It isn't just racism and racist stereotypes (DS halflings as "jungle primitives" as one example), but a history of extensive genocides, widespread cannibalism, pervasive oppression and slavery, systematic forced breeding to create the Mul player race...
All wrapped up in a very violent grim-meathook-future milieu.
Any one of these could be fixed without neutering the setting, but probably not all (or even most) of them at once. Even with the most respectful approach to the material, by the time you were done fixing, it just wouldn't be Dark Sun.
> Personally, I'd love to see more systems that are less "wargaming" oriented than D&D but with a focus on long term play and, where possible, player growth.
Did you actually mean player growth? I'm familiar with Player Character growth, but fostering the growth of the player (at least beyond simply a growing familiarity with the rules) is a new idea for me, although I'm not sure why the notion of helping players become more skillful at role-playing (if that was what you meant) was surprising to me.
> Can we just say it? Business school graduates ruin innovation. They ruin principles. They ruin quality. Their goals are not aligned with the goals of creators and makers. Their goals are, chiefly, to make money.
This is actually the second-worst possible goal. Worse than the desire for money is the desire for power.
I totally get the appeal of having the jack, but when push comes to shove, I'll accept the tradeoff and get a USB-C headphone adapter.
One less hole for water to enter is also a good thing (speaking as someone who has managed to drop phones into puddles, toilets, pools, and pots of soup).
Well, we'll see what the upgrade situation is like in 19 months!
I may just opt to keep the 5a until the security updates stop coming, especially if the Adaptive Charging works as advertised to preserve battery capacity.
> Yes, although: while the Starship project is incredibly impressive, it can’t really be said to have delivered until it’s actually reached orbit.
True, but it isn't as if SpaceX doesn't have a track record for hiring some pretty ambitious targets with their progression of Falcon 1 →Falcon 9 →Falcon Heavy. Admittedly, Starship's planned use of the new Raptor engines seems risky, but the DOD did fund a prototype-and-test contract that presumably concluded successfully a few years ago. While the results of those tests aren't public, there have been no leaks to the contrary, at any rate, and no changes in the planned use of Raptor have been announced (and SpaceX hasn't generally been at all shy about announcing changes to their plans).
I think it's a pretty safe bet right now that Starship will launch and that they will get it working reliably, and that they will have to blow up a few along the way to make those things happen.
This is getting into the weeds, but I'm keeping an eye out for information on whether the 6a will have a subscription option like the 5a (24 payments of $15 = $360 for a $450 phone).
Of course, my 5a will only be paid off in another 19 months, at which point a hypothetical Pixel 7a will presumably be available for upgrading, hopefully also with a similar subscription plan, but meanwhile whether the 6a even has a subscription plan is an indicator of what the offerings will be in another year and a half.
I am glad that the 6a has a Tensor chip (that's the one significant limitation of the 5a compared to the rest of the current lineup), so whatever else, I can be reasonably certain that the phone upgrade will have one too.
I find the urge to conduct kremlinological analysis somewhat annoying, but given that my subscription agreement just says that I will have an opportunity to upgrade at the end of the payment plan, with no indication as to the price or value of that upgrade, it is hard not to worry.
It is interesting though that the present value of a subscription hardware purchase is now hinging in part on the future upgrade opportunity (and in the sense of replacement with a new version rather than expansion with add-on hardware) just like software.
That said, even if that future upgrade opportunity turns out to be crap, I'll only be disappointed rather than feeling burned. After all, a sizable discount and an interest-free payment plan on a solid mid-level phone was a decent deal regardless.
> Microsoft excel driving an astonishingly large number of business processes.
I'm not sure I agree. Google obviously felt that they needed an office suite (including a spreadsheet) in order to avoid being frozen out of some markets (so they bought one), but none of the other Big Tech players felt the same way, nor does the lack of one seem to have actually limited their growth, and the current crop of low-code and no-code tool entrants don't seem to be predicated on Excel as a starting point.
> But this is exactly the "we need fewer regulations" approach, implemented sanely.
The problem is that people conflate "fewer regulations" with "less regulation".
We certainly need fewer regulations (there are too many and they are too complex). But we need more regulation (too much falls outside of the current regulations' scope).
Both aspects of the status quo seem to be a result of regulatory capture by concentrations of capital and power.
> I've seen programming newsgroups, those things from the 90's, with what can best be described as MITM attacks having taken place when coders have been looking for solutions to problems and the solutions have not been correct. Most newsgroups were never secure so vulnerable to MITM from day 1 and what is being reported today is just the latest variation in that attack process.
Well, that's also the side effect of taking Cunningham's Law to heart, which says "the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."
Looking at the Google Fi plans available right now, the Subscribe and Save option ($15/mo, upgrade after 2 years) for the Pixel 5a and the Pixel Pass option for the Pixel 6/6 Pro ($45-55/mo) that bundles a bunch of extra services like Google One and YouTube Premium are both interesting, but what I really want is a Subscribe and Save option for the Pixel 6.
Maybe I should just wait until a Subscribe and Save plan for a (hypothetical) Pixel 6a is available.
At some point cinder block construction will become it's own aesthetic (or an element of an aesthetic), perhaps something like the current 'industrial' trend or maybe an architectural equivalent of 'tactical' stylng.
> Whenever you see a wall being made of red clay bricks, that’s because the builder wants it to look nice.
There is a scene in Penny Dreadful (Which is set in a fictionalized Victorian London) where a character laments all the brick buildings that are being built, replacing wood buildings that have "character", because wood "holds its history" unlike bricks which are all the same, forever.
The main appeal of bricks is essentially nostalgic, similar to the appeal of low resolution 8-bit graphics. We call one 'traditional' and the other 'retro' but those labels are arbitrary.
> It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he’s been incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide web.
Despite his failure to ship, Nelson's vision hasn't been particularly nebulous. Overambitious, somewhat srlf-referential and brittle, perhaps, but fairly clear.
And I definitely don't think the WWW is 'nearly indistinguishable'. A few features that are missing are (off the top of my head): bidirectional links, link referential integrity, versioning, annotations, transclusions with attribution and provenance, etc.
Now, none of that ever shipped. Little of it ever got as far as a PoC as part of Xanadu/Udanax. And it is pretty clear in hindsight that, if implemented, the spam problems created by many of those features could have dwarfed what we (or rather, search engines) have to deal with today (remember blog referer linkspam? That's what bidirectional links with server-enforced referential integrity leads to). Arguably, the WWW wasn't just the simplest thing that could work, but also flourished because TBL didn't attempt to implement many of Nelson's cherished features.
But that the web today falls far short of Nelson's vision, and that as visions go, his was fairly clear (If overly reliant on neologisms like enfilade etc. usually defined in terms of implementation details such as novel datastructures rather than formats or protocols), shouldn't be particularly controversial.
> How does the user benefit from having a phone built on top of open source software, that they cannot update a well known security vulnerability because the manufacturer can't bother to run a build with the last upstream version?
Well, depending on the incentives and restrictions involved, an ecosystem of 3rd-party builds is a potentially viable escape hatch for the user from the manufacturer's grip.
Of course the sticking point is the degree to which the hardware requires proprietary and opaque binary blobs in order to enable important user-facing features. But then, that isn't anything really new, as open source PC operating systems have been dealing with this issue since forever, with the caveat that PC hardware is mostly modular, so having or swapping in well-supported components is an option, whereas smartphones are an integrated slab of metal, plastic, and glass, with "no user serviceable parts inside" as the status quo.
But even that caveat has precedents, in non-PC devices such as consumer networking gear that only became well supported through aggressive GPL license enforcement actions that freed some of the necessary code.