Oddly enough, the same trick doesn’t seem to work for trips to the liquor store.

I think I managed to win my first run after about 40 tries, where I got lucky with a really good build. I think it was with the rail and a couple of the bomb upgrades from the Daedalus hammer – the rocket and the 5-shot. I probably had a boon that increased special damage (Aphrodite, maybe?).

I didn’t win again until number 55-60, but then I started winning every three runs or so. Eventually, I started winning every run, regardless of weapon. Then I started dialing up the heat and winning without using Olympian keepsakes. I eventually hit 100% on Steam.

A year later, I replayed it on Xbox when it was on Gamepass, and I think I won on my 11th run. (I needed a bit of metaprogression and time to relearn the enemy patterns after being away for a while.)

My opinion is that it’s a near-perfect roguelite in terms of luck and metaprogression helping beginners, but there’s still a definite skill element. Builds that I hated when I first started eventually became some of my favorites. I feel like the learning curve wasn’t punishing, but the game wasn’t “easy” for me.

I’m guessing that most music platforms get the majority of their sales from outside the top 20.

Or are they talking about PC gaming versus console gaming? Actually, if you include mobile games, do the top 20 represent the majority of sales? Again, it feels like there’s a very significant long tail on mobile as well.

And down the road at the University of Waterloo (founded in 1957, I think), incoming math students were still doing the Frosh Wash until maybe 2001.

Once students started carrying cell phones on a regular basis, it became a lot harder to dump water on them without financial liability.

Trying to make out the headlines on the magazine.

It looks like “Whiskey cures AIDS” and “Interview: Anna Nicole MacDonald”, but I’m not positive.

Then it sure is a good thing that the vast majority of the US census is not the result of door to door enumeration. Most people complete the census online or by mail.

Looks like it came out today!

Isn’t it a reference to the trick that mentalists have been doing for decades? My mind immediately went to Uri Gellar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending

But terrapins are not tortoises, since they’re semiaquatic, but are differentiated from common turtles by their presence in brackish water.

The whole “Boaty McBoatface” thing is just a way of conditioning us for the next time someone named McGovern wants to run for leadership.

Yeah… I received the email teasing their upcoming announcement.

Here is the text in full for the context:

We’ve spent the last six years in Framework proving that it’s possible to build high-performance, thin, light computers that last longer and respect your rights through repairability, upgradeability, and customization. We’re happy to see repair rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception, with even Apple of all companies embracing it on their latest notebook. I built this company specifically to reset and fix a broken industry. So, mission accomplished? Not quite. There is a very real scenario in which personal computing as we know it is dead.

Memory, storage, silicon, and everything related to it is being consumed at unprecedented levels in a “winner takes all” race to an AI-first world in which access to compute is metered by the token. It’s clear that the fundamentals of computing and electronics have changed. The computer in the cloud has increasingly greater economic output than the computer in the hand. This means that to the extent that there are constraints on the supply that feeds both, the cloud will win every time. We see this in the rapidly rising costs of silicon and all of the devices that depend on it, the shift from ownership to subscription, and the rise of closed black boxes over an open ecosystem. What does this all mean? The industry is asking you to own nothing and be happy. Computers are no longer a bicycle for the mind. They are becoming the self-driving car that takes you directly to the destination.

You might be reading all of this and thinking, is this a farewell letter to personal computing? Is this the end of Framework? No, this is a manifesto. No matter how inevitable the AI-takes-all scenario may sound, as long as there is a person in the world who still wants to own their means of computation, we will be here to build the hardware that enables it. That means computers that you can own at the deepest level and do what you want with, whether that is choosing your OS, modifying your hardware, or even just keeping your data and computation local rather than leased from the cloud. We won’t get there all at once, but we will always be fighting for a future where you can own everything and be free.

Every step we take and every product we ship serves that goal. With that, we’re happy to announce that we have our next live launch event coming on April 21st at 10:30am Pacific time in San Francisco. During the event, we’ll be streaming our announcements live to the Framework YouTube channel. You can subscribe and get notified when the stream goes live. We can’t wait for you to see what we’ve been working on.

These products are for you, so we’re opening a batch of invitations to the Framework Community so you can meet the team and get hands on with our newest products. Having community members at our event last year was a lot of fun, and we can’t wait for you to join us alongside press and partners. If you’re a Framework fan and are in the San Francisco area (or are able to handle your own travel to us), you can apply to attend in this sign-up form. We expect we’ll see a lot more interest than we have available seats in our venue, so don’t wait to get your application in.

We have one other update for you ahead of our launch event, which is that our products are now available to ship to four additional countries: New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, and Singapore. You can start ordering everything we have in-stock now, though you may want to wait until the 21st to see what we’re announcing!

For a hint at what we’ll be announcing, head to the event page.

Do you think prices work like “A big Mac is 3”, so it will be CAD$3 or USD$3 or 3€ or 3£, and that’s what makes the Canadian dollar weak for travel?

Otherwise, I don’t understand the question. Like, yes, 1 Canadian dollar is worth less than 1 Euro, but after conversion a lot of prices end up being similar. (Beer and cheese tend to be a lot cheaper in Europe than in Canada, but that has nothing to do with exchange rates.)

Zucchini on pizza works pretty well, but you need to cut it thin, so it has a chance to dry a bit during baking. Otherwise, it makes the cheese soggy, which is nasty.

In Canada, polling stations are also run by members of the public. I think they get paid, but it’s a small enough amount that most people think of it as volunteering. In my experience, it’s usually retired people. They also sit there for the day. On election day itself, they’re also responsible for counting the ballots and making sure that the ballots are preserved. (I was once a volunteer scrutineer for one of the political parties, so I got to be there to watch the ballot-counting process.)

Regarding early voting, my recollection is that a subset of polling places were open on two or three specific days in the weeks leading up to the election. Like, if my riding had 25 polling sites, only maybe 4 (one in each “quadrant”) were open for early voting. On the plus side, I think the early voting days were usually on weekends.

On the topic of “remote voting”, my wife is Romanian and used to vote at the train station in Iași, since her official residence was still her home town. I always thought that was an interesting solution to the “voting outside your home district” problem, since it kind of implies that you’re away from home because you’ve been riding a train. That said, since Iași is a university town and most people never seem to update their official residence (like, most of my tech worker friends officially “lived” in their hometown, even if they’d been in Iași for 10 years), the lineup to vote at the train station during a presidential runoff could be hours long. Of course, nobody needs to “register” to vote at the train station, since they just show their national ID card to prove they’re eligible to vote.

Not saying that he won’t try, but the president has no (constitutional) say in the sitting of congress.

I looked it up and in Powell vs McCormack (1969), the Supreme Court ruled that the speaker of the house has no authority to deny a representative sent by their respective state. So, unless the current Supreme Court decides to overturn that precedent, it would require a 2/3 majority vote of the newly-seated house to expel someone, assuming I’ve understood correctly (which is questionable).

Tl;dr: I think even this couldn’t necessarily prevent folks who win in November from serving.

I never registered to vote in Canada.

Since I was moving a lot before I left (student, then early-career renter), I would always show up to my local polling station with proof of address (usually a utility bill in my name) and proof of citizenship (usually my passport). They would copy down my details and give me a ballot. (I wasn’t a douchebag who would do this on election day. I’d always go for early voting when the polling station was empty.)

Thanks! I saw it’s on sale, so I just picked it up. I look forward to giving it a try.

If it’s the shareware pinball game I think it is, that complete stranger who wanted your credit card number? Tim Sweeney

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Pinball

I was able to convince my dad to give them his credit card number over the phone for the full versions of Epic Pinball and One Must Fall 2097.

Systemd? More like systemdeez.

I built an RS232 cable from parts from RadioShack 25 years ago, with no soldering, just electrical tape. It’s surprisingly easy if you don’t need speed. Mine capped out at 1200 or 2400 baud. Was it good? No. Did it work? Absolutely.