the website for it is pretty comprehensive as far as i can tell

this strikes me as a fascinating idea–with a couple of eyebrow-raising backers–that is probably going to flop spectacularly because it’s too minimalistic to the point of just being cheapskate

here’s your fun fact of the day: the hierarchy of how unchecked your law enforcement is basically goes something like federal police > city police departments > rural police departments > sheriffs of any kind. apparently, while regular police are at least nominally accountable to someone higher up than them, we basically let sheriffs do whatever the fuck they want

whatever recourse you think you have against a PD usually and very explicitly will not exist against a sheriff, even if your governor is sympathetic–most states devolve an incredible amount of power to sheriffs while demanding basically no qualifications or oversight of them. also, most outspoken police you will ever hear are probably sheriffs in specific–they are hugely over-represented in politics because there’s nothing stopping them from opining on politics even where ordinary police chiefs and the like are inhibited. (also their positions are usually elected and partisan, so they are politicians)

naturally, the mixture of election and targeting by the far-right over the past 50ish years means like 85% of these guys are just total cranks now too, because almost all of them represent Republican-leaning counties

FYI: we’ve banned this user because after communicating our disinterest in being used as an anti-China dumping ground to shadowbox with people who can’t even see our instance, the user responded with a bunch of hostility about people pushing back on them.

yeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children

it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off

What you mean? Have you seen all those articles publisher website just giving out 8-9 on every damn game they get early access to?

this has been an issue people have complained about in gaming journalism for–and i cannot stress this sufficiently–longer than i’ve been alive, and i’ve been alive for 25 years. so if we’re going by this metric video gaming has been “ruined” since at least the days of GTA2, Pokemon Gold & Silver, and Silent Hill. obviously, i don’t find that a very compelling argument.

if anything, the median game has gotten better and that explains the majority of review score inflation–most “bad” gaming experiences at this point are just “i didn’t enjoy my time with this game” rather than “this game is outright technically incompetent, broken, or incapable of being played to completion”.

no, obviously not; is this a serious question? because i have no idea how you could possibly sustain it

currently reading:

Then we slap a random-ass speed limit sign down and say “job’s done.”

we don’t actually–the basis we derive most speed limits from is actually much worse, if you can believe that. from Killed by a Traffic Engineer:

Traffic engineers use what we call the 85th percentile speed. The 85th percentile speed is whatever speed 85 percent of drivers are traveling slower than. If we have 100 drivers on the road and rank them in order from fastest to slowest, the 15th fastest driver would give us our 85th percentile speed.

Traffic engineers will then look 5 mph faster and 5 mph slower to see what percentage of drivers fall into different 10 mph ranges. According to David Solomon and his curves, the magnitude of the speed range doesn’t matter as long as we get as many drivers as possible into that 10 mph range.

and, as applied to the example of the Legacy Parkway, to show how this invariably spirals out of control:

North of Salt Lake City, the Legacy Parkway parallels Interstate 15 up to the Wasatch Weave interchange where these highways come together. It’s a four-lane, controlled-access highway with a wide, grassy median and more than its fair share of safety problems.

So how did the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) respond?

It increased the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph. It said the speed limit jump will “eliminate the safety risk” on the Legacy Parkway.

UDOT conducted speed studies up and down the Legacy Parkway. It found that most drivers were going much faster than the 55 mph speed limit. Channeling the ghost of traffic engineers past, the safety director for UDOT said, “We decided to raise the speed limit to a speed that is closer to what drivers are actually driving. In doing so, we hope to eliminate the safety risk of speed discrepancy, which can happen when you have a significant difference between the speed most drivers are actually traveling and those who are driving the posted speed limit.”

In the case of the Legacy Parkway, the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 65 mph to 75 mph. Based on that and what it deems engineering judgment, UDOT originally proposed raising the speed limit to 70 mph. After community pushback, it settled for 65 mph.

According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), this slight adjustment is acceptable. The MUTCD specifies that speed limits “should be within 5 mph of the 85th percentile speed of free-flowing traffic.”

in terms of notes usually i just do unrefined, copypasted highlights into Obsidian to start and then synthesize my notes into prose later; for most books i also tend to export my highlights into their own markdown document so i always have the initial highlights even after the prose

on and off for about two years in varying forms, but i’m still in the process of putting my archive up

Obsidian.md; for fun, although i do tend to write blog posts about the things i read

the going theory is that this is effectively the western division of NetEase getting axed because they’re not important enough and “cost too much” to keep around

resetERA is an unusual source for this, but the OP is just direct screencaps off of LinkedIn of people saying they were laid off, and it’s hard to get more definitive than that in terms of sourcing

it’s very funny because at the absolute most this maybe saves like, what, two steps in the best case? AI is so bad at this stuff that you have to human-edit it into something that looks good most of the time anyways

take a week off, you were told the issue politely and this is not an acceptable way to respond

Kind of annoying to have to click the damned link if the text can just be in the body of the post. What, do you work for PC gamer?

no offense but why are you on a link aggregator (and a clone of Reddit in particular) if you’re averse to clicking links? that’s literally the point of this form of social media: emphasis on sharing interesting links from other places, with the expectation that you’ll follow them.

in any case we strongly discourage the practice of copying the entire article because it’s technically copyright infringement, we generally expect people to actually engage with what’s posted instead of drive-by commenting, and it’s just generally bad form to rob writers of attention and click-throughs for their work.

i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:

The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.

The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”

RTFA before replying