Same, but games run uncompressed assets as an optimization measure to trade disk usage for CPU usage, depending on which is the bottleneck for their particular game (iiuc)
So it'd be surprising to me if a developer chose to use uncompressed/lightly compressed assets, and compressing them caused performance to increase; because you're intentionally choosing the tradeoff in the opposite direction the developer did
Of course, there are game developers that are less technical and may not have knowingly made that tradeoff in which case all bets are off, but the games made by those developers tend not to be the kind that require beefy machines to run at 60fps+
The right tradeoff for compression ratio can change with just a few years of technological progress, or even quicker if it's a half-assed port from console to a high-end PC. There are similar issues for a game's decision of how many threads to spawn based on the CPU's core count. The developer's assumptions may not have been right to begin with, and even if they were, they're not likely to stay right for long.
Being able to rely on fast storage makes compression less necessary for performance reasons. But the higher price/GB of SSDs mean users have a stronger preference for games to keep the install size under control.
There was a time when console games would avoid disc seeks at all costs, even duplicating uncompressed assets. Compression can easily interfere with laying data out in blocks to read sequentially.
That’s not a problem with SSDs and most machines have more cores or even dedicated hardware decoders. Of course it’s also more worthwhile to compress since SSD storage is comparatively more expensive.
It never ceases to surprise me that people still embed 5+ MB resolution photos on their sites, then use them scaled down to thumbnail size, but here we are.
My power company’s outage website is about the only site I can’t access through my cell phone when our power is out because even the “low bandwidth” version is a bloated farce.
I got a light interrogation as a US citizen. For the record, I have Global Entry, NEXUS, and TSA Pre-Check.
I handed the border agent my US passport and the conversation went like this
"why are you entering the country?"
"I live here"
"do you have legal status in the US?"
"I'm a citizen, you're holding my passport"
"have you ever overstayed a visa in the US in the past?"
"I was born here, so no"
"do you intend to do any work while you're in the US?"
"yes, I'm a US citizen and I have a job"
I didn't get pulled off to the side or anything, it was just standard questioning at entry processing when flying in, but it was just bizarre
the border agent kept looking me up and down suspiciously like I was hiding something, but he had my passport the whole time
even when I got questioned on my way to Canada (I would've stopped me too), they were much nicer about the whole process, it's an air of "we're just double checking cuz making a mistake here would be real bad, but as long as everything's legit, no worries, I hope you have a nice stay in Canada"
entering the US the vibe is "you're a violent criminal and it's my job to ask you questions until you slip up and admit that fact, the US is magnanimous for allowing you to touch our great country's land with your disgusting feet, and you should remember that every day you're here or we'll detain you so you won't forget again"
I'm a little surprised you've only had positive experiences.
That is indeed quite bizarre. Most of those questions literally don't matter for a citizen, and if you were somehow falsely claiming to be a citizen, the other questions also don't matter because a false claim to US citizenship is punished more harshly by US immigration law than the other things they were worried about. (Such false claims make one permanently ineligible for permanent immigration to the US, with no waiver available, and require a waiver for any kind of nonimmigrant admission.)
> I'm a little surprised you've only had positive experiences.
I was talking about the experiences within the country. The border is horrendous, exactly like Russia. Same vibe of "we hate you, kneel before stepping into my country"
For a foreigner, even one that knows the US pretty well, there is a background feeling of "if it goes bad, it will go vey bad". This is mostly because of movies and news like this article but the everyday life was more or less friction free. I did not get into anything serious, though.
> normally, you can visit the PRC for 15 days, you're railroaded throughout your whole trip, and you're required by law to stay in a select few hotels where the staff speak English anyway
Huh?
The tourist visa is I believe 90 days per entry (as it is for most countries), and valid for 10 years. There has been no foreign guest licensing requirement in the PRC since 2002, as far as I can tell, and even then it didn't seem to be a "select few" hotels, it was something any hotel could get, but probably a lot didn't because international tourism to China wasn't as big then. Some hotels will refuse foreign guests, apparently, but that's the hotel's individual decision and it doesn't seem to be widespread.
I know several non-Chinese people who have traveled extensively throughout China via simple tourist visas, there were no restrictions as far as I could tell, and I've never heard of any.
15 days is the duration for visa-free entry available to the citizens of the 54 "Western" countries. Only Singapore nationals get more than that.
The validity of a tourist visa is 90 days - it doesn't mean that presenting a 90 day itinerary is accepted upon application with a Chinese consular office. And as a general rule, it's not. If yiur itinerary includes any destinations outside approved areas, certainly not. As for hotels, see the following thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/17fe0p9/why_do_lots_.... The vast majority of hotels will not accept your booking.
With all due respect, I don't think you know what you're talking about. =)
My personal experience as a Western tourist is that I could travel all around China for 2 months with no real issues. The provided itinerary was mostly a formality (and I didn't have to stick to it strictly). I managed to book hotels, trains, I even got a permit to go to Tibet (although a guide was required for that portion of the trip). It's true not all hotels can host foreigners, but in practice that's rarely a problem.
Although I personally wouldn't live there long term, China has actually a lot to offer as a tourist destination. It's very safe and there's lots of interesting history and beautiful nature to explore. It can obviously be challenging to move around without speaking the language, but some spirit of adventure goes a long way.
We're not talking about whether China is worth visiting. I think so, my tourist visa experience was in fact applying to walk a part of the Chinese Silk Road in 2019 with my (Cantonese-speaking but non-Chinese national) wife and we were politely told to shelve that particular idea permanently. There was no visa-free entry at all back then. We ended up going to Macao instead, and had a good time, though not at all what we originally planned.
In any case, the question was whether learning a Chinese language allows you to go on unique tourist experiences that would otherwise be unavailable. And the answer is that it doesn't, certainly not to the extent that it's worth learning a language, because, as you yourself state, you don't need to know the language to visit the approved destinations, and while there are some experiences that would require you to know the language, they are anyway outside the approved set of destinations and you'll be blocked using all bureaucratic systems from visiting them anyway.
I was also there in 2019 by the way. Out of curiosity, which part of the Silk Road did you want to walk? I can see why you would get denied permission to hang out near the Taklamakan desert.
The only real numbers the article gives are
> About 62,000 people are linked to criminal networks in the country, police say.
which says... nothing? What does "linked to" mean? are those people that buy illicit drugs off the street? are they "linked to" a criminal organization?
> Last year, 363 recorded shootings led to 53 deaths across Sweden, according to police.
Absolute numbers, without per capita context (given above) this is not useful.
> In 2022, the gun murder rate in Stockholm was roughly 25 times higher than in London.
This is _gun_ murders specifically, but for all murders, London is comparable to Sweden overall (~1.3 per 100k population), I wasn't able to find numbers for Stockholm specifically, but yeah, if I die I die, I'm not sure I would particularly care whether it was due to a knife or a gun.
Overall, seems like another overblown narrative that doesn't reflect reality to me. Violent crime just doesn't seem to be trending upward in Sweden.
Curious if others have information that counters what I've found.
I don't have anything insightful to add, I just want to add my voice to the choir of people saying that after using sum types, working in a language without them feels unnecessarily restrictive and awkward.
If this feature were implemented, it would take C# to a top contender for a daily driver language for me, and would make me feel a lot more confident in choosing it for projects where the C# ecosystem is already present, such Godot's C# version.
I'm really excited about this proposal, and I don't know anything about C#'s development pace, but I'll be watching from the sidelines hoping I can use union types in production in 2025 or so.
As a very junior developer, I once worked on a chatbot for purchasing flight tickets. You know the ones, the annoying windows that pop up when you're trying to navigate a (hopefully) otherwise perfectly usable site, the ones that are intended to replace customer support but are fundamentally unable to, the ones that you'd never trust with a transaction worth $5, much less one worth hundreds or more.
Even if this project were a rousing success by the company's definition, it would have ended up a useless chatbot used by very few people but frustrating many more.
Instead, one day we're chatting about the project, and when talking about strategy for implementation, the product manager pushes back on working too early on integrating with the actual API calls to purchase tickets. I thought having a proof-of-concept for the actual functionality would be important, so if we ran into roadblocks we could ask other teams to provide us alternative APIs with enough notice at the beginning of the project rather than the end.
The product manager said that we couldn't afford to do that, because if we did, we'd lose.
I said "what? lose? what do you mean?"
It turns out, our team was one of 3 teams competing to make the same project. Leadership wanted to make 3 fully implemented, separate systems, and the one they liked best would go live, while the others would wither and die.
It also turns out, that our team was way behind because although we had some logic set up for handling edge cases in conversations (not great by any stretch), another team with no backend developers had a beautiful UI concept that handled only exact strings with no room for deviation on the user's part. This UI concept demoed well, of course, so they were the favorites.
It was made clear to me by the team's technical lead that nobody up the management chain (including our team's direct manager) had ever written a line of code before, or knew what the difference was between backend and frontend, or a tech demo that presents well versus a working product, and so wouldn't be able to differentiate a finished product that actually purchases tickets from one that runs entirely on the frontend and talks to nothing (until launch day, of course).
I was already on edge because I had been asked to test API integrations by using my personal credit card to purchase a real flight ticket and refund it because we didn't have test cards or even corporate cards we could use.
So I resigned within a week, and my manager was furious.
This story happened probably more recently than you're thinking.
That was the most useless project I've ever worked on.
Expedia asked me to test production ticket booking flows using my personal credit card.
It was a flow where you can use a special code to book a refundable ticket. I asked what happened if I forgot to refund it in time, or if something went wrong.
"Don't forget!"
I asked for a corporate card to test with and was denied. I refused to ever input my personal card. I think the team lead said I could use his, but I refused to use anyone's actual, real card.
I was young at the time, and I'm glad I saw the red flags quickly enough and left.
From light googling, a quick-release steering wheel seems to be a steering wheel that you can simply remove by pressing a button.
So from your post, the implication seems to be that if someone has one, and their car is rear-ended, the steering wheel just comes off into their hands and they can't control their car.
Is that right?
Why would someone purchase a quick-release steering wheel? What does it help them accomplish?
> Why would someone purchase a quick-release steering wheel? What does it help them accomplish?
The “actual” answer is that quick release wheels makes getting in/out of race cars much easier. In some of them it’s nearly impossible to get your knees past the wheel if it’s not removable.
Generally though, it’s just for looks and to feel like a real racer with your momo wheel.
No quick-disconnect steering wheels don't have airbags.
And it makes me wonder, even though I'm at fault for rear-ending someone, should my insurance (or me) have to pay out MORE because the person in front of me removed mandatory safety equipment?
This particular question doesn't seem like a fallacy to me.
I, like most people intuitively answered b). Given the explanation on the Wikipedia page I went "oh, of course, yeah", but then I thought about why I'd answer b) given that I'm fairly familiar with basic probability.
If you give me two options and ask me to pick between them, my brain is usually going to assume it's not a trivially true problem.
Language needs context for any sense to be made of it.
As a result of the above, reading the question, the intuitive reading makes the answer choices
a) Linda is a bank teller (implicitly, a bank teller NOT active in the feminist movement)
b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
This question is one of language, context, and interpretation, not of people failing to understand basic probability.
I suspect that if you prime people to excise interpretation of the question by presenting it as the following, the majority of people would guess correctly:
The previous point is very reasonable, and I think your response is overly flippant and confrontational.
I've had coworkers hounded by managers from unrelated teams because my coworker wasn't working fast enough on a feature that was important to their team. They made assumptions about how many different tasks my coworker might have had assigned to them.
They were juggling like 3 or 4 fairly important features/fixes for various parts of the organization at the time because our team was (in my opinion) understaffed.
But of course, each of the relevant managers can only see "didn't satisfactorily complete my fix in the expected timeframe", and then perf review comes back and collates that info to "doesn't complete tasks on schedule" without taking a step back and recognizing that this is a failure mode of planning where one engineer was responsible for way too much stuff with no reasonable ability to push back.
At the same time, of course, engineers were getting promotions for doing exactly one thing well, which is as it should be.
There are lots of lessons in here, one of which is very likely "push back on work that causes you to overburden yourself", but I'd argue another important lesson is that you just don't see what others are working on. I'd be surprised if there were more than one or two people in your org who knew every task you've completed in the last 30 days, and to me it seems unreasonable to expect that you can make that assessment of more than 5ish people in your immediate radius.
But while we're throwing ad hominems for the fun of it; I'd rather have a bunch of "bloaters" on my team than the one person who is convinced that they are one of the golden few producing value, and everyone else is a lazy freeloader. I've worked with that type of person before and it's awful. It is rarely the case that they are _actually_ producing an 2-3x the value of other engineers, it's much more likely that they're just reducing morale and causing internal conflict while building some small piece of the pie and assuming that's the majority of the work.
Like someone who builds a button that says "delete my account" and says "I built the delete account feature" while not recognizing that there are a ton of people on the database teams that made the feature possible without performance hiccups or leaving dangling foreign keys.
You are bringing up a completely different problem that's a whole another case than bloat: bad managers that don't realise that some workers are juggling many problems, not just their own. That is very different to people doing a lot of work in secret in an unsecretive organisation, like twitter.
> I'd be surprised if there were more than one or two people in your org who knew every task you've completed in the last 30 days, and to me it seems unreasonable to expect that you can make that assessment of more than 5ish people in your immediate radius.
This is not the case at all in many work situations, a prime example being when you work on a team and all code and work produced is shared. None works on other teams. The code reviewer and hopefully project lead will know, or have a very good hunch, what everyone is producing.
I would argue that bad middle management is another bloat problem, so in essence; you just made another point for how bloat is very bad for an organisation. I wonder why you are so interested in defending the all too common effect of corporate bloat in an economy where its calculated that a large percentage of jobs are useless and there is a trend to collect multiple useless jobs.
How did you discover that? Is it intentional on Unity's part? Percentage-wise, are we talking 2% of a 100GB game, or 50% of a 4GB game?
I can't find anything about it online.