Since Skyrim? I’d say their quality has been slowly declining since Morrowind. It wasn’t that noticeable at first, since oblivion, fallout 3, and Skyrim were still quite good and fallout 4 was decent. But then fallout 76 was a mess at release, TES blades was shit, and starfield just seems lazy.

I don’t know if phone call spam is only an American thing or something. In my country (and most of Europe) that stuff is effectively banned and doesn’t really happen.

Still hate getting calls though.

Is there any reliable source for this information? Or is it rumours only.

It was the beginning of the end, because they saw how much money they made on the horse armour vs how much effort it took to make it. It was actually generally criticized at the time, but it also sold really well.

WoW was like the iPhone of MMOs. Didn’t invent anything, just put it all together in a coherent, accessible, user friendly package.

But on a fundamental level, in the least instance admins have to be able to know who votes for our version of the system to even work compared to the competition.

Could you elaborate on this claim? Because I don’t really see why that would be true.

This is basically correct but i would add sometimes it’s better to add chips than to add mult. For example, if your score is something like:

10 x 50 = 500

Adding +50 mult here would give you 10x100=1000 points. Adding +50 chips will give you 60x50=3000 points.

Adding to the lowest of the two numbers improves your score the most. Especially early game, mult is much lower than chips, so you want to improve mult. However once you have some good mult jokers improving chips becomes important. Especially in high card based decks, where you get very few chips from your hand.

If the multiplier jokers come in, the picture can change again. It makes adding mult more valuable because the addition will be multiplied.

is-number is a project by John Schlinkert. John has a background in sales and marketing before he became an open source programmer and started creating these types of single function packages. So far he has about 1400 projects. Not all of them are this small, though many are.

He builds a lot of very basic functionality packages. Get the first n values from an array. Sort an array. Set a non-enumerable property on an object. Split a string. Get the length of the longest item in an array. Check if a path ends with some string. It goes on and on.

If you browse through it’s not uncommon to find packages that do nothing but call another package of his. For example, is-valid-path provides a function to check if a windows path contains any invalid characters. The only thing it does is import and call another package, is-invalid-path, and inverses its output.

He has a package called alphabet that only exports an array with all the letters of the alphabet. There’s a package that provides a list of phrases that could mean “yes.” He has a package (ansi-wrap) to wrap text in ANSI color escape codes, then he has separate packages to wrap text in every color name (ansi-red, ansi-cyan, etc).

To me, 1400 projects is just an insane number, and it’s only possible because they are all so trivial. To me, it very much looks like the work of someone who cares a lot about pumping up his numbers and looking impressive. However the JavaScript world also extolled the virtues of these types of micro packages at some point so what do I know.

The sad truth is that there are overriding geopolitical strategic interests behind the US support of Israel. The American executive power recognizes this, so military support is not going to go away as long as those interests are a concern.

They may pay some lip service to the whole genocide thing, but this is ultimately realpolitik. Human lives do not matter when they are not American.

Hydrogen is a Japanese government strategic initiative, they want to be world leaders in the technology so they’re encouraging Japanese companies to invest. And giving out hella subsidies too.

So weird that only 15% of Steam sessions are using controllers. I thought everyone had a controller. Most games are just better with a gamepad.

Even if that was true, not all games have the same number of players. Counterstrike and dota 2 regularly top the most played list on steam, and are terrible with a controller. It shouldn’t be surprising that most sessions have a kb/m if that’s what people are mostly playing.

I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.

The problem is they don’t know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don’t add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I’m spending on my town, I’m not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren’t interesting to explore at all.

Aan an aside, I don’t think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.

All well and good, but the term dictatorship here still refers to a situation where the state apparatus has complete control over the means of production, in other words a total centralisation of power. Indeed in Marxism-Leninism the dictatorship takes the form of a vanguard party forming a single party state. Whichever way you look at it, practical power resides with a very small group of individuals.

The contrast with the eventual stateless communist society, in which power would be completely decentralised, is quite striking. It’s not quite clear to me how Marxist-Leninist theory envisioned the transition from one to the other, although it seems to me there was a general feeling that central economic planning and industrialization would fairly quickly lead to the end of scarcity altogether, which in hindsight seems… very optimistic.

If you ask me, the ideals of communism mostly died around the same time as Lenin. Pretty much all communist states that have existed (and currently exist) are mainly interested in maintaining their own power structures rather than actually working their way towards the idealised communist society. Which pretty much just makes them dictatorships in the classical sense.

Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦

One of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism is that a dictatorship is required to guide the proletariat to communist society (which would be completely stateless). So the dissonance is inherent in Leninist dogma 🤷

Just a mistake I think. Americans are so steeped in gun culture that when they hear calibur, their brain goes immediately to gun calibers. Autocorrect also might play a role.

When your audience is five years old you don’t really need to go anywhere with it.

Is it safer to stay inside without AC or go outside in shade? Isn’t the ambient air temperature still too dangerous in the shade?

Humidity is a big factor, if humidity is low then evaporative cooling (e.g. sweating) is quite effective. Even more so in a breeze.

Recommend looking into moissanite also if you like diamonds but don’t want to support the industry. Very similar looking, better in some ways. And because it hardly occurs naturally at all, you can only buy synthetic.

Micro services always require more maintenance, devops, tooling, artifact registries, version syncing, etc.

The initial transition is so huge too. Like, going from 20 to 21 services is no big deal, but going from 1 service to 2 is a big jump in the complexity of your operations.

That doesn’t mean energy has a weight.

No, it literally does mean that. If you put light in a box of mirrors the total weight of the box will literally increase by an amount equal to the energy of the photons. If you put some radioactive material in a theoretically perfectly sealed box from which no heat or light could escape, and weigh it while it decays into radiation, the weight will not change.

This applies to all forms of energy. A spring is heavier when compressed. An object gets heavier when you spin it, or heat it up. Sunlight hitting the earth most definitely makes it heavier. In fact, the sun hits the earth with about 4.4*10^16 watts of power, corresponding to about 0.5 kilogram per second.