nickhammes

It sounds like they sent emails to the district and made some noise in online spaces that made their intentions clear. If it was just wearing wristbands as silent protest, we'd never have known, but they told the district via email, the general public online that they were going to do someone bigoted, and then they did a minor version of it.

Imagining the perspective of an administrator, they really should do something about that to protect their students. And it seems like they went with a temporary ban, which seems proportionate.

It's uncommon, absolutely. But I bought Super Mario Odyssey around the third time I got an alert that it was on sale, for $50 or so. This took a couple years, so it's reasonably rare, but if the future looks like the past, it will happen

The Switch was the generation where I really started to have adult money, and while a lot of the games I got were lower-priced indie titles, I did get pretty much all of the big 1st party titles.

There's a reasonable chance I get a Switch 2, but I'm not gonna be buying a lot of games over $70, and the ones I do will probably be when they go on sale for like, 10-15% off. I suspect I'll be buying fewer games this generation, and I'm okay with that.

It's not that there wasn't any political pressure. It's that the slightest bit of pressure caused them to pull the plug swiftly.

I think the companies who were led by people personally antagonistic to DEI already weren't doing it. They started it when the political winds were in favor of DEI, found that it did something beneficial for them that was worth the investment (ultimately, increasing profits, probably through PR) and reaped what they could. But the slightest headwinds caused them to drop it, for lack of confidence it would be worth the continued investment. For others, it was beneficial enough this pressure didn't change their decisions.

None of this is likely coming from company leaders caring about DEI for some sort of principled reason, just companies who care about only one thing, reassessing the value of DEI in terms of that one thing, $ return on spend. This is a group who needs subtler treatment than the anti-DEI crowd, this is fair weather friends who don't care. What little we can do is reward those who don't give in to the slightest push.

Yeah that's basically why I didn't pull it out as an option in the first place, it's not always practical. A lot of your proprietary code is going to be external dependencies linked/built against, or your own IP reused from the last project. But not all of it, and I can definitely see that smaller chunk causing a lot of problems.

You need a team that does a lot of dependency management and similar things well while building it, that don't actually help them get the game out faster, to keep the problem manageable. Or a team who specialize in open sourcing games like this, which could become a thing if this was more commonplace.

The one MMO I've meaningfully played, RuneScape, has open source replicas of its server from different points in time, that the community has made. I'm not gonna pretend it's zero work, but a developer with the source code absolutely could do these things. It also doesn't need to be perfectly compatible with the original one, you can replace a complex DB backend with something standard and less performant. Only runs on Linux, or MS Server 2k8? The community of people who care will figure it out.

Maybe a source code release would be preferable in this kind of option. EA just did this with a few Command and Conquer games.

Impeachment is easy, relatively speaking. A simple majority of the House can impeach Trump as they did twice in his last term. I believe the number is 7, of 220 Republicans in the house, would need to vote to impeach.

Getting a trial in the Senate to convict and remove, which requires a two thirds vote, would need about 20 Republicans, of 53 to vote to convict. I can't imagine what would need to happen for that to occur. And even if it does, JD Vance is sworn in by Roberts as POTUS? I guess that means we're in a world where Republicans think that's better in some significant group.

If a multiplayer-only game turns down official servers, and you can't self-host within the game, they should owe players a separate server binary they can run, or a partial refund for breaking the game. It should not be hard, especially if it's a known constraint when they develop the game.

If it doesn't work well without the Internet, it's a bad investment. Features that require the Internet degrading a bit is one thing, but if a toilet or toaster can't do its basic job offline, it was ewaste the second it rolled off the factory line.

The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.

Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they're running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.

The state of being old is a whole bunch of things that correlate with chronological age, but unless you know someone moving at relativistic speeds, chronological age is the only one we all move through at the same rate.

If you can hold on to the good bits of youth, like open-mindedness, and grow along dimensions like maturity, maybe youth doesn't need to be wasted on the young.

A crazy, washed-up former reality TV host running for a new term as president while in exile on the moon sounds like the plot of a fun sci-fi political thriller, but not a reality I want to live in.