The universe can’t be a simulation, the framerate is way too good.

Days before the Queen of England died, the Roman Empire collapsed. Coincidence? (Literally no, but I sure could speculate).

I got 17/28… I do not use javascript. This is not the first time I have taken this quiz (but it has been a while).

“AAA” gaming began as a reference to the “AAA” creditworthiness rating, meaning (essentially) “certain to repay the loan” // “certain to earn more than the development costs” (contrarespectively). AAA gaming has always been about the safe bet, the easy money, and the tailored to mass market design.

High budget games can only have so much ROI, so there’s kind of implicitly a limit on how much risk is tolerable for investors/publishers. Meanwhile, a game that costs a few million (or even less) could be the next big success, and rake in a massive sum - enough to justify its own budget in addition to many failed attempts to craft a star.

Even more risky is indie gaming, where the cost of development is provided by crazy people that want to produce “fun”, and gain money as some kind of (important) side effect. That’s where you get the wild “no one (in the know) would expect this to work” ideas, and most of them do fail, just as expected. The ones that are good enough to make it are by nature surprisingly good - indeed, this surprise is why publishers won’t go after the same concept under most conditions.

For me, it’s “Jessie’s Girl”. The things we learn about this girl are: She has eyes, she has a body, at some times she talks cute with Jessie, she loves Jessie. Then the question, “Where can I find a woman like that?”

The contrast between the exceedingly generic description, and the exasperation (as if no other girl would suffice) annoys me every time I hear the lyrics. This is then multiplied by the fact that the song is catchy.

I was thinking of JLC3DP, PCBWay, Shapeways, and Slant3D. I’ve only bought from PCBWay and JLC3DP from among those.

I’m not in this business, but I have purchased prints from a print farm before. There are already at least 4 large, high quality printing companies that offer to print any model in any material. I think most of the competition is now on speed and price. There are also many smaller printers I have purchased from. Most offer ~10 products, have them already printed, and sell those items to fulfill a specific need. As far as I can tell, those smaller printers either design their own models, or paid for models that are not readily available. Once model files are available, the general purpose printing companies can deliver the same part.

Unless you have ideas for models no one has made before, and you want to try to profit as much as possible off those, I don’t see the upside to a small print farm.

If small numbers are much more frequent, it’s better to return early. Really, you should gather statistics about the numbers the function is called with, and put the most frequent ones at the top.

If I were a government, I’d be afraid of French traditions, too.

I’m bragging when I say this: A decade ago, I rewrote an indecipherable mess of code into an elegant and transparent procedure, nestled comfortably inside every sanity/insanity check I could think of for the situation. Today, that code (aside from an update for a vulnerable dependency) is still running just the way I wrote it.

Releases should be fast and rare.

Vowels have low point values, so I would prioritize getting new tiles. It might be different if you could somehow play six or seven of these tiles, but I think 4 vowels left is still more than the optimal number.

You’re not showing the rest of the board, so of the letters visible, ‘oi’ on the beginning of oozed is the best I see.

“Aeon” or “iota” would be much better, if there’s a cooperative n or t.

Good news, everyone. 314159 is not evenly divisible by 17, just as you’d expect.

When a monopoly is faced with a smaller, more efficient competitor, they cut prices to keep people from switching, or buy the new competitor, make themselves more efficient, and increase profits.

When Steam was faced with smaller competition that charged lower prices, they did - nothing. They’re not the leader because of a trick, or clever marketing, but because they give both publishers and gamers a huge stack of things they want.

Ha! Unlike (some of) you plebs, I live in a very exclusive time zone with less than a billion people in it.

Companies try to maximize green per red. By paying less, and getting the same, they maximize that, year after year until (in a temporary and unforeseeable setback) you leave for… Bluer pastures, apparently.

There are different sorts of companies, and the more they think of employees as a number of years of experience plus a stack of skills, the more susceptible they are to believing that replacing humans with other equally skilled humans is a productive way to spend their time.

Have you tried turning them off, then turning them on again?

I think we’re still headed up the peak of inflated expectations. Quantum computing may be better at a category of problems that do a significant amount of math on a small amount of data. Traditional computing is likely to stay better at anything that requires a large amount of input data, or a large amount of output data, or only uses a small amount of math to transform the inputs to the outputs.

Anything you do with SQL, spreadsheets, images, music and video, and basically anything involved in rendering is pretty much untouchable. On the other hand, a limited number of use cases (cryptography, cryptocurrencies, maybe even AI/ML) might be much cheaper and fasrer with a quantum computer. There are possible military applications, so countries with big militaries are spending until they know whether that’s a weakness or not. If it turns out they can’t do any of the things that looked possible from the expectation peak, the whole industry will fizzle.

As for my opinion, comparing QC to early silicon computers is very misleading, because early computers improved by becoming way smaller. QC is far closer to the minimum possible size already, so there won’t be a comparable, “then grow the circuit size by a factor of ten million” step. I think they probably can’t do anything world shaking.

You can buy high (97-99) CRI LEDs for things like the film industry, where it really does matter. They are very expensive, but can pay for themselves with longer service life, and lower power draw for long term installations.

The CRI on regular LED bulbs was climbing for a long time, but it seems as though 90ish is “good enough” most of the time.

You can just issue new certificates one per year, and otherwise keep your personal root CA encrypted. If someone is into your system to the point they can get the key as you use it, there are bigger things to worry about than them impersonating your own services to you.