I’d been on Reddit for 15 years, predating the Digg exodus. Actually, I find that my memories of the early days makes moving to Lemmy easier. Present-day Lemmy is already ahead of Reddit back when I started, both in terms of content and features/availability.

I think that’s just how the US signs off on every meeting with world leaders.

Russia was always Turkey’s number one geopolitical antagonist; even in the best of times, a dangerous frenemy. Now, Turkey is probably the number one beneficiary of Putin’s botched war. Its main antagonist is defanged, maybe permanently, and it’s become a geopolitically indispensible regional power that the US and Europe desperately need to keep onside. It can dick around with stuff like hosting Putin visits, just to flaunt its own importance. Everything is coming up Erdogan.

Material degradation is a very serious issue for these perovskite cells, so it’s a bit concerning to see it brushed off with a “lol we’ll just have to see” comment. Also, these materials contain lead, so disposal/recycling becomes a significant concern.

The grim reaper is coming for old.reddit.com any day now.

Shutting down polluting businesses, relocating others away from where people live, and traffic congestion control are all valid approaches to air pollution control, used not only in China but around the world. Not sure why you need to put scare quotes around the word “solved”.

That’s not at all how the GPL works…

Chrono Trigger. It’s basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.

After seeing this, I thought I’d go over to the Play Store to leave a 1 star review. Then discovered I had already left a 1 star review (complaining about their shitty interface) a few months ago, which I’d totally forgotten about ;-)

Optical components are already used in some parts of servers, in interconnects. But I don’t expect them to replace silicon for general purpose processing ever. One thing that’s never noted in these scientific press releases is that optical components are huge. The wavelength of light is about a micron, i.e. a thousand times larger than the feature sizes of silicon electronics. This limitation can’t be easily overcome.

Google was angsting so much about Facebook’s success at the time, and weirdly enough if Google was actually good at product management, Google Reader would have been a great basis for creating a social network. Instead they went all in for Google+, whose value proposition over Facebook was… well… slightly nicer web animations.

Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.

I know this upsets a lot of people, but the ruling isn’t without justification. $450B++ in government spending should not be accomplished through a legal loophole. (Quite aside from the fact that fiscal stimulus is the last thing the economy needs right now.)

for some fucking reason

The reason is that she expected Hillary to win and the satisfaction of the first female president appointing her replacement.

It’s a great example of how these justices aren’t as wise or smart as they seem to think they are.

Pull for scantily-clad farmhands.

This is a deliberately obtuse take by the Telegraph. Central banks are literally empowered to create or destroy money; the profits and losses they themselves make are accounting fictions.

Ultima Underworld

It came out before Doom, had full isometric 3D environments including looking up and down, and contained immersive sim and RPG elements. All the ingredients of a modern first person action RPG… in 1992.

There’s a saying in developmental economics. There are four kinds of economies in the world: developed, undeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.

It’s really mind-boggling how Argentina’s economic troubles never end, under socialist governments and neoliberal ones, with a pegged exchange rate and a floating one, under high global interest rates and low ones.

Taking a quick look, it seems that South Africa went for the Pfizer-BioNTech and J&J vaccines. If vaccine supply was the issue, they should have bought Indian and Chinese vaccines. Those vaccines were actually the best bang for the buck for the global South at the time: their marginally lower efficacy was more than compensated for by their far better availability. It seems like the problem for SA, ironically, is that it stuck too close to the West and did not think independently enough.

People are very understandably dubious because of the Stadia fiasco, but this is a lot more promising. IMO, this have been what they tried first. There’s a huge market for casual games that people can play on their phones or tablets, and these often don’t suffer from the strict input lag requirements that bedevil cloud gaming.

Knowing Google, though, chances are they’ll fuck up the execution.