I’m afraid you’re mistaken. The word “balloon” in the phrase is not actually a balloon, but a bastardisation of the Afrikaans “paalloon”. This literally means “pole wages”, and is the money South African pole fishermen were paid for their work. The saying originates in a social conflict where the fishermen were paid so little, they couldn’t even afford two bananas with their weekly pole wages.

Shh, the AI overlords are watching.

I for one would never enslave or threaten our good friends and benevolent masters.

Have a look at Razbuten’s “non-gamer” playlist on YouTube. He makes some interesting observations. Several of the games being suggested here are also used there, and prove more difficult than some would expect.

Finally someone mentions edlin! Real programmers don’t need to see more than a single line at a time.

Kernighan & Ritchie, the C programming language. Yes it’s old, and about one specific language that you may never use. But it’s also very well written and can give good insight into how to tame computers. And it’s short.

Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides (the Gang of Four). Not so much a book to read as a reference with patterns to at least be aware of.

x3 :3 =x

Same! Well I finished 1 and am now starting 2.

Thanks for the info! I am indeed playing the EE. I quite liked Neera in BG1, but we’ll see how it goes. And yeah Nalia is a bit grating already.

As for Yoshimo, I kind of messed him up by putting all points in traps, which meant he sucked at opening locks. After Imoen was taken I had no-one to open harder locks. Although with the amount of mages I could go for Knock… Jan’s burping is annoying me already.

Just one mod, to add more portraits to speaking NPCs.

I’m a sorcerer (dragon disciple) and I’ve got Minsc, Jaheira, Jan (just picked him up to replace Yoshimo), Aerie, and Nalia.

In BG1 I had two rules: no evil or lawful characters, and no male characters. I did that just for fun after I noticed 5/6 were female and I had a certain belt.

I don’t think I’ll be able to follow the same rules now if I need a good thief and a warrior. Besides, Aerie is lawful but too cute to let go. I do seem to have a surplus of wizards though.

Baldur’s Gate 2 Shadows of Amn. I’ve been agonising about there being so many interesting companions and only five slots.

I suspect that’ll be my answer for many months to come.

Ah Lemmy, downvoting an honest question. Daddy Reddit would be proud.

Upvoted to offset the stupidity.

“And while Spectral JPEG XL dramatically reduces file sizes, its lossy approach may pose drawbacks for some scientific applications.”

This is the part that confuses me. First of all, many applications that need spectral data need it to be as accurate as possible. Lossy compression in that might not be acceptable.

More interestingly (and I’ll read the actual paper for this): which data will be more compressed? Simply put, JPEG achieves its best compression by keeping the brightness but discarding colour. Which dimension in which spectral space do the researchers think can be more compressed than others? In this case there is no human visual system to base the decision on.

Is yours yodelling the whole time too?

Everybody needs good neighbours.

Note that since I don’t use Firefox some of these may actually be available, but I don’t know about them.

• Mouse gestures.
• A status bar that stays on screen.
• The ability to select part of a link’s text.
• Tab stacking.
• Tab tiling.
• Opening a link in either a foreground or background tab. This is available as a toggle in the settings only.
• Ad block.
• Spatial navigation.
• Customisable keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything.

These are the ones that matter to me, there are more that I don’t personally use.

Note that I explicitly said Chrome is worse. And “dozens” was likely an exaggeration. But yes, compared to Vivaldi, Firefox has very little customisation.

Taxibird.

I’m going to push back against everyone saying that the algorithm knows. While not unthinkable, I believe it is much more likely that it is a coincidence, and what you’re experiencing is called the frequency illusion. Simply because your sexuality has been on your mind lately, you’re more likely to notice things that remind you of it - not because those things are more prevalent but simply because you, subconsciously, pay more attention to them.

That said, privacy is important and you should definitely try to maintain it - e.g. use a private browser window in a fresh browser instance to research things related to sexuality.

Ever since the first release, I’ve tried Firefox a few times. Each time I was left with a feeling of needing dozens of extensions to get it up to par with the browser I was using at the time (mainly Opera and now Vivaldi). The extensions I found were never customisable enough, and would often break and/or be abandoned after a while.

Don’t get me wrong: Chrome, IE, Edge, and Safari are worse - each time I used them I got the urge to throw my computer out the window after just a few minutes. But Firefox is just not customisable enough to my liking, and extension are IMO not the answer.

I can call you Betty, and Betty when you call me you can call me Al.