Well, that part at least I don’t think is necessary. It’s a parody of a dating app, and it seems from searching screenshots the real app doesn’t have units either - just the number.

Which is just fine, because the number next to someone’s name being their age is clear from context.

I suspect the person you responded to understood the context, but was cheekily calling out the “technically incorrect” usage of ±

The ± symbol requires a tolerance value to create a defined maximum and minimum range, e.g 300±20 (so Soran could be anything between 280 and 320)

it doesn’t mean “approximately”

But I understand this is just an inconsequential funny picture, so whatever right.

Yes, of course it will be online.

And after the apocalypse is finished there’s probably gonna be Iike, jobs available, and plenty of empty real estate. Opportunities!

Viewers have literally zero attention span, so if the talking isn’t super high speed back to back without even a single second to pause for breath, people click off or scroll past.

Same with subtitles that flash up rapidly, a single word at at time.

That’s the sorry state of affairs we are now living with.

Cloudflare presumably don’t want to give away the identity of their customer.

Even if only 1% of people used adblock, then that’s 1% of millions of dollars of ad revenue. It’s easily enough to put several people on this as a full time job if they want to.

I’m sure Google saw it as only a minor issue at first, but the number of people using adblockers is presumably going up all the time.

The irony being of course that adblock usage is skyrocketing only because companies like Google have made the Internet so thoroughly ad-polluted it’s intolerable to go without one.

The real dress is actually blue and black, yes, but the illustration tries to show how the exact same colours can look different depending on lighting and context.

In the diagram, the dress on the left is strongly blue and black, while the dress on the right is strongly white and yellow.

And yet the connected parts of the dresses with the “pipes” between them show the exact same colour on one dress can look like a different color on the other. The “pipe” is there so you can follow it with your own eyes from one side to the other and observe that it is indeed the same colour on both sides, despite looking very different when observed as part of the whole image.

The point being, how our brains perceive colour is very situationally dependent, and some people assume a different situation than others, hence the differences in perception.

People tend to believe that vision is absolute, that we all have the same eyes and see the same things, but that’s absolutely not true. The dress phenomenon occurred because It’s not about what your “eyes” see in absolute terms, it’s about what your “brain” does with that information.

Put hummus in your sandwiches or something, it’s a great condiment.

I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.

Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.

The coffee story is quite a long way in, but it was an interesting read, thanks.

I guess the message is, things aren’t always good because they are objectively good. Sometimes things are good because of when we had them, and who we enjoyed them with. And that’s definitely true.

I’m two ways about this.

In recent years I’ve become quite a coffee lover. I’ve experimented with a lot of brewing methods, and got into small batch beans from independent roasters, with interesting qualities like being aged in whisky barrels (that one tastes and smells sooo good)

At the same time though I grew up in a family where the only coffee my parents ever drank was instant - a teaspoon of granules with some hot water and milk and maybe sugar. When I go over there to visit that’s what I’ll get, and I’m not going to turn my nose up at it. In some ways it’s got that taste of nostalgia lol.

Yeah, I agree the bots are genuinely "more fleshy"and with skin and such - just saying where my imagination was at - which thanks to the wonder of books can be quite different for different people.

I wish we knew what the motivation was for choosing the actor. The cynic in me thinks they opted obviously male lead to reduce friction and claims of “wokeness” but without some inside insight we can’t know.

In my imagination, Murderbot looked kinda like the player character from the game ‘Citizen Sleeper’, pictured below.

Which is to say, very androgynous and very obviously cybernetic.

There’s quite a bit of character similarity between them too, because the titular Sleeper is a human consciousness in a cybernetic body that has a lot of biological parts, and they are kept loyal to the company who owns them by a drug that will cause their body to break down if they stop taking it. Same intent as the governor module, but a different approach.

I found Murderbot’s physical appearance an important aspect of the books, not just for surface plot reasons (everyone knows they are a bot etc) but because it’s a large part of what people need to overcome from the perspective of seeing past their prejudices.

Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.

A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.

What was the bug and workaround? :)

Matrix org isn’t obligated to run a public instance at all - they could stick to developing the spec, and let other people run instances.

And honestly maybe they should, because then we wouldn’t have this huge consolidation problem on matrix.org in the first place.

To me, the unspoken premise of the game is that you’re a kid in 1986 with a parent or cool uncle who went on a business trip to Japan and brought you home a Famicom and a copy of the original Zelda - months before the console even launched outside Japan.

The whole game is about replicating that sense of childish fascination and wonder.

The ‘Alien Language’ game manual is supposed to mimic the feeling of trying to read the Japanese manual that came with the game, muddling through as best you can with the pictures, and a few random English words they included just because English is ‘cool’ in a gaming context.

It’s a very fun mechanic, and my favourite thing about the game.

Sorry yes, that’s what I meant really. They could be straight. My poor description.

I loved that app and I still miss it (and reddit) in some ways, but the API Apocalypse was when I decided I had to take a moral stand and quit. No way was I going to be railroaded into the first-party app full of ads and nonsense.

I haven’t looked back since.