The average age of Congressmen has increased, but much of that can be attributed to modern medicine and gerrymandering and the incumbent effect letting existing Congressmen stay in office for longer periods of time.
As far as the presidency goes, it's hard to draw any strong conclusions due to the small sample size and flawed two-party system. Our last two presidents have been very old, but neither was particularly popular with the voter base as a whole. Plus, Bill Clinton and Obama were very young and were elected just a decade or two prior and enjoyed a higher margin of victory and approval rating.
One of HN's quirks, for better or worse, is that the lack of ability to downvote submissions encourages "controversial" content to rise to the top.
On Reddit, if 500 people like a submission and 500 people dislike it, then it'll end up with 0 points and fail to reach /r/all
But on HN, the same content will end up at 500 points since only the people who like it can affect its rank (unless it dies after getting mass flagged).
The end result is that HN's system favors "hot takes" while Reddit's system favors "preaching to the choir".
The two systems have their pros and cons, but personally I dislike being unable to downvote articles that are full of nonsense.
> Here is a list of things that make a game of Magic The Gathering fun to us.
> No Discard. It sucks to have no spells to play.
> No Land destruction. It sucks to be unable to cast spells.
I've always enjoyed these kinds of house rules that let you customize TCGs to your own liking.
A while back, I bought a bulk box of common Pokemon cards and put together some decks where I limited the cards to basic or stage 1 Pokemon, no high-impact coin flips, and a single EX card per deck. I found that setup to be more enjoyable than the official format.
But ChatGPT has been popular since early 2023, and even before it there was no shortage of low-quality content on the web.
If anything, this model being trained up to 2025 is a positive sign that the "circular LLM training" problem hasn't (yet) become unmanagable.
The year-long delay is probably just due to how long it takes to test/refine a cutting-edge model. It's surely possible to train one faster, but Google wouldn't want to release a new model unless it's going to top the usual benchmarks.
Can confirm. The main reason why I don't sell stuff on eBay more is because of the high shipping costs and frequent scams.
Facebook Markerplace has issues of its own, but if you agree to meet up at a safe public location to buy/sell the item in person, then it mostly alleviates those two issues aside from the small chance of receiving counterfeit bills.
If Gamestop and eBay merge, then they could (potentially) offer a better deal to buyers/sellers by either buying certain items directly, shipping them at lower costs, or having an employee "verify" the item before it ships so that the seller receives better protections.
That's assuming that this is truly an ambitious merger rather than just being some kind of exit liquidity scam that gives Ryan Cohen a golden parachute right before he peaces out.
The best analogy that I can think of is cruise control on a car.
Do you need it? No. Is it nice to have? Yes.
The strict "no tech" premise of these tractors feels comparable to someone disabling the cruise control feature on their own car because they read an article about BMW locking heated seats behind a subscription.
I don't know much about tractors, but I would think that surely there are some modern benefits that these Ursa tractors are missing out?
However, the article claims that they're selling really well, so maybe at that price point the tradeoffs are still worth it.
Unlike the free plugins, they're not reviewed by the WordPress.org team, and if you stop paying for them then you'll lose access to their future plugin updates, including critical security fixes.
I wouldn't say that their code quality is noticably higher, either; there have been countless CVEs for premium WordPress plugins over the years, and no shortage of discontinued/abandoned premium plugins that are no longer being maintained but are still installed on thousands of sites.
Gmail's spam detection has some real headscratcher moments every now and then.
Some days it'll mark legitimate transaction emails from major companies as spam even if you've been receiving emails from them for years.
And then right afterwards it'll allow an obvious scam email with a PDF attachment from some random Gmail account that you've never contacted to go straight to your inbox.
The real embarrassment is how little effort there's been to limit/reform the pardon system since then.
Pardons have valid uses, but it's wild that a single person can unilaterally pardon donators, family members, former presidents, etc, without needing so much as a simple majority confirmation vote in the House or Senate.
The questionable pardons that we've seen over the last few years (and the Nixon pardon) are just the tip of iceberg in terms of how badly they could be abused.
I'd imagine it won't be long until we see a president issue a preemptive pardon to themself at the end of their term, because there's nothing in the constitution that says they can't.
Fast Food Tycoon 2 (AKA Pizza Connection 2) was absolutely amazing. I spent so many hours customizing my pizzas and filling up the competing pizzerias with cockroaches and woodworms (and occasionally kidnapping their employees).
The English version had some bizarre translation quirks, but those just add to the retro charm.
One time I found a bug where the game would crash if you followed a courier into an enemy HQ building while they had guards inside (I guess they kill the courier, which then leads to a null reference or something?). When the game crashed I was so scared that I had broke my grandpa's computer. Good times.
The only thing it was missing was multiplayer. I hope that somebody creates a full OpenRCT2 style remake of it someday; it has so much potential for online multiplayer and wacky mods.
As far as the presidency goes, it's hard to draw any strong conclusions due to the small sample size and flawed two-party system. Our last two presidents have been very old, but neither was particularly popular with the voter base as a whole. Plus, Bill Clinton and Obama were very young and were elected just a decade or two prior and enjoyed a higher margin of victory and approval rating.