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.

Is it really worth it?

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.

Reading your comment I got worried about disk writes, so I’m glad this info is on the website:

Replay data is stored in RAM by default but there is an option to store it on disk instead.

Sensible design decision, because writing video to your SSD 24/7 wouldn’t do anything good for the lifespan of the drive.

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.

They are incentivised because showing accurate results for what you asked for isn’t necessarily the best way to keep people on the platform.

By pushing certain types of videos, such as opinionated content or loud shouty videos for low attention spans, YouTube hopes to keep you engaged for longer than they would by being accurate.

There’s also a direct advertising reason to funnel certain types of video. YouTube creators earn different amounts of money for the same number of views depeding on what category (e.g. financial, gaming, writing advice, cookery etc) YT has auto-categorised your video as. We can infer from this that advertisers are willing to pay more money for ads in some categories than others, and therefore YT is directly incentivised to push those more lucrative categories in search results, even if they aren’t what you wanted.

Plenty of reasons why they want to mess with results.

Promoting that the nunber exists as a actual thing people should use is good, yeah. :)

The actual number isn’t so important, though. If ever needed to call the non-emergency number I’d search it up, which fortunately I can do given I’ve got loads of time because it’s not an emergency.

For sure.

If they’ve got a problem with non-emergency callers dialing 911, surely it would be best to try and reduce that problem through other means (such as fining persistent inappropriate use of 911)

I don’t want to talk to a robot when I’m on the floor dying.

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

I heard this in the Worms voice.

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.

God literally used the scale-up tool on a seagull. I guess it was a Friday afternoon in the animal design bureau.

You are huge!

Two of the lines having elbow bends in them when they could just be single right-angles makes me unreasonably upset

For sure. And youtube is going to be on the winning side of that equation in terms of developing a fondness for specific channels and the individuals who run them.

With TV there were only so many channels, but with Internet distribution the limits have been blown away on how many shows can be produced and available at once. There’s more content now than ever before, and the way people consume that content has changed, too.

Streaming incentivises a model where new content is pushed at you constantly to keep you watching and “engaged” (because engagement = ads = money) and so the most important metric is quantity of shows, not quality.

I’ve watched shows I enjoyed that six months later I couldn’t even tell you the name of, because it’s a once-and-done watch, and then I’m onto the next thing.

With such high volumes of new content there’s no opportunity to get bored anymore, and that has consequences for how much old content gets revisited.

In the 2000s we’d all have some series or other on DVD, and when there was nothing good on TV that night we’d go back and re-watch it. And that re-watch process built up both your own personal fondness for the show, and the staying power of that show in the shared cultural consciousness. Plus you could probably speak with your friends about shows because chances were pretty good they’d seen it too, which only boosts it more.

When we’re all just watching things once and never again, and often not even the same things as each other, there’s no staying power.

I also believe - my personal opinion - that this quantity problem is why right now there are SO MANY remakes, reboots, spin-offs, and live-action versions of existing movies. Even the big players are finding it very hard to launch new things that reach the audience they want because the market is so absolutely saturated with “content”. And so they have to fall back on franchises that are already recognised and popular across a wide cultural gamut, things that cemented their popularity at a time before the quantity problem really set in.

It’s strange times.

Half the reason I like sci-fi so much is that it’s the genre which most often avoids pointless interpersonal drama.

I like to watch shows that are about things happening and how the characters deal with those things, not just jealous relationship fighting and people who can’t even decide whose side they’re on.

Don’t get me wrong - character conflict is necessary for any good show, regardless of the genre, but I don’t want the entire show to be that.

I agree with you, it’s insidious.

Given you’ve got a Pixel phone, you can save at least yourself from this problem by running Graphene or Calyx on it.