Oh absolutely having an aggressive manager and skip will help you with bonuses and promotions. But they don’t force managers to give people low scores anymore.

While the management tool had a weird slider and score system (you could give a number between 0 and 1000 IIRC), the general terminology was you could get between 0 and 200, indicative of how you compared to the average person at your level. 100 meaning you did average per-say or completed about 100% of the work an average person could complete.

While not unheard of it was basically impossible to get 200% (required at least your skip/M2 and maybe your M3 to agree).

Last I heard (keep in mind this was 2023 or so) managers got around 105% or 110% of their bonus allocated for their team. Generally that meant you could give everyone “100” if you wanted, but practically it never worked out that way.

Also there were strict rules you couldn’t take from a more junior budget to give a more senior person a higher bonus. You could however take from a more senior budget and give it to a junior.

I. E. I couldn’t give two SWE1s 80 to give a SWE2 a 120. The reverse was allowed though.

Layoffs are generally done algorithmically. I’m not kidding. They don’t want to be sued. They follow all the legal rules otherwise (can’t layoff a US citizen without laying off a Visa employee first, etc).

Source: I worked there for 11 years, I was an IC but have many friends who are managers who would tell me how the system works, and have been laid off twice. The first time I found another position within MSFT but the most recent time, in December, I opted to take some time off and find something else.

Edit/addendum: when the managers get in the room for people discussions a lot of that is around promotions. Very little is bonuses. Bonuses are determined by your manager, then go up the chain. So your manager sets and signs off on your score. Then your M2 checks it and either sends it back if they don’t agree or signs off and sends it up. Then your M3. At the M3 and higher levels I suspect they don’t look too close but just make sure everything makes sense and the budgets balance.

Microsoft got rid of that in 2014 or so, when Nadella took over.

Depending on what I needed I remember using AltaVista, AskJeeves, Dogpile, and I feel like later on MetaCrawler or something like that (would search multiple search engines for you and ordered them scored based on platform and relevancy iirc?)

Oh that makes sense. I also now just realized all the RoR2 maps are pre made, you just randomize the order you see them in, and the enemies that spawn there (within a fixed set)

Rogue had you start from scratch with a new character in a random map every time.

Rogue-like games initially meant you start from scratch in a new random world, but you incrementally improve your experience by small buffs you can buy, or changing your starting equipment / skills (sometimes by changing out which character you start as).

Rogue-like has slowly changed to mean “start over regularly but slowly unlock new items/buffs/equipment/characters/etc to help you further explore a world which may or may not be random”

So it applies to games like Risk of Rain (and 2), Balatro, Dead Cells, and Rogue Legacy, just to name a few examples (though 3 of those are 2d platformers with randomly generated worlds if I remember right…).

But yeah it seems to have morphed into a broadly used term for games where you get better over time through purchasing permanent buffs and whatnot (as well as natural skill), but are forced to restart any time you die.

Vampire Survivors and other similar style games have you constantly restarting when you die so I think the term fits as a partial descriptor.

Maybe we could adopt the idle/clicker game term Prestige, but that’s more of a voluntary restart when you hit a wall and can’t progress, so I don’t think it quite works.

All UK machines, phones, and servers should just remove all root certificates. Can’t trust encryption right?

X509Brexit.

Then they wouldn’t have to interact with any part of the encrypted internet.

My understanding is 32-bit PhysX games are broken.

64-bit compiled games are fine.

It’s not that seamless depending on the content you usually consume.

I feel like I keep seeing the same single livestream trying to sell me a phone charger, and then roughly the same 5 or 6 videos trying to sell me a specific product over and over again.

As long as I don’t report or say “I keep seeing this ad” it will show me the same ones so they are easy to skip.

Usually it’s something I started watching until I realized it was an ad, but because I started watching it one time it thinks I’m interested so it will continually show it to me.

Once you spot them they are easy to skip. (at least, until they get better at masking then and then it will get harder).

That’s a separate issue from requiring internet access / cloud / their servers to be online to print.

If you’re open to sci-fi:

Nathan Lowell - Smuggler Series (3 books, starting with milk run) or Trader Series (first 6 books, starting with quarter share)

Smuggler has more… Intrigue and whatnot. Trader is pretty straightforward and “feel good”, iirc.

I would say read both series to those points before going further with the Seeker Series and later books. I forget where in the series but at some point the characters cross paths so having read both series before then helps it all fit together.

From Alberta but not working there anymore. Found out somewhat recently, specifically in regards to Software, APEGA lost their protection on the word Engineer. Again, specifically in regards to Software.

https://www.apega.ca/news/2023/11/06/notification-of-changes-to-the-engineering-and-geoscience-professions-act-regarding-the-title-of-software-engineer

If the studio is already rather large and retains a number of employees then you’re either asking for them to divide into small teams and produce a bunch of projects in parallel (none of which will potentially sell well or be able to maintain the momentum the studio has with previous AAA title releases), or you’re essentially asking them to downsize into a smaller studio, laying off 80-90% of their workforce, to produce non-AAA titles again.

Those smaller projects now have smaller marketing budgets (1/10th each). Smaller marketing budget generally means less sales, unless something goes viral (0.1% of the time or less, so really you need 1000 projects not just 10). Not to mention price point is going to be at $20 or maybe $30.

Internally on each game you’ll need people to take up the roles of like art director, or whoever decides the look and feel of the art for the game. With AAA titles you used to have one of those (I assume), but now one person has to look after 10 projects, or other people have to step up (one for each project) to do that job. Should they get paid more? Now your smaller projects are costing more money.

It’s sort of like saying 9 women can make a baby in 1 month. We know that’s impossible. AAA studios are not structured around creating 10 smaller projects.

This might not be super useful if you don’t write code but I always found the contest submissions fun to read and try to figure out for the https://www.underhanded-c.org/ contest.

They break down and explain the runner up and finalist for each year and how the attack works. It’s usually something very subtle that most people wouldn’t catch.

You’re comparing a 2d custom engine. Which admittedly you wouldn’t expect to have multiple os support…but it’s built on allegro, which is open source c++.

To a 3d game in Unreal Engine 5, which stresses even the best systems running dedicated gpus on windows. Do many macs offer dedicated gpus these days?

Yeah what a badly written article, with awful takeaways.

Hard agree… One of the most polished early access games I’ve played in a long time. I’ve started over at least 3 or 4 times now. Sometimes single player. Sometimes multi-player. Can’t wait tor 1.0.

Looking forward to finally learning what the few WIP (work in progress) things will actually do…

While you’re forced to use ticketmaster you can still avoid installing their app via https://am.ticketmaster.com/

At best case 60 miles an hour… Your commute was more than 90 mins? Ugh. That’s awful.

You weren’t clear if that was round trip or not, so possibly more than 180 mins? How did you find time to sleep!?

You can find port crystals around the map or via quests. There are also some fixed ones on the map.

You can place them anywhere… Outside I think? But maybe just anywhere.

Once you find/place them you can use a Ferrystone while outside to travel to any one you have placed. There is almost always at least one Ferrystone for sale in each town, and it will refresh after a few days when you buy it. It will cost 10,000 gold.

The number of port crystals you can place are limited (in the first game it was 8 or 9?). You can find roughly 5 per playthrough iirc. You can NewGame+ as many times as you want once far enough in the main quest (retaining most items, equipment, all vocation levels and experience…i imagine any vocation master skills too; generally just the quests and the world reset). I’m still on my first playthrough so haven’t tried.

But there are no issues finding Port crystals and buying / finding Ferrystones. You DO NOT NEED MTX. That headline was so overblown.

I’ve had an Nvidia shield TV for like 6 years now. Very happy with it.