Wow! I need to check that out myself!

• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
• Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

It’s woke not because of what’s in it, but why. It’s performative politics. Token ensemble casts. Empty signaling. It’s not meant to make the world a better place, it’s meant to make money. It’s like cheap pride merch at Walmart.

Borg can’t match the lifecycle speed of Zerg though. Yes, they can create new infants, implant them, and accelerate their growth in maturation chambers to produce new adult humanoid drones, but the process took 17 cycles (days). Zerg on the other hand produce new drones in a matter of seconds and new hatcheries in a minute or two. Within a single day they could multiply across an entire planet or overwhelm a cube.

40yo single dude checking in. I think the government lost my assignment form!

And YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, BitTorrent…

People have a lot more choices now than they did in the bad old days of high cable bills. If streaming services charge too much people will just bail back to free stuff.

There’s a lot of advantages that simply come with using a more popular distribution. For one, having a larger pool of package maintainers (and therefore more packages) is pretty important. Have you ever tried using NixOS as a daily driver? I did a few years ago. Very annoying having to create my own packages for so many different (and relatively common) things I wanted to use.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned this: it’s a numbers game. It only takes a small number of cheaters to reach a critical mass where everyone is encountering them all the time. If only 1% of all players are cheaters and you play games against 10 people in one day, your chance of playing against at least one cheater is about 9.6% on that day. Play 10 players per day for a month (30 days) and your chance of meeting at least one cheater goes up to 95%.

Now consider the effects that cheaters have on the rest of the population: if people get frustrated by cheaters often enough they’re more likely to quit the game. Over time, this can cause the number of non-cheaters to go down, increasing the chances of everyone playing against cheaters. If cheaters are now up to 2% of the population then your chances of meeting at least one in a day (assuming 10 opponents again) rise to 18%.

Conclusion: Over a long enough time span the population of cheaters rises to 100%.

I switched from vim to emacs years ago. Then years later I switched back. Emacs is cool and all but it really killed my pinkie finger!

I have carbon steel and stainless steel, as well as cast iron. I don’t use nonstick whatsoever. It is well known that induction doesn’t perform well with carbon steel. The issue is carbon steel’s poor heat conductivity which makes it very difficult for heat to spread up the sides of the pan. Gas doesn’t have this issue because the flames and hot gases wrap around the sides of the pan and heat them directly. Having hot pan sides is critical to prevent the eggs from sticking when you tilt the pan to roll up a French omelette.

As for warping? Just search on YouTube. There’s tons of videos showing how easy it is to warp a pan on induction: just use high heat. This is never an issue on gas because of the superior evenness of heating, so you can crank gas as high as you want. Yes, you can turn the induction heat way down to avoid warping but then your performance and responsiveness goes out the window and you spend a ton of time waiting around for the pan to preheat.

Another issue is when you’re searing meats, frying eggs, or sauteeing veggies and basting by spooning hot fat over them. To do this you need to tilt the pan at an angle so the fat pools on one side and then rapidly baste the food. Unfortunately, induction burners stop heating as you try to lift and tilt the pan. Plus the sides of the pan aren’t getting hot so the fat cools when it reaches the sides of the pan as you tilt. You can still do the technique but it’s much slower, clumsier, and less effective without gas (which continues heating no matter how you tilt the pan).

Here’s some videos on the technique:

Steak

Eggs

I wouldn’t exactly call it niche if you’re an Asian family who cooks with a wok every day. Yes, Technology Connections videos are heavily focused on the North American market because this is where Alec’s audience is largely from.

North Americans love gas stoves because of how simple and performant they are. North Americans also tend to have a fascination with wanting to cook with professional, restaurant-grade equipment (including ultra-expensive Sub Zero refrigerators and freezers, for some reason).

Having said all that, induction cooktops are still pretty niche in North America because large ones with large cooking surfaces that can handle large pans (without creating intense hot spots that literally warp and destroy your pans) are insanely expensive here ($4000++). Even the best Wolf professional induction ranges cannot do what a gas range does with carbon steel pans: heat the bottom and sides of the pan evenly. You always get intense heat where the bottom of the pan makes contact and then the sides are hundreds of degrees cooler, which means your French omelettes stick to the sides of the pan and get ruined.

This induction wok device from the video is cute but it only works with woks that are the exact same shape as the one included with the device. A carbon steel pan with a flat bottom and gently sloped sides won’t work at all with this thing.

See, the thing Alec complains about with gas stoves (the flames going around the pan and heating up the room) is actually a feature for people who know how to cook and want their pans to heat evenly and perform really well. There’s no electric stove on the market (radiant or induction) that can replicate this!

I bet the sign is just driven right off the serial port so Linux just treats it as a console to log to. Then their custom signage app just starts right up from init. Nice!

I think you mean there’s never a right time to update! You’re always rolling the dice!

That’s a lot of lactose in human milk! You’re gonna have a bad time if you’re lactose intolerant!

We can’t even get our own news on Facebook anymore!

Anyway I think a much bigger problem is the death of local newspapers which has caused people to ignore local politics even more so. Some of our biggest problems in society (housing, lack of community, alienation and depression) can be traced back to terrible decisions made at a municipal level.

Which is a shame. This is an untapped skill in games! I recall sniping in Metal Gear Solid had a steadiness mechanic. It used analog and rumble. You could even pop some diazepam to slow down your muscle twitching, as well as press a button to hold your breath! Very cool mechanics that other games don’t bother with!

I think we can state as a truth that they have less potential profit.

That’s true but it’s not because people aren’t playing single player games. The reason single player games are less profitable is because the non-subscription, non-microtransaction single player market is extremely saturated with indie games. That makes it very hard to sell AAA single player games. The standards are extremely high and the opportunities for extra monetization are not there.

I have been a single player gamer for most of my life, yet I haven’t bought a AAA single player game in decades. I have more indie single player games to play than I know what to do with, and frankly they appeal to me more than AAA titles. Expensive graphics and voice acting don’t have much draw for me these days. I am much more interested in roguelikes and retro games now. I think there are thousands of others like me out there, among all those who don’t go in for multiplayer games and haven’t purchased a console.

Even if you take only 10% of Canada’s land area, that still exceeds the land area of 160 other countries in the world, including many with far larger populations such as Pakistan (6x the population of Canada with less than 9% of the area). By the way, Pakistan is a highly mountainous country with more than half of its area covered by uninhabitable mountain ranges and deserts.

You didn’t address my points about investing at all. I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that governments are fighting against the construction of new subdivisions in order to protect the property values of existing single family homes. It’s not about stigma, it’s about the fact that too much of the upper middle class’s wealth is tied up in real estate and the government is terrified of jeopardizing that!

Canada is the second-largest country in the world by land area. There’s no reason we should have a housing crisis, yet we do. The answer is to build more houses. A LOT more. And that will make all the other issues go away.

Yes, even those hated real estate speculators. They’ll stop investing in real estate when the value of their investments goes down because of oversupply.

We should also be looking to incentivize investment in the stock market. When people invest their money in unproductive real estate instead of productive stocks and bonds it makes the economy sick. It leads away from innovation and employment and towards unproductive rent-seeking, AKA Neo-feudalism.

Presumably the ore they’re mining can’t be transported safely at all because it’s explosive or something. It would also make sense that it can’t be replicated either, otherwise they’d just do that.