>Those that produce the best wool are not used for their meat

You can eat delicious merinos. If anything, you could see their meat as a free by-product. Same caveat applies, meat processing is not cheap.

I think the erroneous view is just how things work unless you look at luxury/high grade market, which obey fundamentally different economics.

Then, everything closed and the only thing left was to send it to China. Priced dropped entirely, to the point where it would mostly be considered a net negative. You have to store it before you can send a batch, and that takes a lot space. Not only that, but it has to stay dry. Then, consider you want to have a basic sort already done, because you don't want the whole batch to be paid little because it would be considered the lowest grade. So Bags should be consistent; they also have to be dense enough to avoid taking too much space (typical bags are around 1 cubic meter / 100kg). Most of these operation require quite a lot of very tiring human labor, which also require some skills, a problem pervasive with the sheep industry.

So yes, in the end it's too cheap to produce but too expensive to buy.

1. Deliverability: "the email mafia will flag your emails as spam"

2. Complexity: "configuring and maintaining a mail stack is a technical nightmare".

3. Network blocks: VPS providers and residential ISPs frequently block outbound mail ports (like port 25) entirely or in their terms of use.

I decided we should try self-hosting because some issues with their reliability cost us very expensive problems. The experience was frustrating anyway, as the weird restrictions on providers caused our setup to be quite bad on some regards -- most notably being forced to use the provider UI to manage some things, which took time and is a non-transferable useless skill, not having users for things that should have had one, etc.

MailCow made the technical setup trivial, blowing objection #2 out. For #3, we could not rely on stable electricity/internet, so we just spun it up on a reliable VPS provider after a small research. As for the biggest fear, the IP reputation and deliverability mafia (#1), it is easily solved by routing outbound mail through a simple SMTP relay like SMTP2GO. You pay based purely on sending volume rather than a flat service fee, and their free tier completely covers small setups. And how much time did it take? Less than half a day, before AI could do everything for you.

Most paid services charge absurd per-user or per-domain fees for basic features that do not cost them anything. After 2 years of bad service on paid providers followed by 2 years of flawless self-hosting, there is absolutely no going back.

The whole write-up is quite interesting so I'll definitely try it out.

I read some Dostoevsky recently and I found my speech to be substantially altered for a while, so it makes sense that LLM writing would have an influence.

The big problem with the linked poll by Cynthia Dunlop is that it's all self-reported. The fact that the sample is not representative of the general population rather but might be closer of 'early adopter'/'power users' is interesting. But the idea that "I prefer authenticity to polished crowd-pleasing content" is something that people love to believe about themselves, but is hardly ever supported by facts.

As someone who spends a lot of time painting (maybe more time thinking about it than doing it, but still), it is quite evident that this is a fable. AI content is now everywhere in the streets -- just yesterday I went to a fair and food stands were divided into 2, the ones that hadn't updated their menu in 10 years or more, and the one that had generated it with ChatGPT. Museums are shameless at using AI images for their signs, and way too often even for their content. People do not prefer crappy human art, and those who self-report they do fail very hard at 'image Turing tests'.

I think the general point is true, but it does not give any timescale of when the dark age might end, when the tools will adapt etc.

You could even argue that it's the fundamental basis for post-modernism, since mathematics have destroyed the notion of absolute truth in any advanced domain. It's back to a form of "all models are wrong but some are useful" similar to what we have in physics. Sayonara, Plato.

The experience is unparalleled to this day, although writing it down I realize more why it was never really reproduced. For a browser, I would imagine having blocks like:

A. meta (browser itself) / B. page (DOM) A1. page controls (bookmark, ...) / A2. Navigation experience (font size, dark mode, ...)

One can dream :-)

FWIW, same problem with PRs or PoC that I have to work on; now my first question is, "did you know about his behaviour?". The first step, getting a decent spec, is delayed to after a first draft implementation is already pushed...

>so I would get random brake slams which would panic me more

Every time it happens, it hurts as I'm not prepared for it.

Lane assist is also particularly bad as it handles some slight curves incorrectly, so it resists your driving. As a result with such cars I have my arms muscles tense up in anticipation of some turns.

In a game format I would for instance expect not to have to type the "proof [...] qed" part for example; its purpose is to be a bounding box, but interacting through text is cumbersome -- it isn't really for a developer who sees the benefit of plain text, but it is for a most users who might bang their head against the syntactic impedance mismatch.

To put that into perspective though, I remember Brett Victor's "Alligator Eggs", and the idea is very compelling; games are self-motivating, so if you can learn some real skills then you solved everything. Combinatory logic, sequent calculi etc naturally lend themselves pretty well to the puzzle formats, yet I don't think there's anyone who really succeeded at any real implementation of it.

I'm mostly rambling my own view on the subject here, it's certainly an interesting experiment :-)

2. The statements made by somewhat representative groups like the ESA showed any compromise was impossible since their whole premise is "if you don't let us kill games (which we aren't doing) then it's going to kill the industry"; the typical propaganda of "our enemies are insignificant and stupid yet the greatest threat to humanity"

3. The ESA statements were disavowed by some developers, and SKG made a point to have longer videos with developers agreeing and debunking the lies in the ESA statements already. If that's not enough, refer to point 1.

>rights of its citizen workers/producers

The whole point is that the basis of commerce is that you can't sell something and destroy it just afterwards. Sure you can have limited time subscriptions but that's not how video-games are sold. They are changing the definition based on context so they can do the most unethical things as they see fit, and as a result they are entirely destroying the industry by breaking consumer trust.

Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.

Reddit was the place to be for nerds and spread like a pandemic. However, karma points turned this on its head since you have a mechanism to enforce conformity in non-conformity that was the basis for "nerd communities". Nerds hobbies that would be the gateway are gated behind such platforms that enforce a social credit system in a totalitarian way. The would have been nerds are thus mostly integrated into the redittor archetype that is so fundamentally opposed to the nerd archetype; a contorted version of itself trying to fit through distorting mirrors.

I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?

However, "a Mega Drive game!" is a great sales point to the majority of people invested in the nostalgia market, with only a surface-level interest of what these games are. It's why it made it to the font page of hn, and not it's perfect 'traditional' sprite art, or its Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack.

I like shmups because they are pretty much "pure game design"; games are such a complete package of story, interactive experience, etc that it's hard to separate what comes from where. This is what makes design experimentation so interesting and rich.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELcS_IyXygs&t=2788s

Also instead of meta-progression through stats you have increased difficulties through the puzzles, but you improve your puzzle-solving skills.

Thankfully the Avision FB5100 states native Linux support (AFAIK, this is the only flatbed A3 scanner that does), so I'm certainly going to buy this one. I know implementing device support for companies that don't make any effort is hard and thankless, but then we need to divest/invest in the right companies and solutions.