On the other side of the same coin: When I mass edited my comments before quitting Reddit, I got site-banned. Basically, my first account’s automated edit got me auto-banned from several subs with pro-spez mods. Some subs had set their automod to detect when people were using the more popular methods of auto-editing, and set the automod to ban for using them. Then when I did the same with my second (and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc…) account, it almost immediately got site-banned for ban evasion.

Basically, account 1 was banned from a sub, so when account 2 started doing the same thing on the same IP address, it was flagged as ban evasion. And ban evasion is one of the few things that will get you banned site-wide instead of just from a specific sub.

I went back and checked a few months ago, and all of those site bans were lifted and the edits were undone. Likely because a site ban prevents the comments from showing up (which hurts Reddit’s bottom line, because they show up as a bunch of [removed] comments instead,) but also prevented any of the edits from actually being published. So when they lifted the site ban (to get those old comments to show back up again) it was as if I had never edited them at all. I had probably a million karma spread across my various accounts. I was extremely active at one point, so Reddit had a direct incentive to unban those accounts with literal thousands of comments.

Oh and there's probably less of an emphasis on hiring business majors since the workers on the floor tend to have a better idea of how damaging decisions that seem to make more money on paper can be.

There’s also the idea that as employees rise through the ranks, they have a better understanding of how their old jobs are done. Let’s say you’re in a manufacturing job: Nothing is worse than being managed by a business degree who doesn’t even know how to turn on the equipment you use every day. Because that manager has no idea what is and isn’t possible to do with the machinery, what kinds of timeframes to expect from jobs, etc… So you’ll end up getting unrealistic expectations, based purely on numbers on paper.

There’s a huge difference between a game featuring politics as a sandbox for players to play around with, and featuring political themes as a main story driver.

Civ is a good example of the former; It has politics present in the game, but the politics aren’t presented in a hero/villain way. They’re presented as potential advantages for the player, potential disadvantages for opponents, etc, but the actual policies themselves aren’t central to the system.

The game pulls from historical political systems as a way to present them to the player, but it could just as easily forego that and call the system some made up word besides “political systems”. Because the politics and policies aren’t actually important to the gameplay; All that matters to the player is what potential benefits and drawbacks they provide. You don’t actually care if a particular civ is “democratic” or “totalitarian”, because those titles could just as easily be replaced with “A” and “B”. The only thing that matters to the player is how that particular civ’s political affiliation will affect their actions.

But if a game heavily features political themes and messages as part of a plot line, then it’s not something the player can avoid or ignore. If it’s central to the story, one side (likely the side helping the player) is inevitably going to be presented as the hero, and another side (likely the side working against the player) is going to be presented as a villain. Final Fantasy X, for instance, is a good example of the latter. It heavily features anti-religion themes and messages. It’s impossible to play through the game without receiving “religion bad” messaging, because they’re central to the game’s plot line, with religious leaders as the main villains. We can draw direct parallels to real-world examples. And if you’re someone who is religious, those parallels may make you deeply uncomfortable, because religion is being portrayed negatively no matter how you play the game.

I’ve recently picked up Solo Leveling. I’ve already read the Webtoon it’s based on, so I already know all the big plot points. But it’s nice seeing it translated to a show. It’s only the second or third time I have actually read the “manga” (do Webtoons count as manga?) before the anime, so it’s interesting to be on the other side of the fence this time.

Honestly, Andromeda didn’t deserve the hate it got. It wasn’t awful. It had some issues, sure. But many of the complaints about the story basically boiled down to “it wasn’t larger than the entire first three games combined.” It was trying to start a new story, but instead of being seen as a new start it was compared to the entirety of the original trilogy.

It completely misses that the entire first Mass Effect game was basically just an intro to the Reapers. Like the entire first Mass Effect game is basically just “oh hey here’s a new villain.” And by that metric, Andromeda did a lot more than the first Mass Effect did. But it wasn’t larger than the entire trilogy, so it got panned by the players who were too impatient to wait for a sequel.

Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

For real though, I have written some truly monstrous operations in Excel.

What do you mean you want to use Excel to manage everyone’s calendars? And now you want to export that horribly built calendar management spreadsheet to Google Calendar? What do you mean you want the Google Calendar entries automatically formatted based on who is working on a particular day? I mean yes it’s possible but-…

And every piece of code you think you write for one-time use is guaranteed to be reused every day for the next 5 years

The scheduling demand thing is referring specifically to the project manager going “we need this for an upcoming major product launch, so you need to fix this before the launch.” It feels like Microsoft cracking the whip to try getting free labor, because it is.

If they truly can’t do without it for their product launch, they can fork it and fix the bug themselves. Surely Microsoft has the resources and brainpower to do so. But the PM didn’t want to do that, because it means they’d be spending their own time and resources on it.

I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a huge fan of the story at first. It took me a few hours and a few quests to actually get into it. It suffers from Kingdom Hearts 2/The Witcher 3 Syndrome: The two hour long intro/tutorial is absolutely the worst part, which is a shame. The game really begins to shine once you get to Meridian, but that’s several hours in.

Typically speaking, you’d want to cut instead of boost. Cutting is easy; You just reduce the volume. Boosting is much more complicated, because you need to “add” signal where none exists. So boosts tend to be noisy and/or outright distorted, while cuts will maintain a clean audio signal.

Need to boost around 2KHz? Try cutting everything else instead.