The strong law of small numbers strikes again!

why would I want to use it?

You wouldn’t, but that’s fine with Match Group: JP Morgan^[1] are loving this new monetization strategy. If they think they can get more money out of their users they will, the experience and usefulness of their app be damned. Very similar to aggressively monetized mobile games, but extra icky since they’re monetizing human relationships.

Sentient, spacefaring bees, according to the article! Not what I was expecting but still, sounds pretty intriguing!

Agreed. Strong (and effectively enforced) worker protections are just as important as tech-specific safety regulations. Nobody should feel like they need to put themselves into a risky situation to make work happen faster, regardless of whether their employer explicitly asks them to take that risk or (more likely) uses other means like unrealistic quotas to pressure them indirectly.

There are certainly ways to make working around robots safer, e.g. soft robots, machine vision to avoid unexpected obstacles in the path of travel, inherently limiting the force a robot can exert, etc… And I’m all for moving in the direction of better inherent safety, but we also need to make sure that safer systems don’t become an excuse for employers to expose their workers to more risky situations (i.e. the paradox of safety).

Yeah, cryptobiotic crust! I’ve seen it in the Sonoran desert. It doesn’t look like much, I think if I hadn’t been warned ahead of time not to step on it I might have just done it without thinking. Given that just footprints can take on the order of decades to heal I think a dune buggy ban makes sense in areas where it grows.

I’m still surprised to learn about the microbes in the Atacama: it’s the driest place on earth, and I would have expected the salt deposits to make it even harder for anything to live there. Yknow what they say I guess: “Life, uh, finds a way.”

Some pretty interesting ideas. I was unaware that anything was living in the Atacama salt deposits, which certainly lends some credence to the idea that something could be pulling moisture out of the air on Mars, thin as it is.

If you have a USB stick you’re not using you can install Mint on it and boot directly from the USB drive without modifying your actual OS, and see how you like it! The same is true of many other linux distributions if you’d like to explore, but Mint was my own first foray into linux and I think it’s a comfy distro to start off with. I think you’ll be shocked by how snappy it can be on a lower spec machine like that, even running from a USB stick.

I’ve also heard great things about Crosscode. I haven’t started it yet (mainly because I’m worried about what it will do to my already flagging productivity), but from what I’ve heard about it, it sounds like it’d fit the bill quite well!

I really enjoyed Death’s Door, which is frequently compared with Tunic. That might be one to check out!

You might also be interested in Supergiant’s older games: Bastion and Transistor. They’re the team behind Hades, but those older games don’t have the same rogue-like elements that Hades does. (They also both have absolutely phenomenal soundtracks by Daren Korb!)

You might also like Divine Divinity (the 21 year old predecessor to the popular Divinity: Original Sin).