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Cake day: May 20th, 2024

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  • It isn’t going to be one or the other (if they don’t offer a 401k, then you can use IRAs), unless you just make a bad choice. An employer can contribute to a 401k and also provide a pension (mine used to but I’ve been around long enough that I get both the pension and 401k with matching) but if I had a choice, I could pick a pension for example but also put money into an IRA for retirement that would normally go to a 401k.

    If you absolutely had to pick one, it isn’t going to be the same answer for everyone. Amounts, what you’re able to contribute, matching, risks and tax situations are going to vary from person to person and their employer.

    As far as controlling your money, some 401k’s allow some extra control, some don’t but most have a middle ground except for their company stock which you can usually directly buy. If you’re 401k allows general different ‘markets’ and/or ‘lifecycle’ buckets (they get more conservative on investment risk the closer you get to your retirement age) is, at the end of the day, all controlled by a broker and they are making the actual decision as to what to invest and how. Some plans may allow you to invest into individual stocks through the 401k’s brokerage though.

    At the end of the day though, if all you had was a pension offered which you aren’t going to be contributing your income to, then you should invest in some sort of retirement plan yourself, be it an IRA, money market, bonds, CDs or whatever.


  • Step 1: License the technology for very cheap or free to competitors.

    Step 2: Include features but its free because ads. Pay small monthly fee for ad-free.

    Step 3: Revise CANNBus or replace it with new system. Make it a ‘standard’ so that aftermarket units can provide features but will also serve ads from the original car manufacturer and its DRM. Anyone reverse engineering the system gets sued into the ground for DMCA/Copyright laws because now they are bypassing DRM.

    Step 4: Everyone gets ads regardless. Also, you must pay subscription fee to basically use the car. Ads are to “keep costs down” for features and/or car purchasing price.

    Step 5: After everyone is mad, give slightly higher cost for subscription for ad-free.

    People that complain are told 'It’s just one coffee a month. No big deal."

    Step 6: Offer a 5-year (non-transferrable or refundable) plan that you can just roll into the price of the car loan and ‘locks in the price’ and 'You don’t have to worry about it anymore." Maybe toss in lame very small discounts for certain branded charging stations while on the plan. People already sign up for credit cards, give away their personal info. and become loyal customers to gas stations to save single digit percentages off on fuel.

    People that buy new every 5 years usually buy the package.

    People that try to save money and buy used cars pay the subscriptions.

    Step 7: Double monthly price for ad-free tier and market it to “we had to raise prices for those that want a premium experience but kept the ad-based subscription fee cheap. We had to pass the cost somewhere.” This will increase the demand for those 5-year plans.

    Overall new car purchase demand increases a bit because of those plans.

    Over the course of 15 or 20 years there will be an entire generation of drivers used to ads always being in cars and will just accept subscriptions and ads are just the way it’s always been that way and that it must be that way.

    For the EU, it’ll probably be different where the car can perform basic functions without ads but ‘premium features’ for stuff like traction control, auto lane following, etc. will probably still be behind the system I’d imagine.




  • It depends on the genre of course because of the mechanics in play. Sure, FPS with bots are hard but a lot of genres are as challenging because the mechanics usually surround mostly running and gunning with bots (if you’re playing with bots). Making the ‘AI better’ is going to be extremely difficult, especially when balancing resources out for your minimum requirements.

    But for say an 3D action game, enemy ambushes, tougher environmental challenges, harder puzzles, more platforming, increase gear rarity for ‘normal’ gear and stuff can add a real challenge. Bullet sponges seems like the path of least resistance to development time. Especially if the 3D action game is single player.

    Counter-strike specifically is a tough one because what other mechanics can be involved in it? In the original CS:S there were actual environmental concerns like you could shoot off boards on the rope bridge denying that path. When it released, the rope bridge was static and was always there. I’d imagine this was due to resources on the physics vs. 31 other players having to have a reasonable sync with the server and their updates.

    Battlefield has done this over the years but instead of making it really dynamic it has been fairly static, even if it changes the map, it always does it the same way. Blow up a building in BF:BC2? The walls will always fall the same way and the destruction will always be the same, so it’s like a state on or off update for that location for everyone. BF3 which was newer seemed to have even fewer instances where this could happen as just an example but they also doubled the player count. There have been other games that have done more dynamic updates but every engine, fidelity, language, updates/ticks expectations are all different.

    Not every genre or game has to be focused on just your targets. The more mechanics that are offered or can be offered are going to be different but certainly, it seems like many games still do not take advantage of that even though they could.



  • This is true. If you have DMARC and your RUA set up (with a working email (or one that doesn’t bounce at least)) along with SPF and DKIM, Google and MS will accept your mail. The only time it won’t at that point is if your IP is in the same /24 as a known spammer but so long as the spam stops, you’ll fall off the list. Some of the common spamlists allow you to request your IP be removed by request and I can only recall one list that almost nobody uses that makes you pay for the removal though there may be more I don’t recall.


  • It does represent freedom.

    Kent can fork the kernel if he wants with all the fixes he wants in it and distribute it as he sees fit. This particular instance of the kernel (which happens to be original – the upstream), Linus has to balance allowing some fixes other developers want to include versus a ‘minor’ release of the kernel during this cycle (because it is a minor version release, not a major one). Kent could then also stop other developers from contributing to his fork but then those people could just fork his kernel fork and do what they want.

    You as a user are free to use any of them. You’re even free to take Kent’s PRs right now with everything done in the kernel at this point, compile it and run it yourself if you want. You could even market it as something and sell it all if you want for a profit if you can get the customers. You’re free to do all of that. You can do it right now if you want.