TwinIon

MS sure seems to have a significant lead in cloud gaming. It feels like they're the only one with a clear vision for the business and the tech. The best experiences will continue to rely on local hardware, but who knows how long that will last.

It wasn't ground breaking by any means, but I enjoyed the first Jurassic Park Evolution well enough that I'll probably pick up the sequel.

Excuse me. I'm a straight white American man, age 18-35, with disposable income. I'm pretty sure all media is supposed to be aimed at me and only me and I take any suggestion otherwise to be an attack on me personally.

So this cop was pulling someone over for speeding on the freeway, the driver slowed down, moved to the far right lane, and put on their hazards, looking for a safe place to pull over given the very narrow shoulder. Half a mile before an exit, after only 2 full minutes the cop decides they're fleeing the scene and used a PIT maneuver, flipping the small SUV. Pregnant driver is now suing the Arkansas State Police. In 2020 AK State Police used PIT maneuvers 144 times last year, double the year before, resulting in at least 3 deaths. The driver's actions followed the exact textbook procedures.

While not directly related to the trial, you can add one more upset app creator to the pile. Fanhouse, which is described as something between Only Fans and Patreon, is mad that Apple want's its full 30% for every dollar that goes through the app. This does seem like a place where Apple's distinction between physical and digital goods is particularly difficult. It also seems odd that Patreon can use third party payment solutions, but Fanhouse, which is pretty much the same model, can't. Fanhouse even suggested that Apple could take a 30% cut of Fanhouse's revenue, which is 10% of a subscription, though it's not hard to imagine why Apple wouldn't want to create that kind of precedent. They also seem to have an Android app that doesn't look like it has in-app-purchases, but it only has 5K downloads to it's not clear if Google decided to give them a pass or if they're just small enough to be under the radar for now. The Fanhouse folks make a lot of "you're taking food out of our mouths" arguments, which I'm not really inclined to agree with, but I do think more examples of Apple being inconsistent with their rules and potentially harmful to innovation is bad for their future prospects in the Epic case and other inevitable anti-trust action.

I do really wish they'd given a real number for what the "true tax rate" of the average American is, even if it was a rough estimate. At some point they mention that wage earners in their 40s typically saw their net worth expand by $65,000 a year, and slightly earlier they said the median household earned $70,000 a year, but the methodology page makes it clear the former is a subset of the latter, so the numbers can't be directly compared. In the graphic they used they showed that "typical wealth growth" was less than typical taxes, and that the typical income tax was 14%, but they either messed up or decided that ascetics were more important than data in their visualization, because the "typical taxes" box is not to scale with the income. I feel like it hurts their argument when they keep comparing apples and oranges, especially since comparing apples to apples almost certainly wouldn't change their argument, and even bolster it in some demographics. For most Americans wealth growth follows increased income, but because most of their wealth comes from wages, they pay an increasingly higher "true tax rate," obviously not the case with the billionaires they profile. I guess it would be much harder to figure out those numbers, or even how to calculate it across demographics (which is why they took such a small slice for many of their "typical" numbers), but it would be easier and more honest if you could say the median "true tax rate" of Americans is 12% or whatever.

lol

Looks like the kind of thing I can see the Animal Crossing crowd getting really into, but probably not for me.

I'm bummed we didn't see hardware, but my understanding is that Apple has expanded their R&D spending. Their last quarterly report shows a more than 10% increase YoY. We're really not that far off the release of the M1, which is by far the most significant development in chip design in a very long time. Devices as transformative as the iPhone don't happen often, regardless of how much you spend, though there's reason to suspect that Apple is at least hoping that AR glasses will be that next thing, and they're spending billions to make them a reality. I still wouldn't expect to see them for years.

That's certainly good news. If there's one aspect of Bebop that should have no trouble coming over to live action it's a rockin sound track.

I don't want to bother typing my whole crypto rant out again, but I feel like so many crypto enthusiasts seem to think of it as this panacea of untraceable currency, unhindered by government intervention, but that was never going to be the case. One of two options were inevitable: Either crypto fails such that it has no real value so it's not worth regulating, or it becomes something and governments everywhere regulate it. Even if that something is basically a digital commodity and not a functioning currency, of course the government would regulate it. The US government isn't just going to decide to ignore huge stores of value being transferred.

Just put in my pre-order. I wasn't terribly worried Insomniac would somehow fail, but it's good to see they're continuing to live up to their reputation.

I also thought it was excellent. It did an amazing job of capturing this moment in time. I was very impressed at the production values he was able to achieve as a one man show. Really great work from the projections to the color grading in individual sequences, to wrangling multiple cameras. Really great stuff.

Probably a good idea. Still, I always feel like these measures are aiming at the wrong thing. Like in CA, in NV the vast majority of the water is used up by irrigation, not by public use. The article in the OP indicates this ban should conserve a very non-trival amount of water, so I'm all for it, but it doesn't come close to addressing the real water issues. It's a bit like how congress is always fighting over a small slice of NASA or NIST or NIH budget, while the DOD gets a blank check and a guaranteed % raise year after year.

I worded that poorly and was obviously wrong, but what I was getting at is that there's no indication that they moved this movie back after switching directors and starting from scratch. They kept the production on track as well as they could and delayed it only because of Covid.

It does seem like they want to be included among the real launch companies like ULA and SpaceX but they haven't ever even shown something worth putting in the same discussion.

That was disappointing. Nothing very exciting, no hardware at all, and the changes made were less than I'd hoped for, but probably about what I expected. I do have to say that the Universal Control stuff is something that I would have loved at a certain point in my life. There was a time where I ran a triple monitor setup at work with each monitor being driven by a different computer. I used some software that basically did exactly what they showed off, and it worked between operating systems, though it was a bit temperamental. These days it's not really something I have much use for. Even though I have an iPad with a keyboard on my desk right now, I probably wouldn't enable universal control even if I could on my Windows PC. I have to imagine very few people will get a lot of use out of it, but for those that do it'll be awesome.

Somehow missed that Windows and Android users will be able to open Facetime links through the web. Not full Facetime app for other systems, and I don't think those systems can initiate a Facetime call, but that's still kind of a big deal.

Well, the iMessage stuff wasn't terribly exciting to me, but I don't use it, so I'm not one to judge. The new multitasking UI on the iPad is better, but not as big a change as I was hoping for. Also, no indication as to them changing what apps have to do to support multi-tasking, which is often my biggest pain point. Nothing like navigating the confusing UI gestures only to figure out that a certain app can't be run side-by-side. The homescreen changes also feel minimal. Basically the iPad gets some of last years updates to the iPhone. Still no option to add more apps to the huge iPad screen. Why they keep that grid so small is beyond me, and I don't even have a 12.3" version. The website and app privacy reports seem like a good idea. Transparency is one of the best things a company like Apple can do to show individual users how their data is being used. I'm interested in the idea they'll be blocking IP addresses. Honestly not sure how big of a deal that is for how apps and websites track users, but I have the feeling it'll be pretty significant.

Pretty much my thoughts as well. I am wondering if Dr Strange 2 somehow key to the next phase of the MCU or if this is just another example of Disney refusing to move release dates no matter what (an insistence I've often found puzzling.) As always I'm curious what kind of creative differences can lead to a split like this, but we probably will never really know.

Happy to see it's being well received. We'll probably be watching it this coming weekend.

WWDC 2021 will be starting soon, at 10am PDT. It could be quite an interesting show. Lots of rumors of what we might see, and lots of weird pressure on Apple in the wake of the Epic trial. I've heard rumors (or perhaps simply hopes) that we'll see new 16" MacBook Pros, probably with a new M1x or M2 SoC, which would give us our first insights into how Apple plans to scale up towards high performance chips. There are rumors that we'll get better multitasking on the iPad, but I wouldn't be surprised if all we get are widgets. I'd love for some crazy iPad action, like true windowing or anything else to justify putting an M1 in the iPad Pro, but I won't hold my breath. The twitter hashtag emoji and the splash screen indicates something with iMessage. It's a hugely outside shot, but it's plausible they open up iMessage to Android to lessen some anti-trust concerns, but odd are it's likely just some new junk they've thrown in there. I doubt they'll even acknowledge it, but whatever they say it'll be hard for Apple to escape the cloud of the Epic trial and Tim Cook essentially saying that Apple owns and deserves to profit on every piece of software sold in their store. They could try playing up how great they are to devs and how many opportunities Apple provides to them, but they might just try and sidestep the issue entirely and talk about privacy or how fast the new chips are the whole time. We'll find out soon enough.

On the bright side, Facebook will no longer treat posts by politicians by their own set of rules. So if Trump does get his account back, he'd probably break the rules right quick.

DF covers it in their video (starting ~3:15). Basically, there's a "fake" light source that follows the main character (or often any character in a cutscene) so they're more evenly or just better illuminated. The recent demo had some very intense hero lighting for Alloy. It's a stylistic choice more than anything.