Non-Americans who have been to the US.. What is the weirdest thing about America that Americans don't realize is weird?
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    It depends on the place and the cop that is present, but jaywalking isn't often enforced. It's a law to try to protect people from crossing the street and getting injured by cars that may not see them crossing. Instead of crossing anywhere, they are supposed to cross at a specific area where cars already are supposed to stop. Since jaywalking is against the law (even if it isn't enforced well), it will stop some people from crossing the street in the middle of a road, and it may save a few lives. It's kinda dumb, but if it helps a few people, I have no problem with it.

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  • I make games and this literally happened to me this morning
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    You're correct on the two thoughts you listed. Wishlisting also makes the game more visible before release. For example, highly wishlisted games appear in the "Popular Upcoming" section, along with some other spots. This increased visibility before launch then feeds into the two points you made. I believe games that are highly wishlisted before launch are also more likely to appear on the frontpage right after launch.

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  • when AI tries to get in my way
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    I haven't used it often, but the few times I have asked it very specific programming questions, it has usually been pretty good. For example, I am not very good with regex, but I can usually ask Copilot to create regex that does something like verifying a string matches a certain pattern, and it performs pretty well. I don't use regex enough to spend a lot of time learning it, and I could easily find a few examples online that can be combined to make my answer, but Copilot is much quicker and easier for me. That said, I don't think I would trust it past answering questions about how to implement a small code snippet.

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  • What is your favorite movie of all time?
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    I have two that flip for my favorite depending on my mood at any given time: "There Will Be Blood" and "Blade Runner 2049". They are both kinda slow and require attention to really appreciate, so probably my favorite movie to turn my brain off and have fun is "Mad Max: Fury Road".

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  • What are you currently reading? (09/06/2024)
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    For a physical book, I'm reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez. I'm not too far in yet, but I'm enjoying it so far. I am having some issues keeping track of names, which usually isn't a problem for me, and I'm not sure why.

    For my drive to work, I'm listening to "Words of Radiance" by Brandon Sanderson. I'm not sure if I'm really enjoying it or not, but I'm giving it a chance. For the first book, I thought it was just okay until about the last third of the book, so we'll see how this one turns out.

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  • What kind of messaging apps do you use?
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    I'm from the US as well, and I can verify that very few average people use those types of messengers primarily. It is almost exclusively iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS texts as the main form of messaging. I will admit that quite a few people will use the messaging features that are built into social media apps (like messaging in Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, etc). At least to me, it seems like those are moreso used for sending memes or messaging people you don't interact with regularly and are still secondary to the other forms of messaging.

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  • "what happened??"
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    Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren't great. I wouldn't hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.

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  • Roblox gets banned indefinitely in Turkey over “child exploitation”
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    I watched a video a while back about this, but the details are fuzzy. I think it was the one I linked below if you want to look more into it. In essence, there aren't a ton of cases where kids are actually being forced to work. However, there are strong incentives for kids to work on Roblox projects that the developers themselves push. The devs want a constant stream of content and money coming in, but they don't want to pay adult workers at adult wages, so they offer Robux to players who make games. It is difficult for people to convert Robux to actual cash, and the money they receive is often significantly less than they would if they put the effort into any other form of work, so many of these kids are essentially making content for the developers for free or significantly less than they should earn. If there was no payout for content creators and the kids were doing that development just because they had passion for the game, it might be a different situation, but there are quite a few kids that believe they can make serious money doing this and don't understand that the developers are exploiting them and paying very little. Adults can probably do more research and better understand the situation they are getting into, but kids often don't have the same critical thinking skills as adults and will accept the lie being pushed by the developers and community that they can get rich by contributing to the game they love.

    Video: https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ

    Follow-up: https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

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  • Russian Missile Identified in Kyiv Children’s Hospital Attack - bellingcat
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    I'm sure most people knew it was Russia from the start, but I saw a comment earlier today that apparently Russia was saying that it was a Ukrainian defense missile that fell out of the air. They are likely just confirming that it was indeed Russia.

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  • No more extra taps: Google Play Store will soon open installed apps automatically (APK teardown)
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    I'm not sure why these comments are so negative so far. If I'm understanding the article correctly, it is an optional setting to automatically open the app as soon as it is done installing. The Play Store isn't just installing and opening apps on its own.

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  • Elon Musk wins back his $44.9 billion Tesla pay package in shareholder vote
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    To add onto this for anyone interested, the reason it and many businesses are incorporated in Delaware specifically is because it has a very pro-business legal and judicial system. Many businesses benefit from choosing that state over others and can find loopholes that allow them to save money (though there have been efforts to eliminate those loopholes in much of the country).

    Phil Edwards recently released a video on this, which is how I found out about it: https://youtu.be/b4q99EuZF_Q

    And this is the article that inspired the video: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/corporation-trust-center

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  • So here's a story of, by far, the weirdest bug I've encountered in my CS career.
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    I had an issue where a client reported a crash on login. The exception and stack trace reported were very generic and lent no clues to the cause. I tried debugging but could not reproduce. I eventually figured out that the crash only happened for release (non-debug) builds that were obfuscated. I couldn't find the troublesome code, so I figured out which release introduced the issue, then which commit, then went change by change until I was able to find the cause. It turned out to be a log message in a location that was completely unrelated to login. That exact log message was fine a few lines up. Other code worked fine in that location. For some unknown reason, having that log message in that specific location caused a crash in a completely different area of code.

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  • What it's like to be a developer in 2024
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    I've used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google's (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.

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  • Wall to Wall.
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    I have a Funko Pop of the "This is Fine" dog on my desk at work because there are times where I'm really feeling that way.

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  • When a real user uses the app
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    I can't remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn't load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?

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  • When a real user uses the app
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    User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I'm talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.

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  • Daylight saving creator left the chat....
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    I worked on a project that had a few spots where we compare a saved timestamp to the current time. During testing, the client would randomly change their device time a few days forward or backward and complain that things weren't working as expected. I had to explain to them multiple times that they were basically time traveling, and the program was actually handling it fairly well all things considered.

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  • Steam Deck hits over 14,000 games rated Playable or Verified
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    I would say it's a bit more nuanced than that. I have installed quite a few games on my Deck that have had serious issues that require their own unique fixes in order to work. I had a few games that had shader issues with flashing neon textures that required specific Proton versions to work, a few games that could never get past the main menu due to infinite loading that required reinstalls and using specific Proton versions, and one that required adding some additional commands on the startup in order to avoid crashes. I've also run into a few games where the Deck has quirks, such as one I played where the keyboard would cover the game's text input and the keyboard would appear immediately after closing, which meant you could hardly read what you were entering text for. They do work eventually, so you are technically correct, but they require effort to fix that some people will not feel comfortable doing.

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  • cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/15669474 > This could be something that you bought for a higher price than what most people would guess based on the item, or it could be something you bought for a normal price that has gained significant value as time has gone on. > > What made me think of this question is a LEGO minifigure I got with my "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" disc. It is [Bilbo Baggins in a blue coat](https://brickset.com/minifigs/lor057/bilbo-baggins-blue-coat) that was apparently only sold in that movie box only at Target stores. Even considering the exclusivity, I would have guessed maybe $10-20 for such a tiny piece of plastic, but there are sold listings on eBay from $80 to $225. I could possibly even get towards the higher end of that number since I still have everything in the original box in good condition. It's not worth a ton compared to some other items people may own, but I think most people would not expect nearly that amount.

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    This could be something that you bought for a higher price than what most people would guess based on the item, or it could be something you bought for a normal price that has gained significant value as time has gone on. What made me think of this question is a LEGO minifigure I got with my "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" disc. It is [Bilbo Baggins in a blue coat](https://brickset.com/minifigs/lor057/bilbo-baggins-blue-coat) that was apparently only sold in that movie box only at Target stores. Even considering the exclusivity, I would have guessed maybe $10-20 for such a tiny piece of plastic, but there are sold listings on eBay from $80 to $225. I could possibly even get towards the higher end of that number since I still have everything in the original box in good condition. It's not worth a ton compared to some other items people may own, but I think most people would not expect nearly that amount.

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