Agreed. A lot of people in this thread are confusing what they believe should be illegal discrimination with what is actually illegal discrimination. Or they believe discrimination laws are more broadly encompassing than they are. There are a lot of kinds of discrimination that most of us agree is bad and shouldn’t be allowed… but unfortunately is not illegal.

I think this is helpful context from the actual report (linked at the top of the WaPo article):

In 2022, half as many (47%) of adolescent girls and young women acquired HIV as in 2010. Even with this decline, we are not on track to meet our 2030 target to end new HIV infections among adolescent girls and young women.

The global sex-distribution of new HIV infections among adolescents is driven largely by sub-Saharan Africa, which carries the overwhelming global burden of HIV. In 2022, 33% of older adolescents aged 15-19 years newly infected with HIV lived outside of the region. In the Middle East and North Africa region, the number of young people living with HIV has increased by 13% since 2010. In East Asia and the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean, two thirds of new adolescent infections, age 10-19 years, occur in boys. Stigma, discrimination, societal inequalities and violence sabotage the efforts of adolescents and young people to protect themselves against HIV and other health threats. Young key populations are especially vulnerable.

They should not do this without checking where the bed is supported on the floor. Your method only lifts the perimeter of the bed. It is very likely that the bed also rests on the floor down the center line of the bed or at other spots within the perimeter. If they only prop up the perimeter of the bed, it is liable to collapse in the center.

Gradation, color reproduction, and gaming performance are also important factors. There are a lot of “mid tier” TVs (and even some of the “premium” TVs) that can produce really dark blacks, bright whites, and vivid colors, but…

• Gradation: Mid tier and above non-OLED TVs have local dimming and other features to improve blacks and contrast. They tend to have dark blacks and very bright whites, but their performance in between is important too. You will find that many of these tvs are hard to impossible to calibrate to get even gradation between black and white. This leads to muddy grays and “crushed” blacks and whites. Crushed blacks means that very dark gray appears black so you lose detail. Crushed whites means the same on the white end. Additionally, local dimming can lead to “halo” effects in which when there is a quick transition from black to lighter colors, the black area has a halo around it.

• Color: In my experience, the colors are often off. Youll get really vivid colors in certain tones and more muted colors in others. This can lead to a picture seeming to have a tint to it. Skin tones, which we tend to be more sensitive to, may appear greenish. These TVs will often have a “feature” to improve skin tones because manufacturers know that people notice that. This feature will try to correct green (or other tint) but tends to also influence reproduction of other colors.

• Gaming: many TVs have a “game mode” which reduces input lag to make gaming better. Input lag is the amount of time it takes for a video signal coming into the tv to be displayed on the screen. With gaming mode off, many TVs have input lag that is 70-100ms (100ms is 1/10 of a second). This amount of lag is very noticeable in any game that requires fast reactions. Gaming mode input lag tends to be great these days - often 10ms or less… but on a lot of TVs it comes with a big price: many of the TVs picture processing features get turned off. This can include local dimming, which means you end up with gray blacks and a muddy picture in gaming mode.

I purchased and returned three higher end tvs ($900 to $1200 for a 65” tv) from about 2019 to 2021 in an attempt to replace a 55” plasma TV from 2013. Despite the fact that the plasma was 1080p and had no HDR capability, the picture was way better than any LCD-based variety I looked at (note: LED, QLED, and MicroLED are all LCD tech). All of them were bad enough in one or more of the above areas for me to return them. Most notably, I game on tv and that is where the failures of these TVs really really showed. Finally, about two years ago, I dropped the $$ for an OLED (LG C2). This was a true upgrade and I am really happy with the picture and performance. Not to say there aren’t software issues, but it felt like a real upgrade.

Great post, thanks! Looking at the pictures makes me feel like I must have played a different sierra war game using the same engine back in the day. It all looks very familiar, but I’m pretty sure I never played this.

I think there is a typo for you to fix; it sounds like the following should say to not just grab the best weapon:

Be careful, especially as a Confederate player to grab whatever the best, most high value weapon is within reach as the more expensive weapons tend to have higher rates of fire, which translates into more expense to keep the unit supplied with ammunition. Running out of supplies will turn the finest repeating rifle into a glorified club and make the unit easy pickings.

Ambrosia probably provided me the most hours of gaming entertainment over the 90s. They published Mac software and, if I remember correctly, most of their games were shareware and the non-paid versions were pretty well featured.

I wonder how many hundreds of hours I played Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override. Those were some absolutely amazing games and they supported plugins (mods) and had a thriving mod community.

For the 90s mac users, you’ll probably recognize a lot of their games (listed on the Wikipedia page). Here are some from the 90s that stand out to me:

Maelstrom

Chiral

Apeiron

Swoop

Barrack

Escape Velocity

Avara

Bubble Trouble

Harry the Handsome Executive

Mars Rising

EV Override

Ares

Escape Velocity Nova

I don’t think you understand how spread out rural America is. A lot of areas have tiny grocery stores to support a small population spread over a wide area.

Sorry, no answer here. I just want to say that this is a really interesting question and I hope someone is able to answer.

Agreed. I’m 40 and I’ve reached a point where I feel like an adult. The biggest piece of that is that I understand that we’re all just making it up and figuring things out.

Imposter syndrome is also an intrinsic part of feeling like you aren’t an adult. Most of us experience this frequently - we have that feeling that everyone knows more than us and it makes us feel like we are fakes. But in reality, we just know more about ourselves and the gaps in our knowledge. We assume that they they know more than they do because we aren’t in their head and they aren’t expressing all the uncertainty and doubt hiding in there.

I think there is a pretty big difference between hearing people like you and me say “everyone is just making it up” and really internalizing that. I think internalization comes with time - you can believe something conceptually but often need to see it in practice over and over to really believe it in your bones.

There are other factors, too, which come with age and experience. Adults on the younger side are constantly running into new adult things and not knowing how to do those things is going to created this self doubt. “If I were an adult, I’d know how to do an insurance claim” or whatever. With further age, you will learn these things and have fewer of these doubts.

But you’re seeing the effect of having multiple niche communities right now: they are mostly dead. Quite simply, there is not a sufficient user base to keep niche communities active. Along with lemmy search being as bad as (maybe worse than) Reddit search and the issue of having niche communities dispersed and duplicated through multiple instances.

It looks to me like the numerous, inactive niche communities we have now largely sprung up during the Reddit protest. People came over her for a few days, created a whole bunch of niche communities, but then those communities never got traction. It seems most users quickly went back to Reddit, and now we have all these little ghost towns.

“Solutions”:

I see a few fixes that may help this issue, but I think the largest barrier is the size of the user base. There probably are not enough users on lemmy right now to have a bunch of active niche communities (edit: even if other issues with connection users were fixed). From that perspective, as others her are saying, the practical solution seems to be to keep your activity to broader communities that cover the niche topic, and use those communities until there seems to be enough discussion on a niche topic to warrant a niche community.

Other fixes:

Aggregate communities: this is something that has been discussed on lemmy, but I haven’t followed in depth. But essentially, being able to have a “multilemmy”, which aggregates communities across instances. Eg, there may be 10 different “model_trains” communities spread across 10 instances. This means that there could be enough discussion across those 10 communities to have one active niche community. But there isn’t an easy way to get users to participate in one particular community/instance combo. Some way to aggregate those communities could really help connect users and content. I get the impression that we are unlikely to see this kind of feature any time soon (but like I said, I haven’t been following this issue).

The other solution is finding a way to hide/remove/mark inactive communities. There are lots of niche communities with zero or one post from months ago with no active owner or moderator. It is up to the instance owner to decide how to deal with those communities on their instance, which means there is not going to be consistent handling of these communities.

Old farts unite! I’m right there with you, although I think my first wing commander game was 4. I think I did something similar with Myst to escape constant “hunting” on the disc drive. The noise of the cd drive revving up and down 2ft from my head is seared into my brain.

Can we meaningfully say that performance has improved over time when games are getting more graphically intensive and wasting all that potential? I would say a Nintendo DS running Tetris has more performance than a PS5 running that new Bethesda game

Yes, we can. Gamers and computer nerds have been measuring performance for decades. For example, see https://www.userbenchmark.com and https://www.digitalfoundry.net.

You could develop a benchmark around the DS version of Tetris, I suppose, but that doesn’t seem like a useful benchmark to me.

The rest of your question seems to be a value judgement that graphically intensive games are “wasting all that potential”. Kind of ironic considering you appear to be asking for objective ways to measure performance.

Optical drives were a major bottleneck in every gaming system that used them. They were convenient because they offered a lot of data storage for cheap, but the trade off was that games performed worse than they could. The fact that consoles have moved off of optical storage and onto fast internal storage is a boon to people that care about performance. That may be a sad situation for you, but a lot of people find it to be a good thing.

Just curious since you clearly know a lot about this stuff: What are your thoughts on the heat sinks being a part of the issue? Is there a decent chance the device could benefit from replacing whatever adhesive/paste was used to attach them? Or is that even doable?

Undoubtably, the airline doesn’t allow them to help because of “lawsuit”

And while I agree, they should have had the wheelchair there in the first place, I don’t see that as the core problem. While this incident wouldn’t have happened if the wheelchair were there, there will always be problems that need to be addressed in real time while running their business.

This incident shows how they respond to problems and it is terrifying. Sure, the company could make sure there are wheelchairs on every plane so that this particular incident never happens again. But the broader issue is that they appear to have actively disempowered their employees from solving problems or doing anything outside their specific list of duties. Problems will always happen and you can’t have a precise plan for every possible problem. That’s whey employees need the power to solve those problems. Otherwise you get evil shit happening like this.

Edit: and the solution was simple. If you don’t have the wheelchair you are required to have, you wait for a wheelchair (or give the passenger get the option to be physically assisted off). Yes, that is painful to the business. It means delays. But that is the obvious solution.

She said that eight cleaning crew members, two flight attendants, and the captain and co-captain watched as she tried to help her husband exit the plane.

At first I was going to say, “how as a human being do you stand there and watch this?” But i have to think that many of those people wanted to help but felt that they could not. Instead, I’ll ask: What kind of terrible, shithole, money grubbing, leach on society company must this be to have made all of those employees too scared to step forward?

Except the captain. That is your plane, you subhuman piece of shit. The company you work for may be the devil, but you let this happen while it was your responsibility to fix it. You watched it and did nothing.

Yes. But i was trying to make my change small… which is, of course, subjective. For me setting an empathy baseline feels like more than a small change.

Agreed, but looking in the bright side: it would kill the diamond industry, which is a fucking awful blight on the world :)

I’m trying to focus this answer on something that seems like a really small change:

I wish everyone is slightly more empathetic.

I feel like this could give us a lot of small nudges toward being better people and a better society. I wonder if a small nudge could end up having a profound effect.

While I haven’t dug into anti-chest specifics, I’m pretty sure they all function this way. Not that I like it either, but if you don’t want games accessing this information, you’ll probably want to avoid games with anti-cheat.

Eg Denuvo, which is widely used and recognized (recognized as shit that causes lots of issues, too), gets kernel level access, which means it can do anything it wants.