Sony very famously scheduled the PS2 launch in Japan to happen right after exams - so schools would finish for the year and exams are over and a shiny new PS2 for you the next day.

Thats a ...... weirdly.... responsible bit of corporate behavior. The Japanese are surprising people sometimes.

Eh.. not necessarily. Starfield was supposed to be a game of this scale, touted as another Skyrim or Fallout. And it went over like a lead balloon, and about a week later everyone shrugged and went back to Baldurs Gate. Though I'm not expecting this to fare as poorly, since Rockstar do not have the reputation for jank that Bethesda have

But more to the point, this is a console only release. I wont be playing it, cos its not on PC. I *will* be playing it when it releases for PC however.

Yes, because animations use animators ,not actors.

AI slop uses neither. No humans or art are involved. Hence why people who backed a crowd funded project to make art are pissed off that instead of art they got AI slop.

What actually is your point here?

Oh you'd be surprised. Back in my younger years I worked in the court technology group for the (west australian) DOJ and for a while I was detailed to the WA supreme court, and was a bit surprised to find that the Judges quarters had an absolutely epic collection of very expensive aged whiskeys and brandies, and those judges would be hitting that booze pretty hard between hearings. What was weird was , you'd have a judge with enough whiskey to kill an elephant in them, having a debate with a QC lawyer (queens court is, or was, the highest rank of lawyer in our legal system) over the finer point of some obscure metaphysics axiom in Kant's Prolegomena , or an arcane ruling in a 1500s court case in the UK or whatever and would usually utterly thrash the lawyer. If it was me I'd be slurring my words and demanding the lawyer meet me in the carpark for fisticuffs lol. Those old yodas are just wired differently.

This does seem to be a modern issue.

My folks where dirt poor, and while often dinner was just... scrambled eggs again... Mum was adamant we had to eat a balanced dinner with NO sugar or salt (back in the 1970s doctors where a bit more worried about salt than we are now. We largely think salt isn't the heart killer we thought it was back in the day, though added salt still isnt recomended for folks with high blood pressure), and junk food was very rare indeed.

With that said, we lived in rural Australia, so that might have been a very different upbringing to an urban American, even in the 1970s.

I will add one caveat regarding weight and elderly health.

While it IS true that nutrient restriction is correlated with longer lifespans (although you basically need to practically live a full starved life , cradle to grave, for this to be significant) , and of course in many metrics being a healthy weight is absolutely more healthier, in late life there is actually some value in being *slightly* overweight, because thin elders are more prone to hip injuries and other broken bones from falls , and a hip injury can be a death sentence if your old enough. Folks just .... don't recover well... So in geriatric cases having a bit of weight can actually be good for you. Not obese, just a little chonky padding to help cuishon falls. Beyond that, a bit of fat can actually be protective beyond about 70-75. But crucially, we dont actually know why. So one would presume that the key here is to stay thin until 70, at which point, it is useful then to put a few happy kilos on.

Mortality risk was lowest for overweight participants. The risk of death for overweight participants was 13% less than for normal-weight participants (hazard ratio (HR)=0.87, 95% CI=0.78â"0.94). The risk of death was similar for obese and normal-weight participants (HR=0.98, 95% CI=0.85â"1.11). Being sedentary doubled the mortality risk for women across all levels of BMI (HR=2.08, 95% CI=1.79â"2.41) but resulted in only a 28% greater risk for men (HR=1.28 (95% CI=1.14â"1.44).

There was a sample size of around 9000 participants, roughly 50/50 m/f

Reference:
Flicker, L., McCaul, K.A., Hankey, G.J., Jamrozik, K., Brown, W.J., Byles, J.E. and Almeida, O.P. (2010), Body Mass Index and Survival in Men and Women Aged 70 to 75. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 58: 234-241.
https://agsjournals.onlinelibr...

These drugs are handed out like candy today and now seeing more and more side effects. The world has truly changed in my lifetime. Almost nobody was overweight or obese when I was a kid and when you see old pictures.

So I was skeptical on this, as I certainly remember obese people when I was younger, and decided to do a dig on the stats. Turns out , in a rhetorically exaggerated way you are right.

Overweightness rose roughly from 50% of the population to 70% of the population in the US from 1990 to now. From 35% to 60% in the UK (Though it hasn't risen there in a decade) , and 35% to 62% in Australia, with the same plateau seen in australian data. Japan from 17% to 21%. South Korea from 17% to 37%. And so on.

The conclusions seem complex. The fastest growths seem to be in wealthy western countries, the wealthy asian countries have definitely seen growth but are still significantly lower. I can only conclude there that while people are still over-eating in wealthier asian countries, the diets are healthier and/or people are working out more. There is extremely high obesity in Samoa and pacific islander countries, but these are not recent phenomena and may be keyed to genetic adaptions in fishing people for whom having a bit of extra weight might confer some advantages, evolutionary speaking. I've long suspected human fattiness is a misfiring evolutionary measure to store nutrients in fat for the winter. In the Samoan case, that might not be misfiring at all.

Ah.... ADHD rant. Let me get back on track....

Overweightness is huge burden on the health system, and issues of food security and lifestyle might be making it increasingly harder for people to keep their weight down while simultaneously being bombarded with various perverse incentives to eat absolute trash. If someone in a poor neighborhood can only afford to feed his family nasty mcdonalds crap, then they are gonna eat that instead of a good healthy home cooked meal with an assortment of vegetables and non-preserved meats.

In this regard I think widespread GLP-1 is a good thing that folks are are using GLP-1s to get that weight down. So far other than these rare side effects, they are largely free of downsides except expense, are correlated with improved cardio health, reduction in sleep apnea (which might make a measurable dent in dementia cases), respiratory health, and all around fitness. And most importantly can deeply reduce the caseload of Type 2 Diabetes. In other words, if we can get the prices down, this will likely take a huge chunk out of the costs of maintaining an ageing populations impact on the health spending of society. And that benefits everyone.

Theres a big difference. The exccellent short you refer to (I think it was part of love death and robots?) was created by a team of extremely talented artists with a significant amount of labor. Not some douchebag who takes a bunch of fan money and blows a quarter of it on AI tokens and the rest on....... I dont know..... coke maybe.... or whatever fuck aI bros do in their spare time. One is skill and talent, the other is a grift.

Atom was an appalling memory hog. I was always mystified as to why everyone abandoned the superb sublime text and its tiny footprint for a giant wrapped webpage that seemed custom built for making peoples computers chug.

On the upside, the day Atom was released, people stopped having the "bloat" excuse to not try Emacs anymore.

"Your eyes are like the deepest oceans. Black-green and filled with monsters"

No thanks. Imagining what might be in any cup with Microsoft's name on it just gives me the willies...

Two startups, one cup.

Disclosure: I'm also non-American, but from an english speaking country.

I desperately want to agree with you. It would be great for the temperature in any political debate to be brought down. But I think America is a little past that now. Do you think, based on all the evidence, that Trump has society's best interest at heart, or his own?

So wanting society to adopt the posture of "all we need is for Trump to change his tune and make sure he has society's best interests at heart" is a little naive. That's not going to happen. The frog and scorpion parable is completely apt here. Society needs to do what it must to avoid becoming the frog.

No, the last two years will be over. But not until January 3.

Wait what? GTA6 has been delayed AGAIN?

(Seriously though, yes, you are correct, the current arangement with the two houses is in place for another month)

Oh I dont know. I somewhat enjoyed Oblivion, and with the recent remaster/UE5 port they did , it actually holds up quite well, although the face animations are as horrifying as ever.

My concern is Betheda appear unable to learn. Starfield had the same janky faces doing creepy staring that Oblivion had, just with much higher quality assets. Its like... theres something about the facial animation rigs that arent hitting right. Compare with Baldurs Gate, which is actually packed with face to face cut scenes but no real uncanny valley and we learn this CAN be done right, but it requires keeping up to date with modern animation techniques. I'm more just using that as an example, though, to say that starfield felt like a 15 year old game with a modern-ish coat of paint, but not a good 15 year old game. For that we have Oblivions remaster which WAS a good 15yo game, but in a modern-ish coat of paint.

I dont know. I'm not gonna set my expectations high. And if I'm wrong , and its excellent, well that'll be a delight.

The problem is you are legally, and morally, correct. But you are economically completely wrong. He can't forbid you from owning RAM. But he can buy all the ram so theres none left for you to have. And thats precisely what he, and all his fellow travellers in silicon valley have been doing. They aren't even sticking it in machines, half of its just being warehoused for datacenters that arent built yet.

Meanwhile RAM continues to be absurdly expensive because retailers are struggling to find supplies. Prebuilt computers are rising in prices to astronomical levels. Barely more than 6 months ago Apple put out a computer for $600 , cue forward 6 months, and the Ram crisis has forced them to release their latest computer at substantially more than the equivelent model in the last generation. Apple famously had one of the most locked down supply chains in the industry, yet even THEY couldnt get around it.

Nobody is coming to take your RAM away. But they sure as fuck are making it hard as possible to let you affford any more of it.