you can’t follow people
He said “Lemmy” but probably meant “Threadiverse”, and mbin does support both the Twitter-style following user model and the Reddit-style forum model.
To use fedia.io as an example:
I dunno about piefed, haven’t used it.
Not a very large userbase.
I don’t know how much impact this has, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, while there has been some recovery since COVID-19, one phenomenon I’ve noticed is that even now, a much larger percentage of orders seem to be takeout rather than dine-in. I hear those “new order” audible alerts constantly at registers, but it’s very common that I’m eating in a restaurant that’s well under half-full. Go back to pre-COVID and I’d not infrequently need to wait to be seated. I think I’ve hit a full restaurant exactly once since COVID-19.
While I guess a restaurant can still function doing takeout, I assume that having a lot of dine-in facilities that aren’t being used are a financial drain, and that if this doesn’t change, over time more will shift to be more takeout-oriented.
And I’m sure that it’s not good for wait staff.
I don’t have numbers or know whether a similar situation exists elsewhere, but it’s very noticeable here.
kagis
https://datadreamers.com/why-is-post-covid-restaurant-delivery-still-going-strong/
Though experts are saying COVID-19 has become endemic, the days of the pandemic are long behind us. We may have left banana bread and Tiger King largely in the past, but another pillar of those long months remains strong: delivery.
According to USAToday, 80% of American adults have used some sort of delivery service in the past year. 40% have sprung for food delivery specifically. With inflation driving prices to an all-time high, it’s hard not to wonder… why?
skims through
These seem like the most-concrete:
- Food delivery is convenient.
This is perhaps the #1 factor in why people pay for food delivery. It’s just easier than cooking or going out, especially if we’re busy or tired. Over 65% of delivery customers have said “they didn’t mind spending more money to save time and effort.”
That’d argue that people are more-willing to spend more. I don’t know if that’s true, but could be.
- Habit-formation is a powerful force.
As early as March of 2021, restaurant delivery experts were speculating that our COVID-era fondness for delivery would soon become a habit.
That could be true. I’d believe that COVID was just the impetus to get people over a hump to just ordering to home.
- Remote workers are here to stay.
Almost a third of the workplace is remote these days. Lots of those people used to work in urban centers with countless fun and exciting lunch options. And while plenty are happy to simply cook at home, some people miss the daily delight of a great meal out. Delivery is an excellent way for them to maintain that tradition.
That’s an interesting idea that I hadn’t thought about, but makes sense. I’d think that it’d mostly affect lunch, but I guess that if you have a restaurant, it’s more cost-effective the more meals you can serve, so if you can’t do lunch, it also impacts ability to do other meals economically.
EDIT: If the last one is a major factor – many workers moving office from urban to suburban areas and having less restaurant access – I’d think that it might open the door to a business model that I understand is common in India – “lunch subscription”. Basically, lunch catering with delivery that automatically shows up every day. I remember reading some article about the economics in a business publication some years back.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala
A dabbawala (also spelled dabbawalla or dabbawallah, called tiffin wallah in older sources) is a worker who delivers hot lunches from homes and restaurants to people at work in India, especially in Mumbai. The dabbawalas constitute a lunchbox delivery and return system for workers in Mumbai. The lunchboxes are picked up in the late morning, delivered predominantly using bicycles and railway trains, and returned empty in the afternoon.[1][2]
It sounds like the economic factors in India driving the creation of the system were different – that people at one location just had widely-differing tastes.
In the late 1800s, an increasing number of migrants were moving to Bombay from different parts of the country, and fast food and canteens were not prevalent. All these people left early in the morning for offices, and often had to go hungry for lunch. They belonged to different communities, and therefore had different types of tastes, which could only be satisfied by their own home-cooked meals. So, in 1890, Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started a lunch delivery service in Bombay with about a hundred men.[3] This proved to be successful, and the service grew from there.
EDIT2: If that became common in the US as an alternative to hitting a restaurant at lunch, I wonder if it might reduce lunchtime traffic road congestion, since I assume that it’s probably less-intensive to transport the food than the people.
According to the article text:
A key driver behind the success of Chinese apps is that they have integrated e-commerce into their platforms, blending entertainment and networking with sales to monetize their famously addictive algorithms, according to Chinese social media experts and marketing firms.
Isn’t Jenkins a continuous integration system? I’d think that you’d want a configuration management system (like ansible) if you’re not trying to set up CI infrastructure.
They don’t really have a choice. TV viewership has been on decline.
kagis
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-much-tv-does-the-average-american-watch
Time spent watching television: digital video vs. traditional TV
From 2021 to 2025, daily time spent watching traditional television is projected to plummet by 28 minutes. In contrast, Americans are spending increasingly more time consuming digital videos. In 2021, they spent an average of three hours a day enjoying digital videos. By 2025, this is set to grow to four hours, marking an overall rise of 33.3%.
No – Trump is perfectly aware that the thing is going to get overturned on constitutional grounds.
The point of this is to keep Trump constantly in the news “fighting” for something that supporters want without actually needing to do anything.
I suspect that there are many websites that already dynamically generate an unbounded number of pages based on the links one clicks, and that Web spiders will have needed to deal with those for as long as there have been people spidering the Web, which is going to be no later than the first Web search engines.
I’d guess that if nothing else, they cap how far they spider a site. Probably a lot more sophisticated, use heuristics to figure out which sites are more worth spending indexing resources on, as it’s not just whether to spider but also the frequency with which to do so. Some parts of a site are more “valuable” than others – for a search engine, a more desirable target for users clicking on results – and some will update more frequently and are more-useful to re-spider at higher frequency. Google will return current news articles, yet still indexes a large portion of the content out there. They won’t be doing that by simply sending GoogleBot at everything that they’ve indexed at a fixed frequency.
Isn’t that 50 years later?
SDL is a widely-used-on-Linux platform abstraction layer. A lot of games have targeted it to make themselves more portable and provide some basic functionality.
If you’ve been on Linux for some years, you’ve probably run into it. I’d guess that most Windows users probably wouldn’t know what it is, though.
Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything”
Agreed.
shortly after 2027
I doubt that.
I think that there are near-term things that have real value that one can build with existing approaches. However, I think that we are still a fair bit of research away from beating humans across the board.
Three years is “build a software package when you already know what you’re doing”, not “start on a grand research program” timescale.
He’s alluding to a previous comment during Trump’s first term during earlier California wildfires about how Finland raked their forests.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46256296
Citing a conversation with his Finnish counterpart, Mr Trump said they spend “a lot of time on raking and cleaning”.
But President Sauli Niinisto told a Finnish daily he could not remember talking about raking when the two met.
Firefighters in California are currently battling the deadliest blaze in the state’s history.
Surveying the damage on Saturday, Mr Trump revisited his claim that poor forest management was to blame.
“You look at other countries where they do it differently, and it’s a whole different story,” he said.
“I was with the president of Finland, and he said: ‘We have a much different [sic]…, we’re a forest nation.’ And they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem,” he added.
Puerto Rico’s official language is Spanish, and it’s a US territory. I imagine that their representative might complain.
I’m okay with game prices going up – they’ve fallen far behind inflation over the decades – though personally I favor DLC rather than one large shebang. Lower risk on both sides.
And there are a lot of games out there that, when including DLC, run much more than $100. Think of The Sims series or a lot of Paradox games. Stellaris is a fun, sprawling game, but with all DLC, it’s over $300, and it’s far from the priciest.
But if I’m paying more, I also want to get more utility out of what you’re selling. If a game costs $100, I expect to get twice what I get out of a competing $50 game.
And to be totally honest, most of the games that I really enjoy have complex mechanics and have the player play over and over again. I think that most of the cost that game studios want is for asset creation. That can be okay, depending upon genre – graphics are nice, music is nice, realistic motion-capture movement is nice – but that’s not really what makes or breaks my favorite games. The novelty kind of goes away once you’ve experienced an asset a zillion times.
I mean, I just don’t have the expertise to say on the legal/regulatory side. Someone who has a background in securities and has been following the cryptocurrency situation would probably be in a better position.
I suppose that there will be people who do have such a background looking at it. The fact that it’s the President – who is in charge of the Executive Branch – and that most media that might be reporting on it has a partisan position makes this a lot more complicated.
Still, wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve run into high-level graft in the Executive Branch. Dealt with it then.
Axios is reporting that the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States has rolled out a “meme coin” dubbed $TRUMP, which is being billed as the “only official Trump meme.” According to Axios, $TRUMP has already accumulated a valuation of roughly $32 billion. And because the Trump Organization is keeping 80% of the coins, this means the president-elect and his businesses are roughly $25 billion richer as a result.
80%. Hmm.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/19/trump-meme-coin-what-to-know
Reserving 80% of the new supply for the team is an awful lot. It’s usually more like 10% to 30%.
It’d be interesting to see who is buying.
I mean, yeah, one possibility is that it’s supporters getting fleeced here, which is what the article is proposing.
But I suppose, without having a lot of familiarity with the structure here, that it could also be a route to launder funds. Supposing I wanted to bribe the President to do something. If I buy this, I’m increasing the value of the asset, and most of that asset is held by Trump – that’s functionally transferring wealth to Trump’s pockets.
If I buy, say, shares in a publicly-traded company, then the SEC can see what’s going on. But I don’t think that they have direct visibility into who is purchasing coins on a coin exchange.
EDIT: Hmm. Okay, so I’m not really in the loop on this – not something that I’ve been super-interested in – but it does sound like (a) they assert that they do have that ability and (b) exchanges have not been doing so.
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-102
SEC Charges Coinbase for Operating as an Unregistered Securities Exchange, Broker, and Clearing Agency Coinbase also charged for the unregistered offer and sale of securities in connection with its staking-as-a-service program.
As alleged in the SEC’s complaint, Coinbase’s failure to register has deprived investors of significant protections, including inspection by the SEC, recordkeeping requirements, and safeguards against conflicts of interest, among others.
For some reason, Warno didn’t grab me and Steel Division 2 did. That being said, I may not have given it a fair chance – I bailed out on it after a short period of time, probably because SD2 was also available at about the same time. It is true that it’s one of the few options out there with a late Cold War setting, like Wargame, so if you like that setting over WW2 – which is refreshing – it’s certainly worth looking into.
IIRC, one thing that was a little disappointing was that the unit database was a lot smaller than in Wargame: Red Dragon – I’d kind of taken that, which had been built up across multiple Wargame games, for granted.
Very much. One of the very first things they did at the outset of the war to try to delay Ukrainian aircraft from getting in the air was use ballistic missiles. In a very expensive way to do this, I recall that one of the things they did was to try to crater runways at Ukrainian airbases by dropping ballistic missiles onto them down the length of them. Had satellite footage showing a series of ballistic missile-created craters down the length of them.
kagis
It looks like Russia does have anti-runway weapons – the BetAB-500ShP is apparently one. I assume that they just couldn’t use it in that role because they couldn’t get air superiority.
EDIT: I guess I shouldn’t say that the aim was runway cratering. I remember seeing the satellite footage of the craters down a runway and discussion about use of ballistic missiles, but I guess that they could have been trying to hit aircraft placed next to the runway (that Ukraine moved or something, as there weren’t destroyed aircraft there). I think that they were probably trying to crater the runway, but I do not know that for a fact.
From the standpoint of your question, though, doesn’t really matter – either way, was still really early.
Hmm. “Strategy” is pretty broad. Most of the new stuff you have is turn-based, but you’ve got tactics stuff like X-COM and strategy stuff. If we’re including both real-time and turn-based, and both strategy and tactics…What do I enjoy? I tend to lean more towards the milsim side of strategy…
Stellaris. Lot of stuff to do here – follows the Paradox model of a ton of DLCs with content and lots of iteration on the game. Not cheap, though. Turn-based, 4x.
Hearts of Iron 4. Another Paradox game. I think unless someone is specifically into World War II grand strategy, I’d recommend Stellaris first, which I’d call a lot more approachable. Real time, grand strategy. I haven’t found myself playing this recently – the sheer scope can be kind of overwhelming, and unlike 4X games like Stellaris, it doesn’t “start out small” – well, not if you’re playing the US, at any rate.
Carrier Command 2. Feels a little unfinished, but it keeps pulling me back. Really intended to be played multiplayer, but you can play single-player if you can handle the load of playing all of the roles concurrently. Real-time tactics.
Rule the Waves 3. Lot of ship design here, fun if you’re into gun-era naval combat. Turn-based strategy (light strategy), with real-time tactics combat. Not beautiful. There is a niche of people who are super-into this.
I agree with the other user who recommended Steel Division 2. If you’ve played Wargame: Red Dragon or earlier Eugen games, which are really designed to be played multiplayer, you know that the AI is abysmal. I generally don’t like playing multiplayer games, and persisted in playing it single-player. Steel Division 2’s AI is actually fun to play against single-player. Real-time tactics, leaning towards the MOBA genre but without heroes and themed with relatively-real-world military hardware.
XCOM-alikes. I didn’t like XCOM 2 – it felt way too glizy for me to tolerate, too much time looking at animations, but I may have just not given it a fair chance, as I bailed out after spending only a little time with the game. I have enjoyed turn-based tactics games in the X-COM series and the genre in the past – squad-based, real-time tactics games. Problem is that I don’t know if I can recommend any of them in 2024 – all the games in that genre I’ve played are pretty long in the tooth now. Jagged Alliance 2 is fun, but very old. Silent Storm is almost as old, has destructable terrain, but feels low-budget and unpolished. There were a number of attempts to restart the Jagged Alliance series after 2 and a long delay that were not very successful; I understand that Jagged Alliance 3 is supposed to be better, but I don’t think I’ve played through it yet. Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 aren’t really in the same genre, are more like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, CRPGs with turn-based tactics combat. But if you enjoy turn-based-tactics, you might also enjoy them, and Wasteland 3 isn’t that old.
If you like real-time tactics, you might give the Close Combat series a look. I really liked the (now ancient) Close Combat 2. The balance for that game was terrible – it heavily rewarded use of keeping heavy tanks on hills – but it was an extremely popular game, and I loved playing it. There are (many) newer games in the series but they started including a strategic layer and a round timer after Close Combat 3. These improved things in the game (and if you like a strategy aspect, you might prefer that), but I just wanted to play the tactics side, and don’t feel like the later games every quite had the appeal of the earlier ones. Still, they’ve certainly had enough to make me come back and replay them.
https://youtu.be/Jxb-Szj8jVU?t=1449