I think it was a joke that got typo'd. "Toe-Killer 3000"

Even tiny mods can be significant to user experience. I hate the trend of games always having sharpening filters on. I started playing Expedition 33 this weekend and discovered it has a super strong sharpening filter with no option to turn it off, so I went and got a mod before I did a single thing.

At least one of the modern Ghost Recon games has motorcycles.

This article leaves out Order of the Sinking Star, a sokoban-style puzzler from the Braid/Witness designer.

This doesn't have the pretentious stuff of Witness.

It's a sokoban game, so it's a grid-based puzzler about moving stuff around to get to an exit. It has a bunch of characters, each with distinct mechanics. It gets really interesting when you have multiple characters in play at once, requiring you to mix their abilities.

So far, it looks to be one of the best of that genre, though it's hard to tell how it will be later in the game.

Some short-sighted companies are evaluating employees on AI use, with more being better. This script sends tons of requests to one of the main LLMs, allowing you to appear to use AI a ton. It has the side benefit of costing your employer a ton of money.

If you have a dynamic container, it is sized based on its contents and everything inside of it is positioned based on everything else. If you move something, that impacts everything around it, including the container itself. There are workarounds like having an invisible placeholder and a separate graphical element, but they aren't user-friendly.

Offset transforms allow you to leave the logical version of a thing in place while moving the visual. The demo in the release notes has a grid of icons which get bigger and move when you mouse over them, which would have reflowed the other icons or resized the box before.

Rectangular area lights can create softer shadows and more realistic reflections for your scenes.

In real time rendering, the first half of this is false. The shadow casting for area lights is identical to point lights. They aren't casting from everywhere on the surface of the area, just from the center point.

They may be handling it correctly when baking.

in case anyone is curious, those comments are not a modern addition. They are a faithful reproduction of the original scanned copy of the code.

I love how every once in a while there's a comic from the parents perspective and he's just a normal kid with loving parents.

The claim that they are doing a clean-room implementation is bullshit. The only way any of these models are able to make any working code is by being trained on every bit of code that could be scraped from the internet. Unless the project you are cloning was released after the model was trained, it was trained on the code. It may be a tiny fragment of the training data, but it still saw it.

It's not a different screen in SMB1. After you hit the axe, Mario walks to the right and the screen scrolls until the castle is off screen, revealing Peach and the ending text. It's functionally just part of the level.

They noted that the garage door was set up by the previous owner. That likely also means that the previous owner could still open it from the app.

Cyanoacrylate was formulated specifically to bond well with human skin. Liquid stitches.

The show can see the future, which helps the early seasons a lot. Knowing what happens in the later books allows them to bring stuff forward. A great example of this is in the pilot when Avasarala is torturing a Belter and questioning him about stolen stealth tech. This is a character that doesn't even appear in the first book and it is setting things up that don't become important until book/season 4/5.

The authors being active writers on the show and senior producers on the later seasons also helps. They aren't in charge, which means people with TV experience make the show work, but they keep the voice consistent. Regardless of who is credited as writer on an episode, nearly all Amos stuff in the first two seasons is written by one of the authors so that his mentality would be consistent. Throughout the whole run of the show, pretty much all the formal speeches are written by the other author.

The last thing that really helps them is the drive to be faithful to the story of the source without being slave to it. This leads to many small changes that slot actors they already have into story beats, giving the viewer more connection to what they see. Drummer, for example, is a tiny character in the books but the actress was great so they kept slotting her in instead of having a different Belter for everything. She even erased the existence of a main POV character and took on that role, outlived his role and just kept going. That then leaves his character design available, so he ends up being a major character in season 5, a completely different book.

We can thank Game of Thrones for a lot of that. One of the authors worked for GRRM for a while and was involved in his side of the early seasons of GOT. Even early on when it was well received, GRRM was getting frustrated by the changes the show was making without regard to knock-on effects. When selling the TV rights for Expanse, they fought to be in the room for both writing and production so that they could have a say when decisions were being made as opposed to just being asked for feedback after the fact.

Earthsea is beautiful. There aren't very many books, and they were written across 50ish years. They evolved with the genre, allowing readers a clear window into how we got to the modern works of Jordan, Sanderson, etc.

If your religion requires premarital sex, you can argue that. Freedom of religion and freedom from religion are not the same thing.

The trackpads on the Steamdeck/SC2 are much better than the SC1.

Valve was forced to stop manufacturing the SC1 due to patent trolling related to the paddles.

Aquaman felt like two movies running at the same time. One was a fun action comedy, the other was a serious movie that had places to go. Each scene had plot shots and comedy shots, and they didn't feel like they had been shot together.

My theory, based on zero research, is that half the movie was reshoots. Whether it was shot super serious and turned into a comedy later or the whole story was replaced after the fact, I don't know. Either way, it likely bears little resemblance to what he walked on set for.

That's the fatal flaw with AI. If you can replace the base-level workers in a skilled field, competition will lead to most places doing that. 5-10 years later, the industry has a shortage of mid-level workers.