I was just about to go to bed and what a surprise seeing Grandia trending #1 on Hacker News of all places.
For myself, Grandia is one of those games that was part of my childhood so despite having flaws, it transcends ratings in a sense.
It was the first game I ever got on the first home console I ever had, the PlayStation 1. I would only have been about 9 or 10(?) (31 now) and the intro to the game is burned into my mind because I never had a memory card for quite some time so I'd replay the opening hour or two over and over until it was time for dinner or bed.
Eventually I got a memory card and my next entry was Digimon World 2003 and I wonder to what extent that lead to me being interested in computers generally and ultimately becoming a developer as a day job.
To this day, I've still yet to finish Grandia. I picked up the HD Collection on Switch and I'm about halfway. Every time I go on vacation (or particularly during the Christmas holidays), I'll progress a bit. There's no real rush though in that once it's over, it's over. I don't really tend to replay titles, particularly long RPGs.
It's also kind of weird actually seeing the rest of the game too. For the longest time, I had no idea where the story was going. I've still mostly managed to avoid spoilers as well so I conceptually don't know where the story ends up which is nice, given years of reading Wikipedia synopsis only to regret it later.
> A total joy… but one that demands an intense time commitment. A player Justin’s age surely has the time
I found this part funny because I was Justin's age when I first played Grandia and never found the time then let alone now
I bought my Switch because I found out about the HD collection, so this is remembered from 6+ years ago and may be fixed now, but two problems stuck out with Grandia II: One video crossing the Granacliffs didn't play (with the flying ship), and several magics turn out to be multiple videos played on top of each other - and they messed up the aspect ratio in a few (stretch vs center) so the visuals don't line up.
Other than that it was what I remember on Dreamcast. Oddly, even the snowy area lagged in the exact same way as on Dreamcast.
My example of that was Heroes of Might and Magic 2 vs 3. 3 is the legendary one that everybody remembers, but I actually liked 2 better. Sure, 3 is far superior for balance and AI and content... but for me, the unbalance of 2 was its charm. Trying to win with the underpowered knight castle, or against a far superior force with tactics like the blind spell that the AI wouldn't counter... that was the fun of the more primitive Heroes 2 and wasn't quite the same in the more developed 3. Less development in a game can actually make for more fun factor.
My particular favourite of this genre is "Maple Shortbread Bars" from The New York Times which starts with the opening "Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001"
On the normal food blogger pages it is fluff to make room for ads or to get people to misclick on the ads while trying to get to (or back to; the scroll changes feel intentional too) the actual recipe bit. Super effective, especially with people using mobile and trying to scroll with one finger while cooking.
A ton of these sites were bought up and they all look the same now and run the multiple floating ads, especially a wide banner at the -bottom- which is a perfect misclick monetizer.
I thought it's because there's no copyright possible on recipes, but there is on the fluff writing...
I don't know if it's to prevent mass theft of content (oh no, the thieves would have to go through the text and cut off the stories. Although nowadays the biggest IP thieves have built systems to automate this..)
My neighbor had 1940s Joy of Cooking, which in itself was probably one of the first every recipe, for the most part, just works cookbooks. Between rationing and more important not spoiling when sending cookies from the US to soldiers fighting on the front lines, many cookie recipes were without butter.
Outside of a story like that, there is no reason to include war in your recipe. Cooking is about nurturing and sustaining homeostasis. There is something fundamentally wrong about taking other people's suffering and making it about one self -- it is narcissistic which spoils like cookies made with butter after several weeks of travel.
Oh, it's worse than you think. It's not just "taking other people's suffering and making it about oneself." It's often purely SEO. Recipes get ranked higher when they are preceded by long, "engaging" introductions that nobody reads but that use keywords and address common questions (Like "can I substitute ingredients?). Often the longwinded introductions you see aren't the result of narcissism but of thoughtless SEO.
Hah! I had watched this just last night. I have a Fisher & Paykel Dishdrawer so this prompted me to check the instruction manual and sure enough, I had been putting Rinse Aid in the pre-wash area. I don't even really know what Rinse Aid is honestly but it's fun having some things be a black box. Turns out the correct spot is turning a knob, pulling it out and pouring it down a hole containing a glowing red light. I had assumed there was just some sort of circuitry down there and doing so would be a horrible idea. Thanks Technology Connections!
It's a volatile surfactant. Thus, it allows water to drip off your dishes before drying, so you don't get spots, but also doesn't produce a residue of its own.
I wouldn’t use rinse aid. It’s not good for you - damages your gut and may contain dioxane byproducts. I also would avoid detergents with ethoxylated alcohols (AEs).
What to look for is any powder or powder-filled pod with a) no AEs and b) does contain amylase and protease , two food-eating enzymes that are often omitted for who knows why.
We absolutely need rinse aid here, even with a water softener. But we make our own with ethanol and citric acid. For us works just as well as the pricey stuff and costs us…. A large bottom shelf bottle of vodka (sorry, don’t drink and don’t buy this enough to remember) and about $0.50 in citric acid will last me 6 months.
Yeah, I have very soft water. I tried using a liquid rinse aid when I switched from a name brand pod with a rinse aid to the cheap Kirkland pods. The rinse aid made things worse and I did end up with a residue on my glassware.
It’s cheap enough to try it and see if it helps but don’t feel obligated to use it if it doesn’t.
I ordered citric acid off of Amazon (it’s great at getting out hard water stains in bathrooms and toilets and helps keep my water softener going well (I add some to the salt tank), also can add some good kick to lemonade)
For every cup of vodka (40 or 60% can’t remember, but prolly 40. Though scientifically 60% would be better) I add 1 to 2 tsp of powdered citric acid. Takes a surprisingly long time to dissolve so you’ll get a quick workout shaking it. I’ve added blue food coloring before to make it more visible in the dispenser to see the level but it’s not necessary at all so I usually skip it.
I make it in a 1 liter bottle which will last a couple months. We have a Bosch dishwasher, refill it… every couple of weeks maybe? I’m not the only one filling it. We do 1-2 loads of dishes a day (4 kids who can’t ever seem to find the cup they JUST used. Probably a parenting problem)
I have no idea if that’s helpful. But I did just lookup a cost by fluid volume- I live in a state with high alcohol tax rates and my cost per fluid oz of my DIY rinse aid is around $0.19 (mostly from alcohol, per fluid oz of citric acid is less than one cent. ) for reference, the small bottle of Jet-dry is $0.58/flOz.
Household usage levels are probably fine [1]. That being said, we don't use rinse aid and I don't see any issues with glasses. I can see how it could be a problem in areas with harder water.
Why would you assume I am a chemist, an investor, and a pro-additive experiments? (I'm 2/3, but which 2!?)
I'm an educated citizen who likes to have some evidence-based sources to learn about surprising claims people make. Especially when their claims read like pseudoscientific babble that has little or no basis in reality.
Not only is there an extremely small amount of rinse aid that is dispensed in the final rinse, but even less of it would be present once the dishes are dry. The paranoia over it theoretically affecting your gut lining in the amounts used as directed is hogwash.
Without rinse aid your dishes will never be even remotely dry unless you manually wipe them dry yourself.
There are rinse aid brands which undergo independent tests to ensure they don't contain problematic things but you can also pretty successfuly make your own with a combination of some food grade acid, alcohol and water.
The guy in the video disagrees with you. From his other video, 23 mins in,
> next, rinse aids. use them. this isn't a scam.
I'll trust the dishwasher expert until there's some proper citations.
You have to realize that every time you sip a glass or eat off a surface that's provided by a commercial entity, you're getting items that have come in contact with industrial appliances that dispense rinse aid.
I have a difficult time believing that something so ubiquitous is as harmful as you claim, but I'm open to being convinced.
I don't understand where you are getting "cause gut issues" from. Hopefully not some random person on the Internet spewing nonsense without any sources.
Edit: i see the linked pubmed in a child comment now. But it seems to be not in humans, so saying it "damages your gut" is not an appropriate conclusion.
You should read more than the article's title. Like how they were testing against "liquid-liquid interface cultures, organoids, and gut-on-a-chip" and not humans.
Reading the Conclusion is also helpful. Says nothing about damaging your gut.
Another, not incompatible explanation is that it's also just easier to develop for a handful of known iOS/iPadOS targets compared to Android's unbounded set of screen sizes and device specs.
In practice Android is much more difficult to handle the myriad of offerings - Have you ever tried both? To your other point, what app spend would Anthropic be worried about - they have a subscription model.
They sell through the app, too. And Android users are just as unlikely to spend outside of apps as they are inside them. Android deprioritization is a business decision, not a technical complexity decision.
Please take a look at the percentage of paying Android users. It just does not compare. It's useless to count 2 billion users in third world countries who never have and never will pay anything in-app.
Users spend <25% as much as iOS users, and less than half in total despite larger user counts (having double the users who spend <25% each does not add up!), a gap that widens year over year. Why would they prioritize that?
Why would they care about prioritizing users who spend much less? Android pays <25% per user. You need a LOT more than 70% to make that worth prioritizing. Those users are just going to eat up free tier resources without paying. It's borderline parasitic from a business perspective.
Android users are more likely to be useful for spreading word-of-mouth reputation to Apple platform users, than they are as direct spenders. Just another reason to ensure Apple platform features don't trail Android.
iOS/iPadOS aren't exactly the same, without bothering to count, there are about 10 screen sizes to account for, and Apple contrary to Android world, doesn't have somethine like JetPack, either the user updates their phone or there are no new features for the apps to rely on.
The fairly popular Renovate bot provided by Mend is being renamed to just "Mend" shortly. The timeline for this doesn't seem set in stone but some users have raised concern that some workflows may break if you make assumptions about the name of the Github app being used.
Thanks for the reminder. I went to reset my password when the email went out but when following the reset flow, I hit a Cloudflare page (due to the origin presumably having crashed) and got sidetracked
Any plans for the HN API to expose highlights? It's a neat high signal collection that I have some custom bit of code that translates it into an RSS feed but an official endpoint would be neat :)
Not to beat on frontend but I vaguely remember that the UI was rebuilt with React a couple of years back and the other day while browsing a sale, specifically hovering over Final Fantasy XIII would crash an entire sales widget, printing out a React error. I wonder if this is just a case of framework bloat getting out of hand (again)
The new Steam UI was incredibly bloated at the start, it was frequent (in my experience) for it to force close because it wouldn't fit in RAM along with the active game. It got better, but I'm still not loving it.
Maybe I'm prejudiced to React and its variants, because I have never used a React app I liked, just React apps that are useful despite their shortcomings.
React is so wildly popular that you probably have a bunch of websites and apps you like that use it but because it’s so wildly popular there are also extensive examples of poorly made applications.
Ding ding ding! It's possible (easy) to make terrible software in any framework/system. The popular systems are almost certainly going to have the most offenders, the worst offenses.
(It makes me nuts but) I seriously think the web is basically the greatest. And we have some pretty good tools for doing pretty good, that we can use, if we try hard. But also, the whole middle-tier data-architecture is made up by almost everyone, with little guidance; there's incredibly little guidance & views of how we effectively get data to the client and cache & update it effectively.
The tools and tech exist, but instead of clear industrial practices everyone's stringing shit together.
> It's possible (easy) to make terrible software in any framework/system.
It's always possible but not always easy. Some frameworks can and do choose to make certain kinds of errors hard to make, even at the cost of asking more from the programmer. It's a fallacy to think that they're all the same.
I also think that stringing shit together is often very much okay.
Your user or customer wants their problem solved or their desirable experience delivered. They often don’t care if there are bugs or jank or slowness as long as they get what they want.
I agree, but it’s usually not an “all else equal” situation when it comes to alternative products.
Customers would rather play a buggy/janky game like the Elder Scrolls series, Minecraft (especially early in its lifespan, not really so much anymore), or Ark (the dinosaur game) than play a polished bug-free game with boring gameplay.
Or as another example, customers would rather deal with the ugly UI and slow UI performance of Autodesk Fusion than use a more polished/native feeling application that isn’t as powerful for design work.
Games are a completely different type of application. They're not utilitarian, they aren't automatically better when they behave predictably. The launcher, the menus, the game engine are fairly traditional but the game mechanics code has completely different desirable properties.
It could be, or maybe poorly optimized assets? I always have such a problem loading the pictures and videos associated with each game.
I've used other sites that are fully React based that run quite well and don't have these issues. So I can't imagine it is specifically the frameworks fault.
But I do find if developers use these big frameworks and don't use them properly, the slowdowns can be much more pronounced.
For myself, Grandia is one of those games that was part of my childhood so despite having flaws, it transcends ratings in a sense.
It was the first game I ever got on the first home console I ever had, the PlayStation 1. I would only have been about 9 or 10(?) (31 now) and the intro to the game is burned into my mind because I never had a memory card for quite some time so I'd replay the opening hour or two over and over until it was time for dinner or bed.
Eventually I got a memory card and my next entry was Digimon World 2003 and I wonder to what extent that lead to me being interested in computers generally and ultimately becoming a developer as a day job.
To this day, I've still yet to finish Grandia. I picked up the HD Collection on Switch and I'm about halfway. Every time I go on vacation (or particularly during the Christmas holidays), I'll progress a bit. There's no real rush though in that once it's over, it's over. I don't really tend to replay titles, particularly long RPGs.
It's also kind of weird actually seeing the rest of the game too. For the longest time, I had no idea where the story was going. I've still mostly managed to avoid spoilers as well so I conceptually don't know where the story ends up which is nice, given years of reading Wikipedia synopsis only to regret it later.
> A total joy… but one that demands an intense time commitment. A player Justin’s age surely has the time
I found this part funny because I was Justin's age when I first played Grandia and never found the time then let alone now
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