I love how what’s close to the median Y-axis value is by far the tallest, meanwhile the lowest Y-axis value is the fourth tallest bar and the highest Y-axis value is by far the shortest bar

Especially once you count Charles Entertainment Cheese into the total number of Charleses

It’s hard to say what the responsible and ethical approach is for journalists given it is newsworthy that the richest man in the world (who is also extremely influential to the highest office of the most influential country of the world) is encouraging such an extreme and unexpected regime change, but also Musk, like Trump, puts out so much noise it’s hard to predict what will actually be policy they persue vs what is just noise

I put some more thought into it and did some measurements and it makes way more sense than I initially thought. I looked at a random neighborhood in a large city nearish to me and it had 50-60 foot wide roads (and it seemed most of the roads with sidewalks the road itself was narrower but had a very similar ~60-70 feet sidewalk to sidewalk) and a narrow road with a traffic calming median had 10 foot wide lanes. Each of these neighborhood streets had an average of about 10 single family homes on each side, with roads about 1500 feet long (0.25-0.3 milesish, so a very short walk from end to end) most appeared to have 1 car garages with a few having 2 car garages

If we take on of those 60 foot wide streets, place a pair of small garages on each end with 6 parking spots each (parking spaces are 8x16 feet on average and this assumes a 16 food wide driving lane to access these garages) providing covered offstreet parking for 1.2 cars per existing household (makes the transition more politically palletable) which consumes about 160 feet of the 1500 feet of former-road and preserves a dedicated 10 foot wide alleyway (potentially with a 1 foot each side “keep out” space for emergency vehicles. Some fire engines are a bit more than 10 feet wide)

We’re left with a 1340 x 50 foot strip of land. If we break that into 50x100 foot plots you can fit a dozen double-wide manufactured homes (square footage of 800-2500 sq feet, just using manufactured homes as a consistent and easy example) with space for a yard for each of them. Alternatively if you do 50x50 plots you can easily fit a cute little 30x30-40 foot home on each plot with a small private yard and add 26 900-1200 square foot single family homes. You could even convert one or two of these plots into new green spaces to further make it a nicer neighborhood

In the example block I looked at, there were 3 very similar parallel streets squared off with other slightly higher throughput streets surrounding them. If we convert these 3 streets in this way, creating a dense walkable/bikable superblock we’ve taken an area of 1300x1500 feet that previously contained 60 single family homes, and increased that to about 135 homes without reducing anyone’s yards and only by shifting them to use a communal garage instead of a private one (which they can now convert their garages into living space and remove their driveways for more yard space!) Or we go from about 800 single family homes per square mile to over 1800 homes per square mile. And this is just unimaginative replacing existing roads with single family homes and not even considering adding any sort of mixed use or multifamily homes¹ nor annexing any portion of the existing homes’ 50 foot deep front yards!

If we annex 30 feet existing homes’ 50 foot deep front yard (they still keep their 50 foot deep backyards!) that gives us about 120x1500 feet to redevelop. Lets put a 10 foot wide alleyway on each side in front of the existing homes, drop the shared garages because nobody loses road access, and we’ve got 100x1500 feet to work with, or easily 60 new 50x50 foot plots or 74 40x50 foot plots (240 or 282 homes where there was previously 60, alternatively 3400 or 4000 lots per sq mile up from ~1800 originally)

^1. I did calculate out 2900 48 units in the 50x1500 foot space using 100x40 foot quadplexes

I just use Media Player Classic to rip CDs the handful of times a year I get a new CD and just want to quickly rip it without running to a different computer

Everything that Microsoft has tried to improve has ultimately gotten worse. I recently installed Windows 2000 in a VM to install a similarly old game and it was kinda jarring how well it just worked and how much it didn’t suck compared to a fresh install of Windows 10 or Windows 11. Obviously there were some very dated concepts especially related to networking (it clearly was designed for a world where a lot of people only plug their computer into a phone line for dial-up, or just directly place their desktop on the internet with a public IP, and letting it listen to a DHCP server and connect to an existing network was weirdly obscured)

Better use of the money is to strong arm cities into adjusting into better land uses. Building a city from scratch you’re probably taking farm land from making food to instead be a new city, and if you can attract enough businesses to attract enough residents you’ve only helped by creating walkability for a few hundred or thousand people while the rest of the country remains car dependant.

Honestly I was on a walk recently and had the thought cross my mind of “what if this road were ripped up, the newly reclaimed land was sold for housing and small quiet businesses and the sidewalks widened into first class bike/walking paths just wide enough for an emergency/utility vehicle to drive down?” and I got a little sad that such a utopian vision just isn’t politically palatable.

When I first watched it, I had the benefit of a nerd who’d read the book explaining certain scenes that weren’t super clear on what was happening in the film, and I feel like that is what made the experience for me

Personally I really enjoyed the world building. I’ve played enough Kerbal Space Program that I just assume any space movie/show is going to be factually wrong and just try to learn what the in-universe rules are and enjoy it

For me its mostly that with a bit of “this is a foreign film/show so some cultural references and formulas are entirely new to me!” excitement sprinkled in

That’s relying on them having the political will to do more than half-ass it. Let’s be real, everyone loyal to trump is loyal for one (or more) of three reasons:

1. They directly profit from the loyalty
2. They believe it will help them realize their career ambitions
3. They believe they can use him to ultimately achieve their own private ideological ambitions

These are the same reasons people joined the first Trump administration and literally none of them are attempting to join his second administration meaning they were not able to realize any of their goals through Trump (or they were shown exactly how far they could go before they found the line they could not cross)

Simply put, it’s not an environment conducive to actually realizing policy goals in any incredibly complex interconnected web. The last trump administration tried to block China from international logistics and instead made logistics more robust (and helped the Mexican economy by accidentally encouraging significant investment in manufacturing and logistics there) and got completely deadlocked by infighting when they attempted to realize their wet dream of “repealing and replacing” Obamacare/The Affordable Care Act. I’ll be extremely impressed if a trump Administration manages to actually achieve a meaningful disruption of the Internet, especially with how the rest of the world largely refuses to support his policy goals

Heck a tiny regional bank I worked at with less than 2 dozen locations was constantly flinging data between its Primary and DR datacenters, and they were too small for any dedicated fiber so that was just over standard ISPs (with some locations technically on residential plans because the ISPs didn’t offer any better options than that in the small towns the bank supported)

I think you’re misunderstanding what people are saying. The author of the article is clearly trying to say that major video game studios should stop focusing on high fidelity games, making unrealistic statements about market demands (let’s be real, that’s not how people select what games to purchase. The art style is certainly a factor, I’ve not played games with art styles that don’t jive with me and I’ve certainly had gaming experiences elevated by brilliant artwork, but regardless of art direction, of the gameplay isn’t for me I’m not going to play it) and honestly it feels like the author was told to write an article to support the title rather than reporting on actual industry trends or providing real criticism ongoing industry trends. The entire argument the author is trying to make falls over when you consider any market segment other than the AAA developers

I think the worst part is the author even points to freaking Minecraft and Roblox, both were indie titles when they first launched, and also compared triple-A titles to a live service game and Epic’s tech-demo-turned-Roblox-clone.

Honestly it reads more like they set out to write an article supporting a given narrative and carefully tuned their evidence to fit that narrative.

How about some studios that aren’t hurting and don’t fit that narrative? SCS software which makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator hasn’t released a new game since ATS’s launch in 2016 because their business model is to keep selling DLC to the same customers, and invest that money in continuing to refine the existing games. Urban Games has openly stated they exist solely to build the best modern Transport Tycoon game they can, releasing a new iteration every few years with significant game engine improvements each time. N3V Games was literally bought out by a community member of one of it’s earlier titles when it was facing bankruptcy and simply exists to refine the Trainz railroad simulator game. Or there’s the famous example of Bay12Games which released Dwarf Fortress (an entirely text mode game) as freeware and with the “agreement” that they’d continue development as long as donations continued rolling in

The answer isn’t a move to live service games as the author suggests, nor is it to stop developing high fidelity games but simply to make good games. Gaming is one of those rare “if you build it they will come” markets where there’s a practically infinite number of niches to fill and even making a new game in an existing niche can be extremely successful whether that be due to technical differences, design differences or just differences in gameplay. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Banished all have very similar basic gameplay elements but all can exist without eating eachother’s market share because they’re all incredibly different games. Banished focuses more on city building, RimWorld focuses on story and your colonists ultimately escaping the godforsaken planet they’ve crashed on, and Dwarf Fortress is about building the best dwarf civilization you can before something ultimately causes it’s collapse (because losing is fun!)

Having read the article I don’t see how the comment your replied to is out of context. It’s very in context, especially given the article literally points to highly successful indie games as examples of low fidelity games that are incredibly popular

XKCD did it long before you