beefcat

you don’t anymore

Because they require extra certification from Microsoft.

The new app has fewer account requirements than the one it is replacing. With GFE, you needed an account just to get automatic driver updates. With the new app, you can do just about anything except redeem free bundled games without an account.

I’d put Jedi Survivor up there, despite the technical issues. Also no list of best Star Wars games is complete without Republic Commando.

It’s no secret that since the 2019 Avengers: Endgame, the company was asked to scale up in an unprecedented way to feed its fledgling streaming service, Disney+

There’s the problem

“Some of our studios lost a little focus. So the first step that we’ve taken is that we’ve reduced volume,” Iger said on a Feb. 7 earnings call.

And there’s a big part of the solution. Another is giving actual creatives more control over the final product, which they also alluded to.

My hope is that with scaled back Marvel production, they can direct some of that money towards new, original IP.

It’s possible with high end PC hardware today. Since when have consoles been 20 years behind PC?

A lot less work for developers, smaller game sizes, and map and game design no longer needing to be built around the onerous limitations of raster lighting and reflections.

Ray tracing is a bigger deal than most people realize. It feels like a gimmick because the games that support it today are still ultimately designed around rasterization.

Path-traced lighting in particular is a huge game changer, and means developers will no longer have to choose between rudimentary global dynamic lighting and very static and storage-intensive baked lighting. You can get the benefits of both without the drawbacks of either, assuming the hardware is up to snuff.

Ray tracing performance that’s actually good enough for games to fully ditch rasterized lighting and reflections

QR codes wouldn’t solve this problem, because they would still house a link that has to be opened in the NaviLens app to be of any use.

These codes don’t just take you to some static document. It opens up in the NaviLens app, which when use features like the gps, gyro, and camera in your phone to provide more rich, contextual information.

It seems to me like they do more than just generate QR codes that download a static document. They've built out software that helps the visually impaired navigate pedestrian and transit infrastructure. The software seems pretty complex, beyond what a city would likely have the expertise or budget to build from scratch on its own.

You point out the key weakness to the whole approach (dependency on a single third party). Though I suspect that the content in question is also hosted by NaviLens, so the codes would still stop working if they ever shut down.

Just taking a look at their website, it seems to me that NaviLens' value proposition isn't just "codes that download a document", but an entire framework for building and presenting essential documentation in a way that is accessible to people with vision impairments. I can see why it would be cheaper and more effective for a city to buy a service like this than to hire their own software developers and accessibility experts to build out their own bespoke system.

But it is possible to recover, and many do. There is no recovery from being murdered. Personally, I'm glad I'm still alive even if I'm still dealing with my own SA-induced trauma 20 years later.

Murder also has further externalities. When you kill someone, you take them away from their friends and families, who now have to live forever without that person in their lives.

But this whole conversation feels a lot like we're asking "who was worse, Hitler or Genghis Khan?", and it's weird to put either side on the defensive even if there is an objectively true answer to be found.