Disco Elysium seems to have revived the point and click genre. People are getting nostalgic for the GameCube with the new 'GabeCube' and with Dawn of War IV and Medieval III being announced there seems to be a renaissance of RTS games happening.
For all the bad news percolating in the world at the moment these are some of the good notes I choose to dwell on.
I wish Ron Gilbert well in contributing to this epsilon in the gaming world.
Disco Elysium has been out for several years now and nothing else like it has yet been released. So I wouldn't say it's revived anything, just that it's proved that it's still possible to do something amazing in the genre.
I like to say Disco Elysium is one of my top five books I've ever read.
Well, he did. He made Monkey Island 5 and he was part of the Kickstarter wave which I think is what truly revived the nostalgia for older games (first by being tangentially involved with Broken Age, and later by making Thimbleweed Park).
I think the headline, and to some extend the article is wildly misleading. Ron Gilbert have never limited himself to Adventure games. After he left LucasArts, he made educational games and was a producer for Total Annihilation. He also made Death Spank and The Cave.
Disco Elysium is truly a wonderful game for adventure/rpg fans. I have a small fraction of the time I had as a younger man to play games so I have to be very selective with my choices and Disco Elysium has taken up a large portion of that time for the past few months.
>rest assured there will be no available hands to keep the status page updated
That's not how status pages if implemented correctly work. The real reason status pages aren't updated is SLAs. If you agree on a contract to have 99.99% uptime your status page better reflect that or it invalidates many contracts. This is why AWS also lies about it's uptime and status page.
These services rarely experience outages according their own figures but rather 'degraded performance' or some other language that talks around the issue rather than acknowledging it.
It's like when buying a house you need an independent surveyor not the one offered by the developer/seller to check for problems with foundations or rotting timber.
SLA’s usually just give you a small credit for the exact period of the incident, which is arymetric to the impact. We always have to negotiate for termination rights for failing to meet SLA standards but, in reality, we never exercise them.
Reality is that in an incident, everyone is focused on fixing issue, not updating status pages; automated checks fail or have false positives often too. :/
Yep, every SLA I've ever seen only offers credit. The idea that providers are incentivized to fudge uptime % due to SLAs makes no sense to me. Reputation and marketing maybe, but not SLAs.
The compensation is peanuts. $137 off a $10,000 bill for 10 hours of downtime, or 98.68% uptime in a month, is well within the profit margins.
This is weird - at this level contracts are supposed to be rock solid so why wouldn't they require accurate status reporting? That's trivial to implement, and you can even require to have it on a neutral third-party like UptimeRobot and be done with it.
I'm sure there are gray areas in such contracts but something being down or not is pretty black and white.
> something being down or not is pretty black and white
This is so obviously not true that I'm not sure if you're even being serious.
Is the control panel being inaccessible for one region "down"? Is their DNS "down" if the edit API doesn't work, but existing records still get resolved? Is their reverse proxy service "down" if it's still proxying fine, just not caching assets?
I understand there are nuances here, and I may be oversimplifying, but if part of the contract effectively says "You must act as a proxy for npmjs.com" yet the site has been returning 500 Cloudflare errors across all regions several times within a few weeks while still reporting a shining 99.99% uptime, something doesn't quite add up. Still, I'm aware I don't know much about these agreements, and I'm assuming the people involved aren't idiots and have already considered all of this.
> I'm sure there are gray areas in such contracts but something being down or not is pretty black and white.
Is it? Say you've got some big geographically distributed service doing some billions of requests per day with a background error rate of 0.0001%, what's your threshold for saying whether the service is up or down? Your error rate might go to 0.0002% because a particular customer has an issue so that customer would say it's down for them, but for all your other customers it would be working as normal.
> something being down or not is pretty black and white
it really isn't. We often have degraded performance for a portion of customers, or just down for customers of a small part of the service. It has basically never happened that our service is 100% down.
Are the contracts so easy to bypass? Who signs a contract with an SLA knowing the service provider will just lie about the availability? Is the client supposed to sue the provider any time there is an SLA breach?
Anyone who doesn't have any choice financially or gnostically. Same reason why people pay Netflix despite the low quality of most of their shows and the constant termination of tv series after 1 season. Same reason why people put up with Meta not caring about moderating or harmful content. The power dynamics resemble a monopoly
Most of services are not really critical but customers want to have 99.999% on the paper.
Most of the time people will just get by and ignore even full day of downtime as minor inconvenience. Loss of revenue for the day - well you most likely will have to eat that, because going to court and having lawyers fighting over it most likely will cost you as much as just forgetting about it.
If your company goes bankrupt because AWS/Cloudflare/GCP/Azure is down for a day or two - guess what - you won't have money to sue them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and most likely will have bunch of more pressing problems on your hand.
The company that is trying to cancel its contract early needs to prove the SLA was violated, which is very easy of the company providing the service also provides a page that says their SLA was violated. Otherwise it's much harder to prove.
I was subscribing to these guys purely to support the EU tech scene. So I was on Pro for about 2 years while using ChatGPT and Claude.
Went to actually use it, got a message saying that I missed a payment 8 months previously and thus wasn't allowed to use Pro despite having paid for Pro for the previous 8 months. The lady I contacted in support simply told me to pay the outstanding balance. You would think if you missed a payment it would relate to simply that month that was missed not all subsequent months.
Utterly ridiculous that one missed payment can justify not providing the service (otherwise paid for in full) at all.
Basically if you find yourself in this situation you're actually better of deleting the account and resigning up again under a different email.
We really need to get our shit together in the EU on this sort of stuff, I was a paying customer purely out of sympathy but that sympathy dried up pretty quick with hostile customer service.
I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but it seems you had a subscription missed one payment some time ago, but now expect that your subscription works because the missed month was in the past and "you paid for this month"?
This sounds like the you expect your subscription to work as an on-demand service? It seems quite obvious that to be able to use a service you would need to be up to date on your payments, that would be no different in any other subscription/lease/rental agreement? Now Mistral might certainly look back at their records and see that you actually didn't use their service at all for the last few month and waive the missed payment. And that could be good customer service, but they might not even have record that you didn't use it, or at least those records would not be available to the billing department?
>This sounds like the you expect your subscription to work as an on-demand service?
That's exactly what it is.
>I'm not sure I understand you correctly,
I understand perfectly well, I don't agree with that approach is the issue.
If I paid for 11/12 months I should get 11/12 months subscription not 1/12 months. They happily just took a years subscription and provided nothing in return. Even if I fixed the outstanding balance they would have provided 2/12 months of service at a cost of 12/12 months of payment.
My critique is more levelled at Mistral and not specifically what they've just released so it could be that some see what I have to say as off topic.
Also a lot of Europeans are upset at US tech dominance. It's a position we've roped ourselves in to so any commentary that criticises an EU tech success story is seen as being unnecessarily negative.
However I do mean it as a warning to others, I got burned even with good intentions.
When Andromeda and the Milky Way collide there will be no planets or solar systems that collide from either system. A fascinating fact in in own right, it's simply due to the scale of the galaxies and that they are mostly composed of empty space.
Unless we find the means to manipulate our own star or the orbit of Earth we most likely will not be around at that time. The sun's increased luminosity will boil us way earlier.
The key is to add lots of onions and garlic and some butter to give it base flavor. The nettles give off great colour and a more subtle flavor and of course add more nutrients.
The real key though is stinging nettles just simply grow like crazy in your backyard (at least in Ireland) so it's a two birds with the one stone kind of deal, you're gardening as well as cooking. There is also the 'badass' feeling of eating something that previously was dangerous. The heat will denature any stingers in the soup.
As a kid is somewhat rural western washington our backyard bordered on a many acred wood and just beyond our backyard fence was just a huge tangle of blackberry and nettles. As kids we'd get our dads machetes and carve a path into the woods proper every spring and every few years our family and the families on either side would spend a day trying to eradicate the encroaching blackberries to no ultimate avail.
We never ate the nettles, just had 1000 remedies for stings, but we did eat a lot of blackberry jam, cobblers and pies.
I'm in western washington and some people (not me) do eat the nettles. The blackberries are of course, delicious and well used. Always a good idea to pick above waist height of dogs. ;)
These blackberries are everywhere so if you're walking down the road in season, you'll be able to snack on them (and you'll find lots of people stopping to harvest them).
There was, due to lead compounds in vehicle exhaust. Nasty stuff.
These days, tyre microplastics and diesel particulates are still a concern, but there's little hard science around the hazards of eating them in small quantities - there's microplastic in basically everything, to some degree, so you're not making it appreciably worse - and agricultural farm machinery is a worse diesel PM offender by far than a street's worth of modern cars.
It's a franken debian. Which a lot of Linux users don't like for a variety of reasons but I think that debate is of a wider scope than this one submission.
The main Dev/Maintainer for Linux Mint 'Clem' is also based in Ireland. So these are the only two Linux distros I know of to be associated with the Irish tech scene which is small.
>I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart.
Tools always empower those with knowledge further than those without knowledge.
Surely we can rule out bait if the cameraman is underwater with the Orca. At that point there isn't much stopping the Orca preying on the human especially if we're acknowledging their intelligence.
The specific claim I'm disputing is that the Orca is using the 'gift' as 'bait' here. The implication that once the human bites or engages with the bait they are then preyed upon. The fact that moose are preyed upon by Orcas is irrelevant here.
The point I am trying to make is that Orcas can choose to prey on large land animals when they are in the water and that they are not using the gift as bait. Why do you think I am disagreeing with you?
Because he naturally assumed that you were attempting to say something relevant to his own claim rather than a complete non sequitur. Maybe in your head you intended to somehow make the point that they're not using the gift as bait but you didn't say anything of the sort so it wasn't your point as written. You also said nothing about humans and moose both being large land animals (and from the Orca's POV it's not likely that it considers humans to be land animals) and that therefore yada yada ... none of this was expressed.
(I see quite a bit of this, where someone is called out and then they say "my point was X" where nothing they had said previously expressed X.)
Perhaps but it's the norm. I try to preface what I write with "I agree" just to try and clarify my position ahead of time. Remember that there's a bunch of context missing in text such as facial expressions, body language and tone of voice that would have quickly made clear that you were in agreement ;-)
> Only on the internet will "here's a related example why you might be correct" result in strange discussions like these. Makes me sad.
It would help if the comment said any of those quoted words. The context as I see it was:
1> they could be baiting the human
2> why bait the human and not eat it?
3> They hunt moose
With no further words, it could be intended as they hunt moose, so they clearly like surf and turf and would love to eat a human. Or it could be intended as they hunt moose, they know how to hunt land animals so it's a choice to give a gift that'a not bait.
In person, someone hearing the 3rd comment would probably make a confused face and the person making the offering of a moose reference would make clarifying comments.
I pointed out that he never expressed his point and then he comes back with a quote that again is not anything he said. Sad indeed.
And yes, these sorts of discussions do occur in person, although I rarely encounter people who say things like "orcas attack moose" with ZERO elaboration--that is indeed strange. And if someone said that's irrelevant and they then said "My point was ..." I would still say "Well, you didn't say that".
I've been on the internet since the early 90:ies, and this does happen semi-regularly, especially during the last decade. But I have never in my life experienced such situations stemming from an agreeing reflection/interjection during face-to-face communication. Sometimes it feels like people are (un)intentionally looking for reasons to disagree rather than anything else.
I agree with them, your original post lacked clarity. I propose that the reason these types of conversations are less likely in person is because there is typically no log of exactly what was said and people tend to get defensive and narratives change. This makes it a pointless endeavor.
I would suggest, rather than wondering why people on the internet point things like this out, maybe wonder how many people in real life never bothered and just write you off.
It is not that surprising that this kind of misunderstanding happens more often on the internet. In real life we communicate with more than just our words. We see how our communication partners say what they say, where they are looking, what cadence and tone they use. We also see what faces they make while the other person was talking, how alert they were.
When all of that is missing it is harder to glean the tenor or direction of the message.
And then on top of that there is a thing I would call "expectation bias". We expect to see something, and when what we see does not match our expectations we sometimes become blind to that. Conversations on this site very often go "argument - counter argument - counter counter argument - counter counter counter argument". Because of that people (me included!) often read comments with the expectation that it will at least in some way disagree with what was said before. And once someone has that expectation it is easy to misread a supporting comment as a weird and under-argued disagreement.
> Makes me sad.
I do understand. And you are not wrong. Misunderstandings are sad. It seems we sometimes forget that there is an other human being on the other side of the screen too. So sadness is not unwarranted sometimes.
But on a constructive level we can recognise where the confusion slips in and we can add extra words to help lubricate the discussion. I often start my comments with stating my level of agreement. (From "Yes, you are 100% right..." via "You are mostly right, but I disagree with X" to "No, I'm afraid that is not true at all") Basically typing more characters because others can't see my gestures, and can't hear the tenor of my voice.
For example in this case you could have wrote: "I agree that an orca probably doesn't see a human diver as a significant threat, and wouldn't need to use a bait to attack it. After all they are known to attack moose too! ..." (As an example. Of course I don't know if that is what you were actually thinking.)
Could your comment been understood in an ideal world even without that? I think so. Could it have been fortified with a few choice words to better signal that what you are providing are related examples to support the already stated argument? I would think so too.
"here's a related example why you might be correct"
Again: YOU DIDN'T SAY THAT. And there's no obvious logic that connects the two--certainly the person you responded to didn't see any such logic and said so: "The fact that moose are preyed upon by Orcas is irrelevant here."
As someone else said: "Consider instead reflecting on why your point was misunderstood?"
i.e., take responsibility because--seriously--this is on you.
What is sad is how you completely ignored and blew off what I wrote and then just repeated the very same thing I critiqued, and implied that I was at fault for the "strange discussion"--when in fact there was nothing at all strange about the clear and valid points that I made.
And as others have noted, it's not "only on the internet"--the internet is simply where the vast majority of such discussions occur. But it's not the only place where someone might say "oh, you didn't make that clear, and it's still not clear to me how they are logically connected". And it's not the only place that I have encountered people who reason poorly, act in bad faith, and blame everyone but themselves.
Visit family.
That's not mentioning you can dislike the current administration without disliking other aspects of the US. The US is big and diverse.