Genshin Impact until these last few months had exactly what @onnekas@sopuli.xyz is suggesting on Google Play. You could redeem Google Play points for a voucher that gave you $3 off a real money purchase. Additionally, devs on Reddit would often post codes to give a set dollar amount off of a new app. I’m pretty positive that at least with Google Play, vouchers that can give $X off a purchase are baked into the platform in numerous ways.

this vehicle was travelling over 200km/hr. It hit a cement barrier. That car could have been made of bubble wrap, it wasnt going to be pretty, no matter what.

The car looked like this after burning to a crisp. That’s a survivable wreck any day of the week (assuming seatbelts and airbags were in working order) but of course for the burning. The story says they hit a guard rail and eventually a cement pillar. Given the image, it doesn’t look like it was a head on collision and the passenger compartment is still in its original shape, so they were not likely to have been doing 200 kph by the time they hit the cement pillar. Guard rails (and I know this from experience with an unfortunate black ice incident that harmed nobody) will slow a car down quite a bit in not a whole lot of time, they’re not just there for show. My experience totalled the car, but it saved my whole family’s life by getting us down from 65 mph to 0 mph safely and in a very short period of time. It was shocking to see how short the deceleration had been once we drove past it in the daylight the following day and saw the tiny marks in the shoulder and the railing from our crash.

Crucially, one of the occupants of this Tesla crash did in fact survive, which makes it pretty clear what the survivability of the crash was. The fact is that people on the scene couldn’t get the car open from the outside and people that probably would have had a chance at otherwise being saved, burned to a crisp. You can say that the 125mph made it so they were doomed any way you look at it, but there were rescuers on the scene trying to get people out and the one person they managed to get out did in fact survive, so it’s probably disingenuous to claim that the battery fire and egress issues didn’t have anything to do with the deaths.

I’m not anti EV. My primary ride is an EV these days and I love it enough to say that everyone should drive an EV if they can manage, but claiming that the speed involved meant anyone in any vehicle would have met the same fate is probably not squaring with the reality here. The rescuer who saved the one passenger was surprised later that 4 other people had died, he claimed that it was hard to see other passengers in the car because of the thick smoke inside. I’m not saying that standard mechanical door handles would have saved the day for those 4, but it certainly seems like the lack thereof didn’t help, the battery fire component certainly made a bad situation worse, and the Model Y’s “unbreakable” laminate glass windows probably also pushed the equation more towards deadly than dangerous. I’ll admit that the press loves to bag on an EV, but there are legit dangers with battery damage and Tesla isn’t doing any favors for addressing them by making manual egress more difficult than it has to be with their design choices.

I voted Harris in Utah. I had been trying to convince everyone I could that she was a better option than being complicit in Trump taking office again, and of roughly 12 people I was working on, I think I might have convinced a single person to swing to Harris, the rest went with Chase Oliver or wrote in someone they knew. 🙄

I think there’s a fair few of you. Don’t feel bad.

https://ff8isthe.best/

has a working algorithm

I think the true genius of Bluesky is that it doesn’t have A algorithm, it has a framework that allows users to build their own algorithms, share them with others, and subscribe to the algorithms from people whose tastes you trust. They did the same thing with moderation making it possible to build your own moderation tools, share them, and use those constructed by others you trust.

It’ll be abused by the trolls who love the sound of their own voice and embrace the echo chamber of their choosing, but the flip side is that none of the rest of us have to suffer those idiots if we don’t want to. It’s not a perfect solution to the Paradox of Tolerance, but it’s good enough.

Playtron is all in on Crypto nonsense, so of course SquareEnix is coming along for the ride. I wouldn’t get too excited, like most “Web3” things, I expect that this too will flounder and die.

https://www.theskepticsguide.org/

Generally a science education/communication podcast, but they’re really good at teaching critical thinking skills and just talking about cool advances in science, technology, and everything in between.

I already had a fairly extensive take on this last night, but the team have put together a response to the video that I feel is worth sharing, and not just because it supports my prior post.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/statement-from-110167302

Meanwhile, Kevin over here being all: Am I a joke to you?

Meh. There’s a fair amount here where it’s people admitting they don’t have the receipts and he still ran with it. It’s all fine and well to say that you’ve got receipts that you can’t share because they’d screw people, but you only get away with that if those withheld details are backing credible allegations where the quantities and people involved are known and there wasn’t a lot (if any) of that here that hasn’t already been acknowledged and remediated or resolved from the point of view of the people sticking with Second Wind if their statements on their Discord are to be believed. You don’t get to claim you have receipts that prove a terrible situation is happening while everyone involved with the situation is standing there wishing you well and saying that it’s not terrible.

At best you could charitably make a narrative out of Frost’s “proof” that supports his claim that Nick is all of Second Wind’s problems, but then you have to ask why nobody else is leaving like he has, or trying to force Nick out as he did. Frost claims that Nick is keeping everyone in the dark, but the Second Wind team have been pretty transparent on their Discord about acknowledging Nick’s issues and have claimed that they’re both aware of them and working on improving the situation, so I can’t see where Frost’s argument still has any gas after that? Hell, the Second Wind team saw Nick’s social media presence as an issue and arranged a performance improvement plan around that for him which it seems he is adhering to, so clearly they have the ability to reign him in if they wish and have done so. Where again is the issue?

Nick does seem like an ass, I feel confident saying that because I too am an ass, but this video did nothing to make me think that Second Wind is suffering because of Nick. Meanwhile Frost claims that he only has beef with Nick and doesn’t want to harm the remainder of the Second Wind crew, but that whole video is going to cause the whole Second Wind team a huge amount of damage over issues that they’ve already acknowledged and moved on from, so who is the larger ass here? These guys are both younger than I am by a fair amount and they’ve both seemingly made mistakes that I feel are on par with mistakes I have personally made in my life. I like to go with the Ted Lasso philosophy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-udZZQB5OFU Clearly the Second Wind crew are taking a shot on giving Nick another chance, Frost should just accept that he wasn’t a good fit there, move on, be successful, and hope and pray that the people he supposedly bears no ill will over at Second Wind experience a Nick who has learned from his mistakes and manages to provide the support and success they deserve.

Frost left while nobody else did, that was what was right for him. He’s still trying to grind an axe while they’re wishing him well and allowing him to make his case on a forum they control. He’s made it clear on the Second Wind discord his leaving was because there was a disagreement about content (he thought that only larger shows should survive because it’s algorithmically better) and monetization (I somewhat agree on his point here that they should do something about the Patreon credit rolls at the end, but mostly because I don’t feel those are content, not because of what the advertisers want) and from everything he’s said there I have to say that I find Nick’s argument more compelling even if it does mean the eventual death of the endeavor as Frost seems to think it will.

I say this because the alternative is becoming the same thing that every “media company” these days ends up becoming. As a Patron of Second Wind I’d rather ride this current (maybe naive) attempt at being something not beholden to algorithms and content farming, and see it fail if it is indeed misguided, than have them become another something that can succeed by selling out like all the others have. Frost might not be wrong that they can’t monetize like they’re doing and survive, and he was definitely right to leave for his principles on that, but if the Second Wind team are happy while they’re trying (and all indications outside of Frost’s singular claims are that they’re doing less than perfect but still alright) then we should enjoy the time afforded to them in the attempt. I only ever watched Yahtzee on The Escapist (as I had been watching him before ZP was a part of The Escapist) but I watch more than half of the Second Wind content now and and enjoy it all thoroughly. I watch every Bytesized Review (and have bought or have gotten my wife to buy a handful of the games they’ve covered), every Cold Take (while that was a SW thing), every Design Delve, every Backdrop, every Unpacked, and of course every Yahtzee Tries (the videos not the livestreams) and Fully/Semi Ramblomatic…

If what Second Wind is doing right now is wrong, I don’t ever want them to be right. If Frost is right about Nick and for some reason nobody else is getting out despite that, I hope that they are at least finding joy and fulfillment in what they’re doing and I hope that Nick gets fucked for as long as he chooses not to grow from any of this. That said, unless there are other people coming forward too or leaving, it really doesn’t seem like Frost’s take is the eloquent and passionate truth he usually brings to the table, it seems like his take isn’t meshing at all with everyone else who is still a member of that going concern, and that’s fine, it happens all the time that different people read the same reality differently, but this video ain’t it if he actually cares about the Second Wind crew like he claims. That singular discordant note is enough to trash the whole of his credibility for now on this issue, because he is saying one thing and expecting me to look the other way as he’s doing exactly the opposite in the same YouTube video. It seems like a Hot Take from the guy who I came to appreciate for the other sort. I’ll probably give him another shot if he wants to keep making content, but I wish he was willing to extend the same courtesy to those he has perceived as wronging him instead of attempting to sharpen his axe on someone for their worst moments. 🤷‍♂️

Regardless, the “pedantic” argument against the headline is only a thing if you’re not allowing for the evolution of language, it’s actually just being a snooty language snob given that language does evolve and the usage of the headline aligns with common standards these days:

Decimate strayed from its “tenth” meaning and nowadays refers to the act of destroying or hurting something in great numbers.

• https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decimate

See also definition 3b of the same source.

Anyone have a link that’s beyond the sub-wall?

The U-Force

Got one for $10 at a yardsale as a kid and that $10 was 200% too much, they should have given me $10 to take it off their hands and I still would have dumped it in a dumpster afterwards.

Tap to pay was pretty well established when they went with scan to pay, they just hoped the Walmart name was large enough that they could cut out all the middlemen inherent with traditional payment processors and keep a bigger piece of the pie. Specifically they were in a spat with Visa over merchant fees at the time so they wanted an option that allowed them to cut Visa out of the picture. They thought that having their own scan to pay system would allow them to do that, but they eventually reconciled with Visa and got the merchant fees discount they wanted and that aspect of the scan to pay system sorta dropped out of focus.