In Australia from my experience "not bad" = "good", "pretty good" = "amazing", "bit shit" = "really shit".
I don't think its as much that everything positive is just a non-negative, but that everything (especially emotions) is shifted towards the medium. Maybe it comes from a desire to not be abrasive and always soften everything, but I'm not sure.
Related also to the way Australians and New Zealanders use understatement for humorous effect, e.g. that last example you gave could be used to describe any condition up-to the point of death.
I think it would be a worse game by quite a lot. Most of the "fun" moments in minecraft come from the stories of moving back and forth between your home and your mine for example. If there was no constraint the only thing stopping you from mining as much as you would ever need is your boredom.
Weird, this seems to be getting keyboard input from somewhere else. My split keyboard using ZMK I use for everything else (including writing this comment) does not work, but my old crappy standard one does. Is there some reason that it uses some other type of keyboard input that excludes certain keyboards?
This whole article reads like it was written by someone with no ability to step back for a second and think of other much easier solutions. They just go all in on the first thing they think of even when it is not effective at all.
Just increase the increment size, or if you really want 1c increments you could precompute every 5c or so and then just do linear interpolation between them.
Linear interpolation on small intervals is like, a model of a model. And that’s exactly what differentiable functions are, anyway. And if you want to be fancier then sample the model and fit some polynomials to interpolate between those samples.
If they were really time constrained they could precompute things sparsely first (for a demo the next day) and then progressively refine the values in between.
My first instinct would be to do a one or two in the middle then both of the extremes. The assumption that it would be a normal distribution is so strange to me in this situation.
As an Australian, I find it crazy that getting food from a cafeteria at school is the norm in the US.
In Australia you bring food from home 90% of the time. On special occasions or every now and then you order lunch from the canteen.
It seems almost against American individualism to have a communal meal where everyone is served up the same food and sit indoors in a dining hall. Maybe it is just strange to me but I can't be the only person to think this.
In Australia this is actually an issue for low-income/underprivileged children in schools. Some parents don't give their kids breakfast or lunch, because they can't afford it or they just don't care.
Some schools run a "breakfast club" that everybody's welcome to attend, where they provide things like toast or cereal to kids that don't get breakfast at home, and it's couched in shame-softening language, though most kids know that if you go to breakfast club it's probably because you can't actually afford breakfast.
Schools will often have some bread and spreads available in the office for kids who are sent to school without lunch. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but I know that in some schools this is just funded voluntarily by some of the staff who will pick up more bread or whatever when it's required, because they don't want to see kids go hungry.
I think the idea of having lunch provided as part of your school fees is actually a good one. No kid should go hungry, or be subject to humiliation and shame, because their parents can't afford or can't be bothered to provide them lunch.
School-provided lunches in the US started in the first place in the 1930s and 40s because the sheer number of malnourished teenagers was making military planners nervous. The US is much wealthier now, but there's still about 20 million children who get free lunch for financial reasons.
I've had the same experience here in the Netherlands. Except there often was no real cafeteria to order from if you forgot your lunch or if something special was going on.
This mechanism does cause troubles for the poorest kids, though. Poor families send their kids to school without lunch, or with very unhealthy food (because that's cheapest).
I'm in favour of schools offering lunch. Parents pay for the sandwiches or whatever they hand out to their kids anyway, might as well get the benefits of economies of scale to reduce costs, while helping poor kids through the day. I doubt the taxes necessary to make this happen would be close to the price parents pay for food (and the time they spend preparing meals for their young kids).
Back in the 80s, everyone packed a lunch when I was growing up in Australia. One of my brother's classmates was of Malay background, and we were fascinated by the lunches he'd bring in, including a thermos containing fried rice which would still be hot when he'd eat it at lunch.
America is a place where we don't like the idea of people going hungry. The government provides a great deal of food assistance; 13% of the country receives food stamps. Government policy is that every American should be getting at least $291 of food; if providing yourself that would be more than 30% of your income after expenses like rent, the government makes up the difference. Groceries are cheap, relatively speaking - they're sure cheaper than what they cost in Australia. We have extra programs for pregnant/nursing moms which provide food like milk, eggs, beans, and fresh produce, or if they can't or don't want to nurse, we provide infant formula for them. (Income based, but about half of new moms qualify, although in turn only around half of those new moms bother to take advantage of it.) We have excellent food banks that (at least in my area) are well-stocked. They currently have "expanded eligibility" (meaning they don't screen you when you come in) because they aren't running out of food.
We don't like the idea of kids at school going hungry either, so first we had school lunches, and now we have school breakfasts in places. We also have "summer" food programs. My state decided to use the federal funding for this for "summer EBT", which means food stamp amounts go up by what would be the cost of providing school lunches. (Americans skip out of school for 3+ months in the summer.) The general trend is towards free lunches for everyone, instead of making it income eligible.
Whether any of this is a good idea is another question. We don't seem to be a terribly healthy nation, and we eat way too much ultra-processed food which does not seem to be good for us. Big Food and Big Ag have an incredibly strong grip on government. The amount of money involved is big money. To give you an idea of the dollars we're talking, the amount of food stamps spent in America on soda was around $10 billion. You can go ahead and guess which corporation lobbied to expand soda to be eligible for purchase with food stamps.
It seems to have changed in past decades. When I was in school in 70s/80s, everyone brought their lunch. And we weren't in a well-off area or anything.
As a sibling comment noted, the National School Lunch Program started in 1946. [1]
The School Breakfast Program started in the 1960s/70s. [2]
More recently, in 2010, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed which enabled the Community Eligibility Provision which lets low income area schools offer free food to all kids without individual application/qualification. [3][4]
Various schools I went to in the 90s/00s had some kids bringing their lunch, some kids paying the school for lunch, and some getting free lunch (because they were poor enough to qualify).
Same in Canada. I think this is just another one of those things like voter ID where Americans have been tricked into believing something many other countries do is impossible and evil.
I have been making a micro-arcade of one button games using a fun little library I found.
It is so fun to just have an idea and implement it in under an hour or two. It is a great creative outlet.
Give them a play if you have a second, they are very rough around the edges but are playable on mobile or browser.
https://micro-arcade.netlify.app/