Argurotoxus

Agreed. The author seems like a bummer of a person to me.

Collecting data on users is not inherently bad, there are lots of ways that data collection can be used to the user's benefit.

If course in this day in age that is typically not the case and companies are normally collecting data at the detriment of the user but I really don't see that with what Wrapped shows.

Plus it's fun to see little metrics like how many times I listened to a song this year, or see how my listening habits changed as the year went by.

It's just a fun and cute thing imo.

I feel people are way too quick to jump down Biden's throat for the rail union.

First off, it's worth noting he continued to work with the railroad to get the employees the sick pay they wanted on the back end.

But in the midst of the situation... I'm not going to pretend this hypothetical is completely correct. But I don't think it's crazy.

Imagine you're Biden and you hear about this railroad strike. Your advisors are telling you if the strike goes through how many rail passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere, how much food is just going to go to waste and not make it to various towns, which factories manufacturing hospital equipment will be without material and unable to continue production. On top of a gigantic economic impact there could be deaths associated with the strike.

Imagine you're that guy and have to make the call to say nope, I don't care, the strike continues.

I'm super pro labor and anti corporation and even I would struggle to make that call. Especially if someone proposes the idea that on the backside of forcing the railroad workers to work we could pressure the railroad to give into the demands.

I'm not saying he's perfect and I'm not saying there wasn't a better way. But I think that hypothetical is plausible. And I think people are too quick to forget that often times these decisions are which tragic situation would you rather allow to happen, and it's not as clear cut as it sounds.

Edit: Oh yeah, the comparison. This time, cars don't get built and these corporations will see problems to their bottom line. The impact to human life isn't there. The economic impact still may be, but it's not as devastating across the board like shutting down the railroad would be. Much easier decision to make.

Mr. Happy if you like anything Final Fantasy! Excellent stuff and he goes deep into all lore.

Josh Strife Hayes also does a good job just in general.

I'm still sad that steamingpileofshit.com finally got killed. I think within the last year or two.

Used to redirect to steam.com since the old days when everybody hated Steam lol. It's hugely improved now and I love everything that GabeN has done for the PC gaming community; Steam being a huge part of it.

But I still laugh a bit at the old days.

If you enjoyed FFXVI, it's worth considering FFXIV.

It's currently free to play through its first expansion and the second expansion will be free next year. So it's a safe game to try from that perspective.

The producer of FFXIV is the same as FFXVI. His mentality has been that he's wanted players who don't want to play an MMO to be able to play through FFXIV's story as if it were a mainline FF game. I'd say 95% of story content can be soloed at this point.

The two caveats are these: This is like playing through five full length JRPGs. To finish FFXIV's story takes months. It's easily 400+ hours of playtime imo.

The initial base game story, called A Realm Reborn or ARR is mediocre. It's not bad, but the story quality spikes up in a big way at the first expansion and then never backs down. Even the end of ARR is really good, but it's only decent up until then. However, after ARR is some of the best story writing I've ever had the pleasure to play. Shadowbringers and Endwalker in particular still bring tears to my eyes when I hear certain songs or rewatch some cutscenes. Truly a beautifully told story.

I just use Kenji's recipe off serious eats. Obviously I go for the feta and black olives, I don't do the artichoke hearts though I bet they'd be good.

I also sadly cut out the spicy pepper because my wife can't take the heat. If it were only me eating I'd definitely be throwing in a few Serrano peppers at a minimum.

I do! I use Kenji's recipe from serious eats:

https://www.seriouseats.com/shakshuka-north-african-shirred-eggs-tomato-pepper-recipe

Looks really nice. Super solid sear and the taters and veg are on point too.

Did you do that just in a cast iron?

I agree with the NDA comment, it's difficult to give a lot of the cool details without breaking NDA.

I feel pretty safe in saying that I'm working to come up with new ways to melt glass for our process in order to be more flexible about what compositions we're able to use. That's a pretty fun one for me.

I'm sure there are people who genuinely find that kind of work to be really cool, but I'm with you. It wasn't enough for me.

I just could not get motivated over my projects being "Maybe we should store the pallets right here in packaging instead of 100ft away on the other side of the building" or "Let's replace the screwdrivers in assembly with drills to increase productivity". Who the fuck needs an engineering degree to tell them that drills are way faster than screwdrivers?

Let alone the bullshittery around monitoring every minute of each employee's day and trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of it. One manager gave an entire presentation about how if every operator is 1 minute late coming back to their station from break it adds up to like 2 full weeks for 1 employee by the end of the year.

Like...I saw that manager gossiping with HR for anywhere from like 15-45 minutes every day. But here we're trying to harass our employees for taking ONE EXTRA MINUTE of their 30 minute lunch break.

I just couldn't. Continuous Improvement can be cool but not when it's that kind of stuff, not to me anyway.

Just wanted to say that if you feel similarly and it's making you miserable there are cool engineering jobs out there. Even Continuous Improvement can be really fun if the manufacturing process is complex and requires actual engineering to improve.

I grabbed Terraria and Tiny Tina's Wonderland. Looking forward to them both! Gonna boot up Terraria now, Tiny Tina's Wonderland will have to wait until some friends are free.

I'd like to hear about a long-term plan. I've heard things such as level 100 will be the final level cap. I've heard about potentially making 7.0 a "second start point" to make the game more accessible to future players as the story continues to grow. I want to know if they're going to continue adding 2 jobs per expansion because it seems like at this point continuing that level of growth will be too much.

I'm hoping we get some confirmation around the future of the game. It's an old game. Talking pure craziness here, maybe it makes sense for 7.0 to be FFXIV's final expansion, but they have a way to export your character into FFXVII or something like that.

I dunno! But I hope to hear more about the distant future.