I don’t know, Valve is financially motivated to make every game they sell a hit. This isn’t like YouTube, where they want people to keep churning out content without remuneration; Valve only gets paid when video game companies sell their game.

And as a software engineer myself, I can totally see how this bug could’ve happened. There are so many ways, in fact; they released on 2024-12-12, maybe the bug was that they also released at 12:12, and some ancient code in the emailer got set up to treat any repeating string of four 12’s as a signal that this is only a test and shouldn’t actually be sent (probably in an attempt to diagnose and fix another bug), but that if statement was never removed from the codebase before it shipped.

Or maybe there’s a weird overflow error that happens when an email is supposed to go to exactly a certain number of customers. It’s kind of close to a number divisible by 64 (138,688); maybe it’s just sloppy binary unit choce?

Or maybe it was at the end of the email fanout for the day and the server crashed without warning, and lost some games without notifying anyone. That would only have to happen once a year over that decade and it would add up to all 100 games.

The point is, I don’t see any evidence of malice here, so I have to assume stupidity. Or at least a SWE going too quickly and not checking their work.

Honestly, the fact that NASA and the NPS need budgets, and are subject to the whims and leverage of politicians without a shred of care for what they do, has always seemed insane to me. Sure, these organizations are literally preserving our past (in the case of the NPS) and forging our future (in the case of NASA); they’re some of the biggest and most meaningful things we reach for as a society, but they still have to serve at the whims of this idiocracy that took over after they were set up, and deal with a “looming budget shutdown” every fall.

It’s like if the warp core on the Starship Enterprise was powered by two squirrels bickering over the same nut. There’s just such a mismatch between the goals of the organizations and the people responsible for keeping them funded.

Trump insiders claim

Suuuuuuure. I’ll believe it when I…actually probably never.

Some people see participation in any sense as a sort of tacit agreement or endorsement of the system as a whole. So by casting any vote, even one of protest, you are legitimizing the system as a whole.

This assumes that there we are always afforded the option to choose whether or not to participate. If you are a bus driver and your full bus is careening toward a cliff, and you have the opportunity to swerve into a procession of nuns crossing the street (toward the cliff? What kind of street is this?), not choosing is still a choice. You can’t say, “well, I’ll just sit this one out. I can comfort my conscience with the knowledge that I’m not making a choice.” The people on your bus are still going to die, and it will be your fault. Now, if you swerved, the nuns would die, and that would be your fault, too.

A person who comes of age in a country with suffrage is a part of that system; they are not afforded the luxury of not casting a vote guilt-free, even if they tend more Kantian, because they were placed in the driver’s seat of that bus on the day they became an adult. In fairness, they share that seat with hundreds of millions of others, but they still face a choice between two bad options. No matter which they choose, even if they choose neither, bad things will happen.

I guess what I’m saying is, when the stakes are high enough and stacked up against you enough, you have to become at least a little bit of a consequentialist.

Honestly, for me, it’s the one-two-three punch of easy notes taken anywhere + podcasts + camera.

• notes : before smartphones I carried a notebook in my pocket. And sometimes I still do; writing longhand is still pleasant for me, and being able to sketch and doodle with my notes is still clunky with a touchscreen, amazingly. But the experience of losing my notebook, or not having the right one with me when I need it, is disproportionately frustrating to me.

• podcasts : this is one of the few ways my ADHD brain truly focuses. Listening to a podcast while walking, biking, running, driving, doing dishes, cleaning a room, mowing the lawn, etc. is almost foolproof in getting me to pay attention to the content. I have to be in the right mood to read, and videos are background noise to me after having the Discovery Channel or Scifi Channel on 24/7 in my apartment in college. Before smartphones I had a trusty RCA Lyra that went everywhere with me; and while the form factor and experience were fantastic, I now have a backlog of over 800 podcast episodes that would not fit on that device’s 512MB internal storage. (Also, I just got a pair of noise canceling earbuds, and I have to admit I really like them)

• camera : I’ve chosen my last four smartphones based on the camera quality. I’ve got kids, and being able to take adorable pictures of them at the drop of a hat is very useful to me. I don’t need all the computational nonsense, but I do need it to be good enough and ever-present. Before smartphones, I would occasionally bring a digital camera around with me, but I can’t afford one that would give me the quality I want, and it wouldn’t fit in my pocket anyway.

Messaging, fitness tracking, and work stuff is also easier, though not in a way that I don’t think I could backfill with other things if needed.

Nostalgia aside, the experience of these big three use cases is indisputably better with a smartphone than it was in 2005. Could I live without them? Yes! Absolutely. But I’d prefer not to, and since I shook my social media addiction I don’t really feel the need to.

Oh hey Hurst! They package these in my city. Back in college I used to make a pot of these and a huge batch of cornbread regularly all winter. Good memories.

The weird thing is that Windows 10 broke that model. It always used to be that the even-numbered Windows versions were worse (after, let’s say, Windows 2000): ME (#4)? Bad. XP (#5)? Good! Vista (#6)? Bad. 7? Good! 8? Bad. 8.1 (#9)? Good! But then Windows 10 came out and threw the whole rhythm off.

You could pretty reasonably argue that 8.1 wasn’t a true version, and thus Windows 10 was the 9th version of Windows, but that just means that 8 was the combo breaker by becoming good eventually. In either case, Windows 11 being bad restores the bad version/good version rhythm.

Not on Mastodon. Some of the other fedi microblog platforms have had it, though.

They want us to upgrade to 11 so they can do that when they release Windows 12.

Great point. Their strategy at this point is holding a gun up to your hard drive and saying “upgrade now or your data gets it.”

You just described most of my post history.

Get yourself a tally counter (click counter, hand counter, whatever). As an added bonus, it’s also a great fidget toy!

✅ Colorado

✅ Connedicut

✅ Delaware

❌ District of Columbia (on a technicality)

✅ Florida

But not

❌ I’aho

❌ Iniana

❌ Marylan

❌ Nevaa

❌ North Akota

❌ Rhoe Islan

❌ South Akota

I would assume it uses a different random seed for every query. Probably fixed sometimes, not fixed other times.

Yep. I have a few hunches about how it works (I would guess that the answer to your original question is “no” or “only kinda,” for instance) but honestly my hunches are likely no better than tea leaves and significantly less tasty.

YouTube doesn’t make public their view counting algorithm so that it can’t be gamed, so it’s anyone’s guess.

I’m pretty sure YouTube randomly “fuzzes” the public view count of videos specifically to prevent this kind of research.

“Brick,” or “charger brick.” Sometimes “AC adapter.”

Oh, this is great news. I have Nova tweaked to work almost exactly like this. Excellent, thank you.

Facebook (centralized) is ground for fake and hateful news, while the Fediverse (decentralized) brings meaningful diversity and insightfulness.

That’s because Facebook has discovered that fake and hateful news gets lots of clicks and engagement, and boosts their bottom line. Wikipedia has no such profit motive, nor does federated social media. It’s the economics that make them different, not the server paradigm.

More information also means quicker double-checking for what is true, regardless of political spectrum

Is…this your first day on the Internet? That is almost never how it works. You get one side posting sourced, verifiable, provable information at best. At worst, both sides are posting cherry-picked half-stories that agree with their preconceived ideas. In the end, no one changes their minds, but the people who are willing to stay and post about it for longer are the ones who are seen later on as the “winners.”

Truth is a constructed entity.

I’m reminded of a line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.”

Similarly, encyclopedias are not where to go for truth. They’re where to go for fact, and fact isn’t decided by consensus.