Title needs to be "AAA Gaming is getting worse every year".
I'm getting tons of fun out of smaller games.

The problem with AAA games is that we are going through a period of consolidation and contraction. This is just a normal business cycle and we'll be back to companies throwing money at games in a few years. I'm reminded of an old comic (I think Far Side in the 90's, but I can't find it at the moment) which has a class staring at a black board with the following:

Business Strategy 101:

1. Convince Microsoft you are a threat
2. Accept their buyout offer

This has all happened before and it will all happen again. I doubt we're staring down another video game crash like the 80's, but things may slow down for a bit and we may go through a period of the major studios putting out more shovelware. Eventually, the economic situation will rebound and so will AAA games.

It's a convenient way to avoid having to actually provide an answer, nothing more. Take religion out of it and just consider the underlying argument:

You must believe this, without evidence, because you can't see the evidence.

Ok, there are certainly things which we cannot perceive directly. Radio waves, for example. However, no one was saying we should just accept they exist, without evidence. Humans eventually found a way to detect them and create a reliable, repeatable, predictable way to detect them and show that detection in a way we can perceive. There is no need to take the existence of radio waves on faith, you can actually build a simple radio yourself.

And this is where such arguments fall over. There is some very powerful being. But, it is incapable of giving one of its prophets a framework which can be used to describe the universe in a testable, repeatable, falsifiable way which demonstrates the existence of said being. It all boils down to, "trust me bro!"

Ya, no thanks. If the claimant cannot provide better evidence than a bunch of stories someone may have once said, I'm not buying it. History is lousy with prophets claiming to hear gods. It's the perfect con. Do what I tell you or something bad might happen after you die. Evidence? No sorry, the gods only talk to me. And this Al Gayeb argument is just more of the same.

I know this is just being silly, but stop and think about the difference in scale between a yacht and the larger ships in the ocean. There was a recent case of a cruise ship showing up at port with a whale over it's bow. The ship rammed a whale, effectively beached it on the bulbous bow and no one on the ship noticed. And then you have things like an Eisenhower Class Aircraft Carrier. At over 1000 feet long, 250 feet wide and displacing over 100,000 tons the sheer scale of the ship is hard to imagine without seeing it. Imagine taking a sky scraper, tipping it on it's side and floating that out to sea. That's what we're talking about. You could have 10 large blue whales laid out tip to tail along the length of the carrier. An entire pod of whales ramming such a ship would just result in whales with concussions. And then CWIS goes brrr.....

Whales, dolphins and other marine animals are amazing, but their scale and coordination pales in comparison to what humans do. We have basically no natural weapons or advantages in strength or speed. But, we dominate the planet because we can plan far ahead and work in groups much larger than a local tribe. We also harness energy in ways well beyond what animals do. Even something as simple as fire is outside the ability of other animals to create and use effectively.

Microsoft doesn't care about you. So long as businesses are choosing Entra, Azure and O365, you the average end user can go suck a penguin cock for all they care. I'd still agree it's a bad long term plan. Eventually, people will start growing up not using Windows, not knowing Microsoft products and not understanding why anyone would choose Microsoft. But, that's some other person's problem in the far off future. Until then, it's time to pump those short term numbers up.

People being assholes over it is dumb, but I can't say I would want one. I saw one recently at my local grocery store and I couldn't stop thinking how poorly built it looked. It just seemed like the fit and finish of the body panels was kinda bad. I got an overall feeling like it was something put together by a couple of teenagers in metal shop.

what is the advantage in using Windows 11 over 10?

Many years ago, I was at a Windows XP launch event and the Microsoft Rep had a really honest line:
"Why should you start using Windows XP? Because we're going to stop supporting Windows 98!"

And ya, that's pretty much been the cattle prod Microsoft uses to push new versions, eventually you stop getting security updates for the older OS and at some point there are enough security vulnerabilities which make it no longer safe for daily use. That said, with Windows becoming more and more user hostile, other options start to make more sense.

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Humans don't exist in a vacuum, even if we think something is wholly our own, original idea, it likely pulled in stuff we don't even know it pulled in. This doesn't take away from the individual contribution of that inventor. There are lots of people who will see something and not think anything special about it. But, sometimes the right person sees the right thing and it kicks off a series of connections in their brain and they come up with something novel. But for that particular person's unique set of experiences, that novel thing may not have been created.

I print these containers for my basement hydroponic plants.
My wife has also stolen several to use as traditional soil planters.

New ethical dilemma just dropped - kill 300 to forge the sword, or deny 3150 people blood in an emergency to forge the sword…

The answer to that will be everyone's favorite "it depends". Specifically, it depends on everything you are trying to do. I have a fairly minimal setup, I host a WordPress site for my personal blog and I host a NextCloud instance for syncing my photos/documents/etc. I also have to admit that my backup situation is not good (I don't have a remote backup). So, my costs are pretty minimal:

• $12/year - Domain
• $10/month - Linode/Akamai containers

The Domain fee is obvious, I pay for my own domain. For the containers, I have 2 containers hosted by the bought up husk of Linode. The first is just a Kali container I use for remote scanning and testing (of my own stuff and for work). So, not a necessary cost, but one I like to have. The other is a Wireguard container connecting back to my home network. This is necessary as my ISP makes use of CG-NAT. The short version of that is, I don't actually have a public IP address on my home network and so have to work around that limitation. I do this by hosting NGinx on the Wireguard container and routing all traffic over a Wireguard VPN back to my home router. The VPN terminates on the outside interface and then traffic on 443/tcp is NAT'd through the firewall to my "server". I have an NGinx container listening on 443 and based on host headers traffic goes to either the WordPress or NextCloud container which do their magic respectively. I also have a number of services, running in containers, on that server. But, none of those are hosted on the internet. Things like PiHole and Octoprint.

I don't track costs for electricity, but that should be minimal for my server. The rest of the network equipment is a wash, as I would be using that anyway for home internet. So overall, I pay $11/month in fixed costs and then any upgrades/changes to my server have a one-time capital cost. For example, I just upgraded the CPU in it as it was struggling under the Enshrouded server I was running for my Wife and I.

I haven’t played any games in the Final Fantasy series since the Super Nintendo era...

I think that, right there, is the problem SqEnix is facing. It's games were fantastic a couple decades ago. While I wasn't a fan, it could be argued that they peeked with FF7 and it's why they keep re-making it. But, as the capabilities of systems and games themselves moved on, SqEnix kept pumping out the same, formulaic JRPGs. It's all teens and girls in too short skirts out to save the world with MASSIVE MELODRAMA!!!!!!!! (cue closeups of all characters looking shocked and screaming like idiots). And we all kinda out-grew that. While there is still a lot of terrible writing in games, I think there's a bit less tolerance for that particular brand of schlock. We have such an amazing array of options available to us today, that we can be choosier with what we put up with. If SqEnix intended to compete, they may need to come up with something a bit new-er than "Final Fantasy 7, Rebirth, Again, Look at how well rendered Tifa's tits are this time".

Attempt at serious answer (warning: may be slightly offensive)

Wow, you are a fucking moron. But, there is an interesting question buried in there, you just managed to ask it in a monumentally stupid way. So, let's pick this apart a bit. Assuming Trump gets re-elected and speed-runs the US into global irrelevancy, what happens to the various standards and standards bodies? tl;dr: Not much.

• FIPS - This will be the most effected. If companies no longer need to care about working with the US Government (USG), no one is going to bother with FIPS. FIPS is really only a list of cryptographic standards which are considered "secure enough" for USG use. The standards won't actually change and the USG may still continue to update FIPS, people would just stop noticing.
• UNICODE - Right so UNICODE is a code page maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Maybe with the US being less dominant, we see the inclusion of more stuff; but, it's just a way to define printable characters. It works incredibly well and there's no reason such would be abandoned. Also, there are already plenty of other code pages, Unicode is just popular because it covers so much. Maybe the headquarters for the consortium ends up elsewhere.
• ANSI - Isn't a standard, it's a US Government Body. So, assuming it stops being good at it's job, other countries/organizations would likely stop listening to it's ideas. The ANSI standards which exist will continue to exist, if ANSI continues to exist, it'll probably keep publishing standards but only the US would care about them.
• ISO - Again, this isn't a standard, it's a Non-Governmental Organization, headquartered in Switzerland. Also, ISO is not an acronym, it's borrowed from Greek. And ya, this one would almost certainly keep chugging along. Probably a bit more Euro-centric than they are now, but mostly unchanged.

For this reason, and a lot of other reasons, I am in favor of liberterianism because then, it would not be a government ran by octogenarians deciding standards for communication,

It's ok, I was young and stupid once too. The fact is that, while many telecommunications standards started off in the US, and some even in the USG, most of them have long since been handed off to industry groups. The Internet Engineering Task Force is responsible for most of the standards we follow today. They were spun off from the USG in 1993 and are mostly a consensus driven organization with input from all over the world. In a less US centric world, the makeup of the body might change some. But, I suspect things would keep humming along much as they have for the last few decades.

Will we live in a post-standard world?

This depends on the level of fracturing of networks. Over time, there has been a move towards standardization because it makes sense. Sure, companies resist and all of them try to own the standard, but there has been a lot of pushback against that and often from outside the US. For example, the EU's law to require common charging ports. In many ways, the EU is now doing more for standardization than the US.

Worse, cryptography. Well, for ‘serious shit’, people roll their own crypto because...

Tell me you know fuck all about security without saying you know fuck all about security. There is a well accepted maxim, called "Schneier's law" based on this classic essay. It's often shortened to "Don't roll your own crypto". And this goes back to that FIPS standard mentioned earlier. FIPS is useful mostly because it keeps various bits of the USG from picking bad crypto. The algorithms listed in FIPS are all bog-standard stuff, from things like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) process. The primitives and standards are the primitives and standards because they fucking work and have been heavily tested and shown to be secure over a lot of years of really smart people trying to break them. Ironically, it was that same sort of open testing that resulted in the NSA being caught trying to create a crypto backdoor.
So no, for 'serious shit' no one rolls their own crypto, because that would be fucking dumb.

But what about primitives? For every suite, for every protocol, people use the same primitives, which are standardized.

And ya, they would continue to be, as said above, they have been demonstrated over and over again to work. If they are found not to work, people stop using them (se:e SHA1, MD5, DES). Its funny that, for someone who is "in favor of liberterianism" you seem to be very poorly informed of examples where private groups and industry are actually doing a very good job of things without government oversight.

Overall, you seem to have a very poor understanding of how these standards get created in the modern world. Yes, the US was behind a lot of them. But, as they have been handed over to private (and often international) organizations, they have moved further and further away from US Government control. Now, that isn't to say that US Based companies don't have a lot of clout in those organizations. Let's face it, we are all at the mercy of Microsoft and Google way too often. But, even if those companies fall to irrelevance, the organizations they are part of will likely continue to do what they already do. It's possible that we'd see a faster balkanization of the internet, something we already see a bit of. Countries like China, Iran or Russia may do more to wall their people off from US/EU influence, if they don't have an economic interest in some communications. Though, it's just as likely that trade will continue to keep those barriers to the flow of information as open as possible.

The major change could really be in language. Without the US propping it up, English may lose it's standing as the lingua franca of the world. As it stands right now, it's not uncommon for two people, neither of which speaks English as their native language, to end up conversing in English as that is the language the two of them share. If a new superpower rises, perhaps the lingua franca shifts and the majority of sites on the internet shift with it. Though, that's likely to be a multi-generational change. And it could be a good thing. English is a terrible language, it's less a language and more three languages dressed up in a trench coat pretending to be one.

So yes, there would likely be changes over time. But, it's likely more around the edges than some wholesale abandoning of standards. And who knows, maybe we'll end up with people learning to write well researched and thought out questions on the internet, and not whatever drivel you just shat out. Na, that's too much to hope for.

The advantage of having officers carry malpractice insurance is the same as it is with doctors. Eventually, the premiums to insure a bad officer get so high, no one is willing to pay them. Or, they simply uninsurable, as no company is willing to take on the risk. It also means there will be a large and politically connected organization (insurance companies) which have a financial interest in collecting data on bad police officers. Sure, that should be the government's job, but since we know that's not happening, why not exploit corporate greed for a positive thing?

Microsoft: "We're sorry, this is all just a misunderstanding. We thought you were too stupid to notice."

Not a lot, but several haven't been mentioned yet:

• Darknet Diaries
• SANS ISC StormCast
• 538 Politics
• Lawfare
• Rational Security
• Perun - Technically a Youtube series, but there is a podcast feed for the audio

Food tracks the general inflation closely

That's a fine bit of bit circular logic there. The price of food is used in the BLS's basket of goods for calculating the Consumer Price Index (CPI). So yes, the goods used to track inflation do, in fact, track with inflation.

That said, the US economy (at a macro level) is doing rather well considering that we weathered a global pandemic, we have a war on in Europe involving one of the world's major oil and gas suppliers and inflation has been stubbornly high. Yet somehow, wages are up and unemployment is at historic lows. Seriously, if the administration could actually do something about the housing situation and prices rising, this election would look a lot more like 2008 than 2016. But unfortunately, people vote based on how they feel, not on an analysis of macro-economics. So long as people fell like the gains they have made are being squeezed back out of them via rising prices, the incumbent president is in trouble. When you get down to it, it's still the economy, stupid.

"High Impact" like a body hitting the ground at the bottom of a cliff.

The polls are actually pretty good. There are two problems:

1. The US is very closely divided when it comes to the Presidential Election. In 2016 the popular vote split was about 2%. In 2020 it was about 4.5%. And most of the polling was right in that range.
2. People are shit at statistics. Most of the polls will be published with an error margin of 5% or so. For situations where on candidate is ahead 10-20%, this still puts that candidate winning by a comfortable margin. When the poll is showing a race with one person ahead by 2%, that means the poll is also showing that the other candidate winning is well within the expected result.

And unfortunately, people like clean story-lines and news organizations are more than happy to supply them. Journalists looked at the polls in 2016 and confidently proclaimed that Clinton was leading. The reality was that she had a slight lead and Trump winning was well within the normal margin of error. This turned into a rather famous spat on twitter.

Sadly, we've been stuck in that situation ever since. In 2020, Biden was a slight favorite, but Trump winning was within the margin of error. Right now, polls show a dead heat and either candidate winning would not be a surprise, if the election were held today. One upshot in this, is that pools this early are not very predictive of the final outcome. They shouldn't be ignored, but that also shouldn't be taken as gospel.

So ya, the polls are fine and do a good job of reflecting the actual results of the elections. The problem is idiots that only look at the top-line outcome and don't look at the actual numbers and see that they are actually saying "it's close and could go either way."

Amen.
I was one day a week in the office during the pandemic. We had assets which required a physical presence, but with a rotating shift of 1-2 people in the office each day, we could keep the required coverage. Then my workplace started bringing us back to the office in 2022. It started with 3 days a week and we started hearing rumors of a full return to office. It was well know that upper management was hostile to remote work. So, I flipped my LinkedIn profile to "looking" (or whatever the setting was called, it's been a while). And I started both actively applying and responding to recruiters. I eventually got a message from a reciter who led with "REMOTE WORK OPPORTUNITY", yes the message started in ALL CAPS, though the rest was normal and hit all the points I was interested in. I figured, what the hell, can't hurt to talk. That was just shy of two years ago, I have been into an office since late 2022. It's going to have to be a hell of a bad situation for me to deal with commuting again.

1. Pay attention to the hand she gave me to put the ring on. Oh well, not sure anyone noticed.
2. Tapped the keg much earlier in the day for the reception. I had no idea that it needed time to settle.
3. Make sure we had someone to get the snacks out while we were taking pictures. Seriously, have one designated person, who is not in the wedding party, handle stuff like that.
4. Find a different caterer. While the food was pretty good, they missed the vegan plate for my brother-in-law, despite us being really,, really certain it was covered. Drinks and water were a disaster. I really think we could have just brought in a fuck-ton of tacos, sodas and water and we'd have been good enough.
5. Make damned sure the jeweler's idea of the ring is clearly the same as yours. We had a custom ring made for my wife and I think the jeweler failed to take good notes and the result was bad, very, very bad. We had the ring re-made, after it was presented and before the wedding. Her ring was very nice for the wedding.

But, not a lot. Sure, the year or so before the wedding was stressful. We did the planning ourselves, put together complex invitations, "save the date" fridge magnets and all the programs. But, because we did give ourselves a year to get it sorted, we had the time to find what we wanted. We had also been living together for a couple years by the time we got married. So, it was more a "ya, we should probably finally do this" than any sort of pressure to "start our life together".