fiercely confident of their own independence

In fairness, if you let the average cat out into nature it would be fine. Dump the average libertarian into nature and they wont last the night.

This is a fair point. If people demanded their money back when a film has bad audio, I wonder if that might incentivise the industry to care more about this.

This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.

If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they’re shouting, that’s not adding realism, they’re doing bad acting.

If the sound engineers can’t get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that’s not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they’re bad at mixing.

If the director can’t keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that’s not artistic choice, they’ve made a bad film.

I’m surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it’s pretty good. I’m also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem

Yes, this helps, thanks.

I already understood the need to avoid private money agents like Paypal, visa, etc. In the UK we have the BACS and FPS systems that allow for direct free money transfer. Though they should be more usable for day to day transactions, they work well enough if you need to send a significant amount of money between bank accounts.

Your explanation of the anonymity seems like the real value add of these digital currencies. The fact this only applies to the buyer and not the seller is a good choice, and definitely wins over blockchain crypto. Looking at it more closely, the fact they use signed tokens rather than proof-of-x is also a very good choice.

I will need to read up on Taler’s docs more closely. But looking at the summary of features on their site something hits me as an immediate problem - you need to “load up” a wallet. If Jane Doe wants to buy a coffee, it’s far easier to just use a bank card (which may interface through a private money agent like visa, or a middleman like google/apple). Loading up private wallets isn’t a difficult concept (it’s how gift cards work), but it does add extra steps of friction that I think will need to be removed before this can really be taken up by the general public.

It may harm the anonymity aspect, but I think that to get people using it a system that could operate like a tap-once-and-done bank card payment, loading up a wallet for immediate spend seems like the best solution. It would also help alleviate any fears that typically are associated with blockchain based digital currency - primarily of losing the signed digital money as it sits in a wallet out with the bank account’s protections. And once the system is normalised and people are used to it, then all the architecture is there for anyone that really needs the anonymity.

There’s something I’m really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the “Digital euro” idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that’s new?

Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it’s just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what’s actually new when we’re talking about digital currency like this post?

There must be something I’m missing here.

For a brief brief moment I was elated when I parsed the title as ‘Palantir says it has given up on AI’. Then I read the article and was left dejected.

Adjusted to the initial sale value of the car - Less easy to cheat by not declaring income, and bigger cars (likely more expensive) that take up more space, pay more.

Absolutely. Screenshots of 3d desktop cube on ubuntu more than a decade ago is what taught me linux existed. It’s an absolutely terrible and inefficient way to run desktop workspaces, but it hooked me all the same.

Users need to know what this dot means, and some like children or the elderly will likely not understand the ramifications

A true “Thanks Obama” for modern times

https://jisho.org/word/可愛い

those kanji in that order are read as “kawaii”

OK, but all the ticks can go die in a fire

Absolutely all foreigners - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly67j35y99o

ahem, that’s PROFESSOR Hanks, thank you very much

“Key franchises”? And they don’t think WW is a key franchise? Out of all their films from the past few years, the WW ones have been some of the best. If they don’t want to do anything with it, they don’t deserve the IP.

The biggest challenge with an “owned wealth” tax is how do you actually measure it? It’s easy if it’s held in cash in a bank, but most billionaire’s wealth is is land, property, and how do you measure the value of a Picasso stored in a vault if they can slip the valuator a grand to say it’s worthless?

Closing offshore money transfer loopholes, heightened tax on luxury spending (100% VAT on private jets and yachts?), making fines income-based, and treating capital gains the same way as income, are all more achievable.

I’m totally on board with the sentiment though.

There’s no need to be concerned because they’re never going to build 100,000 new homes, never mind the 1.5M target. Building enough homes to house people would cause supply to meet demand and make the housing market “crash”. And Labour will never upset those who’ve been tricked into thinking that home property is an investment.

I’m not sure if this counts as gameplay mechanics or rather narrative structure, but games like Outer Wilds, Fez, Tunic, where the exploration and discovery of the game is the end goal of playing the game, not just getting to the game’s end state.

I’m not sure if there’s an accepted term for these games, but I’ve always thought of them as “archaeology” games. There’s a bunch of stuff, both plot and gameplay, that is hidden (sometimes in plain sight), until you discover it and find out what meaning it carries.

Just use PCGW for that https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Avowed#Game_data