For the benefit of others, you can stream it here, if you're curious: https://www.thecurrent.org/

YMMV certainly applies but I feel like the warning is important.

I keep telling people that the best laptop value on the market right now is to buy a refurbished MacBook Pro M1/M2. I stand by that from a usability and performance standpoint, but I feel weird about recommending a laptop that could only get security updates for another 3 years.

It seems to have this issue (or maybe Macbooks do? I don't know..) where, waking my computer from sleep, the right side of the keyboard doesn't work. It's quickly fixed by unplugging and replugging the right side of the keyboard into the left, or unplugging and replugging the entire keyboard into the computer.. it's a shame that I have to do that sometimes, though.

I used to be able to declare my house, and my parents' house (I own it). Because of these two things, I have been able to itemize my deductions. In 2024, because I got married, the itemized 'threshold' to reach was higher so I had to take the standard deduction, which ended up costing me a lot more in taxes. It's making me ask questions like "is it worth $3000 every year forever to stay married?"

Your mileage may vary!

Some examples: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page (Pokemon) https://minecraft.wiki/ (Minecraft) https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/ (Old School Runescape)

..only after I started putting together the list, did I realize that a lot of them are hosted by the same individual or community (https://meta.runescape.wiki/w/Weird_Gloop). Interesting!

I hadn't thought about that. The perspective I am coming from (Runescape, Final Fantasy XIV) has players starting in one (or three) locations when they begin the game.

Thanks for the Ashes of Creation name-drop. I don't know if I'll play it but I'm definitely interested in watching the trajectory of this game.

The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants and needs, and they would take actions to fulfill those wants and needs regardless of whether or not the player was even watching. It sounds like it would lead to a very interesting world, but in practice it led to criminal NPCs being dead before the player can meet them. (The truth to this story is debated: https://blog.paavo.me/radiant-ai/)

Likewise, the concept of an MMO where you aren't necessarily safe from other players in a town sounds interesting, especially in a game with a relatively small community. Applied at scale to something like World of Warcraft, I think that it would either be penalized so heavily that no one would do it, or not heavily enough so that new players have difficulty getting anywhere in the game because they are murdered by high-level trolls as soon as they log in.

Maybe the headline is that there is absolutely no curation happening, so if KGATLW remove their music from Spotify, you can probably get a few streams from unwary listeners by uploading song covers under a similar moniker. This has been happening forever though--lots of people identify music that isn't on Spotify and then release their own covers to try to capitalize on the vacuum (this is especially common with video game and anime music, which doesn't always have a label release).

Not that Spotify is innocent of all wrongdoing. I don't know how if this has been proven but there is theorizing that Spotify loads their own featured playlists (specifically ones like 'ambient study music' which people might consider to be fungible) with bogus, probably-AI 'artists' who don't need to get paid at all.

Basically, NetHack development stalled out, so the developer(s?) behind NetHack 4 decided to fork it. Unlike other forks whose main goal is to put cool stuff in the game without regard for taste or balance, they wanted to stay true to the original.

Not that I agree with the fork name. It's best to not call your fork something that could be confused with the original, were the original devs to ever reach a 4.0 release.

I just created a Next.js app, saw that `is-arrayish` was in my node_modules, and tried to figure out how it got there and why. Here's the chain of dependencies:

next > sharp > color > color-string > simple-swizzle > is-arrayish

`next` uses `sharp` for image optimization. Seems reasonable.

`sharp` uses `color` (https://www.npmjs.com/package/color) to convert and manipulate color strings. Again, that seems reasonable. This package is maintained by Qix-.

Everything else in the chain (color-string > simple-swizzle > is-arrayish) is also maintained by Qix-. It's obnoxious to me that he feels it is necessary to have 80 different packages, but it would also be a substantial amount of effort for the other parties to stop relying on Qix-'s stuff entirely.

The video is segmented into chapters--if you're not interested in the whole thing, the section about the Lincoln animatronic is chapter 4, about an hour into the video.