They famously got Al Capone on tax evasion, and nobody thinks of him as "the tax cheat" first and foremost.

Besides, I suspect that this is a case where the floodgates are going to open up in terms of investigations and charges, once the first set sticks to him. There's also the NY state fraud charges already filed, and the GA state election tampering investigation that is widely expected to lead to charges.

Laughable, maybe, but not surprising. Since the Web 2.0 boom started picking up, the game for tech startups has always been to attract users as fast as possible, profits be damned, and hope a FAANG buys you out for your userbase before your VC money runs out. Post-Great Recession, debt has been near as makes no difference free, so VCs have been willing to extend very long runways to the companies they invest in, but with interest rates going sharply up the music has stopped and it's time for companies like Reddit to show they can become profitable or else.

I got my money's worth from the original, but I have two major complaints about it that, from what I can see, the new game doesn't address:

First, the developer originally made transport games and that bias shows. C:S makes it incredibly hard to design a city that isn't car-centric, and gameplay in practice tends to center on optimizing car traffic at the expense of everything else a city-builder could be.

Second (and this ties into the first, to an extent) is that the game doesn't represent the passage of time, in a technological or societal sense. Real cities grow and change over decades and centuries, with decisions made in prior eras imposing informing and imposing restraints on those made after. C:S cities exist in a weird, timeless and anachronistic "now" from the start. This was something that classic SimCity games did well, at least in the context of an American boom town: as the years advance, so does the tech tree, opening up new mass transit options, cleaner and more efficient infrastructure items, and new kinda of commerce and industry.

Personally, I'd love a game in this genre that plays like SimCity but takes in the whole arc of history, say from from the Middle Ages onwards, so that players can start to appreciate how decisions they make hundreds of years prior can leave their mark on the city in the present -- for example, where a defensive wall gets placed during a medieval time of war leaves a mark of the street networks, and changes the way that that social classes distribute through the city and leads to a high-rent luxury district in a future era.

Not sure what his responses are going to do for investors' confidence, given that they mostly show a complete lack of understanding of his userbase, and the reaction to them implies that he's trying to sell them damaged goods.

I mean, I might have accepted a response along the lines of "We're very sorry that we slandered the dev of the most popular third party app for our service, tensions have been running high of late and we're all not at our best right now. Also, bottom line is that running Reddit is ruinously expensive and we desperately need to monetize users somehow, and this seemed like a viable option at the time."

Instead it's all doubling down on everything, not giving any ground. They want those Elon Twitter API dollars (to the extent that anybody is actually paying those!) and they're done with treating their users as anything other than content generation for LLM model training.

If the existing teams won't let Andretti Autosport join the grid, I can't imagine Hitech getting traction -- and if they did it'd make the Andretti snub even more insulting.

/. for me. Pass the aspirin...

I fully expect that subs with major frontpage presences are going to get taken over by the mothership and reopened almost immediately. They may even be able to find some poor saps to mod them, at least for a couple weeks until they realize that's a full-time job. But the smaller subs are what long-time and power users end up diffusing to and what keeps them engaged with the site over time, and those are likely going to be dead or zombies shortly. Any investor putting money into Reddit for any reason other than short-term trading or hoping to be at the front of the line to pick over the corpse in a few years has failed to do their due diligence.

Sooner or later they're gonna run afoul of The Mouse, and then Mickey's gonna sic the (legal) Death Star on them. When that happens all these copyright/liability questions are going to get sorted out real fast, and probably not in a way that anybody but Disney will be happy with.

Damn. I don't usually replay story-driven games like Cyberpunk (especially ones with the sort of... finality that Cyberpunk has) but it seems like CDPR is making it a much more immersive experience. We'll have to see how that rumored new ending turns out. I get that they had a story they wanted to tell (and I felt it was a good one), but it was more than a bit of a downer that ::: spoiler spoiler all of V's efforts boiled down to a few different ways to be chewed up, spit out, and dying at the end. :::

I like for my RPGs to give me more than an illusion of freedom (Phantom Liberty, nudge nudge?) , or else why indulge in the escapism?

Toyota's efforts to win on merit instead of by default continue to be cursed for no readily-apparent reason...

Really good race overall, and portends well for the future of LMH/LMdH as a category. A different manufacturer on each step of the podium, even Peugeot was legitimately leading for a while, and the Caddies were in the hunt the whole way through. Porsche still seems to have some teething problems to work through.

as far as refueling goes, it's true that Formula 1 has a bit of a sordid history with it, but the fact of the matter is that it's a solved problem for other series. IndyCar has a developed and mature system for it, for example. I don't think that adding it back would be inherently dangerous if appropriately regulated -- and in light of Grosjean's crash, there's a counterargument to be made that having less fuel in the cars at any given time could offset the added risk of fueling in the pits.

Another thing that could help would be to focus on reducing the size of the cars. Over the last 10-15 years F1 cars have become enormous -- partially to account for crash structures and fuel cells, yes, but also for performance reasons. Wider track and longer wheelbase aid with grip and stability, but added size means added structure, and besides the cars are now too big to comfortably run at classic tracks like Monaco. Shrinking them down again would reduce individual performance, but improve the racing overall.

Rasputin v. Stalin (v. Lenin v. Gorbachev v. Putin) still pops unbidden into my mind, especially in light of current events.

I'm the host with the most glasnost!

On the one hand, if somebody wants to Haussmanize their Paris I'd say more power to you, the bulldozer tool is in the menu. On the other hand, some mechanic like Transport Tycoon's where local councils stop letting you build around them if you get too aggressive remodeling their town could be interesting too.

At the end of the day, though, I wouldn't want to take to much power or of the player's hands. Will Wright described those classic Maxis games as "software toys," and the freedom to mess around and see what happens is both part of the appeal and how games like SimCity came to seen as educational.

For anybody about to do the same, who wants to hang on to their Reddit history for whatever reason, you can request an export of your account data here:

https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

A friend of mine from architecture school wound up as barista during the Great Recession and genuinely ended up loving it, to the point that he tried to buy a coffee shop from a guy who was retiring. Unfortunately for him, he couldn't get a small business loan mid-recession (the bank told him "you have the most airtight business plan we've seen in a hot minute, but we're just not making loans right now") and he wasn't able to make it work.

There's no shame in wanting to work in the service industry. The challenge is in finding a way to do it without being exploited.

I am genuinely at a loss as to the answer to this. Houses in my neighborhood used to run in the low $100k range, but since 2020 things have gone batshit. A house around the corner went for about $350k, and one down the street that the owners built for about $250k a few years back just sold for almost half a million, and my own little hovel has just about doubled its purchase price as well.

I don't mean to sell my neighborhood short, either -- we like where we live, but like... the schools are terrible, the area across the street from us is a little sketchy, and just last week I had to call EMTs for a couple guys who were ODing in their car around the corner from me. If I bought the expensive place down the street, I would be splashing out something in the range of 60% of my take-home pay to live here, and I am well above the median income for the area.

I don't quite agree. Fueling would add an additional dimension to pit strategy in combination with tire selection, which would play out on track as greater variation in on-track speed -- ie., if you're on a stint with a harder tire, do you run enough fuel to get to your next tire stop, or go light for extra speed on track and plan for a splash-n-dash mid-stint? The time penalty per kilo of weight in F1 is such that it might be worth the extra time in the pits.

pointing at the spike like Janet on the Good Place, pointing at the Jeremy Bearimy That's my cake day!

For all the hate it gets, Inquisition was this for me as well, when I wanted a relatively simple primary plot where the problem of evil could be solved by hitting it with a sword. The musical interlude "The Dawn Will Come" that happens after the player's party suffers their first big setback has stuck with me as well.

I've lost track of it, but there was a study published about this style of filter around the start of the pandemic that suggested it could be effective at reducing PM2.5 and possibly airborne virii. It's a sound idea conceptually -- continuously filtering and re-filtering room air at a high volume is how industrial clean rooms work, and while this is a far cry from a carefully-engineered system like that (you won't have the hygienic surfaces and laminar flow characteristics, for instance), it at least has more than enough airflow to filter a room effectively.