy.

One consideration for many is that when you bias towards a high-protein low fat/carb diet it becomes easier to lose weight or prevent weight gain. Protein is generally more satiating than carbs and leaves you feeling fuller for longer, reducing hunger pangs. A diet higher in protein is also less likely to produce insulin resistance (type 2 diabetes) than one higher in carbs. However, protein is usually also far more expensive (per calorie) than protein which can be a factor in many people's decision-making.

Increasing protein intake (as a percentage of total calories) is also important as you age because it plays a role in reducing the effects of sarcopenia, a condition that affects most over-50s and predisposes people to becoming frail and increasing their likelihood of death from many causes.

Comment Not sure if this affects local fees, but maybe (Score 1) 15

At least around where I live, if a cable provider wants to offer service in a given town, they negotiate a deal with that town where the town gets a little bit of money per cable customer. That money funds things like community-access TV stations, staff and gear, studios at high schools, and so on, so you can watch the local sportsball team, or whatever boring town government meeting, and so on and so forth.

Those community-based things have taken a huge funding hit due to cord-cutting, so they (and towns) have been curious about whether something similar might be worked out for high-speed broadband on a per-customer basis. The local community-access station here has also started looking for sponsorships from local businesses and such, to make up the gap in funding.

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