I’m not sure if you are in the same boat, but I bought ARMA 2 and Operation Arrowhead many years back directly from the dev’s website. I logged into their site about a year ago, copied the registration keys, pasted them into Steam, and was able to redeem it through Steam directly. If your games have CD keys, Steam can oftentimes accept those directly like you are entering a Steam product key. I think you put it into the field where you enter Steam gift cards and product keys.

“The Terror” by Dan Simmons. I already watched the show and enjoyed it, so I picked up the book and am only a few chapters in, but I’m liking it a good bit. There seems to be a good bit of historical facts thrown in, which I personally enjoy.

For those unfamiliar, it is based on the real life Franklin Expedition that disappeared while searching for a way to traverse the Northwest Passage in the Canadian arctic. The story follows the known facts regarding the fates of the expedition crew members, but it tells a paranormal horror story to fill in the blanks.

I volunteered at a thrift store years ago, and I was in charge of looking at the condition and prices of books that were donated. One person dropped off about 10 boxes filled to the brim with Playboy cartoons. They weren’t worth anything and couldn’t be put out on the floor anyway, so they were thrown out. I also remember that someone donated a biography of Benjamin Franklin from 1835. The cover was coming apart, but the pages were in wonderful condition. We sent that to a bigger thrift store in the area that ended up auctioning it for about $350.

Plenty of great advice here, but one more thing to think about is how such a large win for Republicans can be used against them a bit in the future. They won the Presidency and have majorities in the Senate, likely the House, the Supreme Court, and governorships. They have free reign to do what they want, which is scary, but it also means that they can’t blame the Democrats for any bad things that may happen in the next 2 years until the midterms.

Any law that passes with bad outcomes is solely their fault. If the economy gets worse, it’s all on them. If the deficit increases, they are the only ones to blame. If they don’t fulfill their campaign promises, it’s because they chose not to. If there is a government shutdown, it’s because they couldn’t agree on a budget. If bills aren’t being passed, they are arguing too much. They can’t even fall back on blaming the Democrats in the Senate because they have enough votes that they could cancel the filibuster while they are in office and reinstate it before they leave.

This means that you, and everyone else, can point out anything the government does that has a negative impact and say definitively that it is entirely the fault of the Republicans. If this is done frequently enough and loud enough, there may be enough frustrated voters to change the outcome the next time around. They will definitely do things that annoy almost every voter, whether they are going too far or not far enough in their agenda, and they can’t hide that it was only them that made those decisions.

I don’t think it is very well known, but I thought Scavengers Reign was very good. It was a bit slow, but I thought it gave time to see the weird alien world.

If you are on the fence about it, the show is a followup to this short and has some similarities in its world building.

As egrets mentioned, it is more sci-fi tech rather than realistic tech. I don’t think it is extremely unrealistic as a proposed idea, but it is something that could never work at the scale shown in the show. In a weird way, the end of the show felt to me like it got both more realistic and more unrealistic. I’m trying not to spoil anything, but I hope that can give a bit more info to decide if you would like it.

I second The Terror (never saw season 2 though). It was a slow burn horror for much of it, which I really appreciated. I liked the historical aspects and thought they conveyed the isolation well. I need to get around to reading the book at some point.

I really enjoyed Halt and Catch Fire, and I see so few people talk about it. The only issue I had with it was that each season felt like it was almost a reset point rather than a straight continuation of the plot. I wish they would have left a few more open plot points at the end of each season that flowed into the next. I felt the same way with Silicon Valley, even though I enjoyed that one as well.

Recently, Linux removed several people from their organization that have Russian email addresses. Linus made a statement that confirmed this was done intentionally. I believe that there was some mention of following sanctions on Russia due to the war. I haven’t looked into the details of it all, so take my analysis with a grain of salt. From what I understand, it sounded like it was only Russian maintainers that were removed and normal users submitting code from Russia can still contribute. Maintainers have elevated permissions and can control what code gets accepted into a project, meaning that a bad actor could allow some malicious code to sneak past. This may have also contributed to the decision since this type of attack has happened before and Russia seems like a likely culprit. The reactions to this change have been varied. Some people feel it is somewhat justified or reasonable, some people think that it means it is no longer open source, and some people think it is unfairly punishing Russian civilians (it is worth noting that that is part of the point of sanctions).

Someone I knew fell down the stairs while home alone and couldn’t get up. He was able to call out towards the kitchen and tell Alexa to call for help. If he wasn’t able to do that, he would have been lying there much longer before anyone could find out. It sucks for privacy, but those types of devices do have some legitimate helpful uses.

It depends on the place and the cop that is present, but jaywalking isn’t often enforced. It’s a law to try to protect people from crossing the street and getting injured by cars that may not see them crossing. Instead of crossing anywhere, they are supposed to cross at a specific area where cars already are supposed to stop. Since jaywalking is against the law (even if it isn’t enforced well), it will stop some people from crossing the street in the middle of a road, and it may save a few lives. It’s kinda dumb, but if it helps a few people, I have no problem with it.

You’re correct on the two thoughts you listed. Wishlisting also makes the game more visible before release. For example, highly wishlisted games appear in the “Popular Upcoming” section, along with some other spots. This increased visibility before launch then feeds into the two points you made. I believe games that are highly wishlisted before launch are also more likely to appear on the frontpage right after launch.

I haven’t used it often, but the few times I have asked it very specific programming questions, it has usually been pretty good. For example, I am not very good with regex, but I can usually ask Copilot to create regex that does something like verifying a string matches a certain pattern, and it performs pretty well. I don’t use regex enough to spend a lot of time learning it, and I could easily find a few examples online that can be combined to make my answer, but Copilot is much quicker and easier for me. That said, I don’t think I would trust it past answering questions about how to implement a small code snippet.

I have two that flip for my favorite depending on my mood at any given time: “There Will Be Blood” and “Blade Runner 2049”. They are both kinda slow and require attention to really appreciate, so probably my favorite movie to turn my brain off and have fun is “Mad Max: Fury Road”.

I’m from the US as well, and I can verify that very few average people use those types of messengers primarily. It is almost exclusively iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS texts as the main form of messaging. I will admit that quite a few people will use the messaging features that are built into social media apps (like messaging in Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, etc). At least to me, it seems like those are moreso used for sending memes or messaging people you don’t interact with regularly and are still secondary to the other forms of messaging.

I’m sure most people knew it was Russia from the start, but I saw a comment earlier today that apparently Russia was saying that it was a Ukrainian defense missile that fell out of the air. They are likely just confirming that it was indeed Russia.

To add onto this for anyone interested, the reason it and many businesses are incorporated in Delaware specifically is because it has a very pro-business legal and judicial system. Many businesses benefit from choosing that state over others and can find loopholes that allow them to save money (though there have been efforts to eliminate those loopholes in much of the country).

Phil Edwards recently released a video on this, which is how I found out about it: https://youtu.be/b4q99EuZF_Q

And this is the article that inspired the video: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/corporation-trust-center

I had an issue where a client reported a crash on login. The exception and stack trace reported were very generic and lent no clues to the cause. I tried debugging but could not reproduce. I eventually figured out that the crash only happened for release (non-debug) builds that were obfuscated. I couldn’t find the troublesome code, so I figured out which release introduced the issue, then which commit, then went change by change until I was able to find the cause. It turned out to be a log message in a location that was completely unrelated to login. That exact log message was fine a few lines up. Other code worked fine in that location. For some unknown reason, having that log message in that specific location caused a crash in a completely different area of code.

I’ve used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google’s (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.

It was obfuscated only in the release build. The issue is that they have a system to send certain logs to an API so they can refer to them if a user has an issue that needs further investigation. Unfortunately, their target audience is not very tech literate and have a hard time explaining how they got into a situation where they experienced a bug, so the remote logging was a way to allow us to try to retrace the user’s steps. Some of the logs that get sent to the API have JSON values converted from class data, will refer directly to class names, etc, and those logs had the obfuscated names.