This is my take as well. I haven’t felt that graphics improvement has “wowed” me since the PS3 era honestly.
I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone.
And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there.
We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.
This is a significantly better handling than the previous game (final fantasy viii). My disk 1 (it had four disks) got scratched over time (I was a child after all), and the failure mode was just to crash - thus the game was unplayable. The game had a lot of cutscenes.
Maybe it is, these days? As much as I appreciate all the functionality brought to us by these tools, when I started web-dev circa 2005, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL + PHP) was the go-to for hobbyists.
As much as I look back at the simplicity (Apache config was not that difficult for a small site, at least with Apache 2.0), the part of me that operates production software these days gets anxiety the idea of it all.
And yet, when I wrote a small website to host my wedding website last year, it was indeed Linux, (some webserver), Postgres and PHP, with me copying files manually to FTP. It was probably nginx but you know what, I paid a company £50 for a large amount of storage, bandwidth, a domain and SSL certificate, for year, and everything went dandy. Horses for courses and all that.
Well if it is already on fire, what is the worst thing that can happen? Yes you get energetic reaction, but you were having one already and after wards, it is not that big of deal... Just thinking how long does piece of metallic lithium last in container.
This is one of the strongest pushbacks against USB-C that Apple have:
USB-C: You break the stem, you have a useless device and functioning cable
Lightning: You break the stem, you have a functioning device and useless cable.
One of these is clearly more optimal considering the cost difference between the two. Anecdotally, I have had problems with USB-C ports that I did not have with Micro-USB and (so far) with Lightning (admittedly I have only been an iPhone user for a year or so).
Of course, this directive is the correct stance and direction - having a standard and forcing it on everyone. It's just a shame the one they chose may be inferior.
You forgot the springs. Lighting has the springs in the device, while USB-C has them on the cable. That is why Apple stopped improving Lighting and developed USB-C. The stem can break, but it is far more rare than a tired spring, which is an inevitability.
I recently repaired a family member's iPhone. A crappy Lightning cable had been used and the tip metal piece of the plug had somehow broken off and gotten stuck inside the socket.
Let me tell you a story about playing The Settlers IV on a 233Mhz 64MB RAM Voodo 3 2000. This game was cool in that it had two audio features: a soundtrack on the CD itself, played using the CD drive's DAC [^1], and you could also drop MP3 files into a folder where the game would play those instead. It was common practice to use a NoCD crack when playing online, because the CD check took long enough you could time out of the lobby, and if you forgot the CD you got booted. That meant most online gamers had MP3 files, and no CD.
The minimum requirements to play this game were a 200MHz CPU w/ MMX and 64MB RAM - I was pretty close to this baseline. So anyway, I discovered that the game played at much better FPS (like 30 instead of 5) if you turned the music off - but only when playing MP3 - CD Audio had no hit. Now perhaps the game used a sub-par audio codec, but that single MP3 decode stream was enough to make the game unplayable.
Anyway that's not to say that I would expect MP3 decoding to be a problem in 2014, in fact you can likely play audio with no noticable increase on CPU usage, but when you have multi-stream audio (think voices, background music, sound effects from various channels - guns, explosions, etc.) I can see it starting to add up - especially when the CPU is already constrained for the graphics, game logic and perhaps of course everyone's favourite anti-piracy/anti-cheat logic.
[^1] For younger readers, yes, CD Drives used to come with built-in DACs and a special cable you could hook directly into the audio card, allowing you to listen to CD Audio on PC for "basically" free in terms of CPU cycles.
Yeah CD drives were also CD players - I had rigged my computer with a separate tiny power supply for the drive so I could have it on without the computer being on - put a disk in and it would start playing audio through the headphone port on the front and out the special wires on the back, and if you had the right audio card that would even play out the speakers with the computer off.
Even if it's not an always-available thing, how you can control Slack really depends on expectations - especially working remote. Do my colleagues and mentees really want to be blocked for two hours because they need a two-minute input from me?
I have set Slack up so that certain things alert me, and most channels are just muted, but as others pointed out more fine-grain controls would be even better. Really just "only notifications for DMs for these people" would be a great QoL.
On the other hand your organization could be built to be more async or if you do require input from people who can’t respond immediately, there is probably other stuff that can be worked on.
80% of my team is located in India while I’m in the US so none of our working hours overlap (meetings are scheduled early US time / late India time). Stuff can still get done without same-day responses.
This was my initial thought as well, but from the text I gather there is a flow like this:
[Input Data, maybe null] -> Validate field is not null -> Call this method with the assertion.
This is a small bug-bear for me with nullable types and I wish there was a better way to do it, but many languages allow you to smart-cast away nulls, but only within the local scope. If you want to pass a struct-type around which has nullable fields, but you have already checked for non-null (like this one) you need to convert to a different struct-type, which doesn't have the nullability on its fields. I can't think of a good way round this - as you say with the unit test remark, there is nothing to stop another piece of code calling this method with nulls.
> If you want to pass a struct-type around which has nullable fields, but you have already checked for non-null (like this one) you need to convert to a different struct-type, which doesn't have the nullability on its fields.
Which is exactly what IMO the author should have done. It's actually a reasonable use-case for inheritance:
I was hoping there was going to be some minimum definition, and that I could call myself Lord, but alas, my ~300m^2 of land doesn't seem to qualify me either (I live there, I didn't get scammed ~3k times over for 1 sq foot).
I mean honestly if you could be a lord with 1 square foot, there would be a lot of lords in Scotland due to the ownership nature of buying a house (very little of this "leasehold" thing that's prevalent in England). My parents would be a lord and lady, so would their parents...
I've not encountered these ads though, I guess it would be pretty dumb to geo-target it to people living in Scotland.
Edit, on the other hand, if you buy a house and let it out, I guess you can be a land lord, even if you still can't call yourself lord.
It's Britain, the country that wants to get out of the European Human Rights Convention because ... it protects human rights. I wouldn't be so sure about oubliettes...
That's a misrepresentation. The UK government merely wants to make the UK supreme court the final authority on some human rights cases in the UK, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. The UK is not abandoning the convention, and there are plans to create a UK Bill of Rights.
(Putting people in oubliettes is illegal under UK law anyway.)
> That's a misrepresentation. The UK government merely wants to make the UK supreme court the final authority on some human rights cases in the UK, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Perfectly reasonable, until the executive decides to pack the court, and then renege on / "creatively reinterpret" their shiny new "bill of rights" (or even just simply amend it).
You say "merely", but that's the whole dog and pony show. This isn't some abstract, ideological exercise, the current government wants to pass laws that would currently not fly in the ECHR court. If they didn't, there would be zero practical need to change the current state. Ask yourself which bits of the ECHR you think are worth doing without?
Remember, the whole point of the ECHR is to prevent the oppression of a people by their government. Having the court be drawn from a range of different nations and not having any single government exclusively in control is a feature, not a bug.
Those two things are mutually exclusive. The convention establishes the ECHR as the highest court ruling over matters of the convention and states that are part of the convention are bound to those rulings. Establishing the UK high court as the highest court would be violating the obligations under the convention. So yes, if you want to have the high court be the last court of appeal, you’d have to abandon the convention.
What the UK politicians say they want and what the actual bills say are not necessarily aligned. FWIW, the rhetoric that gets hate-quoted at me is mostly in the camp of "rights are bad".
(Would it be illegal to make a law whose punishment was an oubliette? Can the queen be detained at her own pleasure, at least for anything other than the detonation of a nuclear device in her personal capacity?)
> Would it be illegal to make a law whose punishment was an oubliette?
No, it would not be illegal to make a law whose punishment was an oubliette. The British Parliament is sovereign and supreme, and can make any law it wishes.
The devolved legislatures are limited by the Act(s) establishing them. Such a law passed by the Scottish Parliament would probably be challenged under S29(2)(d) of the Scotland Act 1998 which prohibits breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights.
In this case, such a law in Scotland could potentially breach Article 3 of the Convention which prohibits inhuman or degrading punishment. The British Parliament can simply choose to ignore it, but the Scottish Parliament can't (unless the British Parliament chose to give it such powers).
> Can the queen be detained at her own pleasure, at least for anything other than the detonation of a nuclear device in her personal capacity?
No, she cannot be prosecuted for anything while she is the monarch. She would need to abdicate or otherwise be legally removed (e.g. an Act of Parliament abolishing the Crown) from her position.
Even if she were able to be prosecuted, the Nuclear Explosions (Prohibition and Inspections) Act 1998 is not currently in force, and even if the Act were in force, Her Majesty would be exempt under S14(4):
"Nothing in this section affects Her Majesty in her private capacity; and this subsection shall be construed as if section 38(3) of the Crown Proceedings Act 1947 (meaning of Her Majesty in her private capacity) were contained in this Act."
> No, it would not be illegal to make a law whose punishment was an oubliette. The British Parliament is sovereign and supreme, and can make any law it wishes.
Sure, but this is the same argument that comes around whenever previously signed treaties become 'inconvenient'.
Parliament can, of course, choose to ignore EHCR/Geneva/pick-any-other-ratified-treaty. But there are both predictable and unpredictable consequences for doing so, so in practice it's prudent for parliament to not just wield their unlimited power to just start murdering whoever they fancy.
I think prudence really depends on the whim of the executive, since generally the executive is Parliament given the majority it normally possesses. A number of British governments have historically shown little regard for the unpredictable consequences of violating international law.
For example, Iraq, the Chagos Islands, the Brexit trade deal concerning customs checks in Northern Ireland, etc.
I suppose it's all really just one big political matter: do they want to chance it? Probably not, but they could, legally. We just haven't had the government who's willing to do that yet, but given the current government's willingness to flout international law, prudence seems like it might have vanished some time ago...
> In this case, such a law in Scotland could potentially breach Article 3 of the Convention which prohibits inhuman or degrading punishment. The British Parliament can simply choose to ignore it, but the Scottish Parliament can't (unless the British Parliament chose to give it such powers).
Well, if Westminster choose to ignore the convention, I don't see why Holyrood would not choose to ignore Westminster?
This whole politics thing only works if we DON'T ignore stuff we all signed.
Holyrood derives its power from Westminster and Westminster can remove it. The UK Parliament is still supreme, but it refrains from making laws in areas that are devolved to local Parliaments (the Sewell convention). It could overturn the Scotland Act that created the Scottish Parliament. In theory, Scotland could ignore Parliament, but that would be akin to unilaterally declaring independence, which is unlikely to go well.
I think this is the point. All of these arrangements are ultimately by consent. Holyrood agrees to recognise Westminster's power, just as the UK agrees to recognise the ECHR.
This idea of 'power' is a complicated one. What 'power' does England have over Scotland other than the power that Scotland has agreed to accept (see Northern Ireland for what happens when one of the devolved nations is conflicted over whether to accept that power)? What 'power' does the ECHR have over any of its signatories other than that which they've chosen to accept?
There's a well-written and detailed exploration of the negative consequences of withdrawing from the ECHR here, and what is power except the ability to impose negative consequences for not following instructions?
> what is power except the ability to impose negative consequences for not following instructions?
Yes, I think power is exactly this.
> What 'power' does England have over Scotland other than the power that Scotland has agreed to accept
A monopoly on violence to enforce its territorial integrity as the United Kingdom. Withdrawing from international treaties is generally accepted to be within a state's general powers. Seceding from an existing state? Generally recognised by the current international order as unlawful and solely a matter for the state to resolve internally.
Would there be international condemnation if Scotland seceded and England tried to take it back by force? Yes, but doing so would embolden existing secessionist movements in, e.g. Spain or the United States, so those states (plus the ones who promote non-interference in domestic affairs) aren't going to intervene in any meaningful sense.
I think power must go beyond consent and incorporate the expectations and realities of the nature of sovereign state power on the international stage. The UK has the right to insure its territorial integrity, while the principle of self-determination is limited within that framework.
The monarch can be 'detained at his own pleasure' and even charged with treason and executed as Charles Stuart discovered, or simply run out of the country like his son, James.
I'm guessing that many of these are targeting Americans.
One of the weird side effects of being from a melting pot country only a few hundred years old is a yearning for connection to things that feel permanent and historical. "Owning" some land in Scotland and "having" a title may be appealing to an American who otherwise feels cut off from their Scottish ancestry or other longer-term cultural practices.
It would have an appeal to me, because it's absurd. I'm an American and was raised up with the notion that royalty and monarchies are patently absurd, a feeling that has only grown as I've aged. Having a Lordship would be like owning a three-wheeled car or living in a house that looks like a giant seashell, to my mind. It'd be a funny thing to tell folks about at parties. I might even go about creating knights or whatever if the party was good enough.
It's pretty absurd in the UK, too, and no-one really cares about it.
Where I grew up, Lord NotGoingToDoxxHim, Clan Chief of the MacDonalds, was the local TV repairman and satellite dish installer who drove an admittedly rather nice Volvo and had a house with a garden nearly as big as ours.
I don’t think it’s related to melting pot thing - new world history is just not that rich compared to european/asian ones due to its recency and (for the most part) lack of conflict
Isn't that sort of related? People in the mixing pot want to find some rich historical legacy to connect to so they can feel distinct from the rest of the pot.
Personally, I've always found it a bit silly -- the folks I most admire in my ancestry are the ones who looked around and said "Yeah current events are shaping up to be part of some nation's rich history, time to get the hell out of dodge." Rich history is largely made of poor people being shoved into the meat grinder of 'glorious' national struggles.
There was a tremendous amount of conflict in the new world, just mostly not between countries (the conquest of the Americas had a death toll of 70-100m people).
Sure but those are relatively few events (though large in magnitude) compared to stuff that was going on in europe/asia. And americas are fucking huge compared to europe and coastal east asia. Turns out when lota people are sandwiched in tight geography, competing for resources for thousands of years a lot of stuff happens!
Counterpoint: New World history is/was just as rich and valuable; it was just systematically erased by one of the largest genocides in history spanning from pole to pole.
Yikes, you always twist someone’s words like that in a discourse? All I said the history is not as rich which makes sense given there was like 10x fewer people here on a huge territory. But also North American tribes didnt even have much written down unlike the South American civilizations
You literally said that by the metric of population, their history was not as rich. I don't see how that's twisting your words at all.
My point is that Native Americans do have just as rich and interesting a history as European countries. It was just largely deliberately erased by European settlers.
It wasn't an attempted zing, I was curious.
So then, the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas also would rank as "some of the most deadly acts of mass killing in human history."
> So then, the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas also would rank as "some of the most deadly acts of mass killing in human history."
I agree. That kind of strengthens my point - I wouldn’t want to associate my heritage with that sort of thing (unless you’re in Mongolia where GK is still considered a god-like figure by many)
Titles are a form of addressing people. Sometimes it is just nice to be addressed by something that isn't Mr/Ms/Mx(/Mrs/Miss). Plenty of people have been motivated towards a PhD or MD for among other reasons the hopes of getting to be addressed as Doctor. For various reasons most of the available Titles to be found in our world are old and baroque (sometimes literally), which both has its appeals (a feeling of "tradition") and detriments (hard to get).
I've many non-binary friends that especially pine that Mx isn't greatly accepted by many and most of the non-gendered titles (including Doctor) are hard to acquire. I keep joking that if I were Governor of Kentucky, I'd make a simple form for any non-binary person to acquire the Colonel title if they wished.
(In Kentucky the Colonel title, the same one used by, for instance, the well known Colonel Sanders, is a title gifted to anyone for general service to the Commonwealth. It's origins are military, but it's been much more a philanthropic thing for much of the past couple centuries, including in the case of Colonel Sanders who was awarded it for his role as a businessman in the Commonwealth. It's a fascinating title.)
I mean, you know, would you rather have a chat with Ben Kingsley or Sir Ben Kingsley? I know I'd rather chat with Lord Banana699 than just plain-ol' Banana699
> In the United Kingdom, “lord” and “lady” are peerage titles, meaning a person can only hold the legal recognition, privileges, and protections associated with those titles if they rightfully inherit them, if they marry into a noble family, or if the queen grants them a peerage.
> Companies that sell souvenir plots with the claim of granting titles often rely on a conflation of the titles “lord” and “lady” with “laird,” which is not a peerage title, but rather solely a courtesy title akin to the English phrase “lord of the manor.” In Scotland, this title is traditionally applied to a member of the landed gentry who owns a large estate that has a long history and who generally has servants and tenants. Because “laird” is merely a courtesy title, it has no legal significance
The title of nobility is "lord". "Laird" is not a title at all, but a conventional designation for a somewhat related concept.
Time was, you could be a Senator in the American South without the land... or the actual job. They'd call you that in the bar or restaurant, just in case your were.
If you make a reservation at the Marriott they have a long list of titles you can claim. You can say you are a "Lord" there. Also an example that "Established Titles" makes is that you can have your credit card say "Lord so-an-so"
For the Marriott, sure. But for credit cards, normally you can't though. It's not part of your name, and it's not a legal title. Most KYC processes will stop you if you try.
There are sufficient people who value items that give them (real or imagined) prestige with other people (especially those of a similar mindset) to sustain these industries.
They don't do water to whiskey anymore, the new version is called "uisge". I believe the primary difference is that they don't take you out to dig peat on the new tour (because all the peat is dug mechanically now).
Still a nice day out with a picnic by the water source, as long as weather cooperates.
> I've not encountered these ads though, I guess it would be pretty dumb to geo-target it to people living in Scotland.
In-video "sponsored content" on YouTube is probably only made in only one version and thus not geo-targetted, right? I've seen this in several videos on history and adjacent subjects (for instance in some by Max Miller, whose "Tasting History" channel on old recipes seems rather popular here). So if you want to see it, that's where to look.
I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone.
And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there.
We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.