From what I remember ftom modding and just playing games from a while ago, often there is “level geometry” (which can be subdivided into parts if needed), for example, ground and hills in Fallout, city block in GTA; and then there is “decor”, repeated assets, such as trees, fences, pipes, obstacles, etc. This asset repetition is particularly noticeable in Fallout 3/NV, and somewhat in Stalker (mostly on abandoned cars)

Thanks! That looks close to what I imagined. Temperature between -15-10C with smaller than normal seasonal variation.

Longyearbyen has a polar tundra climate tempered by the North Atlantic Current

Fuck amazon (and fuck ebay amazon dropshippers too). But you’re that impatient you need to waste time and energy shipping something back and forth? (and likely having that product end up in an amazon discard bin anyway)

Their price already accounts for returns. You are just fucking over the delivery drivers who have quotas to meet.

The same way oil companies fix public trust after an oil spill. Or Amazon after countless reports of worker abuse. Or Google after privacy violations. Or wealthy people after being on a certain island. Or fine, Jared the Subway guy.

Vought is so large and embedded in every sector it does not matter to them.

LLMs build plausible-sounding texts. They don’t have to be correct or even good.

Think of it this way: If you take all of the dialogue in digital and print media (include forum flame wars, cheap romance novels, and fanfics) then try to get an average out of that - what do you get?

Large corporate, some AI tools are available, some are optionally tacked onto PR reviews (Copilot on GitHub). No quotas or enforcement yet. Most vocal proponents of AI happen to be the most obnoxious developers or designers.

Bowerbirds build elaborate color-coordinated displays to attract mates. How the female bird chooses the bower (and mate) is still unclear - it is not simple number or color or shape. So, in our human understanding, bowerbirds have a concept of “art”.

Toki Pona specifically makes me think of overly verbose programming languages. With limited ~120 word vocabulary, describing things can be lengthy. Orange pet cat would be something like “good animal of house and of red yellow”.

Second the iFixit kit.

Another consideration is some tool to heat up the display or back. iFixit has the iOpener, a silicone “pillow” you heat up in the microwave, which works okay, but you might prefer a heat gun, or a plate (3D printer’s heated bed works too).

And good lighting of course.

Some immigrants change their name to the variation that is more common one in the new country, especially if they use it every day already. Or to un-botch the transliterated spelling. So Oleksandr or Aleksandr is now Alexander, Katerina is Catherine, Ielizaveta is Elizabeth.

IIRC Twitter introduced using # to make words searchable across all of the tweets, hence the name.

Free, sure. There is only one app that does it, with huge dependency on Google and/or carrier (whoever runs the servers), which could just… stop working one day, like it did for me.

Just to add to the fun confusing acronyms, in 3D printing circles, IPA is isopropyl alcohol, not beer (india pale ale)

What specifically do you mean? If you are asking about you = u, to = 2, OK = k, and such, it’s text speak - faster to type and can fit more in 140 characters (SMS character limit IIRC)

But I agree that there is no reason to use those, especially on non-mobile devices.

Here is one of iPad reuse projects

And here is a crazier and thorough project on replacing internals

TBF I considered using my old iPad2 as in-car navigation or just as permanently-on weather display or picture frame. (If battery doesn’t swell from being on all the time)

Smartphones and tablets manufactured circa 2015 were powerful enough to run many apps and software, and not yet locked down as much as they are now. So there were a lot of custom ROMs and kernels being made for Android and jailbreaking tools for iDevices, allowing you to customize much much more than the manufacturer intended.

And it’s just fun to make something that most people consider “obsolete” perform well, or well enough to be usable.

Not sure what role gender plays into that though.

Large companies can do / have done that (dumping) to drive out smaller competition.

Small companies usually cannot afford this.

Unless you can pitch this as a disruptive idea to gullible investors (looking at all tech startups that burn trillions without making profits)

I have a geographic one for you:

Friend: posts some statistics map
Me: Czechia is an interesting outlier here, weird.
Friend: [sic] its czechoslovakia, not chechnia

All countries/regions that start with “ch” sound are the same i guess. Also Czechoslovakia split in 1989.

My friend at the time watched some documentary about chess computers (Deep Blue etc.) and was telling me about the “super advanced algorithm called Brute Force”. I told him that brute force is means trying every possible combination, is the least efficient approach, and does not generally work for chess. He was adamant it was some genius algorithm. The only time in my life I remember saying “I have a computer science degree, I know what I am talking about”.

I think most larger (or older) immigrant communities have their own dialect. Runglish is Russian spoken with lots of words borrowed-adapted from US English.

In parts of Eastern Ukraine and Western Russia, there is also surzhyk, which is a difficult-to-describe blend of both languages, often difficult to comprehend to those who do not speak both or dis not grew up in the area.