Any anti-corporation action has about 60 more days to complete. The US is about to be more of an unregulated runaway capitalism machine than it has ever been.

Excel?! Have to respectfully disagree on that one.

Ah yes, you’re right.

I guess a better qualifier might be: closed-source Microsoft products tend overwhelmingly to suck.

Is there a Microsoft product that isn’t?

To be fair, Teams is pretty bad even for MS. I’ve never seen something do so relatively little and still perform so poorly. When I switched jobs and got to use Slack it was like a great fog being lifted off of my being.

Looking forward to SpaceX and Tesla both having serious issues because of Trump’s asinine tariffs.

Maybe ironically, neither one would be appropriate as a linguistic definition.

I’ve enjoyed that one a lot, as a long time KSP player.

Two things stand out to me about it which are better than (unmodded) KSP:

1. It has a ton of procedural parts, from tanks to fairings to struts. Though I would argue it makes rockets look less detailed in terms of texturing, it really amps up what you can do overall.

2. Vizzy is a built in automation system where you click and drag keywords and functions into place. It is something similar to the kOS mod on KSP, though I’d argue much more approachable and with more features. You can even do multithreading (think: process staging while also processing telemetry data).

Juno is also very well optimized – after all, it also runs on Android. So if you can get beyond the relatively simplistic visuals there is a lot to like.

But is it a KSP killer? No. The character models are not great and that affects everything from EVA to immersion. It lacks a certain “it” factor, and though I have put many hours into Juno, it usually ends with me firing up modded KSP again.

I’m not holding my breath until there’s more than a tech demo to see.

If KCD2 is competent on release (which I think is very likely, considering how great KCD1 was), it might be the first game in a long time that I pay full price for. As much as it is important to be vocal about devs screwing their customers, we also have to support those doing the opposite.

This is why claiming to be a “prophet” (by any of a multitude of definitions) is so popular for cult leaders.

You can say you have information from a deity, one way or another, or even that you get special treatment from a deity. No special powers needed. If people believe in the deity and they believe you were chosen by that deity, to counteract that would mean counteracting the belief in the deity itself.

Are these targets made by the corpos just throwing darts at a board filled with numbers?

I have had fun with ChatGPT, but in terms of integrating it into my workflow: no. It just gives me too much garbage on a regular basis for me not to have to check and recheck anything it produces, so it’s more efficient to do it myself.

And as entertainment, it’s more expensive than e.g. a game, over time.

Fuck Denuvo. DRM does not benefit the gamer. Period. No amount of gaslighting will change that.

It is biased towards the rich. Much of American society and laws are biased towards the rich or biased towards large corporations.

So it is insane, but since it’s just as insane as the rest of the system, you aren’t supposed to notice.

Boomers should have thought of the shareholders.

That is, the kids they fucked over with their bullshit ideas and absolute misunderstanding of the world they created.

I’d love to be able to speak with my parents again, but (and I never thought I would ever say this, if you had asked me 10 years ago) I need to see some heads popping out of asses.

Aw, a corporation upset when another corporation does the kind of shit that corporations tend to do with regular people, thanks to the years and years of corporate lobbying allowing corporations to do whatever the fuck they want.

I almost had a tear.

Yes. I took a trip to Ireland and rented a car. I had a Garmin GPS unit which I purchased for the trip and was extremely helpful.

I remember the first time I saw GPS units at the electronics store. It seemed like some crazy military grade thing from a movie.

It is entirely possible to use a Kindle for epub only (that is, never “buy” a book from Amazon). There are lots of epub around, including from places like Gutenberg.

Additionally, the Libby app allows you to use your Kindle in conjunction with your local library’s electronic collection, which (in my case) is quite sizable and allows you to “borrow” DRMd books for a finite amount of time.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” exists exactly for this, I think.

I played the game for a long time. Then I went to industry and never looked back.

I totally, totally get people who stay in academia. I’ve had and in a way still have the dream. But: the struggle is just as bad if not worse than industry, while the money in industry is much, much better.