I should have known that last one -- I have been programming using Apple's RealityKit for a year and a half which is an ECS -- I guess I get lost in all the acronyms ...
I am actually working on a project where I have scraped ~400k recipes, and now am in the process of wrapping them in a little search engine.
The idea is to have a little python/node script + sqlite file that you can use to search locally for recipes offline. Then all you'd need to do is write a plugin for the notes app of your choice.
The worse the web becomes, and the worse the stability of internet access becomes due to climate change, I will probably be doing more archival projects like this for offline access.
Prior to covid, yes. I haven't eaten McDonald's since covid, but in college I would use the app + whatever promotional "buy one get one" coupons they had going on to hit some devious combos. Usually I could get 3 burgers for like $2.50 with free fries. Each purchase usually gives you another bogo coupon, or a survey that you can fill out for free fries, so you end up in infinite loops of coupons.
When I worked at a bike shop there was a BK that would give you a survey, you could fill it out and on your next visit get a chicken sandwich or whopper with a drink purchase (I think it was a drink, anyway).
Looping that one paid for a loooot of bike parts lol.
Palestine's PSTN is routed through Israel (at least, if any switches still exist). Of all the reasons to criticize Israel, I don't believe that wiretapping calls to/from the Palestinian Authority is one.
The implication in what you just said is that Israel having total control over Palestinian territory is taken for granted. They can wiretap with ease due to their illegal occupation. I think if the example was Canada wiretapping the US, the wrongness of it would be more apparent.
I think in western discourse it's common to treat Israel like a hurricane or some other natural disaster and not a state with agency. It is framed as Israel "just being there" and not as them choosing to occupy an area and subjugate people, so much so that they designate a huge chunk of their GDP to the endeavor and require continuous funding from the US.
Sorry if what I am saying is confusing, I am struggling to articulate the point I want to make. My point is mostly that sure, while wiretapping is several magnitudes less bad than murdering civilians and foreign aid workers, they are only capable of doing it so trivially because of their position of occupation, which is by design.
I imagine that the closing of Arkane studios Austin was a big motivator for worker's to unionize. They created successful games and Microsoft shut them down for pretty much no reason. I am kinda on the periphery of the gaming scene in Austin and that was a huge deal when it happened.
>I imagine that the closing of Arkane studios Austin was a big motivator for worker's to unionize. They created successful games and Microsoft shut them down for pretty much no reason.
And how would it be different with a union? Hold a strike to force the company to keep the studio open?
Its a messy process cause no one has/gets time to come up with something more imaginative (ironic I know cause this is supposed to be a creative class).
Thanks to globalization, ever changing regional differences in interest rates, corporate taxes, forex, labor costs, real estate prices, govt freebies/subsidies/laws etc etc, companies make decisions that have nothing to do with product produced yday or its quality.
In corporate wonderland, execs aren't trained (or given the time and resources) to use their imagination or think too deeply about how to respond to All these external forces. They are expected to avoid complex or unpredictable solutions and React as quickly as possible before the competition takes advantage of the external changes. Its automatic and highly predictable behavior how execs will respond.
The only way to slow the instant (bordering on mindless) reactions down, is to add Delay. Which buys people time on both sides of the equation to think. Now obviously its hit or miss whether any thinking happens and creative solutions are found. But its a starting point in having some sort of say in a process people on all sides have lost control over, due to global not local changes.
If one studio closes you can imagine the screws are tightening at the others. Unionization arguably wouldn't help for studios closing, but it would help push back against crunch and other labor abuses.
IIRC previous Arkane Austin titles are Dishonored 2 and Prey which were great games, but Redfall was definitely not so well received. I wouldn’t necessarily agree they were closed for “pretty much no reason,” but should one big flop mean a studio gets the axe?
With how expensive AAA development has gotten maybe that’s the stakes now, and a reason so many are taking the modern Hollywood playbook of churning out sequels and remasters.
The really egregious “no reason” closure was Tango Gameworks, makers of Hi-Fi Rush.
> With how expensive AAA development has gotten maybe that’s the stakes now, and a reason so many are taking the modern Hollywood playbook of churning out sequels and remasters.
The studio was owned by M$ though. There's no reason they couldn't have kept all those people in-house and just moved them on to some game with a tried and true IP attached to it.
I want to steelman microsoft's position here, and I can find many reasons:
1. The financial loss of the product (Redfall) was large enough that keeping that business unit itself was a risk. They need to show wallstreet that something is being done.
2. While there are talented people at the studio, they are unable as a corporation to be able to figure out what went wrong, ie who do they need to fire and who can they keep.
3. Their current business model precludes just moving people to other products for some reason, they don't want to disrupt those other products with a reorganization, this just isn't how they run studios, they want the teams to be colocated, etc.
While sure its bad that the studio lost its job I really don't think it's no reason.
Maybe "no reason" was a bad word choice. I would say that regardless of the reason, it doesn't matter to workers. What matters to workers is to have as much power as possible over their own situation. The simple calculus is that if you see another studio closing, for any reason, you recognize that this will be used as a cudgel by management and executives to work you and your colleagues even harder. When the true nature of the relationship between employee and worker is revealed, unionization is the obvious response.
I'm honestly surprised at how well 1. works. Like if you told me as a company you spent over a million dollars hiring a ton of people and can't figure out what to do with them that you're just going to fire them I'd see that as a failing of management.
Even worse if you give them severance for like 6+ months of wages. Like you couldn't figure out how to reassign them with that long of a timespan?
I will. I hope it continues to happen. The real policymakers of the country should not be continued to operate without scrutiny. Hacks like this are done illegally only because there is no legal alternative.
> It's the only thing that would keep me functional and able to drive on with a project though.
Don't you think that part of this could be stress? Also potentially dehydration. I have had eye twitches a couple times during long road trips where I drank Red Bull or Monster to keep focused, and was not drinking enough water. But I have never had twitching from caffeine under normal circumstances, since I usually drink 2 parts water for every part caffeinated drink (lots of bathroom breaks).
The parent comment's experience does not reflect my relationship with coffee at all.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, never medicated for it. Just regulated with diet and exercise, also probably self-medicated with caffeine and nicotine in college. Quit nicotine because of the very obvious health problems that come with it, I found it very easy to quit interestingly enough (thank God I quit before the Zyndemic).
But I have never felt that coffee comes with any negative side effects for me other than anxiety. It doesn't affect my sleep unless I drink it past 5 PM, and I've never felt like it "wakes me up", it just lets me enter a hyperfocus state a lot more easily. Other people describe their relationship with coffee that they wake up and feel groggy, so they take coffee to have a baseline. For me it has never been about waking up, it's just something that helps with focus.
I do get the jitters when drinking coffee especially since I eat my first meal very late in the day (12pm), so I switched to mate cocido, which is just mate in tea bags. The effect of even very strongly-brewed mate is far less pronounced than the effect of coffee, and I would even go so far as to say that whatever benefits I think I am getting from mate is probably just placebo.
For reference during college I probably consumed 3-4 cups of coffee a day, then as I started working I would consume 5-6 cups a day, black. Now I stop drinking coffee after I eat at noon, so I am down to 2-3 cups a day.
Also I think that brewing methods matter. Hot-brewed coffee causes less jitters and more focus. Cold-brewed coffee tastes better but it is easy to overshoot what feels like a "therapeutic dose" and actually end up making it harder to focus, as well as more jitters. It might be that I usually have hot coffee black, and I have cold brew with a bit of milk and simple syrup. The sugar or coldness might also make me colder or do something with my blood sugar, not sure.
Is there a regional aspect to it? I have been listening to a lot of Yiddish/Russian music lately and people say that there are a lot of Russian loan words and it is hard to understand for non-Russian Yiddish speakers.
Yep -- Eastern and Western Yiddish are mutually intelligible, but have substantially different accents and word choices. Most people speaking Yiddish today speak an Eastern dialect.
