I had planned on getting a 4k monitor as part of my upgrade path. But then when it came time to get it, I stopped and looked closely at my 1440p monitor and realized that I never thought games didn’t have enough pixels to look good.

I ended up just getting an ultra wide 1440p instead and don’t regret it.

As I understand it, TSMC and Taiwan themselves have a plan to blow up the foundries should a China invasion look like it’s going to succeed. They are already rigged with the explosives from what I understand.

I like games that involve mechanics that change the rules. Magic: the gathering is a big example of that, but Villainous also does it kinda, where each villain has their own goals and rules and the game is a race to achieve your villain’s goals before the others do.

That’s the worst when your cycle time is very long. You fix a bug in the code, start your test running again and come back to check the next day only to see the exact same bug again and might think that your fix didn’t work and something more esoteric is going on (“maybe it’s a compiler or hardware bug!” (It almost never is)).

Then you add a bunch of debug prints to really get a good idea of what’s going on and rerun the test. Either you remembered to save and suddenly the mystery bug is gone because the fix is still in the code. Or maybe you forgot to save again and now it looks like it’s not even reaching any of the code you added the prints to.

Thing is, if it just guesses what you meant instead of sticking to the standard, you can end up with ambiguous meanings. Like what if you forgot a character that wasn’t a semicolon but inserting a semicolon would turn it into valid code?

Like:

x = y z++;

Inserting a semicolon would turn that into set x to the value of y and then increment z. But maybe the line is missing a plus instead of a semicolon and the intent was to set x to y plus z and then increment z.

It’s a pain but strict syntax helps avoid frustrating to debug bugs.

Taking it a step even further, you can make your code more robust by treating warnings similarly to errors. Even though the general cases usually still work despite warnings, they are great for avoiding edge cases that can also be difficult to debug. At least if you take the time to understand what the warning is really about and don’t just google “how to get rid of warning x” and add some casts or something you don’t understand to make the message go away.

Could even make it a manual thing or periodic and dependent on the panel having reduced power generation during the day. Heat up the snow while the panel is angled and it will eventually fall off without needing to melt all of it. Then, the rest of the time you can just let it get cold.

I wish my car’s wheel wells had that to periodically drop the slush/snow that builds up behind the wheels. Just needs to run for a little bit until the chunk falls off.

My interpretation of it wasn’t meaningless.

Like my search for object algorithm goes like:

1. First look where I expect it to be. It’s not really missing at this point.
2. Then I think of whether I can remember putting it somewhere different and check there. If it doesn’t turn up at this point, I now consider it missing.
3. At this point, I’ll make a mental list of all of the places it makes sense to be and search down that list.
4. If it’s still not found, then I’ll start just looking everywhere until either I find it, get distracted by something else, or give up on finding it.

I always thought of “it’s in the last place you look” in terms of the list in #3. You think of 5 places it might be, and whatever the order you check them in, it will be in the 5th location you check.

Your interpretation sounds more like it’s in terms of #4. Or maybe #3 but checking each place as you think of it instead of building up a backlog.

Hmm you’re right. I just looked at a bunch of different pants, saw made in Portugal (cloth made in Italy), Vietnam (cloth made in Japan), Sri Lanka, and Canada (stopped looking at that point).

I just checked the labels on the two pairs of shorts and one pair of sweatpants I’ve got and they are all made in Canada.

I might have found them during a “not made in China” search rather than a “made in Canada” search. Thanks for pointing that out, though, because I had them firmly under the “made in Canada” label when I first commented.

I think there’s also potential for more organic and dynamic NPC interactions. Perhaps even an AI GM type thing, which would allow players to use information they shouldn’t yet know without just ruining the game because if the main mystery is solved in act 1, the GM could just make a new plot.

Not that I think we’re anywhere close to an AI that could do that well, but it’s just a matter of time (assuming things don’t collapse entirely before that, which is unfortunately looking more likely than reaching the tech singularity… Or fortunately, since I’m not sure how humanity will continue after tech makes all of the work we can do redundant, as sweet as it could be for entertainment).

Reigning Champ is a made in Canada brand that makes good quality clothes. I spent about $130 on a pair of shorts and they immediately became my favorite ones (vs my old navy ones).

Or it could be similar to how image generators generate text in images (by making things that look like text but is generally unintelligible nonsense).

Though if it trained on enough keys, it might have picked up on some of the correlations. I’d be surprised if they don’t use a database instead of just a checksum to determine valid keys, but if it was just a checksum, it’s possible that a NN could figure out how to generate valid keys.

A good portion of my failures in boss fights are due to getting the boss low and thinking, “I can just spam attack until he’s dead now” and then getting caught by attacks I was avoiding prior to that.

And a decent portion of the ones left after eliminating those ones are due to not being used to the attacks enough to avoid them consistently.

Assuming soulslike boss fights.

Oh yeah, 90s and 00s Blizzard was great. I had fallen in love with RTS after playing a demo for Dune 2000 (I think it was) and after mentioning it to a friend, he loaned me his copy of Warcraft II. From there, my top games were Blizzard games for over a decade. WC2, SC, found out that cool Diablo game another friend had shown me was also Blizzard as they were marketing D2, then WC3, then WoW was my peak Blizzard obsession. But they still had some more good ones: SC2, Hearthstone, HotS, then the first Overwatch.

I think all that WoW money ruined them. Line must go up, even if they were on a massive mountain that would naturally eventually wane as people grew bored of the game and the niche it fit in grew more crowded. They started chasing dollars instead of chasing great games and making dollars in the process.

That Diablo phone app game being announced as if their audience gave a fuck about mobile games showed how out of touch they were with what used to make them great. And the follow up “don’t you all have phones?” just cemented how blind they were, not even considering that the people making mobile games so much money didn’t have much overlap with their current fan base, most of whom built a relatively expensive gaming PC to game on despite how much cheaper phones already were.

And there were other questionable things, like that WC3 remaster that no one asked for replacing the more capable original.

The D3 auction house, though to be fair to that one, I liked the idea going in and it was only after experiencing it that I understood it was a bad idea that would make most runs boring because most drops couldn’t compare to items I could get cheap on the AH.

Then the China thing and trying to defraud a tournament winner out of their prize because he said something in support of Hong Kong. Then finding out that it was a workplace dripping with toxic masculinity (which was the case even when they were doing great).

And then they did a WC3 remaster on Overwatch, replacing the game that was originally purchased at AAA price with a free to play one that also wasn’t finished, with features promised to make the replacement easier to swallow just dropped.

By the time Microsoft came to buy them, I didn’t care what happened to them anymore. Activision had already been business major enough, with their only credit being that they didn’t immediately enshitify Blizzard when they acquired them.

Plus the Blizzard name has cashed in all of its previous good reputation, at least from my point of view.

Most fond things I see said about them are from people still playing their older games, other than a friend that is still playing wow classic.

If it is present there, it doesn’t imply it’s only present there.

And we really have no idea how close of a relationship Google, or any other corp for that matter, has with various intelligence agencies. Same thing with infiltrations by intelligence agencies.

And no, it doesn’t mean that every phone in the world is compromised with this, which wouldn’t be that sophisticated, just stealthy. The sophisticated part would be part of the normal design process, it’s called DFT or design for test if you want to read about it, used legitimately to determine what parts of the chip have manufacturing flaws for chip binning.

Most phones don’t have an unlocked bootloader, and this post is about the data Google is pulling on factory pixels.

Why would they do all the work on the software side and then themselves offer a device that allows you to remove their software entirely? And if it’s worth it just from the “make more money from people who only want unlocked phones”, why isn’t it more common?

Mind you, my next phone might still be a pixel. Even if this stuff is actually there, I wouldn’t expect to be targeted. I can’t help but wonder about it, though, like just how deep does the surveillance or surveillance potential go?

You’re right that it’s pure speculation just based on technical possibilities and I hope you’re right to think it should be dismissed.

But with the way microchip design (it wouldn’t be at the PCB level, it would be hidden inside the SoC) and manufacturing work, I think it’s possible for a small number of people to make this happen, maybe even a single technical actor on the right team. Chips are typically designed with a lot of diagnostic circuitry that could be used to access arbitrary data on the chip, where the only secret part is, say, a bridge from the cell signal to that diagnostic bus. The rest would be designed and validated by teams thinking it’s perfectly normal (and it is, other than leaving an open pathway to it).

Then if you have access to arbitrary registers or memory on the chip, you can use that to write arbitrary firmware for one of the many microprocessors on the SoC (which isn’t just the main CPU cores someone might notice has woken up and is running code that came from nowhere), and then write to its program counter to make it run that code, which can then do whatever that MP is capable of.

I don’t think it would be feasible for mass surveillance, because that would take infrastructure that would require a team that understands what’s going on to build, run, and maintain.

But it could be used for smaller scale surveillance, like targeted at specific individuals.

But yeah, this is just speculation based on what’s technically possible and the only reason I’m giving it serious thought is because I once thought that it was technically possible for apps to listen in on your mic, feed it into a text to speech algorithm, and send it back home, hidden among other normal packets, but they probably aren’t doing it. But then I’d hear so many stories about uncanny ads that pop up about a discussion in the presence of the phone and more recently it came out that FB was doing that. So I wouldn’t put it past them to actually do something like this.

I was just wondering earlier today if Google kept the bootloader open to allow custom OS installation only because they had other hardware on the phone that would send them their information anyways, possibly through covert side channels.

Like they could add listeners for cell signals that pick up data encoded in the lower bits of timestamps attached to packets, which would be very difficult to detect (like I’m having trouble thinking of a way to determine if that’s happening even if you knew to look for it).

Or maybe there’s a sleeper code that can be sent to “wake up” the phone’s secret circuitry and send bulk data when Google decides they want something specific (since encoding in timestamps would be pretty low bandwidth), which would make detection by traffic analysis more difficult, since most of the time it isn’t sending anything at all.

This is just speculation, but I’ve picked up on a pattern of speculating that something is technically possible, assuming there’s no way they’d actually be doing that, and later finding out that it was actually underestimating what they were doing.