Because it’s virtually impossible to buy a non-smart TV these days.

It’s not the real name for the crime, obviously. But, it’s true that section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass “access controls”, which are so loosely defined that just about anything qualifies. As a result, any device with “access controls” gets to define how you’re allowed to interact with it, and if you interact with it in the wrong way, even if you own it, you’re committing a felony.

Do you still, in 2024, not understand how airborne illnesses like COVID spread?

Unfortunately, where I live it’s very hard to find a well-made apartment or townhouse. I love the idea of an apartment or townhouse where I couldn’t hear the neighbours no matter what they were doing, and I couldn’t smell their cooking, or be exposed to smoke when they’re smoking, and so-on. But, that just isn’t realistic. Even if laws were passed to make that a requirement as of today, it would be decades for the existing housing stock to be sold off.

I just wish someone put serious effort into a microphone that worked with a mask so people wearing masks were easier to understand.

There are a lot of people who speak at conferences who still wear masks. I get it, even if you weren’t worried about COVID, in the pre-COVID times a lot of people were out for a week after going to a conference / convention because of all the germs being passed around.

But, even with professional speakers and professional microphones, the audio just sounds muddy when the speaker is wearing a mask.

I knew Palestinians were suffering in this war, but I didn’t realize how bad the Israelis had it! They have brand new electric school buses, but the children aren’t going to school so they can’t use them! Some evacuated people have to live in a hotel with a well-decorated lobby. The hotel has a swimming pool but they’re not allowed to use it. And the death toll! 26 civilians have died and 22 IDF soldiers and reservists. That’s almost 50!

From the video:

“Let’s talk about eggs, Because these guys actually eat about 14 eggs every single morning.”

There’s just so much that’s weird about that. “These guys” are his 2 sons Ewan (6) and Vivek (4). You’re saying these kids each eat 7 eggs every morning? That’s a lot of eggs. Think about it. 7 fried eggs? Or 7 hard-boiled eggs? If you’re scrambling them, you lose track of the individual eggs, but what, he’s cracking 14 eggs into a huge bowl, then scrambling them? Do you know how much scrambled eggs that’s going to make?

If his boys were teenagers, maybe I could see it, though eating that many eggs every single day would still seem weird. But, at least teenage boys are known to have big appetites.

Even if you include him, his wife and their 2-year-old, roughly 100 eggs a week every week seems odd.

Then there’s just the weirdness of saying “about 14”. We’re talking eggs. Why not “about a dozen”? Slightly more believable, and a more common number to use when talking about eggs. I mean, surely if your kids really loved eggs you’d try to reduce it to a dozen eggs per day just so you’re using one full carton every morning. Then again, if you’re buying hundreds of eggs per month, maybe they come on a pallet, not by the carton, so “a dozen” doesn’t mean much to you.

The egg shortage has enabled record quarterly profits and sales at Cal-Maine Foods (CALM), the largest producer and distributor of eggs in the United States. The company produces brands such as Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

The problem, once again, is monopolies. Not enough competition means one company can jack up prices.

It’s not clear if Harris will continue Biden’s policies, but one of the best things Biden’s admin has done is to actually go after monopolies for the first time in decades. Under a Trump / Vance presidency, I don’t think that’s very likely.

This seems like a golden opportunity for Haitians to share their favourite recipes. Haitian food isn’t as well known as Jamaican food or Cuban food, but I bet there are some really delicious things. I wonder if there’s still any French influence.

I’m sure the total distance covered is going to be relatively small since Arsenal just stayed in a low block for most of the 2nd half. But, still, those explosive movements do use energy. It was nice to see him doing something so well, when recently he has been one of the weak links in the team.

Arsenal did use some “dark arts” and I’m glad. If the ref allows them, they shouldn’t just be tools that other teams use against Arsenal.

But, having said that, that Rodri incident was so strange (the first one). Nobody was fooled, it just made him look like an idiot.

Did anybody notice how Partey was playing? In open play he still had a few issues, but I think he was one of the best players once Arsenal was settled into a defensive block. He was tucked in next to Rice but unlike Rice, when the ball got near him he exploded out of his position to put pressure on the opposing player and really hurried them. By contrast, Rice was fine, but he was jogging into position and wasn’t as effective at those pressures.

I honestly didn’t think he had it in him anymore. It makes me wonder if this is something he learned and practiced under Simeone.

The set piece goal was glorious. The camera was actually tight on Gabriel before the kick, and it showed Walker messing with him, poking him in the ribs. And then it showed Gabriel feinting right, doing a swim move, and getting completely free of Walker before heading the ball in with authority.

What’s amazing is that that camera angle is exactly what you’d expect from a replay. But, in this case they strongly suspected who was going to be scoring, so they were showing him right from the start.

So much happened in that game that this one gets lost, but: Rodri!

The guy dives in the first second of the match when Havertz bumps into him. Just a few minutes later he’s punished for that lie by going down with an actual injury from another innocuous collision.

That’s one thing I’ve always admired about Eve Online. It’s an MMO that’s almost entirely player driven. Various sectors of space change hands between different factions of players. That results in the sorts of things you’re talking about. Unfortunately Eve has extremely boring space battles (for players, for watchers it can be fun), and a toxic community.

But, I’ve always wanted an RPG where the world evolved. To me, the key thing to make that realistic would be NPCs that didn’t respawn. Like, if you killed a certain golden dragon named Gurnadom, that dragon was dead, gone, nobody else could kill it. There would be no Gurnadom killing guides because there was only ever one Gurnadom and only one group of players ever killed that dragon. There might be tips on killing golden dragons, but each dragon was unique so it wasn’t a matter of watching videos and understanding the patterns. Each fight against a golden dragon could only happen at most once, and every fight was unique.

And, in any game involving war, there should be permanent destruction of things: fortresses that were attacked would take damage over time and eventually be turned into rubble. A side that’s winning a war should be expanding its territory. As a result, where a player can safely go should depend on the progress of the war, which is something not programmed into the game, but player driven.

I’m just so tired of the WoW style of MMO where the player is “The Champion” who has saved the world multiple times… along with the hundreds of other nearby players who are all the one-and-only champion who also killed a certain raid boss over and over every week for a month.

Some of my favourite games use procedurally generated maps. But, those maps are not hand-sculpted the way MMO dungeons are. And, while you could certainly use generative AI to come up with generic babble from NPCs, that’s not the same as designing entire quests. It may be that eventually a generative AI system will be able to do everything a human could have done: hand-crafted maps, full quest chain dialogue, etc. I just think we’re nowhere near that point yet.

For example, a quest chain almost always has a goal behind it. You’re revealing a certain aspect of the story to the player bit by bit as they complete parts of the quest. But, to do that you need at least a very basic theory of mind. You need to understand what the player knows before the quest chain starts, what each bit of the quest chain will add to their knowledge, and then what they’ll understand at the end of the quest chain. That “theory of mind” stuff is the thing that generative systems just can’t do right now because they’re just fancy auto-complete.

As for auto-generated dungeons, WoW tried that with Torghast in the Shadowlands expansion, and it was not well received. Granted, part of the problem was that Torghast was a depressing, death-themed “dungeon”. But, a bigger issue was that there was no intention behind the design of the levels. It was just a randomized set of corridors that fit together in a random way. Good dungeon designs require intention. You want to reveal something to the player as they go through the dungeon. Ideally you want to know that you’re working your way towards a boss. WoW’s black temple raid is a good example of this. You start in the sewers, you work your way out into a courtyard, you enter another building, clear out the ground floor and open a door that unlocks access to a set of staircases that works its way to the top of the building. You beat the Illidari council which allows you to access a door that opens to the roof of the building where you face the final boss Illidan. I don’t think generative AI is anywhere near being able to come up with a concept like that, let alone design the maps and art for the whole thing.

The sad thing is, I think those days are 100% over. With data mining, wikis, etc. I think there will never be a game that’s played mostly in-game with in-game tools, with people chatting in-game about how to do overcome various challenges the game throws at you. The world has just moved on. I never played something as hardcore as Ashron’s Call in the early days, but I do miss the early days of WoW when so much more of the fun was player-driven, and there was so much more interaction with other players.

I think that’s one reason why D&D is seeing an increase in popularity. It’s a game where you can optimize things to some extent, but because it’s human-driven, a DM can mitigate that somewhat. It’s also inherently social, and it’s impossible to data-mine, and difficult to min-max because each campaign is different and many DMs have slight variations on the set rules.

I don’t think Blizzard understands how to make a social game, and I’m beginning to realize they never did. The game used to be more social, but it seems like that was by accident instead of by design.

Like, you used to have to use the chat channels to find a group for a dungeon run. That forced you to chat. When they added dungeon finder, you didn’t need to chat anymore, making it less social. When they made cross-realm things happen, zones felt less lonely which was good for being social, but then it meant that you no longer ran into all the same names over and over, so you stopped knowing people. That was really bad for social things because it meant that people who behaved badly didn’t get a bad reputation and people who behaved well didn’t get a good reputation.

This is a great feature given the current state of the game. But, I wonder if it will have the unintended side effect of making the community even more toxic.

So really, all modern browsers are either forks of KHTML / KJS or are based on the Mozilla codebase. But, at least right now, there are 3 separate engineering teams working on 3 independent codebases. Which hopefully will mitigate some of the issues you get when one company completely controls a software “ecosystem”.

Strange, because they say it’s a “custom version” of Firefox. That normally means it’s a custom build, not a true fork.