The only thing more frustrating to diagnose than a circuit that fails all the time is a circuit that fails some of the time. Trying to correct the issue becomes a lot harder if you don’t have a way to reliably reproduce the problem.

With that in mind I think most of the time if a manufacturer cheaped out on making a less reliable component then the engineer designing whatever circuit it was going to be in would probably rather find a more reliable chip, create a different, more reliable alternative to the problem, and/or try to omit that feature entirely. And I think if the manufacturer started cheaping out on those chips after the fact then it would be a stain on their reputation as suppliers of no longer reliable parts.

For every few cents the manufacturer might save on lowering the quality of an existing part they’re likely going to lose many more dollars on engineers no longer trusting that manufacturer to continue to provide parts they want to trust will be good when they’re producing their second 10,000 unit batch for the same circuit, or when that engineer is 5 projects down the line and needs that chip again.

Ah my bad, I guess it’s been longer than I realized since I’ve last seen the movie.

There making a reference to Office Space.

If you’re too poor to afford video games, then you shouldn’t be playing them.

Shame there isn’t a gaming platform that often has tons of really cheap and often completely free games. One that has multiple storefronts, each with regular sales. Darn I guess that just means I’ll have to quit games entirely. For the sole reason of being too poor to afford overpriced hardware and overpriced games from a singular company regularly known for overcharging nostalgia bait games. Entirely because one person on the internet told me to, all so he could defend a billion dollar international company.

To be honest I just don’t bother with the service at all, even if it were for the free games. Last time I tried to use it every time I’d attempt to log in, the application would only show a black window and nothing else. I contacted their support and they informed me that it was because I was trying to run the service at an unsupported resolution. I needed to lower the resolution of my desktop from 1440p to 1080p in order to view the login window. I asked them if I’d need to do this every single time I wanted to use the application and they said yes.

For shits and giggles, I tried it out and they were right. When I was at 1080p, I could actually see the login window. I finished logging in, saw the store front, increased my resolution back up to 1440p, and could no longer see the store front. I immediately uninstalled the application and haven’t touched their service since then.

It’s been quite a few years since this happened, so I assume they’ve probably fixed this particular issue but I specifically remember being completely baffled at how quickly they accurately determined that that was the issue (demonstrating it was a known issue), how odd it was that a windowed application would care so much about the resolution of my machine that it would just stop rendering entirely, and the audacity of the service as a whole to just accept that lowering your resolution was the only viable solution without even mentioning anything to the effect of it being an issue they’re actively working on fixing.

Basically the only part of that entire situation that reflected well on them was their support service I spoke with. Everything else (including their exclusivity contracts for games in the years following) has painted them in such a negative light in my eyes that I’ve never considered using service ever since, even knowing that the specific issue I had with their software was probably fixed a long time ago. Well, at least I assume it was.

Are we going with Eurasia or an Afro-Eurasia distinction? I feel like if someone were to insist on Afro-Eurasia then they also have to accept The Americas, or I guess it would just be a simple “America” which would get confusing since that’s a pretty common verbal shorthand for USA. Under that sort of definition I think if you still insist on North and South America as regions then you’d have to also accept North and South Afro-Eurasia.

It’d also be pretty funny to try to argue that since North America was connected to Asia within the human timeline it should also be added. Imagine trying to refer to the continents: AfroAmeriEurasia, Australia, and Antarctic, with an optional Oceania thrown in the mix.

For clarity, I usually just go with North/South America, Australia, Antarctica, Africa, and Eurasia as the continental landmasses

From what I’ve read, that’s only a story that it was based on climate temperatures in his hometown. According to the story phycist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit defined the 0 and 100 degree points of his scale as the highest and lowest temperatures regularly observed in his hometown of Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland, then later when he needed to recreate the 0 point of his scale he came up with a brine that stabilizes at a specific temperature.

What we do know for certain is that the brine existed, was made of water, ice, and ammonium chloride, it did indeed stabilize at 0°F, and according to a letter he wrote the scale was based on the Rømer scale, but adjusted in magnitude so he could make 32 divisions between the brine stable temperature and the freezing point of a regular water solution, then 64 divisions between that point and what he observed to be the normal human temperature. The reason for 32 and 64 divisions was that since those numbers were factors of 2, they would be easier to divide linearly between their respective upper and lower bounds.

Fahrenheit observed that using this scale water boiled at roughly 212°F then after the popularity of the Celsius scale some 50 years later redefined his scale so that it kept the original freezing point of 32, but now had 180 divisions between Fahrenheit’s boiling point. This kept his existing scales fairly accurate to the new definition (the upper bound which was 96°F was now measured to be 98.6°F and the lower bound of the brine was 0°F now measured at 4°F) and used the new convention of defining the scale by water while keeping some nice number of divisions between their points, although they are a little more arbitrary now than they were before.

It doesn’t quite have everything you were asking for but you might like Space Haven. No cats, but you’re trying to keep your small group of spacefarers alive and your spaceship afloat. A lot of the game is resource management, managing faction relations, and doing small scale tactics as you fight against aliens, robots, and raiders. It has some of the small scale control over your spacefarers similar to Sims, but allows you the freedom to be a group of roaming mercenaries, set up your own little outpost on an asteroid to offer services, or raid everyone in sight.

It’s still in early access, but it has fairly active development with several updates having been pushed out this month alone.

Yeah in less interesting of times I would much more understand where they’re coming from. That being said in this specific context it was the quoted person (person A) not understanding why a friend of a friend (B) would no longer speak to them after learning A voted for Trump multiple times.

The subtext I was picking up from the conversation was that B (I assume) is one of many groups being specifically targeted by Trump so they refused to be in the presence of or communicate with someone who’s by proxy targeting them. A on the other hand just seems to see it all as politics and doesn’t understand what the big deal is about.

In another country or in another time I could understand but given the time and place, their confusion came across to me as showing how oblivious they were to the policies they voted for, who was going to be affected by them, and how negatively they were going to be affected by them.

On a related note: “I don’t see why you’d stop being friends with someone over politics”

Especially these days with what basic human rights have been made political, politics is probably pretty high up there on my list of reasons I’d see in why not to associate with someone.