On the other side of the same coin: When I mass edited my comments before quitting Reddit, I got site-banned. Basically, my first account’s automated edit got me auto-banned from several subs with pro-spez mods. Some subs had set their automod to detect when people were using the more popular methods of auto-editing, and set the automod to ban for using them. Then when I did the same with my second (and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc…) account, it almost immediately got site-banned for ban evasion.

Basically, account 1 was banned from a sub, so when account 2 started doing the same thing on the same IP address, it was flagged as ban evasion. And ban evasion is one of the few things that will get you banned site-wide instead of just from a specific sub.

I went back and checked a few months ago, and all of those site bans were lifted and the edits were undone. Likely because a site ban prevents the comments from showing up (which hurts Reddit’s bottom line, because they show up as a bunch of [removed] comments instead,) but also prevented any of the edits from actually being published. So when they lifted the site ban (to get those old comments to show back up again) it was as if I had never edited them at all. I had probably a million karma spread across my various accounts. I was extremely active at one point, so Reddit had a direct incentive to unban those accounts with literal thousands of comments.

Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

For real though, I have written some truly monstrous operations in Excel.

What do you mean you want to use Excel to manage everyone’s calendars? And now you want to export that horribly built calendar management spreadsheet to Google Calendar? What do you mean you want the Google Calendar entries automatically formatted based on who is working on a particular day? I mean yes it’s possible but-…

And every piece of code you think you write for one-time use is guaranteed to be reused every day for the next 5 years

The scheduling demand thing is referring specifically to the project manager going “we need this for an upcoming major product launch, so you need to fix this before the launch.” It feels like Microsoft cracking the whip to try getting free labor, because it is.

If they truly can’t do without it for their product launch, they can fork it and fix the bug themselves. Surely Microsoft has the resources and brainpower to do so. But the PM didn’t want to do that, because it means they’d be spending their own time and resources on it.

I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a huge fan of the story at first. It took me a few hours and a few quests to actually get into it. It suffers from Kingdom Hearts 2/The Witcher 3 Syndrome: The two hour long intro/tutorial is absolutely the worst part, which is a shame. The game really begins to shine once you get to Meridian, but that’s several hours in.

That copyright thing was never actually tested in court though, because they settled before the trial began. The “copyrighted keys” argument was what Nintendo originally used to bring the lawsuit, but it was never actually tested because it never went to trial. In fact, many legal experts say it likely would have been thrown out in Yuzu’s favor. But Yuzu didn’t have a legal fund, so they couldn’t afford to actually take it to court and fight it.

I mean, that’ll only affect new releases. And even then, it’ll probably only affect new releases that are doing things in radically new ways. Old/current games (and even lots of new releases) will be fine to play.

Here’s a reminder that your neopets haven’t been fed in decades. You left them to starve. You monster.

Just an FYI, DMCA takedown requests will affect forks. If you’re genuinely worried about something getting taken down, you should make offline copies. So even if your fork gets nuked by the DMCA, you still have the files and can rebuild it.

They use Documents because it’s an easy way to ensure saves don’t persist between users. If you and a sibling both play on the same computer, you don’t necessarily want to be sharing game saves. Since the Documents folder is on a per-user basis, the saves are per-user as well. If they simply saved the games in the Program Files folder, saves would potentially persist across users. And anyone who has had a younger sibling accidentally erase all of their saves knows what a bad idea that is.

I always have issues with The Sims. Apparently EA uses the Documents folder for a lot of temp files. So every time I play The Sims, I get warnings from OneDrive that thousands of files were recently deleted. Because it’s creating and deleting temp files the entire time you’re playing, which are all automatically trying to sync to OneDrive.

Given, that’s mostly an issue on EA’s side; Whatever programmer thought the Documents folder was a good spot for temp files should be dragged out back and flogged.

Voluntary deletion won’t remove forks, but a DMCA takedown will.

Tesla routes pretty much everything through the center console. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to route the blinkers through it.

It’s because their wiring system basically just daisy chains everything together with network cable. So it’s a lot less cabling, because they aren’t running six wires for six different systems. But it also means that when one system fails, they all fail in a cascade because everything behind that system in the chain is also affected.

That’s why automakers have traditionally used individual wires for each system, because they have prioritized safety over easier wiring; You don’t want your airbags to fail just because your wipers are having an issue, for instance. So each system is essentially isolated to its own wiring.

Tesla is a good example of people not understanding why things are done a certain way. Elon just saw modern wiring harnesses and went “lol that’s dumb just use network cables.” And on the surface it sounds fine, because it’s less wiring. But it fails to understand why each system is wired independently. And now Teslas have frequent issues with cascading system failures.

It’s not a crime per se, but it does open them up to civil litigation. Because it’s a contract of adhesion, where the consumer gains nothing from the additional terms, cannot negotiate the terms prior to acceptance, and is forced into accepting the terms on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

In order for a contract to be enforceable, both sides need to be able to negotiate the terms, and both sides need to receive something meaningful from said contract.

the arbitration companies are usually fairly friendly towards whatever corporation is being challenged being paid directly by the company they’re arbitrating for, and therefore have a direct financial incentive to rule in favor of the corporation.

FTFY. It’s way worse than just “being friendly” with corps. They’re on the corps’ payroll (indirectly, because the corp is paying for the arbitration,) and they know that if they continue to rule in the corps’ favor then the corp will continue calling them for future arbitration. There’s a tacit understanding between the arbiter and corporation, where if the arbiter favors the plaintiff then the arbiter won’t get called when the corporation goes to arbitration the next time.

Just never connect it to the internet, or (even better) set up a PiHole and block the TV’s telemetry requests. I say the PiHole is better because then you still get all of the benefits of a smart TV (like native streaming apps) without all of the horribly invasive data mining.

If you want the benefits of a smart TV without connecting it to the internet, then maybe a connected PC would be a better solution. Something like an Nvidia shield connected to the TV, while the TV remains offline. That way you can maintain control over the computer, instead of trying to control what the TV collects and sends.

That’s because the Switch’s USB port isn’t actually a USB-C. Their port falls outside of the standard size/dimension specs, because they wanted the Switch to slide smoothly into the dock instead of having a positive click like a standard USB-C should.

This is why using a standard USB-C on your Switch can actually brick the device. Since the port is non-standard, the pins are much easier to accidentally short when plugging a standard USB-C into it. There was a big string of people complaining about bricked devices shortly after the Switch launched, and eventually players just learned to only use the official Switch chargers. But that’s only necessary because Nintendo told the USB-C standard to go fuck itself, and made a port that is almost the same (and will technically accept a standard USB-C port) but does everything slightly differently.

The Switch charger also has a power switching option, since the Switch draws more power when it’s docked than when you plug it in directly. So the power supply is set up to detect whether or not the dock is connected, so it can supply more power.

Exactly. The biggest hurdle to getting new FOSS off the ground is adoption. It’s really hard to gain inertia when the vast majority of users refuse to switch. When they already know how to use the closed-source version, they’ll be resistant to change. Even if the closed-source version is less user friendly and more annoying to use, people will still continue to use it because they don’t want to start learning something new. Unity did Godot a massive favor, by scaring all of their users away and leading them straight into Godot’s open arms.

It would be like if Microsoft did something stupid enough to cause 50% of Windows users to switch to Linux overnight. Even if Microsoft later rolled those changes back, a lot of users have already installed (and started to learn) Linux, and aren’t going to go through the trouble of switching back again. And by that point Linux will have an established user base and will be able to maintain and grow that population much easier.