That’s the big reason why I loved Diablo II, but was lukewarm on the following two. The skill tree was fixed and a had nice synergies between the skills. I used to keep a notebook with plans for different builds that seemed fun and was primarily interested in the skills rather than items.

In Diablo III, the skill tree was much more limited, and you could swap things out at any time. So planning out a build and starting a new character was pointless. You could just swap the active skills.

It also didn’t seem to have any hard spots. If you followed the main quests, your character improved just fast enough to keep the challenge throughout consistent. So I never really felt a need to grind. I mean, I hate games that are all grinding, but I also like it when there are walls that you have to spend some time and effort to move past.

Diablo IV was even worse for this as the areas adapt to your level. So no matter where you were, the challenge was the same.

Neither of the two were awful, in my opinion, but they dropped the parts that made Diablo so exceptional to me. So I really didn’t spend too much time with either of them whereas I played Diablo II for about 10 years.

From the wiki, the idea comes from an essay that somebody has written about a conversation they had with a friend about the struggles of chronic illness. The conversation took place at a restaurant, and she grabbed the spoons for use in a metaphor because there were spoons nearby. She gave her friend a set of spoons, and every time her friend mentioned doing a task, she took a spoon away.

It could have been anything, but spoons happened to be at hand and she wanted to make a physical representation of an abstract concept. The essay resonated with people, so spoons became entrenched. And now I hear people say that they’re all out of spoons to express the idea that they’ve done all that they can that day.

“Jones” is an American slang word meaning to be addicted to something, so “jonesing” for something means to crave something very strongly, and generally very vocally.

“Breve” is a coffee drink that is commonly made with half-and-half, which is a product that is equal parts cream and milk. I assume that people have taken to using the term to refer to half-and-half itself, but I’ve not personally heard that.

So the sentence is saying that their cat was addicted to half-and-half and would act like a junkie doing anything to get their next fix.

In case you missed the joke, this is a reference to how John Hinckley Jr shot Reagan because he thought it would impress Jodie Foster. It’s posted today because of the assassination attempt on Trump yesterday.

Well the origins were laudable, it’s just that it was shortly thereafter extended for racist means. Binet and Simon wanted to see if they could devise a test to measure intelligence in children, and they ultimately came up with a way to measure a child’s mental age.

At the time, problem children who did poorly in school were assumed to be sick and sent to an asylum. They proposed that some children were just slow, but they could still be successful if they got more help. Their test was meant to identify the slow children so that they could allocate the proper resources to them.

Later, their ideas were extended beyond the education system to try to prove racial hierarchies, and that’s where much of the controversy comes from. The other part is that the tests were meant to identify children that would struggle in school. They weren’t meant to identify geniuses or to understand people’s intelligence level outside of the classroom.

The ask that YouTube manage their system better. Currently, they assume that a copyright claim is valid unless proven otherwise, and it is difficult for content creators to actually get them to review a claim to determine if it is invalid. So, a lot of legitimate users that post videos without actually violating anybody’s copyright end up being permanently punished for somebody illegitimate claim. What we want is for YouTube to, one, make it more difficult or consequential to file a bad claim, and two, make it easier to dispute a bad claim.

However, that’s not going to happen because the YouTube itself is legally responsible for copyrighted material that is posted to their platform. Because of that, they are incentivised to assume a claim is valid lest they end up in court for violating somebody’s legitimate copyright. Meaning that the current system entails a private company adjudicating legal questions where they are not an impartial actor in the dispute.

So your concern is legitimate, but it’s ignoring the fact that we already are in a situation where a private company is prosecuting fraud. People want it to change so that it is more in favor of the content creators (or at least, in the spirit of innocent until proven guilty), but it would ultimately be better if they were not involved in it whatsoever. However, major copyright holders pushed for laws that put the onus on YouTube because it makes it easier for them, and it’s unlikely for those laws to change anytime soon. That’s what I’d say we should be pushing for, but it’s also fair to say that the Content ID system is flawed and allows too much fraud to go unpunished.

You’re talking about the court system. They are talking about Content ID. YouTube makes it easy to submit faulty copyright claims with little repercussions if they fail, so there are more fraudulent claims than you’d see in the actual court system. They want YouTube to penalize the abuse of their system more strongly so people that upload videos don’t have to deal with so much shit.

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If you ever use SQL Server Management Studio, you can experience the opposite. Whenever there’s an update, you’ll get a notification in the application, but to actually install it, you need to go to Microsoft’s website to download the latest version and install it yourself. Chrome, on the other hand, updates itself upon restart without requiring anything special from the user.

As a software developer, I really like that part. It means that websites I work on only need to consider the features supported in the latest version of major browsers rather than the last several (as was the case with Internet Explorer).

So, it’s nice and something that I remember really appreciating when Chrome was getting popular. But it’s still a weird thing to brag about.

I like Robert Delaunay, and also his wife, Sonia Delaunay. Their work involves a lot of bright, vibrant colors. It also was rather abstract or impressionistic, which I enjoyed. I think I like Piet Mondrian for similar reasons. Jan Sluyters would be another.

I also like JMW Turner a lot. I’m a sucker for lighting and dynamic skies in paintings, and his work features that very prominently. Frederic Edwin Church is another painter along these lines that I really enjoy.

A more contemporary passive that I like is Nina Tokhtaman Valetova. Her work also involves a lot of bold colors.

For digital copies of written works in the public domain, projectgutenberg.org is a good source.

The vacuum is the hard part, not the maglev. You would need to enclose the entire track inside if a vacuum, and that world be ridiculously expensive and practically impossible with current technology. It’s already very expensive to build a tunnel for a train, which is why they are avoided if possible. But this would need to be all tunnel that is air tight, so even more expensive than regular train tunnels.

To put it into perspective, the current largest manmade vacuum chamber is at a NASA research facility in Ohio. It’s a cylinder with a diameter of 100 feet and a height of 122 feet. If this were laid on its side, about 1.5 New York subway cars could fit inside. The largest vacuum ever made can barely fit the vehicle inside, let alone allow it to travel between two different places where the extra speeds would be warranted.

Yes. The last person that the United States executed for desertion, Eddie Slovik in 1945, was tried in a military court, found guilty, and executed.

I assume that Russia would have rules for the same. Whether they are followed is the question.

5 fluid ounces to the gill. 4 gills to the pint. 2 pints to the quart. 4 quarts to the gallon. And 1 gallon is 10 pounds of water.

Except in the US. For us, it’s 4 fluid ounces to the gill. 4 gills to the pint. 2 pints to the quart. 4 quarts to the gallon. And 1 gallon is 8 troy pounds of wine.