The jokes about Darth Jar Jar were everywhere of course, but it could have worked. Star Wars lifted a few ideas from classic SF sources including Asimov's Foundation series - in which, we might recall, the terrifying, unstoppable galactic warlord known as The Mule was hiding in plain sight as a clown, who seemed to be merely a harmless entertainer at court. His military success was chiefly thanks to his psychic ability to manipulate others' minds to his liking - Darth Jar Jar could have done very well that way!

I saw three Star Wars movies when I was young. They were great. Mainly because I was a child and this stuff was new and fresh and exciting to me. Even the Ewoks.

I saw three more when I was not quite so young. They were... poor.

I saw a couple more when I was older. One was great, the other was okay but a retread of one of the old ones, and I never got round to seeing the rest. Didn't care enough.

Now they've got more, and apparently they're based on a TV series they did, which I didn't watch because I wasn't subscribed to that streaming platform at the time. So I'm not going to see those either. Same reason I've not seen a Marvel superhero film since the first Avengers one - just too much homework required with all the backstory. Every scene is a shout out or reference that I won't get. Every character seems to be getting ever louder and angrier and more and more of them have access to time machines. I just don't have it in me to care anymore.

I like the sound of these horror films, though. They're going to tell a complete story? In one film? With a beginning, middle and end, that don't ask me to be up to date on an entire Cinematic Universe? Sounds great, time to check where they're showing!

A modern version of GTA London would be the absolute dream. Been long enough now, you could set it in the nineties and have the same retro value to it!

... why unions aren't much more common among technology workers. Especially given what you hear about the videogame industry in particular, with that mad 'crunch time' culture in which workers are ruthlessly, well, crunched. I'd always ask, well, what does your union say about it? And what do you know, there isn't one, how about that.

Nice to hear of some progress being made, then. I suppose the risk with this for the rest of us is that GTA 6 might be late to release, but, uh, at this point I think we're over that

Naively, I don't think this approach would work well. Why? Storage devices work with fixed-length blocks of data at given locations. The problem with compression is that the compressed size is variable: A text file compresses well, but media, like video and audio files, are usually already compressed.

I could see an operating system working with hardware-assisted compression, but honestly, given the tradeoffs, I suspect that a bigger drive is probably cheaper and faster in the long run.

Wouldn't a solar panel and a battery be more effective?

I've gotten to the point where I take caffeine pills and drink decaf. Much more predictable.

It reminds me of when I used to go around the Valley telling people I was running a business selling vibrating toilet seats. I used to claim that "they vibrated at the brown note" and that I "crowd-sourced funding from little old ladies who didn't like eating prunes."

You'd be shocked at how many people believed me.

I gave up on noise canceling headphones years ago. Recently, I bought some good ear muffs for hearing protection while I mow the lawn. They just happened to include a bluetooth headset, which happened to have excellent quality.

They're so good, I use them when I fly, and even when I'm in an office situation. A lot of people will start talking to me, and I can't hear them at all if the music is at a normal volume. It's surprising that a $50 ear protection can outperform a high-priced set of bluetooth noise canceling headphones, but sometimes simpler is better.

A few years ago, I wrote software to compare lossy to lossless, and determined that lossy compression was only useful when listening through cheap speakers. Because I use high quality speakers, I decided to subscribe to Tidal: https://andrewrondeau.com/blog...

After about two years, I started having problems. Tidal would go into a mode where I had to restart the application in order for it to stream. Sometimes it wouldn't work for hours. Their support would ignore me, or claim it was a problem with my internet connection. (It wasn't.)

Ultimately, I switched to Google Music because I can upload music that's missing from the service. I hope Amazon offers the same feature, because that would get me to switch to Amazon.

20khz is a truism: It's an average. Some people can hear a little higher than 20khz, and some people can't. There's data that shows some people can hear up to about 28khz. (Which is still less than half of an octave above 20khz, not much.)

A lot of data savings comes from lossy formats trimming the high end down a bit, somewhere between 15-18 khz. Again, this is "good enough" in many cases: Cheap speakers, low volumes, older ears.

I ran a study about what lossy trims out, with graphs that show where the loss happens: https://andrewrondeau.com/blog.... In summary, if you're listening through a good system, lossless is critical.

God bless Lili St. Cyr!

Serious? No. I don't seriously expect really safe speed limits to be set up by any democracy that has so many motorists in it. But I do think that's what we ought to do. As a civilisation, we are killing our own children at an appalling rate, just so that motorists can catch up to the back of the next long line of stationary traffic a few seconds faster. In town, slow down.

Look at the scenario you described. A car doing the speed limit towards a marked crosswalk... it's such a familiar scenario that we forget to be horrified. Think about what we're doing here. We have footpaths across the street specifically for people to walk across. And then we have motorists driving straight at those footpaths, at such speed that it would literally be a crime to go any faster at all, at such speed that they couldn't possibly stop should anyone suddenly walk out on the path. These motorists expect everyone else in the world to pay attention, to stay out of their way. God forbid they themselves should slow down! They're 'doing the limit' and that makes it OK.

That limit is obviously much too high. It should come down. Twenty is plenty.

Then let's redesign those footpaths. At the moment there are raised paths either side of the street, and when the path runs across the middle of the street it is lowered. For the convenience of motorists, of course; otherwise they might have to slow down. Well, let them slow down! The path across the street is a pedestrian walkway just like the paths either side, so let's have it at the same height, for the convenience of people using wheelchairs, people pushing infants in prams, people with mobility issues. We'll put a gentle slope to either side of the path so that it isn't a nasty bump for motor traffic. Well, I mean - so that it isn't a nasty bump if the motor traffic is moving at a safe speed.

Yeah, speed limits are definitely way too high, you're right about that. 20mph in cities is plenty. Then you have a lot longer in which to notice people walking across the road, your brakes have much less work to do in order to bring the vehicle safely to a stop, and if you still fail to respond in time you'll do much less bodily harm to somebody.

In my team, it's much easier to hire overseas contractors. It's not about internal office politics; it's that we work with a contracting firm that makes a big effort to screen candidates well. I find that American recruiters are so focused on being salesmen that it's very hard to pre-screen candidates. They work hard to convince us that a candidate is awesome, when in fact the candidate is a poor match. In contrast, when our contracting firms present a candidate, there's a good chance it's a good candidate.