If they have a great meta-search algorithm, users would be able to search without an account and see how great the results are. Then, when a user wants to personalize ranking and block sites, they can create an account.

I always assumed that they make you create an account to track search usage and cut you off once you hit the free tier limit.

Uncharted and Last of Us are first party Sony games. If they were to say that a game can still be enjoyable without cutting edge graphics no one would want to buy the latest PlayStation iteration.

Polish is a Slavic language written out using Latin letters.

Are there any good lists of known AI user agents? Ideally in a dependency repo so my server can get the latest values when the list is updated.

If they sell you pay $5 for the drug and the next person in line pays $2k for the same drug, they are making $1k per patient. They are also writing off the $3k that they could be charging you as a charitable contribution, so they don’t have to pay taxes on the income. They hope that if they keep you alive, some day you will make enough money to pay full retail price.

It would be a nice gesture, but I will believe those promises of support when they have teeth to them.

What happens if they stop doing it? Do I have to sue them for breach of contract, have to prove actual damages, and settle the class action lawsuit for $5 in store credit?

What happens if the company goes bankrupt or creates a new subsidiary to service the product and the subsidiary folds?

What level of support are they obligated to provide? What issues must be fixed and how promptly?

In regards to SSX, after the success of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater remake, I am surprised that EA did not counter with a remake of SSX Tricky. I love how accessible the SSX controls are while still offering plenty of depth for people who want to optimize their runs. It is too bad that EA Sports seems to be focused on simulationist sports games (and live services).

I would assume some of that is acqui-hiring. Google acquires a company and looks at which employees are the outstanding talent. The best employees are poached for projects Google cares about while the rest are left to keep the product going without the thought leaders who built it.

I thought that the uproar about horse armor was that it was the first pay-to-win DLC. The armor was not just cosmetic but actually provided a stat boost to your horse. The accusation was that the developers had made it too easy for enemies to kill your horse and decided to patch the game to fix it but made players pay for the patch.

Don’t try to have a good diet and workout routine, try to regularly improve your diet and workout routine.

The best workout routine is the one you can stick to. Plenty of people online will tell you that to lose weight you need to be doing cardio in a certain heart rate zone or to gain muscle you need to weight lift a certain way. That is technically true, but useless. A great workout routine is just walking for half an hour each day. It is a much more realistic goal for out of shape people and simply getting your heat pumping and your muscles moving regularly will get you most of the health benefits you need.

Same thing with diet. A keto or intermittent fasting diet may be the fastest way to burn fat, but they are very hard to stick to and when you break them, you will be so hungry that you will eat enough to gain back all the weight you lost. A more realistic plan is to cut out a sugary beverage from each day and to make sure that every meal includes a vegetable high in fiber. Once that is an established habit, build on it with other small changes that move you closer to a healthy lifestyle.

What parts of the (former) communist world have fruit trees? Around Odessa, you can probably live off of fruit taken from people’s yards. In St. Petersburg, there are also abundant fruit trees, in the sense that acorns are the fruit of an oak tree.

If you are ultra rich or ultra poor, the Soviet system is better. If you are lower, middle, or upper working class, the US system is better.

Source: I was born to a family of highly educated professionals in Russia during the late-USSR period, later moved to the US where we were working poor. The US was heaven on earth in comparison.

If WB really wanted to tank their game division, they would do what they did with movies and start cancelling almost finished projects for a tax write off

I feel like there is some context to this meme that I am missing.

I would go a step further and say that it should not be a stock purchase but partial nationalization. The government is not getting shares that will be sold later. The government is getting a right to appoint part of the board of directors. Every time the company issues a dividend, buys back stock, or engages in other activities to return value back to the shareholders, a proportional amount of money must be paid to the treasury. It only makes sense that if a company is so big that its failure is going to hurt society as a whole, it should be owned by society.

The core issue with dressage is that they are putting the medal on the wrong neck. The horse is doing all of the work, they deserve all of the credit. Yes, being a dressage rider is (probably) hard work, but so is being a jokey or a wrestling coach. Also, all animal training facilities should automatically be on animal cruelty watch lists and subject to random inspections.

Note with Stardew Valley: it is not unplayable without a controller, but if you have clumsy sausage fingers like me, the poor touch controls really took me out of the game.

That reminds me of the time, quite a few years ago, Amazon tried to automate resume screening. They trained a machine learning model with anonymized resumes and whether the candidate was hired. Then they looked at what the AI was looking at. The model had trained itself on how to reject women.

Unfortunately, living in the US, I would not take a job with a pension because the (private) pension system cannot be trusted. I remember the 00s when many company pension accounts went bankrupt, because companies were no longer offering it as a benefit and it was easy enough to screw over retired past employees. Companies would take poorly performing divisions and their pension plans, spin them off as a new company that would quickly file for bankruptcy.

I would not trust a pension without it being insured by an organization like the FDIC. Even then, I would be afraid that my pension would not cover living costs due to inflation.

Luckily there are alternatives. I have a 401k, which should give me a steady flow of inflation proof dividends… until a market downturn wipes it out. If that happens, I can fall back to Social Security. Don’t believe the baloney that the government will ever let Social Security go bankrupt. They will just cut down benefits.

That is why they make you lease the battery. You cannot swap out your old battery, just the battery you are leasing. Your lease payments include the cost of them replacing batteries.