Jrockwar

If they're getting money through micro transactions they can charge absolutely precisely £0. I can't be bothered paying for a game that isn't complete.

I put the blame on Microsoft here. I am more pro-ARM than I'm pro Apple; I had a surface pro X and ended up giving up on it because Microsoft has put zero effort into enticing developers to make ARM versions of their apps. Google drive still doesn't have a functioning app (!!) for Windows on ARM, which at this point has existed for over 10 years. (Emulation doesn't help here as it needs drivers).

In contrast, Mac has had apps since basically day 1 of Apple Silicon, and ARM support in Linux has been pretty good for years.

He pointed out that one of WBD's latest big games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, was a disappointment for the company.

[...]

"Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?" he said.

How do you say "whoooosh" in corporate?

Well that's the point I was making with my comment. "We don't need different cars" is just the wrong statement. We need to redesign our cities from the ground up to be planned around people, not cars. But that is going to take a good 50 years, assuming a decent amount of effort goes into it. We don't have 50 years. We need better cars in the meantime, not just to ignore the problem they are until we reach the year-2100 utopia where everyone can travel in bicycles and hoverboards.

Because it's not autonomous, nor "full self driving". It's a glorified adaptive cruise control. I don't think it's even in the L3 category... (I'm not the biggest fan of the autonomy "levels" classification but it's an ok reference for this).

So there's no point in improving technology then? Shall we just go for highly polluting SUVs, just fewer of them?

I have no idea what you're on about. MacBook airs start at £999, and I've still been able to configure one at £1199 with 16 GB of RAM.

Also I haven't said anything about that magic ram nonsense, please don't try to paint me as an idiot. Even my personal laptop has 32 GB. But different needs, different price points. I still maintain that at the price points apple operates, it's hard to find something better with windows - not because I'm an apple fanboy by any means, but because of the laziness of Intel and the lack of decent ARM alternatives (and Microsoft's half assed approach to ARM).

I have to disagree when it comes to laptops: the gap has closed a bit now, but there's still no intel- or amd-based alternative that comes close to the MacBook air in terms of performance/battery life at the £1000-£1200 price point. When the M1s first came out, the fanless MacBook air shattered the intel i9 MBP in any conceivable metric other than pure GPU power (which the MacBook Pro could use for about a minute before overheating).

Even if expensive, the current MacBook lineup is really compelling. If you're prepared to spend £3000 on a laptop, you just can't get anything similar in terms of performance, battery life, and noise. You might get a workstation like an HP ZBook with similar oomph but then you're looking at a beast that weighs 50% more than a comparable MBP, has the fans buzzing all the time at full blast, and lasts a couple hours on a battery charge. I've used my work MacBook Pro (M1 Max) for a full Atlantic flight of ≈9 hours and it still had juice to go.

And even the most expensive ones sound worse than £10 earbuds of the normal kind.

Meta's llama2-70b response to that:

The message you provided is a ciphertext encrypted using the Enigma machine. The key to decrypting the message is to figure out the settings used on the Enigma machine. The Enigma machine has three rotors (M3) with different positions (UKW B VI 1 1 I 17 1 III 12 1). Each rotor has a different wiring pattern, and the positions of the rotors determine which wiring patterns are used. To decrypt the message, we need to set the rotors to the correct positions and then use the Enigma machine's wiring patterns to convert the ciphertext back into plaintext. Here are the steps to decrypt the message:

Set the rotors to the positions specified in the key: Rotor 1: UKW Rotor 2: B Rotor 3: VI Set the plugboard (Steckerbrett) to the position 1 1 I 17 1 III 12 1. Write out the ciphertext in groups of four letters, with each group representing a single letter of the plaintext. For each group of four letters, use the Enigma machine's wiring patterns to determine the corresponding plaintext letter.

Here's the decrypted message: bk nbwo ud iywqr krlqoa mh vjldngahae Decrypted message: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG This is a well-known pangram, a phrase that uses all the letters of the alphabet at least once.

In a press release, police say the device is "in fact a Douglas AIR-2 Genie (previous designation MB-1), an unguided air-to-air rocket that is designed to carry a 1.5 kt W25 nuclear warhead".

I'm sure I'm missing a trick here but what is the purpose of an air-to-air unguided rocket with a nuclear warhead?? Blowing up other planes with 100000% extra risk whether you hit or miss?

Oh I had never thought of this or come across this concept! That's a really elegant concept. Of course, in a transaction you're putting in more effort than the money. The time it takes you to go through the purchase, the research, the cost of opportunity of that money... meaning those have to be covered in the cost of the transaction, and therefore the goods must be cheaper than the perceived value by those amounts.

You've sent me down a rabbit hole and I thank you for that. Now I'm off to read about economics 🤓