TwinIon

I've got an One X and a recently upgraded PC, so I'm probably skipping the Series X. I'd like to see Sony swing for the fences on specs, so I'd be fine with a $500 console if it warrants the price.

Always nice to see people that stick these kinds of cases through actually get some compensation.

Square footage doesn't matter quite as much as simple experience. Layout, wall materials, neighbor proximity, router location, and a bunch of other things factor in. Basically, if your wifi is problematically slower in some places than it is near your router, a mesh system could be a good call. Eero gets recommended a lot. I personally like the Netgear Orbi, because it has a dedicated channel for talking to each satellite, and it starts with a pair of two, which is usually enough for most people. They're also far larger than the Eero or Google options. If you want to have a lot of control over your network, I recommend the Unifi Dream Machine. It's not a mesh system, but it's very likely to cover that square footage by itself. It's basically a condensed version of a small/medium business class network. A slightly more simple, but still good option would also be the Synology RT2600ac. If you want a more simple, single, powerful router, I think the TP-Link gets highly recommended as does the Netgear Nighthawk line.

Microsoft is building an open source system they call "ElectionGuard," an open source voting system, that actually checks most of the boxes for being a pretty good idea. First things first: they're not using it for any major elections this year. They've done testing in Wisconsin and will be doing more, but this isn't rolling out widely for use this year. So here's how it works: Voters make their selections using either a touch screen or an Xbox adaptive controller. Once finished, two ballots are printed. One goes into a ballot box, the other voters take home. Once the polls close, voters can scan the QR code on the ballot they took home and see that their vote was counted and verify that it was counted correctly. Homomorphic encryption allows vote totals to be counted without deciphering all the data and exposing who voted for whom. A ZIP file of all encrypted votes is also made available to download, so anyone can verify the results. Should the system be hacked, the paper ballots exist a safe, offline backup. Lots of hurdles exist, including verification of the machines, teaching people how to use them, and making people actually check their ballots. Still, this is largely a consistent set of best practices when it comes to voting machines that I've been reading about for a decade. It should allow for a voting system that realizes the benefits of digital voting, while being transparent, verifiable, and most importantly, always having a paper backup. If the US decides to throw some real funding at fixing voting systems, a system like this could actually be a good idea.

The two big questions with routers are if you want to be able to mess with a lot of network settings and therefore want something more advanced, and if you need a mesh network setup to cover a larger area for wifi.

Link Most of these people are either rich or otherwise successful, thought it seems there were a couple of reasonable pardons in there as well. Kinda surprising he didn't pardon all his recent co-conspirators, but I'm sure he'll get to that eventually.

Huh. Today I Learned.

I haven't watch much of the debates, but I might actually turn this one on to watch everyone go after Bloomberg. I feel like everyone else on stage has pretty good reason to go after him.

So their insurance company is not paying out because they say the Scouts knew about this and didn't do anything. That's pretty rough. I hated my time in the scouts, but I do think there is some value to what they do. Maybe something better will rise from their ashes.

My understanding is that this is basically how all new skyscrapers in Manhattan have been built for decades. The gerrymandered lot for this particular tower is a bit ungainly, but the basic practice has been standard since they introduced the concept of floor area ratio and air right transfers. I read about a bunch of this stuff when the recent wave of supertalls started getting built. Here's an article on how it has been working. As that article mentions (but incorrectly links to) the Municipal art society has a project where they track the results of these kinds of zoning issues called Accidental Skyline that is worth checking out. Forcing these people to remove 20 completed stories of a building seems kind of insane. They say they'll appeal the decision, but I don't know what I'd expect from an appeal above the state supreme court on this. My initial reaction is also that I don't really want to make it harder to build in NYC (or anywhere for that matter), but the odd specifics of these kinds of things tend to only really affect the very high end of the market. The Times piece on this mentions that nearly half of the new condo units built in Manhattan after 2015 remain unsold. I'm guessing that's because they're all very high end units that do little to change the housing shortage in the city. So while I do think it's kinda crazy to remove 20 stories of a building, I'm not too concerned about how this would affect development at large.

Have you seen Overwatch? I think they're still ok with that stuff.

lol

I don't know anything about this story, but that trailer has me interested.

Also, they really need him to do the press tour for the show, so they can't exactly keep it a secret. Hard to do late night interviews and pretend that you're not in this season.

Turns out that the "ultra thin glass" on the Galaxy Z Flip is probably not really glass after all. It seems to scratch very easily, just as you would expect from plastic. Samsung put out a statement saying that there is a plastic protective coating on the screen, and that is what is being scratched here. Since that layer isn't user removable or replaceable, that feels like a distinction without a difference to me. If you can permanently scratch the screen with your fingernail, I don't care what the layering is like, I just know I'll have to live with every defect. Samsung will replace the plastic for free one time, and do a one time total screen replacement for $119, so that's something. Still, it seems the era of folding glass isn't here quite yet.

I don't think you have to work very hard to convince all of us around here that we don't want a Bloomberg presidency. As far as I can see we're all on board with preventing that outcome. I don't think anyone here is advocating him as a good choice or the choice most likely to win or really any positives. However, it's also very clear that compared to Trump, he's a significantly lesser evil, and in the worst case scenario that is that head to head, I think most of us here will automatically vote Bloomberg.

Over Huawei? That's such a petty matter, and the US has made it so clear that we don't believe our own overblown fears. Trump is such a child when anyone disagrees with him on anything it's frightening.

Bloomberg is by far my least favorite candidate, but saying there'd be no difference between him and Trump is insane. Even if he shares some of what makes Trump so reprehensible, Trump is still a special case; uniquely unqualified, corrupt, and incompetent.

He did, but I imagine he still feels like he should get a director and/or picture win.

I watched the whole thing. Most of it is about wanting open connections between gaming platforms. He wants to see barriers come down between platforms so that games can be bought anywhere, played anywhere, and connect across social platforms. He says "it's a "mind virus" the idea that publishers should own the customer, have a monopoly on the customer relationship through some form of login and ecommerce." He rails against "consumer adversarial business models." He specifies Apple and Google, though I don't think it's a stretch to apply much of his criticisms to Steam as well. He says that Epic's store, with a 12% fee, is very profitable, and that stores charging 30% are marking up their costs by 5-6x. He calls Android a "fake open platform" and dismisses Apple's security concerns in keeping their platform closed. He wants alternative stores to be able to operate on equal terms as the platform's own store. He's a big proponent of data and game portability. He thinks that not only should in game items transfer across platforms, but the games themselves. So you could buy Call of Duty on the Playstation and play it on the Xbox. He wants to see social graphs connect, so you could communicate with your Xbox or Steam friends from the Playstation or iOS. He calls out publishers for using pay to win or loot box mechanics, and thinks we'll see good devs move away from them, calling for the gaming industry to move away from gambling. It's not until 27 minutes in that he gets to the question of politics, and he doesn't talk about it for long. He does reference "pressure from foreign countries on domestic companies about political discourse," and says "to get through that, we as companies need to divorce ourselves from politics." Of course, he offers no suggestions on how to square that circle. He says that companies should treat "content moderation as a judicial branch of the company as opposed to making a lot of ad-hoc decisions based on convenience." Personally, I think that is a load of nonsense. As soon as you have rules around content moderation or player expression you're automatically stepping into the realm of politics. You have to decide where to draw lines and you'll have to deal with outside pressures about how your game was used as a platform for expressing political views.

Poor QT still sitting there waiting for his.

That's kind of bonkers. Goose Game is fine, but it's not even mechanically that interesting.

Plz no.

IGN has the whole video.

I'm confused as to what he's getting at and I'm struggling to see where this issue has come up in games. Is he talking about things like the mess Blizzard got into surrounding the Hong Kong message in Hearthstone? Is he suggesting that developers are being forced to include political opinions or diversity by their marketing departments? When he says that platform companies should be neutral moderators, I don't think that has been much of a problem, nor do I think it's particularly reasonable. I'd like to think that everything from Xbox to Steam could be some sort of libertarian ideal market where anyone can sell anything, but that's not reasonable nor is it a good idea. Also considering that I don't believe that the Epic store works that way, I'm not really sure where he's coming from on this. It's all just very messy and I don't really see what point he's trying to make.