Kids finish school around 3 pm where I live. They have time to do their extracurricular activities (partially) during daytime even in the dead of winter. So of course it’s the mornings they find dreadful. If school finished around 5-6 pm I think they’d be miserable then as well.

Speaking of which, I’m about to end my work day and the sun is setting right now. FML.

Yes it would. I, like most 21st century humans, wake up for work and have free time after work.

In practice for my relatively northern latitude this means I get a little bit of daylight before work (except perhaps around december/january), but winter time is very specifically designed so that today the sun will set exactly 6 minutes before I end my work day.

Were we to keep permanent DST I would get an hour of free time in the daylight today, and at least a little bit of light outside for all winter except perhaps for a month around December. As it stands, I do not get any free time in sunlight for 5 days a week for the entire duration of ST. The switch to ST means “bye-bye sun” and I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I FUCKING HATE IT.

The 24 hour clock is a made up construct. So are business hours. But if we already agreed to change one of these twice a year, can we make it so that it is not optimized to trap me inside for the entire duration of daytime???

Or just :set mouse=a if your terminal emulator was updated in the past decade. gVim has nothing to offer anymore, except that it bundles its own weird terminal emulator that doesn’t inherit any of the fonts, themes, settings or shortcuts of one’s default terminal. Blegh.

Also if you’re not going to leverage Vim’s main feature and just want to click around on stuff, just install VSCod(e|ium), which is genuinely amazingly good.

Brother, these games are thirteen to thirty years old and therefore not in any way relevant to the discussion.

For our sanity we must let TES go. Since Skyrim, Bethesda has only developed Simplified Skyrim In The Wasteland, Buggy Skyrim in the Multiplayer Wasteland, and Very Boring Skyrim in Empty Space. And about a bajillion outright Skyrim re-releases.

Their current leadership is incapable of acknowledging the failures of Starfield, from uninspired game design to extremely outdated engine that holds back the very fundamental vision of the game. Since Bethesda’s leadership hasn’t changed or acknowledged their wrongs, we have every reason to believe that TES6 will make the same mistakes. They do not have the means of their ambition anymore.

Probably yeah. But also the European honeybee is not the only European bee nor pollinator so the argument holds true to some extent.

However I’m not convinced the impact is worse than the monocultures which makes up the majority of our calorie intake. Thousands of hectares of nothing but beets or corn probably does more for killing insect diversity than a handful of beehives, but what do I know.

The people doing this kind of bullshit are either children or fascists. They aren’t interested in “healthy debate” with you. They are lashing out at the Great Woke Bogeyman.

Honestly we should be relieved that the time these brainrotted fascists spend vandalizing Wikipedia isn’t spent sending rape or death threats to the developers, which is usually how these witch-hunts on “woke” go.

These are the pitfalls with the “amazon reviews/yelp” model.

A decent implementation of the Wikipedia/FOSS model sidesteps this because it theoretically is run by opinionated curators. No amount of bots/shills can break the article soft-lock ounce foul play is spotted.

That’s not to say these systems haven’t been occasionally broken through more sophisticated attacks, but empirically it seems clear that the model generally works well enough given enough community engagement (which would be the biggest challenge IMO, because maintainers can’t be expected to buy every product, and reliable primary sources may be hard to come by).

Well “Going private” doesn’t mean anything. It can mean PE. It can mean “traditional” personal/family ownership (e.g. Musk with Twitter). It can also mean moving to a co-op model (theoretically I don’t think anything stops a bankrupt publicly-traded company being bought by its workers). “Private” doesn’t sit anywhere on the political spectrum; even Marxists can generally agree that co-operatives are in principle better than publicly-traded companies.

Unfortunately PE firms are usually the ones who win the bid when a company “goes private” because the PE business model is driven by speculation and leveraged buyouts, and (at least in the US) supported by advantageous tax rates. Even from a purely capitalist perspective it’s an objective failure that harms the macro-economy. It’s not even capitalism anymore; it’s oligarchic.

Ding ding ding. People hear “going private” and think “mom 'n pop shop”. But PE firms are vultures. Actually no, that’s mean to vultures.

How Private Equity Consumed America - Wendover Productions

I wasn’t very old then but the main thing was RAM. Fuckers in Microsoft sales/marketing made 1 GB the minimum requirement for OEMs to install Vista.

So guess what? Every OEM installed Vista with 1 GB of RAM and a 5200 RPM hard drive (the “standard” config for XP which is what most of those SKUs were meant to target). That hard drive would inevitably spend its short life thrashing because if you opened IE it would immediately start swapping. Even worse with OEM bloat, but even a clean Vista install would swap real bad under light web browsing.

It was utterly unusable. Like, everything would be unbearably slow and all you could do was (slowly) open task manager and say “yep, literally nothing running, all nonessential programs killed, only got two tabs open, still swapping like it’s the sex party of the century”.

“Fixing” those hellspawns by adding a spare DDR2 stick is a big part of how I learned to fix computer hardware. All ya had to do was chuck 30 € of RAM in there and suddenly Vista went from actually unusable to buttery smooth.

By the time the OEMs wised up to Microsoft’s bullshit, Seven was around the corner so everyone thought Seven “fixed” the performance issues. It didn’t, it’s just that 2 GB of RAM had become the bare minimum standard by then.

EDIT: Just installed a Vista VM because I ain’t got nothing better to do at 2 am apparently. Not connected to the internet, didn’t install a thing, got all of 12 processes listed by task manager, and it already uses 500 MB of RAM. Aero didn’t even enable as I didn’t configure graphics acceleration.

The studios! Think of the studios! Their execs couldn’t live off merch sales and shitty reboots anymore! They might even have to - gasp - develop original IP if they want to milk an exclusive license. Some other execs would make money off some of last century’s licenses! The horror! The tragedy!

That can’t be. Clearly the best thing about Indiana Jones and Jurrasic Park is the death grip the studios have on those IPs. Ever since Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain I’ve been unable to enjoy the Disney Classics. All joy has been snuffed out from my life.

For current to flow out of your house the voltage inside the house has to be slightly higher than outside. Not by much, but a little. So the inverter has a higher output voltage than line voltage by design. If everyone does this and some of the power has nowhere to go, then the average voltage goes up measurably.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the grid had been designed to be able to bring power out of residential areas, but my casual understanding is that this doesn’t work very well with existing infrastructure, so with a bunch of extra power that has a hard time getting out the voltage keeps climbing until some inverters hit their safety shutoff.

I was thinking of other countries where the billing system has only variable fees. Which used to work when you didn’t have many people who are dependent on the grid but have a (almost) net zero power bill.

Yes power usage is constantly predicted by utilities. Production must match consumption exactly at every moment. This means weather forecasting is an essential part of managing a power grid, and doubly so with intermittent renewables.

I think the local overloading has something to do with transformers not being able to handle the massive local overproduction. It’s not just power not being consumed, it’s power being injected into the grid.

It’s only fine because the panels do not do much of anything.

When large swaths of the population become even partially self-sufficient, it’s an enormous issue for the electric grid. Again, not an issue over an occasional few hundred watts, but when whole neighborhoods cover their roofs in solar panels the following happens:

• These (comparatively rich) people stop contributing to maintaining the grid. Half of electricity costs are distribution costs, so unless you have no net metering and a separate distribution line in your bill the rich are being subsidized by the poor to install solar capacity at home. Of course changing the billing system fixes that, but it also makes solar much less financially interesting and really pisses off people who already paid for solar and now won’t be having a positive ROI for an additional decade.
• The panels are not remotely operable so their aggregate power generation sometimes causes enormous stress on the rest of the grid, forcing old nuclear/gas/coal PP to spin up and down much more quickly and frequently than they were designed for.
• Locally the voltage fluctuations may be very large. Nominal where I live is 230 V, but it’s not unheard of for rich neighborhoods to be pushing 250 V on very sunny days. Then the inverters shut down automatically, but it’s always whoever happens to have the most sensitive inverter who ends up not being paid on sunny days.

Anyways apartment solar is not really the issue here, it’s the people with 10+ panels. But there are good reasons for solar to be heavily regulated.

I would argue that Valorant or CS are terrible games for casual enjoyment anyways. The skill floor is already pretty damn high for a shooter.

In the FPS genre I’ve found Battlebit has faithfully replicated the feel of BF3/BF4 for those of us who just want to run towards the objective and shoot, and it had old school community servers.

The competitive scene happened. Can’t have meaningful competitive matchmaking against the same 100 players. People don’t just want to frag noobs, they want to grind the ladder to be able to say “I’m GE and you’re Gold, therefore I know for a fact I’m better than you”.

This is a global phenomenon. Even goddamn chess has this, first thing players ask each other nowadays is “what’s your chess.com ELO”.

I’m not a competitive player myself but I get why people rush after ELO progression. And it’s not much of a stretch to say CS, Valo, and especially chess wouldn’t have seen such widespread success without competitive ELO-based matchmaking.

Those ones are still under litigation AFAIK. Last I heard about it they lost their latest court case but it will be years before it reaches the top EU courts or an amendment is made to the GDPR.

I have uBlock Origin but didn’t bother configuring any additional filters. My desktop has consent-o-matic as well I think (which unlike a filter actually auto-rejects the tracking stuff).

However on a new profile (no extensions) I didn’t get the prompt, and neither did I on chromium. Just checked on windows as well, still not prompt. So it seems to just not prompt on desktop for some reason… I wonder if that means the tracking is disabled or they just auto-consent.

Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:

Where’s the button to reject tracking? It doesn’t exist.

For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral’s own website:

First time I see GDPR violation this brazen. While writing this comment I finally figured out how to reject consent (clicking on “Purposes” and manually deselecting each purpose).

I double checked with remote debugging, the button is not just hidden in CSS; it’s missing entirely:

For some reason I don’t get a consent prompt at all from my desktop even on a brand new firefox profile – perhaps because of my user-agent?

Anyways I felt motivated today so I’ve sent an email to their Data Protection Officer and set a reminder for next month in case they ghost me.