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.
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.
"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.
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.