watching players metrics and not seeing many people quit or cancel over this

This feels like a case where the metrics are going to outright lie about the real impact.

Maybe not very MANY people quit, but those that leave are going to have been the ride-or-die, dedicated fans that have been playing for, in some cases, decades now.

They’re the only members of the player base that are in guilds that actually have anything in the bank worth caring about, because a new expansion will have effectively devalued the entirety of the mundane gear and potions and food stacks MOST guilds use their banks for.

I may just have a skewed view here, but this is an issue that impacts the dedicated, vocal, and visible section of players far more than your random guy who shows up to run a LFR once a week so uh maybe finding time for a human to actually look at and do something useful would be a good investment.

But then, I’m also not an MBA so what do I know.

Yeah, that would be an improvement, especially since the price per kwh can spike like crazy during situations where they really need you to sell back to the grid.

The only issue that I can see happening is that everyone would then move the ‘sell price’ slider to the maximum setting and leave it there and I’m not entirely sure the power companies would shrug and play along.

My $5 is that they’d keep the low offering price and just wait for SOMEONE to eventually decide that whatever, some ROI is better than no ROI and we’ll end up back where we started.

This is one of those problems that probably has to be actually regulated by someone “impartial” that’s setting the prices that are not unreasonable for either party, but I’m still in Texas and we can’t agree on regulating anything anywhere at any time, so I’m less than hopeful.

That’s a very rosy picture, but they skipped a very important detail, alas. Or well, a few.

First, selling your power to the power companies in Texas is great! Except the amount they pay you is always going to be substantially less than the price you’re going to pay later to import a kwh.

We have the Freedom™ to pay two seperate charges for power: the delivery cost, and the power cost. This is a great Freedom™ because it lets the power company pay you the power cost for your exported power, but you get to pay both halves when you no longer have that kwh in your batteries later.

Also this is just an attempt to get someone else to pay their CapEx to catch extreme usage events, and the incentives being paid out to people who have spent tens of thousands of dollars is still tilted in the power company’s favor. The article itself even says it’s helping them make a bigger profit: if it was a fair set of incentives, well, then that wouldn’t be what’s actually happening, would it?

And, worse, any non-Texans might not catch how unlivable shit gets if your A/C starts screwing with the set temperature when it’s 110F outside. The article says it turns it ‘off’, but the impact I’ve seen from some friends who have one of these plans setup is that it simply sets the temperature to something like 86; high enough to stop the usage, but not quite enough to kill you or your pets if you’re not aware it’s done it. Still, not the most pleasant.

Still, it’s a good idea and a step in the right direction, but we need (lol, lmao) actual real regulation around this and the incentives to be a little less… lame. They’re very much structured around the ‘well, what else are you going to do with your excess?’, rather than with a real intent of fair dealing.

You talking modern stuff, or are we talking 90s Tiger Electronics games here?

I for one look forward to the next Terminator movie, written by ChatGPT.

Speed running Wii Sports?

Huh.

(I have probably 50 copies because I kept ending up with more and more due to buying game lots at estate sales and garage sales and such.)

Wii games worth something?

Maybe I’ll be able to retire on my collection of Wii Sports disks.

Have you been to a theater recently? You only wish it was silent.

Idk when it started but its fine to talk through the whole movie or fuck with your phone volume turned on now.

Fantastic. Though, I have to wonder if this is going to result in either way more cheaters, or if the anti-cheat will become super fucking awful to deal with and start making (broader) arbitrary decisions on what you can and cannot run because it has less access to shit.

Regardless, the less shit fucking around in the kernel the better, especially for shit that shouldn’t have ever been there in the first place.

off-brand Super Soakers until they get frustrated

I’m now imagining the leaders of the Andromeda Initiative shopping for guns at the Citadel branch of Temu, which is Commander Shepherd’s least favorite store.

Far too late

Seriously. Wasn’t the initial change like a year ago?

They must have been absolutely fucked by everyone bailing for them to come back this late and change their mind.

I wonder if some of these long dev cycle flops that have happened are because they’re long development cycles.

Like, this game may or may not be any good at all, but I would assume the logic was reasonable when they started work on it 8+ years ago.

I wonder if the push for everything having to be RTX-enabled AAAA live service games is kneecapping them, simply because it takes far far too long to make and bring to market.

Or it was just a flaming pile of junk, but I kinda think there’s maybe more going on than just that with some of these releases.

…a use of generative AI I actually support?

After a major illness, hospitalization, and two upcoming surgeries for said issues, I fully support any use of AI that can be used to bludgeon health insurance fucks.

People were also quick to start reaching me via SMS instead of IM.

I found that too: people who actually want to talk to you (and aren’t just talking to you because you happen to be in a group with someone they DO want to talk to) will hop through all sorts of modest hoops to do so.

Even after moving back to a real smartphone, there aren’t any apps installed outside of SMS for people to contact me, because I really enjoyed the very clear signal that the conversation was actually important and actually needed my input vs. the constant stream of noise that existed before.

As someone who’s had the FBI serve a subpoena their information regarding activity on a non-exit TOR relay, there’s no way on this planet I’d ever run an exit node, unless I were independently wealthy and could afford a lawyer to deal with the fallout.

I got lucky that the request went to my employer, who knew who I was (obviously) and that I wasn’t doing stupid shit, and it never went further than that, but good lord do I never, ever, want to be of interest to the FBI again, even though literally nothing meaningful happened other than me shitting myself for a few months.

How much is the buggy armor DLC?

The problem I ran into was the dictionary: T9 will let me text the BF and ask him to bring home milk no problem. It’s noticeably less useful when I need to tell someone to use systemd to restart a service, and afaik there’s no good way to expand the dictionary on at least that specific phone, so it was kind of a slog half the time vs being able to just… type out what you needed to send.

It’d do media playback, but not in any format I’d reasonably want to listen to (no flac? for shame!) and rockbox on an iPod did, so that’s mostly the driver behind that choice.

I did the same for about 6 months, but I went with an actual dumb phone, a Nokia 225.

It was interesting, and the things I missed the most from a smartphone were def. not what I expected:

• Visual voicemail: calling a phone number and having to do voicemail like it’s 1993 was probably THE most obnoxious part of the whole experience
• SMS messaging: T9 wasn’t great in 1996, and it’s still not great in 2024.

Replaced all the media stuff with an iPod which worked shockingly well for podcasts, audiobooks, and music, though I did build a little bit of automation to download and convert youtube videos to a format the iPod would play.

Beyond that, it was just what you’d expect: no apps, and no distractions.

I can’t wait for the knife skin microtransactions. For only $9.99, your knife can be pink!

Meh how about a Sonic 06 remaster, except with less >>>> LOADING <<<<?