I’ve got Gran Turismo 7 and it’s great in some ways but they ruined the pacing of the game. It hands out cars like they expire in less than a week. It can be fun to try out a whole bunch of different cars, but there’s not much sense of progression like the older ones gave.

I remember building a connection to some of the cars in older games. When you bought a car, it was meaningful because it took time to win enough money to afford something, and then I’d spend a while upgrading it until eventually hitting a ceiling and needing a better car to upgrade to progress to more races. And then add some variety with a few races with rules or restrictions along the way to give a reason to buy some other cards in the same tier, but then then it would be a big decision.

In GT7, all except the top end supercars feel like an afterthought, my garage gets filled for free as I win races, and any time I want to try a different car, first thing I do is buy most or all of the upgrades because it’s all trivial. Race with limiting rules? Ok, give me 5 minutes and I’ll find, buy, and max out another car to win this one.

Granted, it has more of an emphasis on the driving than the older ones did (where you could usually take your super car into whatever races your wanted and see how many times you could lap everyone), but I think I like the progressing through cars part more than the racing part and GT7 is disappointing in that regard compared to GT4 or GT3.

Yeah, talk about false advertisement!

I like that someone figured out half assing things can be just as funny or even funnier than putting in the effort to make it look more professional.

Now I’m curious about who first bottled that lightning.

Maybe the makers of Aqua Teen Hunger Force? Half the characters in there seemed like they were making it up as they went and is the earliest one I can think of where that was a common theme.

Home Movies came later but is the earliest where that’s applied to media produced “in-universe” that I can think of.

Home Improvement was earlier than both and Tim was often out of his league on his show, but that was more of a “ill prepared but at least trying to be professional” act than “making it up as we go and not even trying to hide it”.

Back in the day, when I fired up Mortal Kombat 3 for the snes, I’d usually end up spending more time in the space invaders game than playing MK itself, especially since the consoles kept the tuning intended to keep the quarters coming for the arcade version (first fight would be easy, next fight would be hard, then easy after continue, so it wasn’t just pay to play for the arcade but pay to win).

I’m curious if I’d remember each of the codes required for the secret menus, one of which contained the mini game. Can’t remember them offhand but it might be different with an snes controller in my hand.

Actually I think I do remember one of them (or maybe it’s the Konami code, or maybe those two are the same code):

Up, up, down, down, left, right, A, B, A

Or maybe it was right then left. Lol I also remember usually needing to try several variations before I’d get each code correct.

This isn’t really about safety, it’s about gun manufacturer profits.

Reviews say it’s adding a giant QR code to downloaded videos to get people to pay a license fee but I do not see that after downloading something just now. Though tbf, they did update it yesterday and might have removed that because of the feedback they were getting.

Permissions look reasonable to me, based on my understanding of what they need to do for the functionality, though I suppose there is potential for abuse.

It requires a companion desktop program for some streams, which did seem sketchy at first but I wasn’t able to find any specific claims of it doing anything undesired, just people who noped out when they saw it wanted them to install something and others who said it does function as desired. Again, hard to say if it does anything in addition to enabling some streams to be downloaded, but I haven’t noticed anything out of place on my PC since installing it either from tool-based scans or manual checks of places where malware can put itself to survive restarts.

There were also claims that it didn’t work with YouTube in the reviews, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for me, since it does light up. Though maybe that was timing-based, too, where Google briefly managed to block it only for them to adjust.

So I haven’t seen any of those issues but YMMV. I’m going to keep using it but will also keep an eye on it. Either way, thanks for letting me know.

How so?

There’s also the video download helper add-on for Firefox that will allow you to download streams that aren’t just media files your browser can http get. Though your browser can still access those streams, it needs a script component to handle it, so the built in file downloader/saver won’t even see it as a thing to download.

Also you can just block elements you right click on in Firefox (though this might be an option added by an add-on). If there’s hidden elements you just need to go through each of those until you can click on the one you want directly (and you can tell by what is highlighted in the inspect element mode).

You can also hit delete in inspect element mode to remove that element. You can also edit whatever you want in the element. Makes me wish it existed back when I was doing more web dev work, would have made things a lot easier when debugging.

With all these stories of malicious or incompetent mods, it makes me wonder if Russian trolls managed to get a bunch of mod positions on Reddit and mod to frustrate and hurt or kill communities to further division. Because it sounds a bit beyond a power trip or normal incompetence.

Though it could be due to volume and lack of effective tools and mods just dealing with their queues with batch actions and ignoring a lot of messages.

I suppose there could also be some mods trying to kill it from the inside after deciding they didn’t want to die on the “set sub private” hill once the admins started taking subs back. Guerrilla modding.

Either way it’s a shitshow.

Anyone who cares to see it already has, so I wouldn’t waste too much energy on it. Even a smoking gun would likely be disappointing when the world keeps turning without much change.

Though if you could show they’ve fucked the shareholders somehow, that might be different. But even there, most of the shitshow is out in the open and if they didn’t cross the line by driving away so much of their userbase, I’m not sure what would be considered crossing the line.

They can also be entertaining. Like there was one post removed within the past week where the mod said “don’t threaten mod action”, so I was curious and looked it up on the log. The guy had taken offense to something that wasn’t offensive (heard what they wanted to hear instead of what was said) then gave an ultimatum that they either apologize and retract within an hour or they’ll report them and an investigation on their comment history would happen. It was hilarious.

Sounds like the first was made with the mindset of, “it would be cool to make a game that does x, let’s do that and see if it will make money” while the second one was more of a, “all we gotta do is make a game that does x and we’ll make a ton of money!”

It seems like Windows and Linux users both agree that Windows sucks, they just disagree on it being avoidable.

Yeah, I was going to mention race conditions as soon as I saw the parent comment. Though I’d guess most cases where the debugger “fixes” the issue while print statements don’t are also race conditions, just the race isn’t tight enough that that extra IO time changes the result.

Best way to be thorough with concurrency testing IMO involves using synchronization to deliberately check the results of each potential race going either way. Of course, this is an exponential problem if you really want to be thorough (like some races could be based on thread 1 getting one specific instruction in between two specific instructions in thread 2, or maybe a race involves more than 2 threads, which would make it exponentially grow the exponential problem).

But a trick for print statement debugging race conditions is to keep your message short. Even better if you can just send a dword to some fast logger asynchronously (though be careful to not introduce more race conditions with this!).

This is one of the reasons why concurrency is hard even for those who understand it well.

Some people do use it to excuse their actions or choices, so it’s understandable that others would have a negative view of the phrase.

It’s not a great saying if used to defend acts (on the love side of things, that mindset can even ruin what it’s trying to “win”), but it does make sense to keep it in mind when considering possible actions of other players. If you’re fighting for someone’s love or at war, don’t assume there’s any moral limits to what others might do and that it’s thus safe to ignore those angles.

Yeah, I use it in contexts where if they know the answer offhand, great please help, but if they don’t know, I’m not requesting they spend time or effort looking it up. I can do that myself and don’t intend to offload that part.

It’s like a short answer question on a quiz rather than a research paper term assignment, except leaving the answer blank on the quiz is an acceptable answer.

That sounds too broad. The vast majority of things in my life haven’t killed me but also haven’t maimed me. Some of it even has made me stronger, such as various things at a few gyms I’ve been to.

This one is about accepting things for what they are rather than wasting energy wishing they were different.