594 karma · joined March 15, 2020
Trees, on the other hand, are scary.
The problem is that it's a global simulator: this is a major part of its appeal and marketing. If you only ever plan to fly airliners between handcrafted payware cities, it will look pretty great. As soon as you start flying VFR outside those points, the generated terrain shows its limits. I don't fly it often, but when last I flew:
* The generator couldn't handle windmills. You would see them as flat, projected images on the landscape with no 3d asset.
* It can't handle boats. Again, they're rendered as flat images on the water. Marinas in particular look bad, because they fade out as they get away from shore.
* It can't handle washes. You'll fly over the desert and see a glossy sheen of reflective water where the sim thinks there should be a waterway, but it's quite obvious that no water was present when photos were taken.
* It can't handle meandering streams. You'll see that same glossy sheen cutting a straight line over the terrain, while the photographed stream meanders back and forth.
* It can't handle bridges: you'll see cars drive right through the bridge and along the terrain underneath it.
Google was like "Hey, FEC, we're planning to do this thing; is it illegal? Our lawyers want to know if this counts as a campaign contribution before we start doing it and accidentally break the law". The FEC considered it and replied with a public letter stating that, in their opinion, this isn't a crime.
Final AO: https://www.fec.gov/files/legal/aos/2022-14/2022-14.pdf
Any other email provider could do the same now of course: it's just an opinion about the law, not a rule specific to Google.
Google also could have gone ahead and just done it, of course, but having the AO in hand puts the lawyers at ease.
This is incorrect. September is a hearing on defendants' motions to dismiss.
Not especially relevant, but of mild interest: this case is with Judge Alsup (of Oracle v Google).
https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
Note that "on information and belief" is lawyeresse for "we don't know this is true, we only have suspicion". Claims 76, 77, 82, and 85 (as well as a lot of the complaint) are so hedged. The claims they're not hedging are more limited: basically "Meta employees were paid to update a database of dangerous individuals and organizations, and Meta shared this database with others (75)" and "OnlyFans' parent company Fenix has a presence in Hong Kong and other countries (78-81)". Claims 76, 77, 82, and 85 must be true... because the alternative would be devastating to their case /s.
There is very little of substance in the complaint. In all seriousness, I think plaintiffs have read public sentiment against tech companies, and I imagine their strategy here is to throw as much mud as they can, bamboozle some credulous journalists, and hope Meta et al settle to avoid bad PR.
But even using Mercurial day-to-day, I had to look up whether `hg strip` or `hg uncommit` has `evolve` integration (no and yes, respectively), and I'm not sure I could fix botched history edits.
Consider just the simple task of "forget about the last commit I made." Mercurial has like five different ways to do this (hg rollback, hg uncommit, hg strip, hg prune, hg histedit), which work in three totally different ways under the hood (obsolescence markers, backup bundles, or just YOLOing it in the case of Rollback), and which may change their behavior depending on whether you're using `evolve`. As a novice, it's not clear which you should be using (hint: use the evolve extension) or how to recover from mistakes.
Git also has several ways to do it, but all operating on the same principles. Whether you `git reset` or `git branch -m`, or `echo $(git rev-parse $BRANCH~) > .git/refs/heads/$BRANCH`, you're just moving pointers around, and the reflog makes recovery simple.
It's weird to me that these multi-billion dollar companies are investing so much R&D money into supporting my niche hobby, but I suppose I shouldn't complain.
I can at least understand the motivation of such laws when it comes to essentials like food or water (although many would argue that such laws do more harm than good by erasing market signals), but inability to run the latest video games in 4K isn't an emergency.
It's nothing specific to recent supply chain disruptions. The problem is that manufacturers have relatively inflexible capacity. Scaling foundry capacity isn't as easy as scaling cloud resources; they can't just decide to produce 10x as much product in a given month. Simultaneously, these are status goods for which consumers place a high premium on having the latest and greatest. Even with perfectly functioning supply chains, the market price for such goods is always going to be high on release and taper off as supply increases.
They can't be "sole suppliers" because they would need to beat out everyone else running a bot. As a consequence, they're not able to price goods arbitrarily high. (But, as usual, efficient price discovery tends to be viewed as evil by consumers).
Even if the price moves suddenly and they're forced to take a haircut, the low barrier to entry means other resellers can enter the market.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/68186/toe-toe-nuklr-comb...
I guess it's included as an easy way to access the fast hardware supported implementation, on architectures where it is available.
If you know anyone within Google, I suggest privately asking their experiences, rather than sampling only those people who are mad about Google on HN.
But really, it shouldn't be on senders to care about how their messages are routed at all. USPS should be able to accept a message, digitally, addressed to a specific individual, and then route it either to an email address or a physical address, per the recipient's preferences.