It was definitely the first. I don’t own and have never played the sequel. They called them “digital trips” or something like that. It was supposed to be like an in-universe computer game, I think? There wasn’t a lot to it–you piloted this tank thing and had to clear a level, by jumping around and sometimes killing some enemies until you reached a checkpoint, in a certain brief time limit. But I found it kinda weirdly compelling.

I didn’t like that game for the most part, but for reasons I find difficult to explain, I really enjoyed that minigame with the robot spider.

Oh, the brand on mine is “Solar Shield,” fitover is just a category. I’ve also used some of the “Cocoons,” but those are mostly orange sleep hygiene glasses. Solar Shield are cheaper but I don’t think they make orange ones. Clipons do also work for night driving, I have a pair of those too.

In my experience they help, but they don’t totally fix the problem. I’d still rather have them than not, though. I use fitovers.

Source?

Over-hopped is a major style here, and I find it baffling. Give me the toasty, malty, barley, coffee, bitter, chocolate notes of a good porter or stout any day of the week. But no, the menu is 6 IPAs, 2 ciders, a bock, and a weiss.

Jerry Falwell was raising alarms about Tinky Winky all the way back in 1999, because they had a male voice actor but carried a bag, and had a purple triangle on their head.

There are no depths too stupid for the culture wars.

Does it support adoptable storage for its SD card?

Note that it only has 32GB of internal storage, which could be kinda limiting for general Android use.

It’s because in the US pixel phones are one of the only ways to get a phone with an unlocked bootloader. Or, in other words, to actually own a phone.

For me the best tech purchases aren’t really the ones that bring me joy. They’re the ones that become invisible because they take away points of friction.

So I would say my Brother printer is one. It’s been incredibly reliable for more than a decade now.

Switching over to Ubiquiti Unifi access points for wifi has been worth it too. It’s a pain to run wires for them, but having a solid signal everywhere in the house in all kinds of weather is just amazing. They’ve been running for a decade too, though I did just replace one so I can have a 6GHz connection in one room. Not really sure that particular upgrade was actually worth it, but the system as a whole has been so nice. There’s just never anything to fix about the wifi anymore. (Well, okay, occasionally there’s something to fix with the Internet, but it’s usually just “Comcast is down,” and we have to wait until they fix it, and sometimes also reboot the modem. The wifi itself is pretty bulletproof.)

So yeah. Tech that works reliably and invisibly for years on end is what I find really valuable. Gadgets can certainly be fun, but great tech is just there in the background making things easier.

I think they may have fixed the app switcher thing? Or at least one of them.

Here’s the scenario I kept running into on my 6. I’ll give the apps names to simplify the description, but the problem was generic. So let’s say I’m in Firefox, and I want to glance back at something in signal. So I double-tap “recent” to switch to my previous app, but what comes up is instead WeatherBug, because I forgot I glanced at that between Signal and Firefox. So I still want to go to Signal, but when I get there, I want my previous app to be Firefox, not WeatherBug, so I double-tap recent again to get back to Firefox as an interim step. Then I hit recent yet again, and this time the whole screen freezes up and won’t respond to touch. The workaround I found was that if you interacted with the screen on WeatherBug–usually I’d just scroll it down and back up a tiny bit–it wouldn’t lock up. So I got in the habit of doing that.

Recently there’s been a change, though, and it seems to fix that bug. Unfortunately, it also screws up the “switch to last app” functionality sometimes. Now I’ll be in Firefox, open recent apps, scroll past Weatherbug to open Signal, and when I double-tap recent, it’ll switch to WeatherBug.

So it’s still a screwy mess, but at least it’s not locking up as often anymore.

Love that one. For anyone who hasn’t read it, this is the full text: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Don’t forget Mr. Card Game!

(it’s actually pretty okay to forget Mr. Card Game, it’s not great)

For anyone else who was gonna check: yes, it’s the fifth circuit.

Oy. Soon we’re gonna have a separate word for films that starred a particular actor when they were actually alive, as distinguished from the rest of the films starring them.

I should rewatch The Congress.

Thanks for the reminder! I had switched to Lawnchair, but I just realized I had forgotten to uninstall Nova. Fixed!

Doesn’t even need to. He’s been frequently citing polls carried out by CPAC, which show him having a 93% approval rating. Why bother with troublesome reality?

Yeah. OP’s alternate scenario, where there’s not supposed to be a way to get the million, is a lot more fragile, since then there’s a huge incentive to get the intelligence to screw up its prediction.

In the original setup, where you can choose either the jackpot box or both the jackpot and $1000 boxes, that incentive basically goes away. Like, maybe you successfully change the odds to 25% $1M, 25% $1.001M, 25% $1000, and 25% $0 (assuming the intelligence’s ability to predict the coin flip is no better than chance). But in the original problem, depending on your analysis, you’ve either got a 99.999% chance of $1M (based on the one-box camp’s analysis of taking one box), or you’ve got a 100% chance of getting $1000 more than you would by taking one box (based on the two-box camp’s analysis of taking two boxes). It doesn’t seem to me that a 25% chance of getting $0 would seem like an improvement to either of those camps.

So yeah. The scenario OP describes would be a lot more broken, because people’s behavior would be much more chaotic.

If the song you listened to was “Why Does the Sun Shine,” you should know they didn’t actually write that one (it’s from a 50’s educational record they liked as kids) and it’s not very representative of their ouvre. They’ve even released a follow-up track (“Why does the sun really shine?”) which corrects a lot of that one. It starts with the line “The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma, the sun’s not simply made out of gas, no no!”