THIS. Voting in America seems completely disconnected from rational policy discussion, people don't seem to care anymore. The average voter gets so caught up in the sensationalism and the most controversial candidates seem to appeal strongly to both Boomers and GenZ. Sadly, I think any successful Democratic candidate in the future will need to appeal to voters in this way.
Gen X broke hard for Trump. Few in that generation agree with any of the culture nonsense the current Dems support. She couldn't give us her opinion on taxpayer funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens in prison? Come on, hard pass. Millenials keep dems afloat at this point.
I'd seen that when first loading the site shortly after the story was posted. Some 12 hours later or so, content is loading as expected. No network adjustments made on my end; I suspect the site operator changed their configuration(s).
What's most wild about all of this to me is that EA has claimed for years a "technical impossibility" to unlink an existing Xbox account and re-link with a new one. (See https://www.reddit.com/r/XboxGamePass/comments/12gsy4i/ea_xb... and many other forum posts on EA). I ran into this wall and after spending hours on support calls with EA they were unable to link a very old Xbox account I had, meaning I can't login to any EA games on Xbox, making the majority of them unplayable on the platform.
Yet, here, we see, it is very much possible.
Reminds me of in 2004-2005, I had my typical Hotmail account with 4MB storage, but Microsoft was rolling out a free upgrade for everyone to 250MB. For some reason they were taking an incredibly long time with my account, and I emailed support several times over a year or two about it. Each time they assured me that Microsoft was upgrading accounts as fast as they could, but it was just such a big job that it took years.
Eventually I read on a forum somewhere[1] that you could partly trick the system by temporarily closing your account and re-opening it, which got you a slightly larger 25MB. But still not the promised 250.
All this 2-4MB for existing accounts, 25MB for new accounts, and years-long rollout to 250MB gave the impression that finding spare storage was a huge struggle for Microsoft. Then a few months later they were having to compete with Gmail and they decided that everyone should get 2GB, which was rolled out to every Hotmail account including mine all at once! I can only assume aliens landed and delivered a UFO full of hard drives.
This attack shows us it's possible to change this link and play games, but it's impossible to say what other effects this would have outside of the easily testable scenario laid out in the article. Maybe this change of link invalidates data stored in a billing system, messes up a monthly report that goes to Microsoft's XBox division or causes an internal admin page to crash on load.
I'm not excusing EA but I have worked on plenty of complicated microservice systems and it's not always so straight forward to change the structure of data in one place.
> Unfortunately game entitlements, friends, and game save data for newer cross-platform games like Battlefield 2042 are stored in the EA account itself, not the persona, so that data isn't transferred.
I call these things technically inconvenient. Like things that make temporary workers share a security badge to go to the toilets (sic!). As a hard hitting quote from Chernobyl series says: "because it's cheaper."
The tech team doesn’t want to give them the ability because it causes too many escalations. The legal team doesn’t want it because what if something goes wrong and someone sues? The customer experience team… wait, customer experience team? We don’t got no stinkin customer experience team. Those suckers only exist to give us money, and it’s been proven beyond a doubt that no matter how much we fuck with them they’ll keep buying the games anyway.
Linking account with first party etc ... is pretty complicated way more than what people think. The whole cross play story is also a nightmare to support.
The third level of complication is to support China.
From the description, we only see a database-value changed. But we don't see this field used outside the account(?)-site, like when installing and starting an actual game. It's quite possible that there are additional checks or dependencies with steam, which would demand action from Valve for a complete link-change.
You might be surprised as to how many are willing to make the splurge. Anecdotal, but I'm married to a high school teacher. She and several of her coworkers have been willing to eat the cost personally just to avoid using dated district-provided assets, which are often clucky and make the job worse.
Does anyone here have insight as to the differences between the various versions of Apple's "Smart HDR" feature? Interesting to see it took the leap from Smart HDR3 (previous model) to Smart HDR 4 (new model), and yet the latest iPhones released last month apparently use Smart HDR 5.
The version is tied to the Image Signal Processor (ISP) of the A-series chip. So the A17 has Smart HDR 4, while the A18 has Smart HDR 5.
Smart HDR uses neural image segmentation for tone mapping and other processing. In my opinion it goes way too far; trying to grab a faintly blue sky and make it as blue as possible, identifying a face and lightening any hint of a shadow, etc.
When people complain about iPhone photos looking over processed, this is why.
Are some combinations just not possible, or am I doing something incorrectly here? For instance, "Dragon" and "Yin-Yang" do not seem to merge (yet logically seem ripe for combination).
YES! There is always "hope" for nearly everything and everyone. The first step is to actually try to define what type of "hope" that you're looking for. Set goals, aspiration, and a clear vision of what you want so that you have an attainable mark. It's okay if this changes over time, but to light that fire you have to have something to strive for, even if it feels unobtainable at the moment.
> Is there a reasonable path to starting over?
Well, what do you define as "reasonable"? Everyone's path is different, and if you're comparing yourself to peers who have never veered off the straight and narrow path then you own path might seem unreasonable to you. Your path might make you the 30 year old intern or apprentice, and that's okay! Success and satisfaction doesn't always come from taking the "reasonable" path.
> Where do I even begin?
For lack of a better vocabulary, you need to find some way to "spark the fire." I was in a similar position to you. I spent years dragging out a degree that I wasn't passionate about, felt less than my peers who had moved onto successful and fulfilling careers, and felt down on my luck. After a series of poor decisions I finally found my spark while sitting in the dirt after a long day of landscaping. No car, no ride home, could barely pay the bills, I finally realizing exactly where my life was headed and I knew I needed to change direction. I spent weeks researching jobs that I wanted to aspire to but that I knew were unattainable at the moment. But I bit the bullet, applied to schools, completed a degree related to the roles I was passionate about, and have gone on to work in roles that I couldn't have even fathomed just a few years prior. So for me, it was the realization that life is short and what I contribute to it is up to my that really sparked my fire, but you have to find some way to get out of the mindset that's dragging you down. It's not easy, and you will face significant challenges on whatever path you take, but find that spark and commit to your goals.
> Will tech co’s ever consider hiring someone like me?
Someone like you now, lacking passion, down on your luck, self-loathing, and without a direction? No. But you won't be presenting who you are now to these employers. It's your life–you can be whoever you want to be! As someone who comes from a less than favorable background, the imposter syndrome is always knocking at the door in my head. At the end of the day, you are who you choose to be, so choose to be the person that those tech co's will hire if that's what you desire.
I agree with the notion of ridding noncompetes entirely. Former employers should be limited to bringing cases against former employees who actually take something of legal value-i.e. trade secret misappropriation claims which require a higher standard of proof, as opposed to the broad restrictions that noncompetes impose on employees.
I can attest to the pains of using Windows containers first hand.
I'm currently working on a project that requires mixing Windows and Linux containers. The deployment and development process since the addition of the Windows containers into the mix has become so cumbersome that we're actually seriously considering using Wine in a Linux containers just to avoid the integration of the Windows containers altogether.
This is great. It brings me back to the early days in my undergraduate trying to get a grasp on programming.
The "Intro to Programming" i.e. Java 101 was my first experience with programming in general, and nearly made me drop out of the CS program altogether. Something about the high-level learning and lack of understanding what was going on behind the scenes made it very difficult to grasp. It wasn't until I took a course in C the following semester that I finally began to grasp the actions behind the code I was writing. Although the code was much more difficult to write, I found the laborious process of writing C made it much easier to grasp the underlying functionality.
There's benefit in not having to understand the underlying intricacies of the code that you're writing, but there is something about that knowledge that makes it just so much more engaging.
> There's benefit in not having to understand the underlying intricacies of the code that you're writing
I don't know. All these abstractions eventually leak. We often run into problems that can only be solved by fully understanding the software layers we're building on top of. I think that this cancels out any initial benefits.
> there is something about that knowledge that makes it just so much more engaging
Agreed. It's such a joy to discover the underlying technology. Lots of people don't care about these "already solved problems" but I find them deeply interesting.
