To this day I cannot grasp how France fucked this up : France had 20 years of experience with monetizing an online network before the internet was a thing. And the Minitel was in almost every household. The terminal was free (or very cheap), and in the 90' , from memory , all the people I knew had one at home. Even the less technological-minded people.

Ok, the minitel services were overpriced, and it was mostly porn chat-room, fake dating site, ads, and silly low-res game...

But the dude making money out of it should have known what would work for the www. They didnt obviously. No google, no fb, no itunes coming from France

you mean the platform where they sold data of teen having insecurities to marketers... you can trust it, they just want to help, what could go wrong :]

What I like so much about google is how inherently bad they are. They failed at anything that is not ads, or data/user-work extraction.

They have the most money in the world, the best mind in the best working environment, the most trapped customer/users/workforce, the most data, they choose the headlines... and .. all their grand plan are utmost failure.

  Everyone was talking about their glass. That was the future. They spend a shit-ton of money. The fad lasted 6 month.. more surprisingly Apple followed the proven failure trend with their watch.. Blind leading the blinds

  Google+ .. it was launched with such a bravado, forcing anyone who made a google-search once in their life to have an account, or something. Outing trans, ruining life in the process.. The "new facebook" is a failure.

  Last year that was the self-driving car. It made the headline (because google own the headlines) every time the car made a turn. It seems it's a dead end. I heard they sold their software and the self-driving business for a penny. Because it's shit, I guess.

  Now the AI. Every time they beat a Go-player, or something, we heard how great their AI is. It's probably another turd, because the headlines are already on the decline.

They are so bad at making anything else than selling ad.. It's funny.

That's my only solace: I can laugh at my overlord. While they still pouring money in a new dung-pile, and selling my data, and making me do the work to better their software/search-engine

you're already paying b telling google where you are, or where you shop. That's how they make the maps good. That's how they make the search engine good: by processing what link people used after a search.

It's a nice business model : make the user work for you. The captcha to create an account on hubski is a way to train the google image recognition software.

But all of that is mere value extracting compared to amazon, who sell anything anywhere anytime to anybody

thanks again for doing the sane work

Do you have an opinion about historical gender bending personna. The male actor, dressed as women during Shakeaspear era, the chevalier d'eon .. Probably a lot more, I dont know about..

In your opinion could it be related to trans (before the era of surgery and medication) or has probably nothing to do with it

X-Com randomness is bad because a bad roll might screw you, and a good one is not satisfying.

Compares to a roguelike.. You have ton of random stuff adding up: you roll for Initiative, then for hit chance, then for enemy dodge, then critical hit, then damage. And the odd of have the worst outcome, or the best one, are pretty slim. It's satisfying when everything goes your way (init / hit /Critical / max damage), it's not so bad when everything goes bad because you hardly can be 1-hit killed.

If I remember correctly the first X-Com (from the 90's in DOS) was a bit more like a RL (you had more crew member, each with more hitpoint, and the aliens did not get the weird first move when spotted, those were alleviating part of the randomness).. It was still infuriating at time.

Giving more hit point to your soldiers and to alien would be a great way to make the randomness more manageable. But like the 90's version (or a RL) it will become very tedious when you exchange fire for a few round with almost no effect.

Another frustrating bit is the fake randomess. In my experience it happen in X-Com. And developer explained how they did it in Civ5: Player expected to win almost every time when shown a 80% win chance. And win half the time with a 20% chance. So they developed a system to mimic those expectation. In the end, the percentage does not make any mathematical sense. And when fight after fight, you experience a 99% success rate on a 80% shown rate, it become more frustrating the 1 time when you miss.

Tricking player brain, even for their own enjoyment, always backfire in my opinion.

Playing "Tales of Maj Eyal" (800+ hours so far). A Very pretty , rich and enjoyable roguelike... You can be almost 1-hitted but you probably had it coming when it happen.

"In the end, Sisyphe come to appreciate pushing its rock" -Camus (paraphrased)

It's still not very fulfilling to go hard at pushing a rock, but hey, as long as we find joy in it ... I guess

But I'm the hubski token french commentator, so I have a duty to go hard at reminding how lazy and strikes-lover we are

Work hard, be nice..

And how come the audio is less than 3min when it take 2h to read those usual long kleinbloo's post!! Disappointed!

Since I saw your post I became obsessed with Jain. I didnt know her, but heard -and liked- another song on the radio: Come. The clip for it, has some weird visual too.

Jain is a french artist from Toulouse a medium town in the south-west. Her mother is a metisse ( from Madagascar) . And she spend her youth living in others country (which I guess explain her choice to sing in English)

She wrote that song when she was 16. But waited 8year to wrote her first album. With the help of 'Yodelice' (whoever the dude is)

In an Interview she confirmed that she want to have a visual identity (so she always wore the simple black robe with white collar) . In that, she acknowledged copying Stromae, and his choice to have distinct visual.

Thanks for posting that weewoo²

or "dark matter" sound really bad

How does the AI fare with white collar crimes?