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skipkey commented on Ultima VII Revisited   github.com/ViridianGames/... · Posted by u/erickhill
jerf · a month ago
As someone who played these back in the day and enjoyed them, I don't think I could even recommend them to myself today. Ultima VII is everything the other comments say it is... but it's also one staggeringly large nested fetch quest, with nothing much breaking it up.

I'd recommend some combination of the Bethesda open world games and the JRPG genre today. They're not the same, nothing really quite fills the Ultima gap that I know of, but between those two I'd call it close enough.

skipkey · a month ago
For years, Ultima VII was the buggiest RPG I ever finished the main quest on. Then I played Daggerfall.
skipkey commented on Vibe Debugging: Enterprises' Up and Coming Nightmare   marketsaintefficient.subs... · Posted by u/someoneloser
AstroBen · 4 months ago
TDD is really commonly misunderstood to be a testing strategy that helps reliability- it's not. It's supposed to guide your software design
skipkey · 4 months ago
But that’s just it-as a design aid it can really go off the rails, but as a testing strategy it’s really useful in one domain. Defect fixing. If I can convince a junior engineer that when he gets a bug report to first write a test that shows the problem and then fix it, using the test to prove it’s fixed, it provides immense benefits.
skipkey commented on Lateralized sleeping positions in domestic cats   cell.com/current-biology/... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh
jfengel · 6 months ago
I should take some data. I've got enough cats to border crazy-cat-lady territory. I had the impression that they sleep in random positions -- basically, whatever shape they were in when the urge to nap came upon them.

I'll keep an eye on them and see if they have a preference that I'd missed. It won't be all that useful -- if nothing else, the specific preferred sleeping places of my house could have more to do with my layout than any underlying mechanism in the cat. But I'd kinda like to know if there has been something staring me in the face all this time and I just didn't put it together.

skipkey · 6 months ago
I resemble this remark. My wife and I run a feral/stray cat rescue, and anecdotally, this seems to be true, with a few caveats. In particular, the ferals tend to sleep with their backs to a wall, which overrides the left/right preference, the strays not so much.
skipkey commented on Microsoft Office migration from Source Depot to Git   danielsada.tech/blog/carr... · Posted by u/dshacker
mmastrac · 6 months ago
We used to call it Visual Source Unsafe because it was corrupting repos all the time.
skipkey · 6 months ago
As I recall, one problem was you got silent corruption if you ran out of disk space during certain operations, and there were things that took significantly more disk space while in flight than when finished, so you wouldn’t even know.

When I was at Microsoft, Source Depot was the nicer of the two version control systems I had to use. The other, Source Library Manager, was much worse.

skipkey commented on How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully   frontiersin.org/news/2025... · Posted by u/layer8
lloeki · 7 months ago
> Cooper’s hawk is on a rather short list of bird of prey species that have successfully adapted to life in cities. A city is a difficult and very dangerous habitat for any bird, but particularly for a large raptor specializing in live prey: you have to avoid windows, cars, utility wires, and countless other dangers while catching something to eat every day.

Peregrine falcons adapted quite well, and they're much more sizeable. That said, their size make them very apt to hunt pigeons, so this could be a less risky niche to hunt for; I mean, pigeons usually fly higher up than sparrows.

skipkey · 7 months ago
In my neighborhood in the East Valley in Phoenix, I’ve seen Cooper’s hawks, kestrels, peregrine falcons, zone tailed hawks, merlins, and one immature bald eagle. Along with the numerous turkey vultures and the occasional black vulture.
skipkey commented on The number of new apartments is at a 50-year high, but states expect a slowdown   oregoncapitalchronicle.co... · Posted by u/rwc9
HDThoreaun · 8 months ago
In my Midwest city the reason for this is because a huge amount of the cost associated with building has nothing to do with construction. You have to bribe the local politician to get zoning approval and then hold community meetings run by expensive consultants you need to employ. With such huge upfront fixed costs it only makes sense to build luxury. If we reduce the friction to building, more housing would be built and affordable styles would be much easier to pencil out.
skipkey · 8 months ago
But see, to the politicians this is a feature, not a bug. It’s the same reason that it’s incredibly expensive in terms of permitting and such to start a brick and mortar business in many cities. They would rather leave the locations unoccupied and available for something that will bring in high tax revenue than tie them up with low revenue occupants.
skipkey commented on Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges   tomshardware.com/peripher... · Posted by u/m463
meindnoch · 9 months ago
>Scanning and sending to an email address.

Who's going to be sender of that email?

skipkey · 9 months ago
Both HP and Brother offer this - it goes to a server that then sends to an email you have configured. I’d guess the vast majority of people who use the scanner do this rather than setting up a share on a home network.
skipkey commented on Steve Meretzky – Working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker's Guide   spillhistorie.no/qa-with-... · Posted by u/Retrogamingpap
Retrogamingpap · 10 months ago
We talked with the designer behind games such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

American game designer Steve Meretzky startet his career at Infocom, where he created some of the great adventure classics of the eighties. For instance, it was he who got the task of making the official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game together with author Douglas Adams, a game that became a massive bestseller and is still remembered for its great jokes and devilish puzzles.

skipkey · 10 months ago
It took me like two weeks to figure out the babel fish puzzle. I almost gave up, but I could only afford one game at a time then.
skipkey commented on Hoard of coins from Norman Conquest is Britain's most valuable treasure find   cnn.com/2024/10/22/scienc... · Posted by u/ChumpGPT
kadushka · a year ago
A thousand year old coin for $1000? That seems rather cheap.
skipkey · a year ago
You used to be able to get uncleaned late Roman bronze coins from the Balkans for about a buck apiece in the early 2000s, so I’d guess they’d be maybe $3-5 each now. Then you get the fun of very carefully removing the encrustations to reveal the coin underneath. You generally ended up with a coin worth about what you paid for it, but it was fun.
skipkey commented on Goldman and Apple 'illegally sidestepped' obligations to credit-card customers   finance.yahoo.com/news/go... · Posted by u/mgh2
bangaroo · a year ago
I'm struggling a little bit with the "misleading consumers into getting interest-free monthly payments" part. I never found the checkout flow particularly unclear or obtuse. It kind of sounds like consumers assumed that making a purchase with the apple card automatically enrolled you in the payment plan, versus having to go through a different checkout flow. I do kind of recall that when I used that feature once, it might have been implemented through Apple Pay? That would be supported by the fact that it was only available through Safari if the purchase was made online. I'm probably an outlier in being likely to experience that as I've just used Safari for a while, and so I'm getting their first-class experience. I am no stranger to how utterly awful Apple's products are outside its own ecosystem (like any Apple software designed to run on Windows.)

All of these issues would be infuriating if I encountered them, but it's interesting how the breakdown of failures seems to be 50/50 "Apple doing a terrible job designing a clear and consistent UI or process" and "being bit by their attempts at locking people into their ecosystem, independent of the card" and the Goldman Sachs portion seems just outright malicious.

Incompetence and malice combined are a really powerful force.

skipkey · a year ago
So I can kind of understand where the confusion comes from. I used this to buy my wife and I MacBooks last year. When I started the checkout flow I didn’t initially realize I was just applying for an Apple Card, rather than just being a loan with a fixed payment. I could see people that don’t understand how zero interest offers interact with revolving credit accounts might not have understood.

But the UI is pretty clear when you make a payment, if you drop the amount under the recommended payment how much interest it’s going to cost you.

u/skipkey

KarmaCake day368July 21, 2022View Original