I imagine their dermatologists are swamped with PR people who are facepalming so hard it actually ripped major patches of their face off.
For most of the last 75 years they could at least say "ooh, look, democracy", "we're far more westernized than our enemies", "outpost for repressed diaspora" and "we made economic development out of nothing, what ever got built when it was Palestine" and it was enough to nerf most Western complaints. If they kept a low profile, they could slow-motion a genocide and get away with it. They had mastered a delicate ballet.
Thry got greedy, figuring they could leverage October 7th into a license for a full scale territory grab, and now they're in full crackhead-with-a-Kalishnikov mode.
Why is the answer never "Biden has to do something bold and public to earn the votes of the unexcited, rather than leaning on I'm-not-Trump?"
The student loan thing night have worked if the courts didn't shoot it full of holes. Why is he not promising to pack the courts to force it through? Stonewall any legislation that limps through the knife-edge House until they codify Roe? Go for the fucking jugular on something!
Showing some real backbone to Bibi might help, but we can't possibly have that.
I keep expecting they'll reschedule marijuana for the desperate hail mary. You'd think it was perfect for him because in many ways it wouldn't really change the status quo of state-level legalization, but shows he's at least read a dorm room poster at some point in his life.
This is the firmware I've been working on. Basically I wrote it because at the time (early 2023) there wasn't a "good" keyboard firmware like QMK or ZMK for the CH32V305. Now it supports keyboards, joysticks, and a rudimentary pointing device made out of a PS2-style analogue stick.
That branch has the mapping I used. Note this firmware has a keyboard-centric assumption that switches are wired as a matrix (between two sense lines), even if that matrix is 1x24, rather than just grounding a sense line individually.
The stick portion was one of those "Pandora Box" devices that was built into a cabinet and pre-wired to a crappy Android TV box.
I bought it because I figured it was probably cheaper than cutting a decent looking cabinet and buying the buttons off AliExpress. That also meant it came with a predefined cable harness to fit the Android box. In the hopes of making it tidy, and reversible, I ordered a little throwaway PCB that accepted the existing 40-pin plug and bridged it to a nanoCH32V305 breakout board. Of course, I made a design mistake, so the PCB had bodge wires, so not much was saved.
If you're starting from scratch, you could direct-wire to the MCU breakout board.
I'm thinking it might be my 2.5G router when it drops. Or worst case, maybe retire the Atom I'm using for a NAS.
I've been using some much smaller CH32V305 based keyboard controllers for a while, recently built a fightstick aroubd the platform. Now if only I fidn't suck at joystick games, having grown up on gamepads.
I feel like the "desktop environment" is a Faustian bargain. You get a plateload of software that looks consistent, but none of it is best of breed.
I can recall being a bit wowed by the original KDE 1.0 betas on my old 486, when Konqueror was the file manager as much as the browser, but in the end it felt like thry were trying to recreate the experience you got wth the pack-in software of Windows 95.
And **** GNOME for really pushing the client-side decorations model. I configured my window manager to put the title bar and close button where I want it, thank you.
My HS chem teacher was a troll; he assigns my group Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions. Which meant dealing with 1999 internet trying to find resources on it. OTOH, it did make for a very pretty lab demo.
I think there are too many big franchises shaping the market. Some of them steer bad business fixations (see EA riding the licensed sports game MTX horse to hell) and most encourage a lot of me-too design (do we need another battle royale?)
Consoles worsen that with the Gilette model problem. Since most are sold at a loss, the vendor has to make it up on games, and constrain who releases software to those who will pay/revenue share for access. A galaxy of small devs and clever designs won't even get past the secretary to see the guy who quotes the rate card.
To be fair, a huge appeal of a console for devs was the promise of a uniform experience. Every Xbox Series X Bellgrande With Chives is supposed to be practically equivalent, so you don't have to worry about someone filing a ticket that the game runs weird when ran on an Athlon 64 FX-60 paired with a pre-production Intel Battlemage card.
It also creates no precedent. You lose, you pay out one angry customer, but the next one who tries, you get a fresh attempt to convince the arbitrators you were right.
In a real court, the first loss woukd be leveraged against you by everyone else in similar straits, even if it wasn't a class action.
And the demolition plans are in a disused washroom in the basement behind a sign that says "beware of the leopard." That's an absurd justification.
Normal users are not going to root around in the registry and twiddle things to mske the OS treat them with respect. Most of them won't search for it, and many of those that do won't have the skills to deploy a registry hack or identify legit info instead of malware or pranks.
The right answer is a third button-- "No, forever." We all know it's the right answer; I'm sure even Microsoft has focus group data. It doesn't exist because someone in Redmond's bonus is tied to how many people are cowed into signing up for OneDtive.
I've got a CS degree and 15 years of dev experience, and have come to the conclusion that you can't negotiate in good faith with Windows anymore. It is going to take you down whichever hellpath their biz-dev team demands, and any attempts to fight it are going to be undermined and replaced with a new set of hacks or a differeny gauntlet of dark patterns for a few months later.
Maybe LTSC and Enterprise versions are a bit better, where they might have to preserve the goodwill of big dollar corporate customers instead of chasing some trifling revenue hack, but do we as ordinary users on home/pro licenses not deserve the same respect? And even there, don't those business customers have to spend undue effort crafting and deploying policies to cram the endless stream of spam back in the box?
Of course! I had always heard the issue was low water levels, but you can clearly see the reactor has not enough R and too much B. G levels look all right.
There's definitely a loss of accountability in the ad-based economy.
Your newspaper in 1990 knew it had to specifically tag anything that looked too much like first party content as an advertorial. If they didn't vet their ads for some level of actual fraud, there was both reputstional and likely legal risk. Not to mention that print ads are static and won't start demanding notification permissions or playing audio.
"We plugged the Google ad tags into our template" denies them this control, so trust vanished and people responded with ad blockers.
Era 1: we have things like media queries or some unholy Javascript hoisting to adjust layout as the page size changes, But the site targets 1024 pixel wide or larger screens as the default and subtracts or hides items as it shrinks.
Era 2: we kept the tools but assumed a 350-pixel wide phone is default. When you take it to a desktop, it reflows the text wider but doesn't add back, for example, the menus that were hidden behind a hamburger icon on mobile.
It's the "beige diesel station wagon" of MMOs. It does everything people explicity ask for: tame monetization, distinct playstyles, a world that's worth playing outside the most recent level-cap zones, broad cosmetic options-- but it's still seen as an afterthought.
Aside from a few skins, there are no cosmetic options-- getting to Level 90, your characters look exactly the same as Level 1. I wonder if that causes the designers to lean ornate-- since they don't tease the Solid Iridescent Mithril Armour with RGB later, they have to pick something sparkly to please the audience that doesn't want plain uniforms.
I imagine their dermatologists are swamped with PR people who are facepalming so hard it actually ripped major patches of their face off.
For most of the last 75 years they could at least say "ooh, look, democracy", "we're far more westernized than our enemies", "outpost for repressed diaspora" and "we made economic development out of nothing, what ever got built when it was Palestine" and it was enough to nerf most Western complaints. If they kept a low profile, they could slow-motion a genocide and get away with it. They had mastered a delicate ballet.
Thry got greedy, figuring they could leverage October 7th into a license for a full scale territory grab, and now they're in full crackhead-with-a-Kalishnikov mode.