You have found a way not to pay for something, good for you, but brandishing it as some kind of "perfectly fine solution" is just laughable.

I can understand people vouching for using youtube premium or nebula instead, but not this.

I would pay extra for a drone with such safeguards. just the prospect of less chances of ruining it would be enough.

Similarly, eskates often have a regenerative battery charging while braking which is a great idea. but it also cannot handle charging while already full. So if you go down a slope while the board is full, it can decide to shut down and let you bomb down that hill. Which sounds like an insane pitfall.

Or what happens if the board loses its connection to the remote ? I would hope that it brakes progressively but similarly it just does nothing .. so up to you to find a way to stop.

It is such a weird blind spot to have. I don't think a car manufacturer would ship a product with this kind of blind spot, is that a culture thing ? regulation ?

Anyway, fingers crossed that somebody seizes these opportunities.

I heard about it but haven't played it. Looks like it was made from the same team as Ground Control, so this would be a tactics game (maybe a bit of a pedantic point to make though .. the 2 genres are closely related) ?

Indeed, it was not what I had in mind but removing the strategic layer would also serve as making these games more focused and hopefully less frantic.

I just watched a retrospective on 20 years of Double Fine. Tim had some interesting comments in there about how BL came to be. They were avoiding very hard to make or market the game as an RTS because the genre already had a big stigma at the time.

It might kinda explain the weird state of the game. It was definitely a fun and interesting experience but it was also flawed .. way too many games packed into one for its own good.

I lost interest in FA around the time when FAF was in its first betas.

Planetary Annihilation is more or less a successor but I could not get into it.

I like its idea but in practice the micro was insane in order to keep an eye on several different planets.

RTS without macro would make no sense

Dungeon Keeper comes to mind as a game that starts to go in that direction but it can be argued it is more a (very) fun management game than an RTS.

Probably not doable, we would lose a lot of expressivity in such a change. However, if there is a new RTS coming, I personally would love to see an innovative take on the genre, closer to Brutal Legends 2 / Sacrifice 2 (or as another commented posted, something emulating logistics would be another interesting avenue) than to the inevitable Warcraft 4 (for ios ;)).

- it is amazing to be able to walk / use public transport to go everywhere you need to

- I just don't like driving in cities. It is just a chore monopolizing my attention.

Still this is way harder to pull of here than it is e.g. in Paris. No subway system serving all the city here.

I am using an eskate to pick up the slack. If the market street project was already completed and we did the same for some other key streets, it would be 100% viable but in the city's current state :

- many roads are in a pitiful state. I haven't hurt myself seriously yet but I saw or know of many people who did.

- car drivers are extremely dangerous

100% on acceptance, culture scene and let's add food scene as well.

give me a break

In particular with Play Music .. not going to complain, I don't think that this market needs another FAANG product but wow, failing to promote that service is one epic blunder.

it is not like these 2 products were identical except for sideloading.

They don't have the same hardware, Apple has an unlimited ad budget, if you want to chat with somebody using iMessages, you are pretty much limited to iOS, you can't transfer app purchases between platforms, etc

And more generally, while I don't necessarily mind a rebrand (although I have to admit that this being Google, I have my suspicions that this will be handled the same way they handle all their messaging services) and I can be forgiving for a v1, this is still so far below play music that I don't really see myself using it.

You can leave it to google to fuck up the same product under 10 different names.

At some point, they had a great service with Play Music. That was ... 5 or 6 years ago ?

Then they basically abandoned it, with maybe one small update every year and it slowly dove into irrelevance :/

I guess that since the benefit would be to make third party devs job easier, the incentive is not that great for apple .. devs will write mobile apps even if they have to write them in assembly.

I am working with jetpack compose these days and it is both open source and documented. I am not sure how I would work with it without that, it is quite a big departure from the legacy ui api.

Well, this did not go _well_.

I wish a lot of luck to the Biden administration, there is a lot to rebuild. I might disagree on tons of policy topics with him but at the very least I can completely agree that he lives up to what should be the bare minimum for any president : respect the rule of law, be the president of all americans, not just the ones who voted for you, etc