Is this a Black Mirror episode or something?
The EV of Theseus
We just had a vote for government officials along the EP vote. Less than 60% turned up which means the most common vote was a vote for nothing. The average voter doesn’t care.
It’s okay. I played Borderlands 3 with voices off, only sfx/background sounds/music. I’m sure I can do the same with this. Maybe turn picture off too while I’m at it.
In 6 your buildings in cities are categorised into districts. The districts take up a hex on the grid and receive bonuses based on adjacent hexes. A large part of the game revolves around planning your districts in every city as once they are placed, they cannot be moved. This is a slightly different playstyle compared to 5 where only the city location itself matters.
Some other changes were around science, policies and eras. You unlock policy cards which you can swap out for different bonuses when needed instead of a constant effect. Policies are just as important as science this time around, and researching science and policies is boosted by actions in the game instead of only using Great scientists/writers. Every set amount of turns the world enters a different era, which also offers different policy cards for that period.
There are no (or few) multiplicative bonuses. Having more cities is always beneficial.
Let’s hope it isn’t. Even though civ 6 had multiple interesting aspects and in certain ways it was objectively better than 5, I just could not look past the ugly presentation.
I recently switched over my ARR stack to only use usenet. Working well now but you really need a good indexer. The public ones are just not quite good enough.
Funnily enough Pornhub became kinda shit these last few years. Not because of overbearing advertising but because they periodically delete large amounts of their content, I think to appease payment providers. Kinda like the dmca takedowns on YouTube but much worse.
Eh, kinda. The macbooks still come with 8gb non replaceable memory and the upcharge for another 8gb is $200 (not just for the air but the $1600 pro too). These are still great laptops but the pricing feels hostile.
IPad hardware is brilliant but what’s the point? You’re stuck with a neutered OS and a handheld formfactor that is not especially suitable for work or for gaming (the fields that usually need more power).
The baseline iphones are still lacking basic features like a high refresh screen purely for product segmentation purposes. And once again a slew of hostile, anti-user and anti-developer decisions like banning sideloading or alternative browser engines mainly designed to lock down the OS so they can retain all control of what goes on on your device. Another way this control is used is to funnel you to use icloud which offers an introductory free tier of 5(?) GB of data. I don’t think I had a single relative that didn’t have the “your icloud storage is full” popup every day until we disabled photo backups or they started paying a monthly subscription.
The app store is also a disaster. Just open it and search for something, I’m not even going to say more. This is an obvious profit vs user experience tradeoff.
Airpods are more or less fine. I had a gen1 Airpods pro which were kinda category defining at the time. Competition has caught up however, also better repairability would be nice. I’m actually surprised you were allowed to use them without an iPhone.
Apple watch seems fine, still no 3rd party watchfaces. The locked down OS is somewhat more justified in this case.
I haven’t tried the vision pro but that is also locked down software wise.
Overall, as you said, the hardware is good to best-in-class but it feels to me that at every turn you are being pushed and manipulated into giving more of your cash to Apple sometimes in the form of product segmentation, sometimes via artificial software limitations.
You don’t get to be a trillion dollar company just by making good products.
I don’t think it’s going anywhere either but Warren Buffet did sell his position in Apple. The M1 for sure is/was a hit but other than that they seem more focused on extracting every penny from customers, rather than providing the best products possible. I guess we’ll see how it works out as a long term strategy.
The new stunning, groundbreaking, and bespoke iPad Pro. They are nice enough but it is safe to say I was not stunned.
Now that’s a reference
There is definitely a buzz, the SPT (single player Tarkov mod) servers have been constantly overloaded for days now
Jesus, that’s like a month’s rent in some places. What do you get out of it in return?
Let’s see.
There is nothing inherently wrong about food pictures but I feel like it is a symptom of the focus shifting from trying to take quality pictures to showing off a nice dinner/vacation/car you had to your “friend” group.
There is a thin line between look at this cool thing and look at how much better my life is then yours. I kinda have a distaste for the second one. (That said I take food pictures all the time but mostly of stuff I made myself, though I don’t post it to social media)
Homing Pigeons 🪽?
I remember Instagram when it was new. It was an actually photography app. Of course it had the edgy filters (which ~15 year old me made full use of). But the pictures people posted actually had a bit of effort behind them.
Then it started becoming another mainstream social media where most pictures were about people’s lunches. I didn’t stick around for it’s final phase of business ads and thots.
I think it lost the cool factor by the time FB bought it but maybe it would’ve taken longer to become as ad-infested as it is today
I highly recommend Living Skyrim. It takes around 300gb storage but it’s absolutely worth it.