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Cake day: Jun 14, 2023

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It’s America, so the answer is probably “No”.

Do you not have consumer protection laws?

We’ve had digital price tags for decades. But you couldn’t do this in NZ. Stores are obligated to sell you a product at the price they advertise it for AND have a reasonable quantity of units at that price… you couldn’t sell 1 TV for $1.

So these systems would need to track what price you saw it at.

(Caveat: Our stores are still cunts and have been found to overcharge people)


They are also IR controlled. A lot of them have a little window on the front of the unit, and an array of transmitters in the ceiling.


The problem occurs when house prices tumble from an influx of sales, and the 32% (In NZ) of your population that are paying their mortgage off on their primary residence are potentially plunged into negative equity on rising interest rates.

Once you’re there, you’re kind of fucked. You can sell, but you’ll still owe the bank money, so you can’t buy/downsize. You can’t even change banks. You’re a risky customer, so you get higher interest rates. All you can do is hope the market rebounds or declare bankruptcy.

So you’re risking fucking over 30% of your nation (and arguably the most productive segment of your country as they’re earning money to pay that mortgage), to appease a fraction of (as not every renter can/wants to buy. Eg, students, temporary immigrant workers etc) the 30% of renters that are being fucked over by high house prices.

Not to mention, all the renters you’ve displaced into an even more competitive rental market.

But that’s not to say the solution is to shrug your shoulders and let the landlord class continue to punch down.

It would be expensive, but you could guarantee (current) mortgages for primary residences in cases of financial hardship. Buy mortgagees out and turn the houses into state housing, renting them back to the previous owners at fair prices.


It’s a poorly worded article that (intentionally or not) ends up sowing resentment between the have nots, and have nots with a family home. (As opposed the haves, with a rental portfolio, holiday home overseas, trust funds, etc)

Makes the boogeyman the people that are seen, the peers in (relative) poverty. While the actual boogeyman can hide away out of sight. Be it overseas land barons, corporate landlords, or just straight up wealthy living in their large secluded properties.


If I were building it, I’d do the watermarking on the individual assets & textures.

Your asset pipeline would publish these to the solution, which would pack it up ready for distribution.

Except, each beta tester logs into the game and the publishing system gives them a personalised set of assets with a unique noise filter thrown over the top.

Mr leaky beta player publishes a video or screenshot of the gameplay, and then the studio can just reverse the noise algorithm to get their unique ID.

Absolutely terrible for large scale content delivery. But for a small closed beta, probably not an issue.


Ditto… ish.

In my dream I mixed up some constraints of the real-world system. I still came up with an elegant solution that would have worked if the dreams constraints were true. Except they weren’t and the solution was useless.

Bonus was the dream-solution exposed a “front door” so to speak on the real problem and I felt dumb that I even spent 5 minutes thinking about it.


Plug a USB-C screen into a USB-C port. Will it work?

Maybe? If the manufacturer has wired the port to the GPU for DP/HDMI alt mode it might.

… but you’ve used this display on this laptop before?

Try another port! Nope, still nothing.

Maybe it’s the cable? Rummage around through your cables and try a few out. Hope you don’t have any from the 2010s because there’s a good chance they’ll ruin your device.

The screen works! But performance is terrible, why? It’s running in DisplayLink mode.

You give up and suffer through.



I used to use ANSI, but then moved to England and bought a laptop and returned it because of the “weird” ISO keyboard, then forever bought dell because I could customise it.

Moved back to ANSIland, but will still probably just buy dell.


I can think of applications of Weta’s MASSIVE in games.

They do a lot of work on mocap technology, which is used in game dev.

And sure, movies run at minutes per frame, but reusing the knowledge and skills developed during the production of them can be applied to game development. It’s not 1:1, but there’s transferable skills. And there’s always emerging technology. Take Gaussian Splatting, that potentially could take realistic low-fps CGI scenes and make them realtime.


Weta is researching and building (amongst other things) graphics processing technologies.

Being able to take cutting edge technologies from the film industry, optimising them and selling them as “click and go” solutions in Unity would be a huge win.