Ron Paul and one of the GOP congressional members who voted no.

This was a twenty five year old mystery around the world in 2014. Probably no easy solution. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/26/7538343...

I got a look at an early version of StarCraft source code as a reference for the sound library for Diablo 2 and curiosity made me do a quick analysis of the other stuff - they used a very naive approach to C++ and object inheritance to which first time C++ programmers often fall victim. It might have been their first C++ project so they probably needed to start over again anyways. We had an edict on Diablo 2 to make the C++ look like recognizable C for Dave Brevik's benefit which turned out pretty well I think (it was a year late but we shipped).

Diablo II is in my top 3 games of all time, i still play it all the time. Thanks for contributing so much fun to my life!

(for ref, diablo III is also in my top 3 :)

I was only one of many programmers at Blizzard North + others at Blizzard and our parent company at the time, but you are welcome from me.

What exactly did they do that was naive?

That figure does not include outside supporters spending campaigns. It's disingenuous to not include dark money spending. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/final-price-t... It's closer to 1.8 billion for Harris supporters versus 1.4 billion for Trump supporters in 2024. That also does not include various media outlets bought in the past decades, including One America News/Fox/Sinclair sandbagging for Trump for the last eight years, at this point, shouldn't one include the budget for Fox News and OAN and Sinclair not to mention the spiking of negative news stories/opinions by LA Times/Washington Post? Even CNN was bought in past year by conservative and the leading story last month for a while was Jake Tapper's book about Biden.

Strong upvote. The Murdoch succession drama is one of the most important things affecting the future of US democracy. There are a lot of smaller and even more radical networks, but I don't think they have the reach and influence of Fox.

FOX is indeed all in for Trump. But on the other side of the ledger, there is the media that was all in for Biden - NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, NYT, etc., during the same time period.

Oh heck no! This is the error in comparison that is allowing an unfair competition between the left + center vs the Right wing information economies.

The whole point of journalism and freedom of speech was to create a market place of ideas that allows for competition between ideas.

The right side of the information sphere insulates its viewers from the left and center. They do not get punished by their own for platforming inaccurate or fringe theories. Instead they compete on getting the more viral narrative platformed, while voices that counter the inaccuracies do not get platformed.

They are a demagoguery machine. The political party and news media are the same entity.

The left and center are largely stuck with the ideas of being relatively true to facts, getting punished by members for getting things wrong.

There are people on the left which are trying to recreate the success of the fringe right, which has become the core base on the right.

They are starting a decades long process, that began around watergate.

The counterpoint is that there is no rational or sane defense of Trump. The rest of the media criticized Biden plenty, arguably way too much in their attempts to be seen as neutral. Meanwhile there is almost nothing good about Trump. So if they write like 90% stories that seem to be against Trump it means they're biased towards Trump.

Almost regardless of political positions it's hard to argue Trump is fit or qualified to be president. He is openly corrupt, persuing an economic policy the vast majority of Conservative economists think is idiotic, and has called our veterans losers. Has never held any other government post has no knowledge of government policies and worse doesn't care to learn. Even though his ignorance is causing a lot of damage including to his voters he doesn't seem to care to learn about how any policy stuff works.

To counter that you need media like Fox or worse OAN/News Max to put out propaganda because it's impossible for even the most partisan person to defend him if they're an honest and thoughtful person

> The counterpoint is that there is no rational or sane defense of Trump.

The point is about does spending buying an election, not rationality or sanity.

I invite you to spend an hour watching Fox News and then an hour listening to NPR and still claim those are just two sides of the same coin. The level of bias, propaganda, and active misinformation is so much greater on Fox News and it’s not even close. They’re not even pretending to factually report the news anymore. Every single piece is straight propaganda for the Republican Party. The best example of this difference is how mainstream media responded to Biden’s disastrous debate performance. The New York Times and CNN were covering it pretty blisteringly from the get go. There was no sugar coating it. Compare that to how Fox News spins the daily depravity of the Trump administration, and it speaks for itself

Maybe a better way to frame it is over time, there's some genetic sequence that gave the snake a preference for eating this newt in particular out of all potential prey and some other genetic sequence that gives them a bit of resistance so they can store the poison inside them. Those snakes that eat more of them with that genetic makeup, up to a point, are better able to reproduce. Run a few thousand years of iterations over this process, where the snake and newt are in a red queen situation, both running faster and faster just to keep up. It is possible to look at this as situation where neither the snake or newt is conscious of the choices or there is no ability to make decision, there is only following the built in behavior.

It’s vague enough in details to still be plausible in one’s interpretation. I think the only dated tech thing is he talks about tapes a bit. And that one death hits surprisingly hard and it’s quite forward thinking though Asimov had similar stuff in his Robots series.

There are very large mosquitoes that do not consume blood (eat other mosquitoes iirc) like the smaller ones. I’ve seen these in Texas.

Are you talking about "mosquito hawks"? That's what we used to call them.

You might be thinking to crane flies--dont' think they eat mosquitoes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crane_fly

Yes, mosquito hawks, though I never saw one in the act of eating a mosquito, just picked up the name somewhere.

Related trivia (he mentions he worked on low budget shows prior to this), 650 million dollar budget for show's two seasons or 26-27 million per episode: https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/andor-tony-gilro...

For reference, Rings of Power, Jupiter's Legacy and Citadel (US version) cost about twice as much per episode on Amazon, and Game of Thrones on HBO started at five to six million per episode and went up to 15 million by the final season.

I haven't seen the rest of your comparators but twice as much for Rings of Power - one of the cheapest looking fantasy/scifi shows I've seen in some time - is shocking.

His first season of Primal has almost zero dialogue and works really well, but it's a caveman and a dinosaur buddy show.