I think that after every 3rd wave of Missile Command (what a disgustingly irresponsible creation!!), the game should require that the player's parents check to make sure the player isn't getting depressed by the prospect of nuclear war.

And in Asteroids, after any ship destruction due to collision with an asteroid, the game should require parental attestation that the player isn't starting to develop symptoms of petraphobia.

In both cases, if the parents aren't available (e.g. dead because the player is in their 80s) I suppose a Notary Public or a AMA-certified doctor would be a good-enough replacement.

We have learned so much since the early days of computer games, and it's better to be safe than sorry. (But don't fuck with Joust! I want to be able to play without having to call my mom every time the Lava Troll touches my mount's legs inappropriately.)

I haven't read the text of this Swiss law, but if it's anything like USA's, UK's, or EU's laws, then it regulates "providers" and/or "carriers," not software applications themselves.

If you are sending already-made ciphertext through a regulated service, the service won't be in trouble. But if the service offers to encrypt for you, then they will be in trouble.

It just occurred to me that the now-common conflation between web apps and local apps (to a lot of phone users, these two things look the same) matters.

Maybe ASF just likes whiskey.

White oak has more tyloses and a tighter grain structure than other oak varieties, which cause its barrels to be more waterproof. It chars better. And it generally wins most taste tests. It's just perfect for barrel aging.

Save your red oaks for furniture.

Is Amazon fitting the bill for higher insurance rates?

This question surprised me.

Before we tackle the unlikely possibility that this raises insurance rates, your question makes me realize there's another question you might want to try to answer first:

Who do you think currently pays for the insurance on Amazon's vehicles?

And another: do you think that by Amazon making the choice to deploy an additional piece of driver hardware, the insurance-premium-paying party in the above question, would change?

OK, so much for that theory because I went ahead and searched the full text for wine and got this:

Mosquitoes showed a clear preference for the well-hydrated, on hops and grapes, that is. Arm landings were significantly higher in beer drinkers compared to those who had nobly abstained for at least 12 hours (FC 1.44, 95% CI 1.20-1.74, PFDR < 0.001, Figure 3C). Mosquitoes seemed to have a taste for wine drinkers too (FC 1.39, 95% CI 1.02-1.88, P = 0.035), but this effect sobered up after correcting for multiple testing (PFDR = 0.103). Measured blood alcohol concentration ranged from to 1.82â and positively correlated with the self-reported consumed number of beers (Spear-man rho = 0.46, P < 0.001) and glasses of wine (Spearman rho = 0.12, P = 0.011). No statistically significant effect of alcohol concentration was observed on mosquito attraction when included as a continuous variable (FC 1.04, PFDR = 0.853) nor as a binned variable using the concentration of approximately two units as a threshold (< 0.5â versus 0.5â, FC 1.21, PFDR = 0.344). Individuals reported to have smoked cannabis in the past 48 hours were more attractive to mosquitoes than individuals that did not smoke cannabis (FC 1.35, 95% CI 1.09-1.66, PFDR = 0.017, Figure 3D). Cannabis was the only substance for which an effect on mosquito arm-landings was found, the effects of other substances were statistically not significant (all PFDR > 0.569). There was no indication that the presence of a cannabis user made mosquitoes fly at higher altitudes or made them less aggressive.

Now I'm on to a new idea. Since hops and cannabis are related, there may be some aromatic compound common to both of them.

The drug companies didn't invent dementia. Alzheimer's was described in1906 and named in 1910, but there was a broad understanding before of older people going in to mental decline--even in ancient times. There's always going to be a leading cause of death. Increased health will lead to increased life spans and reveal new problems. That's what happened with senile dementia. More old people, so more people get it. Those same doctors and drug companies are working on cures and treatments ad yes treatments are more likely to come before cures. Take HIV for example. I'm pretty sure the people maintained at undetectable levels, leading near normal life spans are happier than when they got full-blown AIDS and it was a death sentence. Yes. There's still no cure and the drugs cost money; but they haven't stopped work on a cure. Any researcher in the field would be absolutely THRILLED beyond belief to have their name attached to that, or a cure for Alzheimer's. It's just that it's a really hard thing to do.

Yes. Alcohol. It's on their breath, and insects are attracted to it in general. Googling around, that includes mosquitos but I've heard of people using it to attract wasps and kill them even though it's probably counter-productive since you're attracting the very thing you don't want and the outdoors have a very large supply that your bug zapper or dish of beer is not going to exhaust.

I have a Powershot A640 I bought in '06 or '07. I don't recall. It kind of sucks in low light and lacks image stabilization. Otherwise I'm pretty happy with it. It isn't broken, so it hasn't been replaced. 10 MP is fine for me. I'm not a pro so I don't need more. I heard some of these cameras might be considered "vintage" now, but the last time I checked mine's not worth much so I just use it for its intended purpose. The case I used to attach to my belt wore out before the camera, so now I toss it in my daypack like a trooper and it's still not broken.

Big brother is listening to what YOU are saying to/asking of the ChatBot

Sounds like MSFT is doubling down on good old fashioned face-to-face human colab needed for S/W dev - wonder how that reflects their internal level of success in using LLMs to write code ?

Even LLMs are great for just the morass of shitty business data. Like we get PDF orders from a bunch of our customers, they don't order enough or in a standard enough format to automate it properly but most of the time an LLM can digest that, match up the products and produce a result at least as well as a human can. There's just not much opportunity for it to go wrong, the product list is constrained, we also have it report out all the totals from the PDF so if the dollar amount doesn't add up we won't accept it. It's not solving the big business problems, but there are a lot of small problems where they can be really useful

Might actually solve the fentanyl crisis if it's more attractive to smuggle chips

We all know it when we see it. Grinding is processing. The nixtimalization process for corn is processing and it's GOOD, because without it you don't get enough nutrients. American Indians did it. You could do it in your own kitchen if you had to. You saute, puree, grind, and mix all the time in a home kitchen. These are processes, but they're not ultra-processing.

You know what I've never heard of anybody doing at home? Hydrogenating. Partially or fully, nobody does that shit in their kitchen. So. First item on the list: hydrogenated oils.

You might buy something like Crisco which is hydrogenated oil, but you'd never make it yourself so yes, even a tub of that "ingredient" is an ultra-processed food as far as I'm concerned. Anything that contains it is ultra-processed, so you can make ultra-processed food in your kitchen by using that as an ingredient; but you didn't make it yourself from normally processed ingredients. Pressing the oil from a seed is normal processing. It may or may not be good; but it's closer to the original healthy ingredient as opposed to something that's ultra-processed.

This is how it's going to go with the list in general--there will be debates about what should and shouldn't be on it; but there should be guidelines about how the decisions are made. Whether or not it's a common process from raw ingredients, normally done in home kitchens is a pretty good guideline to start with.

Ha ha! The github page shows it as last committed "48 years ago." Good one, MS.

I carried my Abacus "The Anatomy of the Commodore 64" around all the time, mostly because it had a somewhat-commented disassembly of the C64's ROMs, which included this interpreter. But actual source would be even cooler.

I remember reading through it and suddenly realizing: "oh, that is why IF..GOTO is slightly faster than IF..THEN, because it skips an unnecessary call to CHRGET."