Which btw doesn't work. Users have to first watch the video, identify "sponsor blocks" and then update the blocker's database. So between the Sponsorblock users who have to watch the video and the multitudes who don't even know it exists... Sponsorblock won't block many sponsors.
Yes it's crowd-sourced, so of course it's not perfect. Saying it doesn't work isn't true though, and as more people get onboard, improves. I don't think it's the final solution, but it helps right now.
While I trust the author had good intentions, this blog post is about HN and some common themes and emotions, which was then posted to HN, resulting in more of the same.
There may be some irony to be found in this human centipede.
Given that they've been in continuous use for centuries I question the conclusion that they're not effective, but I'm open to altering my opinion backed-up with data.
> Bear bells may be a popular item to put on your backpack, but they don’t effectively warn a bear you’re in the area. Bears won’t hear the bells until you’re too close. Yelling, clapping, and talking are more effective ways of alerting a bear to your presence.
> In the most advanced testing, bear biologist Tom Smith jingled bear bells in varying volumes in front of brown bears in Katmai National Park. Regardless of how vigorously he shook, 15 different sets of bruins ignored the bells. And yet they snapped at attention the second he broke a pencil in half.
It's not that the bells definitively have zero value, but their effectiveness has been questioned enough that there's been a shift in opinion about them over the last couple of decades.
> Tell your friend to look up the Western Reaches style of play.
The playstyle is called West Marches.
IMHO, the important bit of this style isn't so much the player pool flexibility (tho it does help that case), but the inversion of who's driving the story. The DM prepares the world, but it's up to the players to organize their excursions outside of the safe zone, for their own reasons. This forces more involvement of the players in the story, instead of the more passive campaign on rails you mentioned.
So in the GP's case of flaky low-effort players, West Marches style may not help because it puts more burden on the players in addition to just showing up and having everything presented to them.
That said, if the group can manage to do it, player engagement should be higher, and the DM suffers less disappointment because they're only prepping a session of content based on the players' plans for that session, not a long storyline that requires more alignment and adherence.
West Marches doesn't have to be totally on the fly for the DM. The players organize and define their agenda prior to the play session, so the DM should have a little time to prepare. The excursion is planned to visit a specific area of the map, so the DM only needs flesh out a bit of the world at a time.
You're not calling out the upgrade ability enough.
Most people comparing the price of a Framework seem to miss the long view. After the initial purchase, every upgrade is cheap compared to buying an entire laptop over and over again. Bonus that you can repurpose or sell the old mainboard.
There are better laptops than Framework when compared as one-to-one at a certain point in time, but that's missing the point of Framework's approach.
The point is that a laptop is a tool that you use every day. It needed to be reliable and very usable. Framework is compromising on usability in the service of upgradeability. It seems like you can have refined tool, or a repairable one.
Framework 13 11th gen has been my daily driver for years. It's reliable and very usable. Is it a $4k MBP? No. But compared to the bulk of laptops out there, one might even say it's refined I suppose. It's a sleek 3lb aluminum laptop. Like I said, there nicer laptops out there, but the Framework is a very capable tool.
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