This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.

If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they’re shouting, that’s not adding realism, they’re doing bad acting.

If the sound engineers can’t get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that’s not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they’re bad at mixing.

If the director can’t keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that’s not artistic choice, they’ve made a bad film.

I’m surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it’s pretty good. I’m also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem

Yes, this helps, thanks.

I already understood the need to avoid private money agents like Paypal, visa, etc. In the UK we have the BACS and FPS systems that allow for direct free money transfer. Though they should be more usable for day to day transactions, they work well enough if you need to send a significant amount of money between bank accounts.

Your explanation of the anonymity seems like the real value add of these digital currencies. The fact this only applies to the buyer and not the seller is a good choice, and definitely wins over blockchain crypto. Looking at it more closely, the fact they use signed tokens rather than proof-of-x is also a very good choice.

I will need to read up on Taler’s docs more closely. But looking at the summary of features on their site something hits me as an immediate problem - you need to “load up” a wallet. If Jane Doe wants to buy a coffee, it’s far easier to just use a bank card (which may interface through a private money agent like visa, or a middleman like google/apple). Loading up private wallets isn’t a difficult concept (it’s how gift cards work), but it does add extra steps of friction that I think will need to be removed before this can really be taken up by the general public.

It may harm the anonymity aspect, but I think that to get people using it a system that could operate like a tap-once-and-done bank card payment, loading up a wallet for immediate spend seems like the best solution. It would also help alleviate any fears that typically are associated with blockchain based digital currency - primarily of losing the signed digital money as it sits in a wallet out with the bank account’s protections. And once the system is normalised and people are used to it, then all the architecture is there for anyone that really needs the anonymity.

There’s something I’m really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the “Digital euro” idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that’s new?

Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it’s just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what’s actually new when we’re talking about digital currency like this post?

There must be something I’m missing here.

For a brief brief moment I was elated when I parsed the title as ‘Palantir says it has given up on AI’. Then I read the article and was left dejected.

Absolutely. Screenshots of 3d desktop cube on ubuntu more than a decade ago is what taught me linux existed. It’s an absolutely terrible and inefficient way to run desktop workspaces, but it hooked me all the same.

Users need to know what this dot means, and some like children or the elderly will likely not understand the ramifications

The biggest challenge with an “owned wealth” tax is how do you actually measure it? It’s easy if it’s held in cash in a bank, but most billionaire’s wealth is is land, property, and how do you measure the value of a Picasso stored in a vault if they can slip the valuator a grand to say it’s worthless?

Closing offshore money transfer loopholes, heightened tax on luxury spending (100% VAT on private jets and yachts?), making fines income-based, and treating capital gains the same way as income, are all more achievable.

I’m totally on board with the sentiment though.

It’s honestly not amazing. It’s a third person shooter across multiple different levels of built up environments, offices, corridors. The enemy AI is pretty terrible, and although there are different tactics you can use to “hack” and take over enemies or melee, it’s usually just easier to shoot.

But the parkour style navigation stood out. You can do wall jumping, which I was not expecting, and there are hidden pickups you can explore and find. And the open environments are nice (the corridors can feel a bit samey after a few levels).

It feels like one of those tie-ins that, had the dev team had more time to explore, balance, and really make it into its own game, might have been really good.

I’ve downloaded some old PS2 era games. Some of the gameplay is quite dated, but I really enjoy the retro feel of the environments and graphics. Perfect photorealism isn’t always necessary to enjoy a game. I’ve been playing Burnout and Ghost in the Shell SAC.

To all the people saying they should release server source code: You don’t even need to do that (as nice as it would be). At the very basic level all that is needed is:

• remove DRM (which probably cost more effort to add in the first place)
• a description of the API for any online components (which any decent dev team will already have internally documented)

I find it immensely infuriating that the article’s byline shows they are reporting from ‘London’ when in fact this happened not just in a different city, Edinburgh, but in a completely different country, Scotland.

Sad about the pandas, there are far too many people that simply can’t be trusted with fireworks. Limiting it to a single night in dedicated display venues run by licensed organisations wouldn’t remove the noise entirely, but it would reduce the frequency and would probably help all animals.

According to the 3 criteria mentioned in the article, YouTube wouldn’t need to be banned, logging in to YouTube would be banned. YouTube is still functional (mostly) when logged out, and wouldn’t violate those 3 criteria. The other services mentioned, like gaming, would be banned.

You can’t misgender a brand. You can’t deadname a brand. You can’t befriend a brand.

Women are a better person to be in the past than a good quality piece of wood

100% online games in the past were perfectly playable even after developers / publishers ended support. Online only games dying is a relatively recent invention. This petition is asking for consumer protection to return to the norm where a purchaser of an online game always has the choice of being able to play it in some fashion.

A game developer could do this by releasing a server application. They could even do this at the barest minimum by releasing documentation describing how the server ought to work, to allow for reverse engineering.

The Stop Killing Games campaign as a whole isn’t asking for perpetual server access, just to ensure that games stay in some sort of playable state.

Instead of arguing about 0Mg vs 0mg - use the best of both and upset everyone: 0ᴍg

Answer wrong. The more of us humans that answer wrong, the less accurate we need to be to get past these stupid things. If google want me to do work for them, they can pay me.

Knife Rain? Wasn’t expecting an adventure time reference on star trek, but I’ll take it!

There’s a lot of references linking back to nova squadron here, but I’ve got no idea how it all fits together. Looking forward to the finale.

This is a good change. I think we could be in a much better place if companies that owned both production and streaming were more open about licensing.