It took a lot of inspiration from Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, but the two games had basically the same creative team anyway.

I think those screenshots look like something closer to Ogre Battle or the recently released Unicorn Overlord rather than any RTS.

The story seems generic at first, but it goes places later.

One feature I really liked about this game was that you can adjust the encounter rate, even down to 0%. No in-game consumables or equipment needed, just an option in the menu. If you want to gain a few levels, you can crank it up. If you just want to revisit an old location because you missed an item, you can turn it off.

I’ve never experienced that, and I’ve definitely told Google Assistant to fornicate with itself on multiple occasions.

I had never heard of Humane until I read this article. After also reading Engadget’s review of the thing, it sounds like an absolute nightmare to use.

Maybe I’m too old-school and impatient, but I’ve never been able to make voice assistants work for me. It’s a feedback loop: the assistant fails to do a task, so I become resistant to using it in the future. Even the thing I’ve used an assistant for the most, playing music out of a Nest speaker, seems to still be hit-or-miss after years of trying, and in some ways seems to be getting worse.

The gestures also sound awful. As with voice assistants, I’ve never gotten comfortable with smartphone gestures beyond the most rudimentary. I strictly use 3-button navigation on my phone, and I use Connect as my Lemmy app of choice because it allows me to disable all the swipe commands for upvote/downvote.

Well, there’s the fact that outrage seems to drive more activity than other types of content. YouTube sees it as a more profitable option to advertise a Very Angry Gamer™ to you, even if you aren’t interested. I guess they assume that you’ll find something to watch anyhow, but if they will profit even more of they can hook you into the outrage machine.

Then there’s my personal hypothesis that in order to enable this, YouTube’s algorithm weights your demographics, subscriptions, and viewing history much more heavily than your manual inputs.

My wife and I had this conversation the other day. Our kid is only two right now, but as we’ve learned, these milestones sneak up on you.

I used my own life as a guide to my opinion, and so landed on age eight or so. That’s around the age I remember being able to go to the park or to a friend’s house within the neighbourhood on my own.

Other questions about how much functionality the phone would have and how much access they would have to it at home are still to be determined.

You are welcome.

Pointers do make more sense to me now than two decades ago, mostly owing to me being married to a computer scientist. But I always go back the fact that for the purposes of my first year programming course, pointers were (probably) unnecessary and thus confusing. I have a hard time understanding things if not given an immediate and tangible use case, and pointers didn’t really help me when most of my programs used a bare few functions and some globally defined variables to solve simple physics problems.

EDIT: I’ll also say that pointers alone weren’t what sunk my interested in programming, they’re just an easily identifiable concept that sticks out as “not making sense.” At around the same time we had the lesson on pointers, our programs were also starting to reach a critical mass of complexity, and the amount of mental work I had to do to follow along became more than I was willing to put into it - it wasn’t “fun” anymore. I only did well on my final project because a friend patiently sat in my dorm room for a few hours and talked me through each step of the program, and then fed me enough vocabulary to convince the TA that I knew what I was doing.

I doubt that you’re missing anything about pointers themselves. I may not have done a good job articulating why non-programmers have a hard time understanding them.

I am but one man whose only education in programming was a first year university course in C from almost two decades ago (and thus I am liable to completely botch any explanation of CS concepts and/or may just have faulty memories), but I can offer my own opinion.

Most basic programming concepts I was taught had easily understood use cases and produced observable effects. There were a lot of analogous concepts to algebra, and functions like printf did things that were concrete and could be immediately evaluated visually.

Pointers, on the other hand, felt designed purely of and for programming. Instead of directly defining a variable by some real-world concept I was already familiar with, it was a variable defined by a property of another variable, and it took some thinking to even comprehend what that meant. Even reading the Wikipedia page today I’m not sure if I completely understand.

Pointers also didn’t appear to have an immediate use case. We had been primarily concerned with using the value of a variable to perform basic tasks, but none of those tasks ever required the location of a variable to complete the calculations. We were never offered any functions that used pointers for anything, either before or after, so including them felt like busywork.

It also didn’t help that my professor basically refused to offer any explanation beyond a basic definition. We were just told to arbitrarily include pointers in our work even though they didn’t seem to contribute to anything, and I really resented that fact. We were assured that we would eventually understand if we continued to take programming courses, but that wasn’t much comfort to first year students who just wanted to pass the introductory class they were already in.

And if what you said is true, that later courses are built on the assumption that one understands the function and usefulness of pointers despite the poor explanations, then its no wonder so many people bounce off of computer science at such a low level.

I definitely feel this. I had to take a programing course in university and I was easily able to follow along up until the lesson on pointers, whereupon I completely lost the thread and never recovered.

I’ve known a good number of computer scientists over the years, and the general consensus I got from them is that my story is neither unique nor uncommon.

I’ve gotten the pop-up once or twice, but updating uBlock fixed that.

I have instead noticed a large decrease in quality, things like frozen images/pages and endless buffering. I don’t know if all that is related, but it did start around the time YouTube started cracking down on ad blockers.

My first attempt to cancel my SiriusXM subscription saw the agent tell me that it was “impossible” because I had “just renewed.” It was true that I had recently renewed, but only because I had forgotten to cancel it in time. Since that was my mistake I was willing to just let it go and just use the service another year. But in order to stop that from happening again, I wanted to cancel early, which they didn’t let me do.

My second attempt three months later saw the agent protest again, saying that I should call back when it was closer to renewal. This time I put my foot down and got them to cancel my renewal.

Or so I thought.

I finally had to call them again eight months later after I started getting emails hyping up my impending renewal. It seems that instead of outright canceling, they had instead put a note on my file to cancel at a later date - a note I’m presuming they were going to ignore.

Maybe their system really did make it impossible for front-line agents to cancel to far out from the renewal date. That would explain the agents’ behaviour, and if true it makes SiriusXM look even worse

Definitely the worst experience I’ve ever had trying to cancel a subscription.

My story is a bit different than others. I am not a Trekkie, and most of what I know about the franchise is from cultural osmosis and from catching the odd rerun of TNG in the 90s.

I have, however, been a junior officer in a ship, and much of Lower Deck’s content struck a chord because I’ve been there. I’ve been assigned the banal tasks, I’ve argued with other crew members on an opposite watch, and I’ve had to fight for the attention of the senior officers.

Disclaimer: I am not encouraging you to join the navy just to enjoy LD. That would be silly.

Having learned French as a second language, I can say that the gendered noun thing wasn’t the most difficult aspect, but it was the most consistently annoying. There are signifiers that makes the gender of some nouns very obvious, but then there are just as many others where it feels arbitrary or even contradictory to the established trends.

… there is only passion.

I mean, it should have died years ago the last time they unceremoniously dumped talent over apparently ideological reasons, but they survived.

Granted, this time is different because now they are losing their primary breadwinner. They plodded along before because ZP still brought in people. This wound may actually be fatal.

I’m in the same camp. I was generally fine when it was an occasional skippable pre-roll ad before some videos. But the last time I watched a video without a blocker, there were two unskippable ads at the start plus two more each at the 7 and 14 minute mark of a 20 minute video.

This hour has 22 minutes indeed.

I seem to remember them being surprised by the success of Bravely Default, not expecting a deliberately old-school RPG to appeal to modern audiences.

The cynical part of me believes this is performative on their part - they know a game like that will be popular, but it won’t be the most popular thing ever and they won’t make all the money. So, they try to push bigger games that are more easily monetized in hopes that people will just forget their own preferences.

I’ve seen S2E1 so far. It was a bit slow, but at least Egwene and Nynaeve are mostly in the right spot, and Perrin is almost exactly where he’s supposed to be (a bit strange considering of the five main characters he was the one with the biggest change to his backstory)