Bingo... these are marketing and product design issues. There are no genuine moral or philosophical concerns for American capitalist, save those that can be productized (preferably with a monthly subscription fee).

... about the Fyre Festival fraud and failure, (at least) one of them on Netflix. Check it out, absolutely hilarious. LimeWire buying the Fyre brand sounds 110% like something the LimeWire crew came up with while laying stoned in a Whirlpool. I love this. LOL!

Sometimes I think the general gist of Republican philosophy is to extract the maximum amount of wealth possible from ordinary people. For men, that means maximally exploiting their labor, even to the detriment of health and safety. For women, that means usurping their reproductive autonomy (to ensure a ready supply of future workers) and subordinating them to their husbands (to redirect man's resentment at being exploited). To them, a young man playing video games is a tragedy because that time could be spent working or gaining useful job skills.

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.

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.

Note to self: after the collapse, and after reestablishing the republic, let's outlaw the shit out of these companies. Markets should serve mankind, not the other way around.

Who said it has to be based on commercial cell technology? Design the radio to talk to satellites you control, like when the U.S. bugged China's equivalent of Air Force One.

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

... 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.

I'm not worried... humanity faces practically no risk from this existential threat with all the other ones we have on our plate at the moment. :O

... 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.

... until war, revolution, plague, or famine kills a bunch of people. After that, things sort of reset because (1) elites are nicer in a growing economy and (2) power was effectively democratized by the catastrophe... especially when you have a bunch of young men coming back from war. The decades following WWII are a good example of this.