I have a special level of animosity for Sky TV. Every experience I've had with them was reminiscent of a dying corporation clinging to relevancy that only existed in the cable TV generation. A few examples:
Sorting out my dads sky bill after my grandparents went to a rest home revealed an $42 monthly "multi-box" fee. Sky hadn't relied on a dish for a while at this point, and required a separate box for each TV despite having an android app that functionally operated identically. This also disregarded if boxes were in the same house, unlike Netflix's recent changes. I know they were aware of this fee as they increased it alongside the other packages
Ah yes the packages. They have managed to split channels down an arbitrary line that excluded some of the most requested channels into separate packages. I had a specific argument with my Dad about package price when he wanted a singular channel and could only get it by increasing the price of his monthly subscription by $28. Before we had removed the multi-box fee, his bill had nearly been $150 dollars per month. A large chunk of this was the sports live streaming.
Sports live streaming was an especially sore point, as the list of options was not a list, but singular. Sky TV has held an iron grip on sports live streaming for as long as I remember, to the point that not even the countries second largest ISP could compete. They attempted and shut down their competing service within a year. The price for a generous Sky Sports package? An additional $42 per month.
I could rant about this for hours. Not even mentioning the biased news broadcasting, hours of pricing deciphering, and still being stuck to a cable TV programming special after all that.
Interesting project. I would say the issues had, memory leaks. debugging, etc are a lot more common in game dev than you might expect. Much of these problems have been abstracted away by game engines such as Unreal/Unity/Godot, but if you were to go into game dev with C, OpenGL, and a memory restriction (especially when hardware enforced), you might run into the same teething issues.
The level editor is a nice touch, I would be curious on the implementation as something in the same vein existed for the Tony Hawk series of games and was responsible for "Tony Hawks Pro StrCpy" https://icode4.coffee/?p=954 . Though jailbreaking and arbitrary code execution is probably a lot easier achieved via PalmOS than a minigolf side project.
I used to work at a lotto counter in my towns supermarket. When I started I noticed alot of older regular buyers, a weekly lotto purchase like the daily newspaper. However, as the younger generation started bringing in kids I didn't see this habit, instead just an occasional purchase for a birthday gift or rolling the dice because the jackpots gotten big enough (funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest).
Overall I would consider lotto small next to the scratch cards (our countries version at least). I have never seen a more predatory marketing strategy, and completely swept under the rug next to lotto being berated with anti-gambling campaigning. To be fair, lotto is bad, but scratch cards are much, much worse.
A memory that stuck for me was a customer blowing well over $100 bucks on scratchcards over 20 minutes, just pulling over and over, then getting card declined at the grocery checkouts.
> funnily enough the time when the chance of winning is actually lowest
Not really?
The odds of winning are the same regardless, because you need to match every number to get a jackpot. Really, there is just an increased chance of splitting a jackpot with another person when the prize gets really large, since more tickets are generally sold. But I imagine EV of a lottery ticket with a $1B jackpot is still higher than the same lottery ticket when the jackpot is $100M.
There’s a balance between jackpot size and a given drawing’s popularity for sure.
There are also bad number choices and good number choices. 1,2,3,4,5,6 is a terrible selection, for example. Not because it is somehow “less random”, but because you’re guaranteed to be splitting that jackpot with a 1,000 other nerds who were trying to prove a point!
To a lesser degree, choosing numbers under 31, or under 12, will put you in a collision space with other players who like to choose birthdays.
Just use the random pick and don’t think about it. If you do win the jackpot, you have higher odds of being the only one.
> 1,2,3,4,5,6 is a terrible selection, for example. Not because it is somehow “less random”, but because you’re guaranteed to be splitting that jackpot with a 1,000 other nerds who were trying to prove a point!
Uh... so at first I saw your point, but if your odds of winning never actually change, how is not winning better than splitting a jackpot?
I guess if you only play one drawing, you’re right. Winning is always better than losing.
But if you play the lottery week after week, year after year—and you always play the same numbers—then you’re ensuring a mediocre prize should you actually get the jackpot.
Playing the lottery is not a mathematically sound decision in any case, but there’s no reason to make it even worse by chopping your potential jackpot winnings down by over 99%
The odds of winning don't change, the odds of splitting the pot change. Certain numbers are picked more than others so to have the best odds of not splitting the pot, random numbers are best.
Numbers greater that 31 are better. Almost 30% better! Because you are less likely to split a pot when you win. But not good enough to make playing a lottery ticket a winning propostition.
Maybe, "the time when expected value is the lowest"?
The BC 6/49 lottery (6 balls 1-49, one bonus ball) for example has 53% of the common "prize pool" split amongst all 4-ball matchers, so if you're not hitting the jackpot you get less cash out of a high-demand drawing.
And given the prize pool is something like 18% of net receipts... yeah EV is still well in the negatives.
What do you mean by intermediate levels? In the 2 main US lotteries the only award that gets split is the single jackpot. Even the 2nd place award is $1 million and is not divided among multiple winners.
I really do miss this old regime of utilizing the entire machine in games. There is a fantastic video of one of the original Naughty Dog developers talking about the optimizations they did for the original Crash Bandicoot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o), and some of the less conventional tricks they did to enable 3D gameplay on the PS1.
I've always wondered what the true limit of performance optimizations is in games. Obviously modern systems have a lot more systems to compete and share memory between, but there have been obvious cases where performance has had low priority. Also under consideration is the constantly morphing landscape of PC hardware and software architecture.
Given a fixed hardware, like the PS5 or Xbox, with the hardware of a high end gaming computer, what is the true limit a game could reach.
I'm sure if things were super highly optimized, you could do things like run Cyberpunk 2077 at its maximum fidelity level on something like an i3/rtx 2060. But at a certain point, you're just not gonna get fully pathtraced lighting without something like RT cores, or you're gonna have to settle for something that isn't quite as photorealistic to hit 60fps.
If that were true, then these games would only land on the particular console they decided on. But most game studios develop in either UE5 or Unity and release for all consoles and PC, so what you say sounds wrong.
In fact the whole drama that is currently going on with PlayStation and XBox fans is about games being released into PC, given the stagnating growth of user base in their consoles.
Meanwhile Switch doesn't even care PC exists, other than for the devkit.
People mostly don't write custom game engines any more, so they don't care about platform specifics. And game studios care about sales, so it doesn't make any sense to not distribute on multiple platforms!
The reason why Xbox and PlayStation have games that only exist on their console is because they secure that contractually, and they pay a ton of money for that.
And Nintendo releases Mario and Zelda only on the Switch for that exact reason.
"Integration with Kagi’s legendary quality search results"
I don't disagree that this is useful, but I personally don't consider an assistant to be a chatbot that can tell me the weather. Assistants actively engage your daily life and do things that are usually considered tedious for people with a lack of time. Sure, that's a big ask for A.I in its current generation, but now for example I can ask Google Assistant (Gemini?) to save the shopping list I just gave it or even answer my calls in some cases. It's also certainly not the standard of human assistants, but it's closer than a chatbot.
So the applications are made via A.I, then read via A.I (at least in the case of the major job sites, e.g seek and linked in).
I agree with the poster that this shouldn't be necessary, and is usually done by candidates who don't seem to realise the actual problem (usually themselves), but the recruiters have some blame in applying the same system to read the applications.
As a side note, is this becoming one of the first pure A.I information businesses? Given you can mimic voices and video via LLM, you could start going to interviews via A.I generation too...
The quest to run doom on everything continues.
Technically speaking, isn't this the greatest possible anti-Doom, the Doom with the highest possible hardware requirement?
I just find it funny that on a linear scale of hardware specification, Doom now finds itself on both ends.
>Technically speaking, isn't this the greatest possible anti-Doom
When I read this part I thought you were going to say because you're technically not running Doom at all. That is, instead of running Doom without Doom's original hardware/software environment (by porting it), you're running Doom without Doom itself.
Sorting out my dads sky bill after my grandparents went to a rest home revealed an $42 monthly "multi-box" fee. Sky hadn't relied on a dish for a while at this point, and required a separate box for each TV despite having an android app that functionally operated identically. This also disregarded if boxes were in the same house, unlike Netflix's recent changes. I know they were aware of this fee as they increased it alongside the other packages
Ah yes the packages. They have managed to split channels down an arbitrary line that excluded some of the most requested channels into separate packages. I had a specific argument with my Dad about package price when he wanted a singular channel and could only get it by increasing the price of his monthly subscription by $28. Before we had removed the multi-box fee, his bill had nearly been $150 dollars per month. A large chunk of this was the sports live streaming.
Sports live streaming was an especially sore point, as the list of options was not a list, but singular. Sky TV has held an iron grip on sports live streaming for as long as I remember, to the point that not even the countries second largest ISP could compete. They attempted and shut down their competing service within a year. The price for a generous Sky Sports package? An additional $42 per month.
I could rant about this for hours. Not even mentioning the biased news broadcasting, hours of pricing deciphering, and still being stuck to a cable TV programming special after all that.