A pretty good but not fantastic camera or lens

Definitely Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, an RTS in the Star Wars universe that uses the Age of Empires 2 engine and has very similar gameplay.

Absolutely and it has done so for over a decade. Not LLMs of course, those are not suitable for the job but there are lots of specialized AI models for medical applications.

My day job is software development for ophthalmology (eye medicine) and people are developing models that can, for example, detect cataracts in an OCT scan long before they become a problem. Grading those by hand is usually pretty hard.

As someone from Europe I can guarantee you that 5-10cm (2-4") at the bottom and 30cm (12") at the top with almost no gap between the door and wall are by far enough to not suffocate. Maybe put a vent in the ceiling for good measure.

It always baffles me that this is considered a luxury in the USA while in Germany (and I assume most of Europe) this is the absolute standard. Stalls where the door doesn’t lock properly or where the indicator on the outside is faded so that you can’t reliably determine if it’s occupied are already considered signs of bad maintenance. Gaps that you can look through without pressing your face right against them would be a “nope, I’ll never visit this place again” level scandal.

You mean Godwin’s Law. I think Crenshaw’s Law is the one about Nazis.

Edit: aaaand someone didn’t get the joke.

Yeah, I know. I wanted to err on the side of caution. I could have said “The US has 0” but didn’t want someone to show up with “well actually in my state…”

This thread seems to be about right-wing Americans getting their “non-woke” coffee from Bolivia so that’s what I used for my comparison.

But sure, let’s compare it to Europe:

• Bolivia has universal healthcare, similar to most European countries. No idea about the quality of course.
• Annual leave gets a bit complicated to compare. For the first five years, it’s a minimum of 10 days, that’s not much indeed. The lowest in Europe (though non-EU) seems to be Turkey with 14 days for the first five years. For years 5-10, it’s a minimum of 20 days, about the same as much of Europe. After 10 years, it goes up to a minimum of 30 days which is actually more than most European countries have as mandatory leave (though for example in Germany, many companies offer 30 days instead of the required 20 as a common perk).
• Maternity leave is similar to the lower end of Europe, For comparison, Germany has 14 weeks at 100% pay.

Overall: not perfect but also not bad for a relatively small country in South America with a GDP that’s way lower than most of Europe.

Just a few examples: Bolivia has universal healthcare for all citizens. The US does not. Bolivia has a minimum 10-30 days of annual leave mandated by law (depending on how long you’ve worked), the US has 0. Bolivia has 13 weeks of maternity leave at 95% pay, the US has… well it’s complicated.

I only found out about E.V.O. way later, probably around 2005 when a friend made a web game that combined its evolution theme with gameplay similar to Legend of the Green Dragon. I still wonder why E.V.O. wasn’t more popular. It’s an amazing game, I still occasionally play it on my Analogue Pocket.

I would say Age of Empires 2 which was where I first used the name that I still have on here, over 25 years later. Its amazing editor also resonated with my urge to create my own games without requiring programming knowledge that I just didn’t have at 11 years old. I went on to create custom content for Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, eventually studied computer science and joined some indie gamedev communities where I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still meet in person once or twice a year. I never became a full time game developer but I worked on some stuff part time in the mid 2000s and still do it as a hobby.

And I think letting everyone decide for themselves how they run their instances and who they federate with is an important cornerstone of the fediverse. I’m more than fine with people not wanting to interact with threads. But what happens on my tiny instance with me as the only active user shouldn’t be cause for outrage.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a whole generation for whom loss is the “hide some lines in your posts” meme and who have never even seen the original comic let alone know who Tim Buckley is.

My question was specifically about “the general non-technical population”. Do you expect my mom to even remotely understand what different servers are and why talking to me is securely encrypted but talking to her friends group isn’t? The point about secure software is that it needs to be secure by default or else, entry level users will manage to accidentally send their stuff in plain text and not even notice.

For nerds like us, I agree that Matrix is probably a good choice. For someone who needed to be told that “the internet” isn’t the blue “e” on their desktop… not so much. I’d rather send carrier pigeons than explain Matrix to my family.

I’ve once been downvoted to oblivion for not defederating threads.com before it even went online. Fediverse people are weird.

What would you recommend as an alternative for the general non-technical population?

At this point it feels like the loss meme is completely divorced from its original meaning and more a „where can I fit it in“ like running Doom on a pregnancy test or Bad Apple on Christmas lights.

Just a regular Mastodon server with federation disabled might be a good start.

I don’t think so. French “tiens” is a form of the verb “tenir” (“hold”). German “tja” is pronounced almost exactly the same and is only used as an interjection with a similar meaning but doesn’t have any related forms that I could think of.

Especially the southern German dialects have quite a few words that originated as loan words from French so it’s at least plausible. Could of course just be a coincidence as well. Languages are full of those.

And this is the moment I realized that German “tja” (“well”) probably comes from French “tiens” even though I’ve had five years of French in school.