Unreal Engine royalties only start after you make $1 million from a project. Even then, it’s 5%, and waived for sales done on the Epic Store (whose 13% cut is almost a third of what Steam takes). If you are a small indie dev, you won’t be paying Epic a dime unless you start rolling in some serious dough, and even when you do, 5% of your revenue for using one of the most powerful 3D game engines is pretty fair

The 3 Gorges Dam in China slowed the Earth’s rotation by .06 microseconds per day due to the amount of water moved altering the Earth’s moment of inertia

Developers are on the hook for potentially infinite losses without gaining revenue in a per install fee system. Expenses are entirely unpredictable for developers and bad actors can run basic install scripts to cost the company a lot, so if Unity stays their current course for a few more weeks, many of the larger developers using Unity will begin switching engines even if it means delays. It’s absolutely worth it for a developer to port their game over no matter the cost, because they are easily looking at no limits to their costs if they don’t

Another interesting approach to trash management is what Taiwan does. Taiwan charges per bag of trash, and residents have to manually bring out their bags on trash day to garbage trucks that sing like ice cream trucks. This makes each person care about how much they are throwing away, as unlike in places that charge a flat fee per bin per week, you could spend or save a lot of money and effort on trash days based on how much waste you make. However, in most municipalities, recycling and composting are free, encouraging residents to choose items with the least amount of recyclable/compostable waste to save money. While such a system would not go over well with the people if it were implemented in a place like the US, the program is successful in Taiwan and has done wonders for reducing their waste and keeping their cities clean

Unironically this is the one area where Epic Games is absolutely in the right. They have a 12% royalty on games sold on their platform and a 5% royalty on sales over $1 million for games made with Unreal Engine, with the UE royalty being waived entirely if it’s sold on the Epic Games store. They get a reasonable cut for maintaining one of the most powerful game engines and charge nearly a third of what Valve does for their storefront. If the Epic Store wasn’t so dog shit, they’d be an actual competitor to Valve

If there’s one place I’d expect to have trouble hiring, it’s the Pentagon’s IT team. They regularly deal with the most sensitive information about the US military, and need to have clearance to see all of it. That gives them an incredibly slim hiring pool, so it’s no surprise their IT team sucks

They’re encouraging it because the studio sacked most of the team abruptly. The developers who actually made the game are long gone

Salt 2 is a pretty good indie pirate game. You sail around a procedurally generated archipelago doing quests for various factions while building up your ship, and it’s pretty relaxing. It’s still in development so it’s missing features like ship to ship combat, but it’s the closest thing to a single player sea of thieves

Barely anyone uses Linux, and among those who do, distros vary wildly enough between each other to the point of breaking viruses that it’s just not worth the effort to make viruses for them compared to Windows or Mac

The FOSS crowd is incredibly cringey and annoying

Any country, US or not, spying on other countries’ citizens ought to be taken as a matter of national security in the target countries. China does take it as a matter of national security, which is why, among other reasons, many foreign social media sites and services are blocked, run as separate instances from the rest of the world, or restricted heavily

Even the premium Peacock plan gave ads for Peacock content

For decades, the Republican party has had the Baptist/Evangelical vote in the bag without having to actually do anything thanks to abortion. Republican politicians could rile up their base attacking abortion and be excused for not doing anything about it by their constituents as abortion was a constitutional right, and because abortion was a constitutional right that couldn’t be taken away, those who cared about it could still be in good conscience when they vote for a Republican. The dog caught its tail when Roe was overturned, and now that abortion can be outlawed on every level of government, Republican inaction on abortion will see their support among Baptists/Evangelicals tank. Overturning Roe is the most self damaging thing the Republican party has ever done, and now they are forced to choose between catering to religious fanatics or normal people

You start out as a medieval bum, and you are as good at life as a medieval bum would be. Even if you are a god at the combat system, you ain’t winning fights against tough opponents until your character gets skilled. You start out illiterate as well, and have to learn to read, just like a medieval bum

The software 2B2T and other major servers run is typically custom made. The reason servers like 2B2T need a player queue is because the official Minecraft server software is garbage and runs everything on a single CPU thread, placing a firm upper limit on how much stuff can run on a server. Server networks like Hypixel shuffle players through lobbies and mini games on various different servers to spread the load, but since 2B2T is a single world, they have to run a custom, highly optimized server file to be able to handle their player numbers. If Mojang would invest in developing more scalable server software, player queues would be a thing of the past without having to ban them, but Mojang would rather harass server owners for having to accommodate Mojang’s poor product than actually fix the underlying issue

If they are wearing glasses, God made them nearsighted, so why are they trying to undo what God did? “But nearsightedness is a medical condition” yeah and so is dysphoria

Awesome. We get to save money on storing and disposing of old, surplus equipment, and Taiwan gets weapons that will prove vital should war break out. In the event of a war between Taiwan and China, US intervention is not guaranteed, and it will be significantly more difficult to send arms to Taiwan compared to how we’ve been sending arms to Ukraine, so ensuring that Taiwan has the means to defend themselves ahead of time is vital if the US wants to make sure Taiwan survives. The amount is basically nothing compared to the US military’s annual budget or the aid we’ve given to other countries, but hopefully this opens the door for further investment into Taiwan’s military

You ever drive through Disney World property? They have hundreds of thousands of people on the property every single day, yet there’s hardly ever any traffic on the property itself. They achieve this through free and robust public transportation that takes people between all of the hotels and the parks while penalizing drivers who don’t want to take it with large parking fees. Especially with buses taking people between the airport and Disney property, there’s hardly a reason for most people to rent a car. As a result, despite heavy traffic in the area surrounding Disney World, they’ve effectively beat traffic on the property itself, but clearly traffic is unbeatable with public transportation because the billionaire who owns a car company says it doesn’t work

100k a day for operating in a country of 5 million people. The question isn’t “how much does this affect their global earnings?”, it’s “is it worth paying 100k a day to run personalized ads in a country with a population of Minnesota?”

The US government has literally published a training manual on how to make improvised explosives that is freely and legally available online. It’s not exactly hidden information