All I know about him is that he has a very large YouTube audience and that he does particularly well among young adults. That is an audience that has (a little bit of) disposable income but is still learning how to make good use of their money. I assume Mr. Beast advertised his book non-stop on his channel, so his viewers went out and purchased it.

You need to see more people in your day to day life, then. I saw a lady on the subway that had a rectangular smart phone that folded in half to be a little square to stow in her purse.

Also, one of my friends has a fold out phablet for gaming.

The fact that I noticed and remembered both instances shows that phone makers have been doing a good job of inventing interesting and innovative hardware. The fact that there are only two instances for me to remember speaks to the fact that they have not been as successful at actually getting people to buy them.

Wendy’s released an RPG back in the day. Supposedly it was solid, if a bit silly, though it included meta-gaming rules for bribing the DM with food.

Python does have enums: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/enum.html#enum-cookbook

How are bikes even DEI? Riding a bike is ableist and exclusionary. In order to ride a bike, a person must have two reasonably strong legs (or arms, in the case of a handcycle) and to go any great distance, the rider needs to be in pretty good shape.

I am not saying we should not have bike lanes, since they provide an additional, clean and healthy mode of transportation, but I just don’t see them as DEI.

I use SMS specifically because of the network effect. Almost everyone I want to communicate with has a cellphone, so all of them are capable of sending and receiving text messages. There is no need to list my installed messaging apps and compare it to theirs, we just need to exchange phone numbers.

My longest and most active conversations (chatting with my wife or my closest friends) are going to be over a more feature rich app, but if I need to set up a quick chat with 3 or 4 people, I am not going to think what messaging app we all have in common, I will just start an SMS group chat.

1. I like to borrow game disks from my friends.
2. Sony will delete digital purchases from customer devices and not compensate the customers. Other companies have done it, but Sony seems to do it more often than anyone.

If your car windows are totally fogged up, you cannot clearly see what is in front of your car and therefore, your vehicle is not safe to operate.

Hollywood perfected royalties. If structured right, you can promise everyone at the company 200% of the games profit and never pay them a cent.

For example, you sell all rights to the game to a shell company owned by the studio’s parent for 1¢.

It is a big deal. If Epic changes some API and breaks Heroic, it is your problem for using an unsupported third party application. If Epic breaks their official client, their QA manager has a problem.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/467810/Splody/

It is a Bomberman rip-off, but very fun. The Steam page claims they can support any number of players, but recommends limiting it to 4-20.

It is a grand jury. That is the practice round for a trial. The prosecutor goes over the evidence and explains what argument they are going to make in court without the defendent or their lawyer present to argue against it. The role of a grand jury is to pump the prosecutor up and say “You got this. I would totally believe you if I was on a real jury.”

The fact that in this case, the grand jury said “That is stupid. You have no argument. Just let the guy walk,” means that either the prosecutor is an incompetent idiot who did not understand what evidence he was presenting or the jury thought that no crime had been committed.

In (US criminal) law, you need to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt”. If no reasonable person would have a doubt that the killing is political then legally it is proven. The point of the jury is to be a representative sample of reasonable people.

I thought that the US banned flavored vapes. If your home country has not, encourage politicians to ban vapes altogether.

Edit: In retrospect, I should let the vape addicts be.

MySpace (and a lot of early social media) was about keeping up with what was going on in your friends lives, not screaming into the void and being drowned out by brands and influencers (like I am doing now).

A magnet school is just a school that will take students from anywhere in the district instead of only students that live nearby. Some require tests to attend, but others do not.

But yes, there are public schools for gifted students that admit purely based on academic merit and exam scores. In theory, a rich student would not be able to buy their way in. In practice, having a tutor who can coach a child on exam specifics is a very large advantage.

I assume that Microsoft is trying to appeal to two different groups of shareholders. The first sees Microsoft buying up studios and assumes that the studios will be able to put out better games cheaper (by firing support staff like HR). The second group sees Microsoft cutting low performing workers and assumes that Microsoft will be able to get more profits by cutting lots of cost without losing much income. If they time it right, they can get the second group to start buying just as the first group starts selling.

This is GTA 6. The game could just be Hello World and it would still be the best selling game ever. They could have started taking preorders earlier and it could have also been the best selling game of last year.

People know how popular the last game was, assume that this one is going to be even more, and feel like they need to be first to play it or they will be left behind. They feel like they need to preorder the game so that it doesn’t sell out, despite the fact that it is a digital download.

I love using my phone speaker. I do not always have headphones in my ears. I know some people can walk around all day with an earbud in their head, but I am not one of them. When I am messing around on my phone and decide I need to watch a video that includes audio, I can just turn up my speaker and listen. At home only, mind you. I would have to be totally devoid of empathy to blast loud audio in public.

Since this is “no stupid questions”, I will follow up with a question and demand that you not call me stupid: what about the lamp makes it “not food grade”? I assume that both salts are just NaCl, so do salt manufacturers put the salt through some process to remove dangerous contaminants or something?