OkayPhysicist

Their donation revenue was alright for a pretty significant chunk of that time. For the first decade it was ~$5k/month, which jumped up to ~$10k/month for the second decade before the Steam release.

Toady wasn't exactly raking in the cash, but he didn't need another job.

I pretty strongly disagree. I can see some preferring some fan art style over the official one, even if I don't. But the official gui having support for rendering all the various critters, and factoring in clothing, multi-level, etc, really made the Steam version's graphics vastly better than anything else that was available at the time.

Edge still doesn't have a market share as big as Chrome, even among desktop browsers. Chrome is still a behemoth at 70% of all desktop browser usage.

I can't fix society. I can, however, take a pill that lets me hold down a job long enough to not fall into crippling debt.

Historically, they did a big update every year or two. Since the Steam release, they've sped up significantly, with medium sized updates every 2-3 months.

FYI, the newer versions with their mouse-driven interface solve a lot of those issues. Dwarf Therapist (the RAM reading tool you were thinking of) isn't needed any more, because there are much better in-game tools for managing what kinds of work certain dwarves do. The new menu layouts are a lot more discoverable, allowing you to find most things with just a little bit of clicking around (and the descriptions of stuff are a lot better now, so no more googling "what the heck is a quern?"). I miss the old keyboard controls sometimes, but they're gradually adding them back in the form of shortcuts. DFHack is still around, and basically necessary for automating some of the more fiddly resource chains (stuff like, "request 50 trees get cut down out of this patch of forest if our number of logs gets below 200").

I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.

Religiously subscribing to every "cornerstone of great game design" is how you end up with the plain oatmeal of videogames. Inoffensive, bland, and easily forgotten.

I, for one, hate games spoonfeeding me. Most games are unlikely to be a player's first videogame. I don't need every damn mechanic tutorialized. Present me with my toolbox, and let me get to it.

No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of.

Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.

If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.

If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.

I'm in a similar, but less extreme boat. The new interface has its perks, especially in terms of discoverability, but for tasks that need to be done repeatedly (request 10 beds be made before you have a manager, for example), you really miss the ability to rock some chords.

You're completely missing the point. The Fed did a fantastic job, because they could have given a pretty good estimate of that number in 1914. If you had asked someone in 1814 what a dollar would be worth in 1914, hell, 1824, they would have been guessing, and been wildly wrong.

Making sure that the nitwits stuffing their mattresses with dollar bills maintain their net worth is not the goal of our monetary policy, nor is a good goal. The goal is to ensure predictability.

By design. Having a slightly positive inflation rate gives you a cushion against deflation, which tends to cause market crashes. A currency I can be confident will lose a couple percent yearly is more useful than one that might be worth wildly different amounts year to year.

If you scroll down a bit on this page, you can see the massive inflation/deflation spikes in ~10yr cycles that existed prior to central banking.

https://www.in2013dollars.com/

That stopped working for me on my mobile firefox (but not on my desktop) literally yesterday. It's pretty clear they're doing some kind of A/B testing.

I volunteered with homeless youth in LA, and it can be even more practical than that. When you're homeless, you definitionally don't have somewhere secure to sleep. When you're sleeping, you're vulnerable, to theft or violence (either by other homeless people, or the cops). So you don't sleep much, and sleep lightly. That leaves you exhausted. All the time. You need some energy to work whatever hours you can find at your woefully inadequate part time jobs, so you start using stimulants. That works for a while, but now you can't get any sleep, and the extreme stress of your perilous existence is only exasperated by stimulant abuse. At some point, depressants are the only real option to get some rest. And, as a lovely side effect, they make things feel okay. There's a reason you don't find a lot of otherwise-fine heroin addicts, unlike, say, coke or meth. Mostly, the feeling of opiates is just contentment. The addictive potential is closely tied to how miserable your unmedicated life is. Which, you know, for someone sleeping in the backseat of a 30 year old car in sketchy part of town or worse, is pretty fucking miserable.

And that's how someone can go from scared 14yo runaway to bartering favors for drugs in like, a year. Hell, I'd go even further and say that all the assholes blaming homelessness on mental health issues have the causality backwards, too. Living under constant stress would break anybody's psyche. Not to mention the fact that for most people I was helping, their lives before they were homeless weren't exactly rosy, either.

Libertarian views have always been relatively commonplace in the tech scene. Being a fan of Ayn Rand probably put you in the majority, but left-libertarian views were commonplace, too.

Calling for ethnic cleansing is not a libertarian belief. It is a fascist belief. "Privately owned roads are a good idea" and "Let's round up all the gypsies" are not equivalently debatable ideas.

For restaurants, you typically tip on your card. After you're done with your meal, the server will leave a folio with the reciept. You look over the reciept, make sure it's right, and then put your card in the folio, and leave it near the end of the table. The server will pick up the folio, go and run your card, then bring back the folio, with your card, and 2 copies of the receipt. One is for you to keep, the other has a tip line, and a place to sign. Once you fill that out, you're free to leave. No further back and forth is required from you.

Bars have a similar process, but with the added "close it out or keep it open" option on each drink. To tip on the first drink as suggested, you can close out and then run a tab for the rest of the evening, but cash is easier.

Rideshares and food delivery will have tip options for card.

The only one you really need cash for is tipping hotel cleaners. Not sure why no one has figured out a solution for that one yet.

Yes, I have both been a server, and regularly spend time with people who still work as servers. My whole point is that we did benefit from it, by making much fatter paychecks than we would otherwise.

My price discrimination comment was admittedly unclear, since I tangled up two chains of reasoning. Restaurants make some amount of money from customers. Some of that money goes to the owners, some of that goes to labor. Price discrimination schemes (i.e., charging people willing to pay more, more, and people willing to pay less, less), by their nature, extract more money from customers. So restaurants with price discrimination schemes have more money total to split between labor and the owners.

Thus, we'd expect that labor makes more money at a restaurant with a price discrimination scheme than at one with flat pricing.

Culturally expected tipping is a specific price discrimination scheme, that has the cultural and legal rules to disproportionately benefit the labor. Other price discrimination schemes lack these rules, so we'd expect some of the excess value extracted from customers to be taken by the owners, rather than labor.

Thus, Labor at restaurants with tipping get paid more than labor at restaurants with other price discrimination schemes, which get paid more than labor at restaurants with flat rate pricing.

Tipping culture is not an exploitation of the servers. If you're morally opposed to (even voluntary) price discrimination, you might be able to frame it as being exploitative against the customers. But of all the ways to structure a restaurant, tipping is one of the most effective at inflating servers' pay checks, which I struggle to imagine how you can frame as exploiting said servers.

A neutral tip for table service is somewhere between 15% and 25%. If you're in that range, you're not explicitly sending a signal to staff that you are exceptionally pleased or displeased. 15% might come off as a bit cheap, 25% as a bit generous, but the waitstaff will assume it's a you thing as opposed to a "your opinion of them" thing. Above or below that, and you're making a statement, intentionally or not. Less than 15%, you're saying you were displeased with the service you were provided. Only ever go below 10% if staff took deliberate action against you, and don't go back to that restaurant again.

At bars, 20%, or a buck or two a beer is perfectly acceptable. Cocktails should be tipped better, tied to how much effort it takes to prepare them. If you're going to be at the same bar for a few drinks, consider tipping generously on the first drink to help you get quicker service on future drinks.

At hotels, leave housekeeping $5-$10 a night, using the pen and pad of paper in the bedside drawer to leave a note indicating that the cash is for them.

10% on rideshares and taxis, $5-$10 on food delivery.

Pretty sure that's a pretty exhaustive list of places it's a significant faux pas to not tip. You'll be prompted to tip at a lot of fast-casual (order at the counter) places, but it's unlikely to be taken an insult if you don't. Anything higher than 10% is exceptional.

The entire point of tips is that they are the workers', 100%. It's also a variable cost based on the willingness to pay, so it creates a form of price discrimination, where those willing to spend more, spend more, those wanting to spend less, spend less.

Those two factors lead to the inescapable conclusion that tipped staff make more money. Price discrimination captures surplus value that simply is not available to schemes that don't use price discrimination, and any new price discrimination scheme would almost certainly benefit the employer at least in addition to the employees, if not be entirely captured by the owners.

Combined with the, let's say "extra judicial tax incentives", non-tipping restaurants simply cannot compete with tipping-norm restaurants for service staff. In an environment where tipping exists everywhere else, you then get an adverse selection pressure for shitty waitstaff, because if they were competent they would be working somewhere that competency would earn them tips. Which piles on top of the dealignment of incentives to create substantially lower quality service.

The after-meal ask is to see if 1) you want dessert or 2) you want your soft drink refilled or to purchase an additional alcoholic beverage. Honestly, I think the "waiters keep pestering me" perception from Europeans is heavily influenced by the refill checks, which by-and-large aren't a thing in Europe.

Only with intent to defraud is it a crime in America to deface US currency. Shaving a bit of the copper off every penny you touch, to melt down and profit from? Crime. Scribbling off the 1 on a $10 bill and scribbling on a 2? Crime. Cutting up pennies to show off the unmatched strength of your shitty kitchen shears? Perfectly legal.

Micronesia is, too, a country. Referring to the Federated States of Micronesia as "Micronesia" is just as legitimate as referring to the USA as "America".

Just because someone is willing to build it doesn't mean it has to be you.

We may all play some part in societies that have some degree of monstrous outcomes, but I feel like staying on the "tragic civilian casualty" side versus the "legitimate target" side of a freedom fighter's bombing campaign is probably the way to go.

That is not how the legal system works in the US. Criminal charges are brought by the State, not the victim. The only exception is in 6 states (Kansas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, and Oklahoma) where a sufficiently large group of civilians can compel the courts to form a grand jury (think a couple hundred people). Still isn't the victim bringing charges.

When I was working on my thesis, I had an appendix of annotated source code that was generated by a series of Julia macros that effectively turned my code inside out to make a LaTeX document. The custom macro-comments became the bulk of the LaTeX source, the code got wrapped in some environment that presented it with syntax highlighting and all that.

I was halfway through implmenting the syntax highlighting Vim plugin for the resulting Julia-LaTeX hybrid format when I realized that I had an actual deadline coming up, and just accepted solid-color LaTeX source.

I occasionally have several browsers open when doing web-dev work, to make sure everything looks right on all browsers. There was also a period of time where I got into the habit of opening netflix in Chrome, despite being a Firefox ride-or-die, because Firefox didn't support the DRM that Netflix required to stream higher resolution video, but either that changed or I got sick of the juggling.

California base overtime schedule is 1x for 8 hours in a day, 1.5x for the next 4 hours in a day, then 2x for any time after that. Additionally, any time above 40 hrs in a workweek or on a 7th day of consecutive work in a workweek gets 1.5x, and any time after 8 on that 7th day gets 2x.

Thus, it's possible to only get paid your base rate for 16 hours in a workweek, if you work more than 40 hours in the first 2 days of the week. For example, if I worked 24 hours on Monday, and 16 hours on Tuesday, I'd be making 1x * 8hrs on Monday + 1.5x*4hrs on Monday + 2x*12 hours on Monday, then 1x*8hrs on Tuesday + 1.5x*4hrs on Tuesday + 2x*4hrs on Tuesday. On every subsequent day of that week, my standard workday would be paid at 1.5x for the first 12 hours, then 2x for any time after that, until the seventh consecutive day, where I'd get 1.5x for 8hrs, then 2x after that.

All together, in California, if you work 24/7 for a week, you end up with

16hrs@1x + 64hrs@1.5x + 88hrs at 2x, netting out to an effective 188hrs per week.

IMO, this whole system is a little busted owing to the fixed workweek (it's not "any 7 day period", it's "over the course of a recurring 7 day schedule")

You're conflating "written language" with "language". While it's still far from impossible to find people who can't read or write, it's exceptionally difficult to find adults with no grasp of any spoken language.

As someone who has a secular fascination with religion and its interplay with history, I don't think reading the Bible has the same value that the author thinks it does. Most people who get really into bible scholarship don't go read the bible -> become a Christian. It's nearly universally the other way around. If you are religious, reading a holy text feels meaningful and profound. Meaningfulness and profundity being hallmarks of a good religious experience, they become convinced if more people simply read their holy text, more people would convert.

Problem is, that's not how this works. If you aren't already primed to find it profound, it's a pretty dull read that's about half "I know this part already through cultural osmosis" and the rest split between "too boring for anyone to really care about" and "directly contradictory to other parts, and there probably have been historical schisms about it".

It's worth reading in the same way any other cultural touchstone work is worth reading, but if you're going to force yourself to get through a long, dry text that has fundamentally steered the course of history, I'd recommend some Hegel first.

I was under the impression that there was a gap between Panama and Ecuador that made that trip impossible by road. How did you make that leg?

To answer that you'd need to know what even constitutes vocal language. There's a number of languages that make extensive use of clicks and whistles that would seem to me are pretty orthogonal to the ability to pronounce, say, English.

We know from their remains that Neanderthals would have had a rather different range of vocalizations from Homo sapiens, but that doesn't mean they didn't have structured language.