Eiri

With uhm ... Some sort of fake poop?

Movies (and even most video games) make me so angry with that kind of stuff. You want an artificially tailored experience that only works with a zillion-dollar sound system? Fine, you can make it an optional soundtrack that only kicks in with those systems. But the default audio mix needs to be intelligible even on my phone's speakers.

Video games are annoying because often you can't hear anything over the explosions music during the opening cutscenes, but at least you CAN fix it in the settings. Movies, yeesh, you have to rely on your TV's crap postprocessing.

The USB standards are just... Comically overcomplicated. And almost everything about it is optional. They need a full revamp, making it simpler and mandatory on all future ports, devices and cables.

But they won't do that, will they.

URLs aren't case-sensitive though, so wouldn't those necessarily have another kind of differentiator?

We regularly have that problem at work. Works on your development PC on Windows. Push to pipeline, get cryptic error messages. Once we were two people trying to figure it out for half an hour.

Case-sensitive file names. Why.

That would work for projects important enough to be worth the government's attention. But we don't want every small project ever to be dependent on that.

Do you really see some teenager trying to meet a civil servant to explain how their Super Random RPG 2025 wiki is worth it, and the project is finally accepted (or refused, because the civil servant isn't too hot about giving government money to something about video games) half a year later, when the most intense players, who would have contributed to such a platform a lot, have already finished the game?

I absolutely like that idea and I think it could be great for big sites like Wikipedia and various Internet Archive projects.

But I really don't think it solves everything.

I mean that's still spending time outside. If parasols and big hats weren't so thoroughly OUT fashion-wise where I live I'd absolutely rock one of those. The cooling effect looks really nice.

Well, that and my gigantic head doesn't work with the vast majority of hats.

But yeah being in the shade barely counts as protection against UV radiation anyway. If you understand the science, you do that to cool down and to see better more than you do it to avoid UV rays.

I thought stars of similar masses were also of similar sizes. They're not?

I've got a feeling that advertising companies have ways to differentiate real and fake clicks. Best case scenario, they wouldn't count those. Worst case scenario, they could notice that too many clicks are fake and revoke the monetization for a website.

If captchas exist, surely they can use similar methods to catch ad cheats like that.

This is older, and not quite the same but back when I was into private Ragnarok Online servers, it was pretty well-known among server admins that you couldn't ask people to click your ads. Either because you asked, either because they noticed unusual activity, Google would demonetize the ads pretty quickly.

Servers and bandwidth aren't free. Someone needs to pay for it. There are roughly seven ways to fund a website:

• Complete volunteering, and maintainer pays all fees out of pocket. Only makes sense for very small projects, or when the maintainer is rich and has a great deal of passion or otherwise self-interest in the project.
• Strictly fund the website with donations. That's more or less how Wikipedia works. It can be hard to make ends meet, and it typically only works if your website basically offers community service like a charity or if you have very passionate users.
• Freemium model: most users are just leeches and are subsidized by the few who pay for the premium version. This is more or less how free-to-play video games work, and some newspapers survive this way. It can be difficult to convince people.
• Members only: you literally cannot use the website unless you pay. A lot of SAAS websites, especially for businesses, work this way. It can be a hard sell for a lot of service categories.
• Ads. Sometimes combined with a freemium model, where you can pay to remove the ads. YouTube works this way.
• Sell user data to advertisers or more sinister entities. Only possible if you have valuable user data to sell. Most social networks get a significant portion of their revenue from this method, but they typically combine it with ads.
• Use venture capital to disturb an existing market at a loss, get massive mindshare and maybe even kill existing competition, and jack the prices up to repay your debts and turn a profit once you have customers and the market is more favourable. Airbnb works this way.

What would you do for review sites? News sites? Video game wikis?

Wouldn't it suck if a wiki for an old game was just gone because there aren't many players anymore, and now you just can't access the info in it?

I mean no one said "flee the sun". They said "use sunscreen".

That's cool in principle, but what if I actually want help?