*Uninstall Windows, problem solved.

FTFY

A bit confusing to read. The points are placed on the y-axis using ordinals rather than cardinals. This means if you were to extend the plotting (say, up to 200) it would cause the existing data points to move around. That’s not usually what we expect when plotting data.

Edit: actually, the problem is more severe than I initially thought. If the y-axis were plotted with cardinals (the way we usually plot data) then the German case would show 10 horizontal lines, immediately revealing a pattern in the data (caused by Germans speaking the ones digit before the tens digit).

Seems pretty clear to me: they’re going after the Lego and Minecraft crowd. That is, little kids.

I prefer to think of the creator of the meme as an American and all the awkwardness and sexual undertones are fully intended!

Do you have a source for this?

It’s really simple: Microsoft is a business solutions company. Microsoft helps your boss spy on you at work. Your boss is their customer, not you.

Apple is a consumer products company. You are their customer. They market their products on privacy and security. Betraying that marketing message by spying on users is shooting themselves in the foot, so they’re incentivized not to do that.

Neither company is trustworthy. Economic incentives are the trustworthy concept here. Barring screwups, we can trust both companies to do what is profitable to them. Microsoft profits by spying on users, Apple does not (not right now anyway).

There’s a big issue with using weight classes in team sports: player weights vary dramatically. Take the NFL for example. Setting aside the enormous differences in weight between linemen (offensive and defensive) and all other position players, there are also huge weight differences within a given position. For example, quarterback Jared Lorenzen was 6’4” and weighed 275 lbs whereas Russell Wilson is 5’11” and weighs 211 lbs. That’s a huge weight difference!

You can find similar weight differences across players in other leagues (NHL, NBA, and MLB). Weights don’t really correlate with overall skill level though they do somewhat correlate with position and skill set (and height of course).

How would you classify by weight in team sports? You might think to do it by position but none of the leagues require a player to remain at a single position for their career. Players can and do switch positions, and many even do so multiple times during a game. Sports like NBA basketball don’t even have any particular rules about what a player at any given position is allowed/not allowed to do, so the positions on team rosters are more like a suggestion than a requirement.

Dark Matter isn’t a theory. It’s a feature of some theories to account for otherwise unexplained phenomena (galactic rotation curves, microlensing, the structure of the CMB) but no one knows what Dark Matter actually consists of. It’s basically a placeholder which is compelling for some reasons (theories without Dark Matter tend to explain some but not all of the above phenomena) but not compelling for others (unable to determine what the stuff is made of).

The aether came about by an argument from ignorance rather than the observations. Until the discovery of the wave-like nature of light it was believed that all waves travel in some medium, like the waves on water. Then it was assumed there must be some medium for light as well. But this was an invalid assumption without any evidence to back it up.

I mean the Gimp in particular. My point is that if we could suddenly wish the Gimp into non-existence (a counterfactual) then we could get a do-over. But because the Gimp actually exists it occupies a niche that could go to something better. Instead of banding together to create a better tool, people just grumble a bit and then use the Gimp (or hand over their wallet to Adobe).

I think my biggest issue with the Gimp is that it simply exists. If it didn’t exist there’d be a huge hole in the free software space and people would get together to build software to fill it. But of course there’s no guarantee that would actually produce something better.

Maybe the real problem with the Gimp is that it’s built to scratch an itch for its own developers who are used to its bizarre UIs and workflows. For all the people I’ve seen complaining about the Gimp over the years, none have stepped up to create an alternative. I think this is likely due to the intersection between visual arts people and software engineers being extremely small (and likely most working for Adobe already).

Ideology is one of those words that has become almost useless due to how many different (and contradictory) definitions people have for it. If you have to define a word for someone (and they already knew that word beforehand) then the word isn’t conveying enough meaning!

This was covered in a great talk by Soren Johnson (lead designer of Civ IV): Playing to Lose: AI and Civilization.

His main thesis is that players constantly demand stronger AI (that doesn’t cheat) but when they try it they hate it. The issue is that strong AI doesn’t role-play like an actual historical leader, it plays like a “gamer” who will stop at nothing to win.

That is, strong AI opponents treat Civ like a game of poker and they’ll use every possible means of defeating you. They’re not reliable allies or trading partners, they’re bluffing, duplicitous liars.

Human players who play against such AIs report a very negative experience. Many of the diplomacy functions in the game become rather useless against such an untrustworthy AI, and the whole situation devolves into something more akin to “turn-based Warcraft” rather than Civilization.

Lots of things are poisonous to dogs but just fine for us: chocolate, onions, garlic, avocados, cherries, grapes, tomato leaves, rhubarb, coffee, tea (basically any caffeine), alcohol (in the quantities humans drink), macadamia nuts, apricot (for the same reason as cherries: cyanide), starfruit…

And that’s the most naïve way of looking at it. With more data you may be able to see if Linux users favour certain genres of games over others, so the number may be a lot higher than 2% for your game in particular.

More like Chinese chef knives!

The difficulty setting in Civilization games has never been “how smart is the AI.” The AI always plays with the same level of “intelligence” (which is almost none). What the difficulty setting controls is how much the AI cheats (which is a ton at the highest levels) and how aggressive it is.

My problem with Civ 5 (as a player of the series since the beginning) is that they’ve added a ton of stuff to the game that doesn’t actually make it more interesting or challenging to play. At the same time, instead of improving the AI to make it more interesting and challenging to play against, they decided to hobble all of the strong strategies from the early games in a way that just makes the game more annoying to play.

The fun part of the Civ series has always been about building the largest, most technologically advanced empire and steamrolling all the AI’s cities. Since Civ 5 this has been flat out impossible due to the changes they made to the game which cause exponential corruption / waste for large empires and the inability to stack units which means large armies are extremely tedious to manage.

Can you name a non-bad single player strategy game?

Haskell does both! Most people prefer to use whitespace when writing Haskell but it’s not required. Braces and semicolons are preferred if you’re going to be generating Haskell code.

No way! That stache absolutely fits the look of a 19th century British big game hunter prowling the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa.

That’s what grandma’s house looked like in the 90’s. Exact same way it looked in the 50’s when she and grandpa first moved in!