Yeah that’s not great. To be honest for the most part I really like it. Most of the stuff you unlock is pure cosmetics (profile pictures or alternate looks for units—which only display as different for you, not your opponent). They’re just some good fun, and I find my completionist nature enjoys jumping into the game to get them.
But there have been a few of the things unlocked as part of the challenges—that 256x mod is one of them, and there have also been a couple of cheat codes more recently—that did feel like more substantial things to miss out on if you happened not to be able to play while they were on offer. I wasn’t playing when the 256x mod was around, but when the cheat codes first appeared I recall thinking it was pretty disappointing for anyone who might have wanted them that would miss out for whatever reason.
Just some extra detail that I think you might have been missing about the German electoral system. #1 spot doesn’t refer to the leader of the party as this comment sort of seems to imply.
Germany uses a voting system called Mixed-Member Proportional. In it, you vote for your local candidate exactly the same as you would in America or the UK—using first past the post. But then you also vote for your favourite party. And there are additional seats in the Bundestag (congress) that are not tied to a particular region, but are instead used to “top up” the total of the Bundestag so that its party representation is proportional to the wishes of the voters. So if 10% of voters want the Greens and 20% want SPD, then 20% of the seats will be SPD and 10% will be Greens. If a party wins more seats in local elections than it is owed proportionally, it gets no additional people. If it wins fewer local elections than its national party vote percentage, it gets topped up using its party list. The #1 spot on that list will be the first person elected under this system, unless they also won their local race, in which case it goes to #2 instead, etc.
MMP is a really good electoral system, and honestly it’s probably the one I would advocate for and would encourage Americans and Brits to advocate for in their respective countries. Though I would replace the party lists entirely with a “nearest loser” to eliminate the problem @LwL describes. I’d also prefer IRV be used for the local part of the election, though that might be overly complicating it for some. Having those proportional top-ups means third parties not just can earn a place (which is what IRV by itself does), it actually guarantees that they will earn a place, if any sizeable number of people want them to. No more Nader ruining it for Gore; instead, Nader’s party will actually have representatives elected.
So looking back at the example they described about Germany, if we ignore local seats for the sake of simplicity, if the Greens are owed 1 seat, that seat will always be a woman. If they’re owed 2 seats, they’ll have a woman and a man. Owed 3 seats and they’ll have two women and a man. Etc.
Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance
You don’t do this everywhere. You do it where you want traffic speeds to be low. Residential streets, school zones, shopping precincts, and the like.
Plus, you further aid pedestrians and cyclists by having these residential streets not be through-traffic, except to pedestrians and cyclists. Use “modal filters”.
I can’t speak for others, but I still seem to be experiencing issues with federation. I’ve got a comment in here that isn’t showing up on other instances.
Man I hate this new dynamic and insertion bs. For 15 years all the podcasts I listened to had host-read ads. And in most cases, I had enormous trust in the podcaster to choose companies that he was willing to stand behind. I’ve used products I first heard about on a host-read podcast as before, and never regretted it.
But in the last 12 months I’ve been getting dynamically inserted ads a lot more. Partly because those older podcasts are using them to supplement income as advertisers are less willing to buy host-read ads than they once were (a lack of data and targeting when buying a podcast ad spot is the biggest factor, but also laziness on the part of marketing managers because host-read ads need to be negotiated and bought individually, rather than making single big buys in automated insertion systems), but mostly because I’ve started listening to a few newer podcasts that weren’t around in the heyday of podcasting.
And it really sucks. More and more it’s feeling like the podcasting industry is being enshittified, not even because of the desires of podcasters themselves, but thanks to advertisers hating the idea that podcast ads were more like TV ads than internet banner ads/YouTube preroll video ads, and thanks to big businesses like Spotify coming into the audio content market. (N.B., it’s very important to remember that what Spotify does is not podcasting. By definition if it’s delivered via a proprietary service rather than the open RSS standard, it is not podcasting.)
Eh, humans are better at certain kinds of vision—particularly on tasks that deal with non-white people where the AI was trained mostly on white people.
But things where the vision is looking at very fine detail, AI is very good at. Like determining if a patient has a disease based on a retinal scan or other medical imagery.
And I think it’s fair to say that, at least superficially, the problem in this thread seems like it might be more similar to those medical cases where an AI could do a really good job. The problem is that actually, no. There’s no known marker that could determine age with the level of accuracy that would be required for this task.
Responding to your deleted comment, I’m genuinely not sure how Jar Jar’s role in the downfall of the Republic in Episode 3 is the joke being made by this comment. Sorry.