Feels like everything from Japan either belongs to Sony or Kadokawa already. If this goes through, Sony will will pretty much own everything made in Japan. Not just Elden Ring, but all sorts of stuff from Rpg Maker to a ton of anime.

Nearly 20 years ago I was on a meeting when one of my coworkers suddenly jumps back, takes off his shoe and throws it in the middle of the room, with a scared face. Everybody looks at the shoe and out of it comes crawling a spider. At this moment the boss walks into the room and notices the spider too and says: “woah, careful, that spider is extremely venomous”. The other guy then looks even more terrified.

Boss takes him to the hospital and he took the antidote within like 15 minutes from being bitten, so no big deal at the end of the day, just the story of how he was wearing a shoe with a spider in it for over an hour before it bit him. We were all laughing and cracking jokes in the afternoon but the guy was just relieved about no longer feeling the pain from it.

I have no idea what spider it was, but this happened on a small town in the Atlantic forest region of southern Brazil. My guess would be that it was a Brazilian Wandering Spider (the spider famous for giving painful long lasting erections).

GitLab has such a strong work from home culture that I wish more companies would adopt, I hope they don’t lose that if they’re sold.

My wife got a pair and she liked them, but she also got an offbrand one she likes a lot more.

I’m Portuguese we don’t use many acronyms, but we have shorter versions of words with the vowels removed or things like that. When people tried to use acronyms we ended up with “fds” which some people read as weekend, others read as “fuck it”. The only other acronyms I can think of right now are all for offenses such as fdp (son of a bitch) and cdf (“ass of iron”, very old term for calling someone a nerd).

We get some concerned folks asking about vulnerabilities on our software all the time because some dependency has a critical vulnerability and that gets our stuff flagged as having critical vulnerabilities too, even tho you need to opt-in to that dependency in compile time and even when it’s present it can only be abused by users with enough privilege to do directly much more than anything the vulnerability can end up doing.

You already got a bunch of responses on the ranked system so I’ll mention other stuff.

There are many elements that go into the voting system. Here in Brazil if a candidate doesn’t get over 50% of the votes we do a second poll with just the top two performers, which on top of counting every individual vote instead of grouping them by county, makes it a lot better than the US system. On the other hand, we don’t have anything like the American primaries so we have no say over which candidates are going to run.

If the US election was like the Brazilian system, Trump wouldn’t have won in 2016. If Brazil used the American system (with just two to three parties), Bolsonaro would probably not even have a party to run on in 2018.

Other important stuff is how to vote. Here there’s a single day for polls which is a federal holiday and everyone has their own assigned location for voting, which is mandatory (but not really). If you’re away from your designed location you can go to any other to fill a form or even use an app to notify that you can’t vote. In some states it’s also illegal to sell alcohol on election day. You’re not allowed to do anything for a campaign while polls are open but it’s also illegal for cops to arrest anyone (for anything) without flagrant. We can’t vote by mail and we need to have an ID to vote. Oh it’s also illegal to take a picture of your vote or bring people with you while you vote.

Polling locations are usually the closest school to your house or some other public building that is just a short walk away (except for very small rural towns). However, if you move and don’t change your voting location within a few months or the election, you’ll have to go back to where you lived before in order to vote - too many people never update it and have to go back to their home town every election (or just skip it).

All of those little things impact the end result because they can help (or prevent) people from voting. In the US, actual access to polls is already being weaponized by parties extensively, but here that is only now starting to be a thing.

Finally, there are the urns themselves. Here we have electronic urns with closed source code that can be audited by every party. At the end of the day each individual urn prints its own totals which are then displayed to the public and made available on the election website. It’s not a perfect system and if (or more likely when) someone manages to hack it, they could easily change the result of an election, though I believe the systems in place are enough to at the very least expose that such a hack happened. The paper ballots used by the US on the other hand are much easier to fraud, but with much smaller impact to the total vote count (maybe high risk of impacting the results on key counties). Both systems still have a very large room for improvement in terms of fraud safety.

It really surprised me that Astarion is so popular.

Windows, in the past has been known to sometimes overwrite the Linux boot loader after a windows update.

Linux (ubuntu) do that pretty often too, people just don’t notice it because they’re unlikely to be running any other bootloader if they have Linux’.

Skype for business barely had anything to do with Skype tho, other than the name.

It would be a service problem if the chapter was released officially in one language then translated to others by pirates faster than the official company, but that is not the case. The official Sunday release includes the English, Spanish and Portuguese translations (among others) and they are all made available at the same time, for free for several regions.

Pirate websites only manage to release it faster because they get access to the unfinished product and then have people work on them with no regards to any work laws in order to finish and release it as soon as possible without any schedule or time constraint.

In general, yes, but in this case I don’t think there’s any way for the service to beat piracy even if the service was just as good (which it isn’t). Take the One Piece manga, for example. A lot of people read it from illegitimate sources simply because they can manage to release it two to three days earlier than the official every week. You can read it for free online in your local language once the magazine reach the shelves in Japan, but even that is too late because the contents gets leaked while all the partners are preparing for that simultaneous release.

Here We Go is the old Nokia Maps, which (at least until ~8 years ago) has the absolute best map data of all of the mentioned services, specially for third world countries and other places that Google and Apple aren’t so worried about keeping up-to-date.

On the realm of possibilities, windows can do whatever it wants. If it is connected to the internet then yeah it would be possible for Microsoft to do something like that, but I wouldn’t be worried about it just for piracy. Something like that could be possible for detecting CP or things on that level but I doubt MS would go low enough to do that for simple pirated content.

I don’t see much AI stuff on Google yet but most searches there now give me only video results for some reason, with no way to opt out of them and get text results. It DDG fails me I just give up now.

We’ve had enough of artificial intelligence so they’re switching to artificial stupidity?

You can solve any sudoku easily by trying every possible combination and seeing if they are correct. It’ll take a long time, but it’s fairly easy.

I have no idea where he slept, but there was one former millionaire homeless dude who setup shop on the side of the highway for over a decade. He sold honey, pine seeds and some other stuff like that that he managed to forage around the area (probably getting into people’s property too).

Horrible Bosses.

I was pretty much the opposite lol. Really loved the quest system on the first one and strongly disliked the cast of the second. The third is generally my favorite.

I got xenogears as a kid who didn’t even speak English after returning a non-functional Medievel 2 and picking xenogears as a replacement simply because it was more expensive and I realized the salesman at the store wouldn’t check the price as long as I was trading one game by another. I didn’t understand most of the game but I still fell in love with it back then. To this day it is still the first game I think of when someone ask me what my favorite is.