• 21 Posts
  • 580 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I am curious what these advancements in infotainment are.

    I heard that the cars run a digital assistant (like Siri or Alexa) and give it access to vehicle sensors, so you can ask questions like “Does that restaurant on the right have good reviews?” It sounds like a cool feature, but I just hate digital assistants in general, so I would never use it.


  • And that is that for the Celtics.

    Seriously, why would they make that trade? Brown is, arguably, the best player on the team (and until Tatum fully recovers, there is no argument). The only reason to dump him for picks is if the team is going for a radical rebuild, except they signed Robinson to a fairly big deal.

    I assume the owners do not want to pay for two max contracts. If they don’t want to pay, they are not going to be able to seriously compete.

    Or maybe Brown told the team he wanted out and this is the best offer they could find.






  • I would play a warrior. I can make combat as interesting as I want. If I want, I can plan out grand tactics of pushing enemies into each other and into traps. If not, I can turn to the reliable “I stab the goblin with my sword” even if I am wielding a mace and fighting a dragon.

    I cannot play mage because I am too loss averse and hate using mana/spell slots. I would never play rogue because the idea of playing a close range damage dealer that wears cloth armor is a good recipe to end up spending most of the combat on death saving throws.






  • I assume it is a case of monopoly abuse. There are things you are allowed to get away with as a minor player in a market because no one has to do business with you.

    For example, GoG can insist that developers give them a game build without DRM since they are a minor software store and a majority of their customers know they can buy software other places.

    Steam, on the other hand, is used by almost all gamers. For many gamers, it is the only game store they use. If a game is listed on the Steam front page, a large portion of the games market will learn about the game. If Steam decides not to list a game, customers may assume that the game is not out yet, regardless of the amount of advertising they see for it. The publisher would need to have a special advertising campaign saying “yes, the game is out already but you have to use this other game store to buy it.”


  • Letting companies sell DLC outside of the Steam Store sounds like a bad deal for Valve but they look like a good company for publicly following through with it. If too many companies are abusing that policy, Valve is well within their rights to revise the policy and ban the behavior, taking the resulting PR hit. What they are not allowed to do is act like the good guy publicly while secretly and selectively enforcing a ban for companies that they are mad at

    P.S. If Valve does ban selling DLC outside of the Steam Store, it would make Steam an unusually restrictive store. I can open up Steam and buy DLC for any game by Wise Wizard Games, associate that DLC with my online multiplayer account, then download the same game (for free) on iOS and Android, open up the new copies, log into my online play account, sync purchases, and play my newly purchased DLC from another app store. I have never heard of an App store not allowing it but most game developers do not implement it because it costs them money to code it up and they make money from people who buy the same contents multiple times.





  • There were the cures that worked in theory but did not work in actual cells. There were the cures that worked on mice but did not work on humans. There were the cures that cure cancer but have a higher fatality rate than the cancer. Those cases cover just about every cancer “cure” you read about in the news.

    Then there are all the cures that work for some people some of the time. Big pharma has patented them and is selling them for enough money to cover all of the other cures that did not work (and give everyone a very nice bonus).

    Seriously, if some phara company could cure cancer, why wouldn’t they? They can sell it for 100k per treatment, make enough money for each of the 10 biggest investors to buy a small country, and then close up shop.


  • I still don’t understand why the bottom three teams have worse odds than teams 4-10 from the bottom. Is it a measure to insure that teams that tank only tank a little bit? Even with flat odds for the bottom 10, there is no reason for a team not to start winning once they are out of the play-in. They would want to since it is more interesting for fans and helps with player development.