No, it’s not. The problem with bad AI in strategy games is that ultimately, what ends up happening is the AI doesn’t follow the same rules as the player and gets a ton of unfair advantages. If you were to play a total war game on the easiest difficulty, it’s just CA’s brain dead AI on equal footing with the player, which allows the player to stomp them out of existence with ease. But when you scale the difficulty up to normal or higher, the AI doesn’t get smarter, because it’s limited. So instead the AI gets a ton of money and resources for free even though it would be otherwise impossible for it to given its position.

For example, if a player was limited to one province, it would put the player on the back foot and is very tough to recover from. If you beat an AI back to one province however, the AI will be able to field an otherwise impossible two full stack armies in an alarming amount of time.

This hurts the experience beyond just “difficulty”. Strategy games are often intended to be deeper than just being about military power. There are often economic and diplomatic mechanics you can use to defeat enemies with, but those often break in these cases because unlike a player, even if you deprive an AI opponent of all of one resource, they’ll probably still have it anyway because it just cheats.

You don’t think a “former” agent of the U.S. government agency with the explicit purpose of information gathering having a position of control in a private company with the explicit purpose of information gathering, might have a vested interest in that position beyond paying the bills? I suppose you think the corporate telco/isp lobbyists getting jobs at the FCC is all on the up and up as well.

Geez talk about naive. What is it that you think can’t happen?

I love the ongoing illogical downplaying you keep doing too. “Dead drop microfilm” lmao. How overdramatic.

“Help is on the way, dear!”

Nope, most people do have unlimited data plans. And unless you live in some tiny, mountainous, Eastern European backwater, the plans aren’t actually that expensive either. And even if you truly are a time traveler from the year 2002 like you appear to be, even if you have an incredibly limited 5GB data plan, you’ll be happy to know that even if you reach your data cap, you will still have data connectivity enough to use RCS without issue. All that happens when you “run out” of data on phone plans is your throttled down to a slower speed that is still more than sufficient to sent text messages over RCS.

It’s not worse than SMS in any fashion. Just like SMS, RCS will tell you when your text is actually delivered. You will never assume somebody received something that they didn’t. Furthermore RCS offers read receipt functionality which will additionally let you know your message was read. SMS is not capable of that.

RCS also lets you actually send media to your contacts, like photos and videos without horribly mangling them with compression.

And as for having no data connection, your phone will fall back to SMS same as iMessages do. Which shouldn’t be at all necessary as most people have unlimited data plans and even when throttled RCS has such a small footprint you shouldn’t have any trouble.

Not a “high up employee”, the director of the NSA. The United States premier agency for gathering information on American Citizens. And he’s not “going to work for” OpenAI he’s joining as a board member of a company that’s one of the United States premier private companies for gathering information from American citizens.

That’s a whole hell of a lot of overlap, especially considering your suspicious attempt to downplay not only this connection, but the role of the man himself.

That’s what it’s called. Linode is gone my friend. It’s time to say goodbye.

Your browser is redirecting, the site is not.

It’s because you linked to the site using http://. This is something the site should account for, but doesn’t.

You mean Akamai Connected Cloud, formerly Linode.

Or maybe just the ones with interesting connotations behind them, like this one.

Before anyone gets excited, 49 out of 50 states are at-will. So the purpose of this post isn’t about being mistaken about their ability to be shitcanned, only that they’re mistaken about the type of law that allows it.

DNS is to a degree, by design federated to begin with. What you need to participate is a recursive DNS server, like Unbound as some of your other replies have mentioned. You can run it on the same machine as something like Pihole if you’re already running that.

Except RCS isn’t awful at all. It’s also end to end encrypted on androids. If Apple’s participation isn’t encrypted, that’s on Apple.

Not at all. iPhones are very capable point and shoot camera phones, but even at a more budget price point iPhone cameras haven’t been best in class in at least 5 or 6 years.

The pixel 5-6 were like $600 phones with unmatched cameras and even better camera software. The modern non-pro pixels like the 7 and 8 also beat out all but the pro max models of recent iPhones.

Similar to that the Samsung fan edition phones were beating out iPhone cameras at a $600 price point brand new.

That isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with iPhone cameras, but they’re not nearly the best either. Even at lower price points. Like it’s becoming quite clear that you are just saying things at this point because you really like iPhones. But almost none of the things you claim are remotely true.

iPhones haven’t had best in class cameras in years. One of the pain points of moving to iPhone was giving up the superior camera experience of Google pixels and Samsung phones.

You can invest divorce settlement money. I also cook clean and do shopping for three while working a full time job and saving for retirement. That’s just what the average adult life is now.

You’re avoiding the question. Where did this “life savings” money come from that it wasn’t income for either your mom or your dad? The things you’re saying don’t add up at all.

Taking care of the children you chose to have and doing chores that literally everyone on the planet has to do is not deserving of some special consideration or award. I’m an unpaid maid, cook, and gardener too, as well as an unpaid electrician and plumber when necessary, and then I also have to go to work full time. In doing so I will retire using my own hard earned money, not someone else’s. Your mom worked half as hard as the average adult today and she “deserves” to retire at the expense of other people? Yeah right.

If your mom’s level of labor for you was so beneficial to you and you believe so strongly that she deserves to retire, then how about you pay for her to retire? Are you not the one she did all this “unpaid” work for? It’s touching that you have so much love and respect for your mother, but once again that doesn’t mean anything to anyone else but you.

The way you’re describing this situation your mom lived a privileged life and never earned her own money and your dad didn’t consider retirement for either of them and now she somehow was gifted a bunch of money to buy real estate and live off of somebody else’s dime. You need to understand that this life path is not going to be respected by society at large. Nobody is going to tell you that you shouldn’t love and respect your own mother but you’re not convincing anyone on here to either.

So this money she used to buy real estate materialized out of thin air and nobody paid taxes on it?

Did she win it in a contest? Dig it out of the ground?

So she had money to buy real estate but not put in a retirement fund, ok. It also doesn’t sound like “her life savings” as much as it is someone else’s income in the form of rent.

This just circles all the way back to the comment you originally replied to. It’s difficult to be sympathetic to somebody who retires and lives off of somebody else’s hard earned money, as opposed to the person who retires and lives off their own hard earned money.

You’re describing a woman who has lived her entire life on somebody else’s dime and will continue to do so, with their only measurable contribution being to you and your siblings/father. So I understand where your sympathy is coming from and that’s totally understandable. But you have to understand that trying to apply that to people outside of your family means next to nothing to anyone else but you.