You're at the least a good writer. It's a lot like music (or any other artform). No matter how good the result, even if it's utterly sublime, there will be a group who doesn't enjoy it.
One of the other key issues (besides FOV which was mentioned) is the size of the virtual space relative to the speed your character moves at. So for example, Half Life 2 has you moving around in a lab building pretty quickly > instant nausea for me. Meanwhile running around outdoors in Skyrim might not bother you at all.
Visual complexity ups the ante. Think of walking through a grocery store with high shelves filled with a variety of products -- this can cause migraine in some people and, to a lesser extent, also affects vertigo. So you may not want to play, say, grocery store simulators (although I have no idea who actually does anyway, why are those things popular!?).
Yeah I utterly despise using Google Maps now because of this. In my neighborhood, there are restaurants that will only appear at a very specific zoom level. Zoom in OR out and they'll disappear.
I see things when I'm out and about all the time that just never appear on Google Maps -- cafes for instance. You can search cafe, coffee, restaurant, etc and they won't appear. Search the exact name and it comes up with 300 reviews. Sometimes, they'll come up in general search in week 1, disappear in week 2, and reappear in week 3.
Google is not good at consumer software and not a responsible company in many ways; Maps really deserves to be replaced with something, but unfortunately there's no competitor to speak of. Apple Maps is nice but listings don't come up because they're literally not in the database.
I left over a decade ago, but I actually considered coming back around 2024, so I put some research into it. The result was grim.
- I'm now married to a non-American who is not white. We're not confident in the immigration process, to say the least
- Both of us are self-employed; the quote for decent (not good, I mean aggressively mediocre) insurance was very high
- Housing costs in any city we wanted to live in were very high; YMML on this obviously, but it covers a lot of cities
- Any social ill, irritation, etc that was annoying me around 2010 is unsolved with no signs of progress
- Extreme political polarization (actually a both sides thing)
- The rise of aggressive Christian nationalism (very much a one side thing)
- A horrifying pace of growth in political corruption
Everywhere has its bad points and none of these are necessarily worse than a randomly chosen second country. I think the final deciding factor is just vibes; I feel like America is declining, the culture I was born into is warping, and I don't particularly want to watch it happen from the inside, now that I'm already on the outside.
I think you've misunderstood the idea. Tim Bray and the OP of this thread aren't afraid to visit the US; the key phrase used in the post is "as a matter of principle".
No government has accepted Iranian tolls so far, but some shippers sure have; ships have been passing through the strait. Those shipments go on to countries with governments. I don't think you can actually know that there wasn't government support for any of those payments so far.
And cryptocurrency should be even better for deniability. In reality it would be a really good idea for certain governments that rely heavily on Middle Eastern oil (e.g. Philippines) to pay fees in the short term. More than a month ago the Philippines was already claiming to have "safe and preferential access", if that involves money they'll pay it. (https://www.rappler.com/business/philippine-flagged-ships-sa...)
This makes an interesting assumption: that being told by any member of government that you're legally required to do something, means you're required to do that thing, and that they're definitely not making those things up as they go.
But that's not the case, is it? The government can say that it's legally required to give Donald Trump a gold bar every Sunday. That wouldn't even be too far off from the outlandish claims we've seen over the past year. The Trump administration is, as Chapelle would put it, a habitual line stepper.
Minor correction, expat income is deductible up to (currently) $130k under the FEIE. After that it's taxes as usual. There's also an array of other mandatory forms like FBAR for foreign accounts, and the nightmare that is form 5471, with absolutely wild allowances for the IRS to impose penalties, often with no statute of limitations and per-violation fines. For example, a US citizen with multiple bank accounts and a mistake in FBAR reporting for multiple years running will be liable for the (iirc) $10,000 fine for each bank account, and each year (e.g. 4 accounts, 8 years, $320,000 fine).
Living and doing business overseas is as a US citizen is a high risk endeavor.
Those AOL prices were insane. It has admittedly been so long that I'm not sure I trust my memory, but I seem to recall per-minute pricing that could rack up over $20 per hour just from playing any of their text based games. I begged and begged my parents to let me just try one for a few minutes and they very wisely said absolutely not.
A few years went by and suddenly playing MUD / MOOs was free. I honestly miss those days, text-based has a vibe that no graphical game can ever replicate.
I assume TikTok and similar apps are always doing this stuff.
The thing I'm curious about is whether the GDPR / DSB complaints are likely to have any result. Is that likely to just result in some cost of business fines and TikTok goes on with life? Or could those complaints bring about substantial repercussions?
The population as a whole has a rapidly dwindling appetite for tech billionaires trying to impose "tough decisions and sacrifices" on everyone else, so Bill's probably in the right lane. He has already been the target of a vast array of conspiracy theories.
I don't know if that's accurate to software developers, but it makes me cringe a bit as a game developer. I upgraded from a 1060 to 4060 and suddenly did waaaay less optimization; it just wasn't top of mind anymore. Of course, that bill still comes due eventually..
I've read that there are tribes who spent a month or more at the peak of biting insect season hiding in their tents and filling them with smoke. The bugs swarm so thickly that they can kill cows. Not by biting them to death, but by clogging their nostrils until the cow suffocates.
You're being downvoted but I get where you're coming from.
The dismay is from not needing to speculate, wonder or theorize about why he did this pardon. It's a quid pro quo pardon for helping the Trump family make billions of dollars in under a year using the office of the president. The corruption is entirely flagrant and open.
Yeah, it's a forum of smart people, but none of those smarts are oriented to dealing with this kind of problem. There's a system but it's non-functional, laws but they're ignored, the tools are raw political and social power. It's going to take a while to figure out what to say and do about the slide from normal, functioning democracy into semi-theocratic banana republic.
Yeah the whole "successful businessman" schtick is pretty much a trope in US elections. Before Trump it was Ross Perot, before Perot it was others like Wendell Wilkie. Trump had that going for him AND the celebrity status like Reagan. These things are basically status buffs for elections in the US.
Yeah I'm similarly confused by the idea that it was great a decade ago. SoMa, which more or less includes Moscone, has been gritty for at least 20 years and probably much longer than that.
Similar for a lot of other parts. Market anywhere between 6th and City Hall has been grimy for a long time. The Tenderloin, I'm assuming, has been the way it is for a century (since it derives its name from police getting higher pay for patrolling it). That stuff is all stumbling distance to the downtown core, tourists and business visitors.
Every change this admin implements needs this examination first. Everyone is in here having earnest discussions about policy pros and cons, but it ain't that country anymore.
The companies the admin favors are being given backdoors for every policy that's presented, and the way to become favored is to present bribes, whether they come in the form of gold plaques, lawsuit settlements, crypto investments, or stock market collusion.