Agreed, that game was awesome.

Superman 64 was famously bad. It’s in the conversation with ET for worst game ever made. And because it was bad, it was quicky discounted, and a lot of people who didn’t know how bad it was gave it as gifts.

That crying you hear echoing through the ages is the sound of Superman 64 and well-intentioned grandmothers ruining Christmasses all across the world.

It is, but forex markets allow traders to trade on significant margin. Meaning, if I have $100, I might be able to buy $1,000 worth of foreign currency (a 1:10 margin) and if the value of the currency increases 1% ($100) you get 10% of the profit, which is 10% of your investment. If the position increases by 10%, you double your money. However, this also means that if the value drops by 10%, your money is gone.

Now consider that forex traders often leverage at 1:500 margins. You get to buy massive positions with currency pairs, and even the tiniest fluctuations can provide massive profits or instantaneous ruin.

The algorithm I used monitored recurring micro-patterns, watching for predictable movements. You’re also watching relative value pairs, rather than just an absolute market value. Both sides of a currency pair have nations vying to improve the value of their own currency, so you can make money (or lose money) on either side of the pair. Dollar is low against the yen, buy dollars with yen. Yen drops against the dollar, sell your positions. Euro drops against the yen, go pick up Euros agains the yen, and feel confident that Japan is already trying to strengthen the yen (simplified example, because it’s way more complex than that).

So if you track currencies across all currency pairs, you can find inconsistencies. I called it “torque” 15 years ago, but I’m sure a proper forex trader can give you an actual name for it. These are areas where three or more currencies are out of alignment, like if the dollar is up against the yen but down against the euro, and the yen is up against the euro. These are situations where you would expect the market to equalize in one direction or the other, and the trick was being able to predict which way it would go.

And I thought I had figured that out. I had not figured that out. I had gotten lucky several times in a row. In fact, the market can tolerate that sort of incongruity, and the market forces on various positions are far more complicated. And because you’re leveraged, if you bet big, even small swings in the wrong direction can wipe you out.

And because your leveraged, if the position dips, you can’t just hold it hoping it will bounce back. Once the loss in value reaches your investment, the position automatically closes and you’ve lost everything you put in. It doesn’t matter if it bounces all the way back up, because you no longer own it.

It hurt with fake money, because I thought I had discovered some big secret key. Like that movie Pi. And then it was gone. All the sucess, all the dreams of a 9-screen batcave-style computer station with financial tickers and shit. I realized that I had nothing, and I was foolish for thinking otherwise. Stung like a bitch.

But you’re right, safe investments are the smarter long-term play. I did make an extra paycheck on dogecoin once on a moonshot. But otherwise, my boring retirement funds are all steadily beating inflation by a few percentage points. Why fight the tide?

Reminds me of the time I started learning about forex. I used a practice account to test an algorithm for recognizing short-term trends and trading on the activity. I ran a simulation for a few days to make sure it was working, and my fake $10,000 bankroll turned into $50,000 in less than a week. I was excited about the results, and went to explain it to someone with deeper pockets who might actually have $10k to invest, and in the time it took me to walk from my desk to his and back, it went to less than $600. Five minutes, $50k wiped out.

Needless to say, he didn’t invest and I stopped daydreaming about owning a yacht. Forex is gambling.

Boring is fine. I don’t need my phone to be exciting.

The headline should have been about reliability. The author had to replace the first demo device, and experienced stuttering on the replacement. Will HMD continue to support the device and outfits? Will the maker community adopt the device and start getting creative with the options? Or will this end up in the drawer of abandoned hardware with the minidisc player and active 3d glasses.

Modularity and flexibility is great. Boring is acceptable. Unreliable is not OK.

Funny and factually correct.

But how can this be, when all the world leaders got together and decided to ? And then all the corporations made sure that ? Surely the plan to was enough to slow climate change!

There are oncolytic viral therapies, where viruses are modified to kill cancer cells. So, sure probably.

MAGA is Trump.

Narayama Murthy sounds like an enormous piece of shit.

It’s much easier to run a HTPC on something small like a Raspberry Pi, or an NVIDIA Shield. The hardware on your TV is probably the bare minimum to run its own smart features, and replacing the firmware doesn’t guarantee that the TV isn’t still phoning home with your data.

Only if he could find an anchor of some sort.

In my headcanon, Twitter users were called twits, so Xitter users are called xits, pronounced appropriately.

It also forced users onto their app, which creates a captive market for force-serving ads disguised as content.

There are far too many variables to know for sure. What fuel does the central heat use? Where is the house built? What sort of sun exposure do you get? What type of house is it? What’s in your attic? Basement? How much time do you spend at home during the day?

I would go with the central heat, generally speaking.

Homes are insulated differently depending on where you live, but the exterior walls are usually better insulated than the interior ones. The heat in one room will dissipate to neighboring rooms. You’re correct that closing vents will direct the hot air to the desired rooms first. Over the course of the day, some of the energy will disperse and warm other rooms. One space heater might use less energy than your central air, but you will need to run it longer and more frequently.

You may also find that you’re keeping the one room hotter because you’re always cold in every other room. Getting warm and staying warm are two different physiological processes. Keeping the house at 66 may feel warmer than keeping one room at 72.

Consider what each heat system was built to do. Central air is there to keep the house warm. Central air is most efficient when it is automated to maintain heat. Allowing the space to get very cold every day will cause it to run longer when you feel cold.

Meanwhile, a space heater is a short-term hot spot in a room. It’s designed to create immediate warmth in the immediate area. Use it when you are feeling cold to get yourself warm, and then shut it off. If you use each one to do its job, that’s probably going to be the most efficient.

The best thing you can do for your energy bill is insulate. Get a temperature sensor, wait for a cold day, bring your entire house up to ~70, and then go hunting for cold spots. Check around window sills and near brick or masonry walls. Airflow through your walls is dollar bills flying out of your wallet. You can place film over leaking windows, replace caulk when it cracks, and fill voids that happen when old insulation breaks down or gets wet. Check your attics and crawlspaces for airflow as well, and consider reflective foil as an inexpensive upgrade if you can get to the rafters.

If everything is properly insulated, all heating and cooling becomes more efficient.

Fair question. You’re not going to catch a soda can, but a boat should be a closed system. The thresholds should be as low as is practically enforceable.

First - The major problem with trash isn’t the getting rid of it part, it’s the gathering it up part. If we could do that, it wouldn’t be a problem.

The frustrating part is that this could be the easiest to solve. Require boats to weigh in and out, and account for everything on board. Minus fuel, plus fish, but those old, broken nets and plastic waste need to return to port to be properly disposed of. Throwing even a soda can overboard should result in significant fines.

What they’re saying is that trying to reverse climate change won’t be enough. It doesn’t mean it isn’t the right path, just that it won’t go far enough.

Two types of people reading this:

“Oh no! We should do everything we can to mitigate the damage.”

and

“Fuck it, might as well keep doing what I’m doing.”

And it’s the latter that got us here in the first place.