> When developed as an original product, EVs offer automakers a chance to rethink the automobile, and in the process, make it cheaper.
That does not bode well for German car makers either I'm afraid. Take BMW for instance: they started off with two "pure" EV models, the i3 (a compact car) and the i8 (a sports car). Both of them promising, but neither a particular bestseller. So they switched to offering electric drive as an alternative to IC engines in several (most?) "regular" models. But I agree with TechCrunch that this is more of a cop-out than a winning strategy...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
Here's an idea: what about making an EV free from this enshittification? One where you can decide yourself when to install an update, like in the "olden days" a few years ago? One that doesn't pretend to have an "autopilot" which isn't really one? I think there would be a market for such an EV.
Wow, so now the US oil barons who lobbied Trump to kill renewables and EVs are even worse than Mohammed "Bonesaw*" bin Salman Al Saud? That's really something, if you look at it that way...
Either you're too smart for me or I just can't follow you, but could you please expand a bit on your comment? I find it hard to link it to the parent, but I realize that may be on me.
Sorry, it was referring more to the grandparent comment, that referred to Saudi Arabia behaving more responsibly than the US, and Mohammed bin Salman is of course the crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia.
They're comparing Saudi Arabia to a drug dealer; I don't think they're ascribing any moral virtue to the Saudi regime. They just believe the Saudis are acting more intelligently.
I'm not so familiar with the C64, but Monkey Island did indeed use graphics mode on all the 16/32 bit systems it supported - PC graphics cards had their video memory on the card (same as they do today), so saving memory by using text mode didn't make sense. The only problem with that was that the CPU had to be used for any processing of the video memory, so especially scrolling the whole screen was sometimes a bit slow with weaker CPUs. The Amiga and Atari ST didn't have a dedicated text mode.
I think the C64 palette you linked has been "tweaked" by the artist who uploaded it, this is probably closer to the original: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Color
But your point is still valid: while IBM PCs and other machines of the time had a propensity for "pure" colors (cyan, magenta etc. - so 100% for one or two of the basic colors and 0 for the others), the C64 designers opted for more muted colors.
On my screen that doesn't match videos of actual C64's on actual CRT's. (It also doesn't match my memory of them, but that's a whole lot less reliable)
Videos of actual C64's on actual CRT's are pretty consistent other than brightness, though, so if it doesn't at least somewhat match those, the model is broken.
Good question! Since the game is mostly scene-based, it should be possible to play it scene by scene with lots of reading from disk. However the original game also had some larger scenes that used quite a lot of horizontal scrolling (some backgrounds for those scenes can be seen under "A collection of backgrounds from the game" in the article), not so sure about those...
Speaking of that, I'm really curious how many 170 KB C64 floppies it would need to store the whole game.
The large scenes looks like about 4 screens wide? But they're not full height - looks like about 2/3, so let's say ~24KB total including color data. I don't think it should be a problem. The walk + scroll is slow enough that if you had to (and I don't think you do) you ought to be able to time things so you can load the next screen while the player is walking.
Similarly, e.g. slow down the door animation, and a fade, and you ought to have enough time for a decent fast loader to load the next screen (~2-3 seconds assuming you're loading 2/3 of the screen)
You really benefit from the low amount of action on screen here.
If you want to actually compress the data to reduce the number of floppies, you'd slow it down quite a bit. If you were doing it for a real C64 or cartridges constrained to what was viable at the time, that might well be preferable to more floppies. If you're doing it for a modern cartridge or an emulator, it won't matter.
Well yeah, the good old CRT monitors (the worse, the better in this case) also helped with the EGA dithering, while viewing the EGA graphics fullscreen on an 1080p LCD display, you'll have ~30 pixels for each original EGA pixel.
I for one prefer the Amiga version, because that's what I played back in the day. The Amiga supported 32 colors (without tricks like EHB and HAM) in 320x200/240 mode, so only twice as much as EGA, but they could be picked freely from a palette of 4096 colors, so IMHO it looked much better than the EGA version with its fixed 16 colors. But if you look at screenshots (https://scummbar.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island/versio...) it's obvious that they really put in a lot of work, with custom assets which fully used the capabilities of the various platforms. Of course, the higher the limitations, the more artistry was needed to make it look reasonably good, but I don't think that should be held against the "higher-color" versions...
I was going to say this. I never liked the 256-color VGA game (and now comparing, it does look bland) but Amiga struck the best, IMHO, balance between good hand-crafted pixel art but with realistic enough colors to give sufficient depth and athmosphere in the scene.
For a game like that, while I agree with the Amiga version looks good, frankly the Amiga port still feels like a good example of why there were lots of complaints about "lazy" ports for the Amiga that didn't take proper advantage of what it could do.
For a relatively static display like that EHB would've not been a problem, and the amount of gradual changes would've made it easy to exploit in the palette. Using the copper to modify the palette a few places would've also allowed for more, and switching to 640x200 below the graphics to make the text smoother would've been outright trivial. Even HAM might've been reasonably feasible.
> China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tell
There are a few reasons for that that I can imagine:
- China is one of very few autocracies that has managed to significantly improve the standard of living of most of its population.
- The public trials and (sometimes) executions of allegedly corrupt individuals might help improve the perception of corruption.
- The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence people to declare a higher level of social trust than they actually have, even if the poll is supposedly "confidential" and "only for scientific purposes".
You can’t honestly say that a country where citizens inform on each other and put each other in forced labor camps based on rumor is a society where trust is high.
> The Deutscherblick ("German Look") was a tense, habitual glance over the shoulder used by citizens in Nazi-era Germany before speaking about sensitive topics like food rations, Hitler jokes, or the war’s progress
Not just labor camps. People would regularly get beheaded for anti-regime remarks. Nazi justice was keen on capital punishment for relatively minor crimes.
Nazi Germany was full of dedicated informers who would even earn money or other privileges for denouncing someone. It had about as much trust between strangers as Iran under the Revolutionary Guards might have today.
Now define "members". It's both possible and common for an in-group to experience a high degree of trust and care, while those outside that group to... Not. From the point of view of the beneficiaries the social contract is working beautifully!
I found Singapore somewhat bracing in how honestly they acknowledge the two tiers (natives + wealthy foreigners vs poor "guest" workers) in their society. The same division functionally exists in many "western" countries, but is broadly ignored. (To be clear, I do not endorse this - and, in fact, think it appalling - but appreciate straightforwardness more than I do obfuscation by empty rhetoric.)
It's not like atrocities started with Nazis. Child prostitution, high unemployment, corruption, poverty, moral devastation, drug addiction, injustice, inequality ... all that existed before Nazis so many people ignored the warnings that came with the Nazi party since they were the only ones promising to act.
Something about this doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not a historian but something tells me not everyone else was a-ok with atrocities that existed before nazis.
Also, again I’m not a historian, but I believe their promise to act was also tied up in blaming others and hate.
“At least they got things done” is very often the seed around which a belief in fascism crystallizes.
They don’t deserve any recognition for what they promised or what they accomplished.
This is a thread about my definition of a high trust society.
So far the only argument in support of nazi germany being high trust is that they got shit done.
I don’t see how anyone could argue that imprisoning your own population in forced labor camps based on rumor is something that can happen in a high trust society.
There is no trust in such a society, only fear.
Arguing about this any more is making me feel sick.
My only claim was that things were far from perfect (profoundly broken) before Nazis came to power. They made many terrible things, but they also fixed some of the issues they promised to fix. That's why they were able to grab power.
You can read more about the Weimar Republic. If it weren't so fundamentally broken, Nazis would never come to power. Stating this is not Nazi apologia but a warning of what happens if governments and the ruling class ignore the will of their own people and actively work against it for a long time.
The original context of this thread is the validity of china’s data in this trust survey. Interjecting with positive example of nazi germany is not even correct. There’s no way anyone can argue in good faith that nazi germany was high trust.
The nazis don’t need you to come to their defense.
Nazism is basically ignoring the will of their own people and actively working against them.
Nazis were one of the worst regimes we had in Europe, but the German regime before them was also bad. Bad enough that many saw Nazis as a viable alternative. In desperate times, people make desperate choices.
This is more or less a historical consensus, which I pointed out. If we want to prevent a Nazi-like regime from coming to power again, we need to avoid mistakes made by the Weimar Republic. Unfortunately, I see a global trend of governments making the same mistakes again, and I fear it will end in the same way.
I don't think Nazi society was high-trust. But I also don't think Nazis destroyed trust, because it already eroded before them.
China was getting better for a long time. XI is changing that. Change is slow though and he is not rushing corruption though it seems to be increasing. He has purged some corrupt people as well making things slightly better in the short term - but he values loyalty over competence and so his short term changes are for less corruption but long term increase it.
That is China is a complex country and books (which are not written and many cannot be for decades yet) are needed to understand this, not a short comment box. [This applies to every other country anyone here mentions]
Social trust is high because there are pretty heavy handed control measures over the population with havy costs. Thats more of a fear based society than trust. Government can giveth and government can taketh.
1. Fear of a capricious state can cause survival-motivated compliance which can appear as "trust" in coarse measurements. Meaning, you simply do fewer of those things that would provide opportunities for distrust in contexts where that could happen.
2. In a relatively severe, but consistent regime, the high penalties for violating trust in everyday cases (crime) act as a deterrent.
3. Fear may cause people to be selective and mindful about their social associations based on stronger proofs of trustworthiness. You might tell a Hitler joke to someone you have used more energy/caution to "vet", but avoid being too casual in environments of undetermined trustworthiness.
Also, I can't help noticing that the guy(s) playing with the robot are doing their utmost to make it look good: playing the ball as gently as possible (so it has time to react and doesn't have to exert too much force to return it), aiming for places the robot can comfortably get to etc.
Those "well-read antivaxxers" are the same as e.g. people with a fear of flying: they spend too much time looking at extremely rare catastrophic outcomes (dying or being seriously injured because of a plane crash or a vaccine side effect) and then think that it will surely happen to them or their children. The only difference is just that when someone who's afraid of flying doesn't take a plane, it only affects very few people (if that), whereas lowering herd immunity affects us all.
The difference between yesteryear, when everyone ignored the nutter ranting about lizardmen in the town square, and today is that the nutters can now find company and reinforcement for their beliefs thanks to the Internet. And ultimately it leads to people like Elon Musk getting high on their own supply of toxic disinformation and causing the death of thousands of people by shutting down USAID because they believe some far-right nutter on X more than what "the establishment" has been saying for decades...
Flying is safe, but I think it is not because some rules/regulations or due to "science".
A plane falling out of sky is a pretty big event and cannot be suppressed or silenced. It affects a large number of people at once. If planes starts to fall out of sky often, then the commercial aviation will come to a halt in a month. Given this eventuality, if you want to make money by flying people, it in imperative that there is no other way than to * do everything possible to make sure* planes don't fall from the sky.
If planes could fall out of sky without everyone knowing about it (For example, imagine that when a plane crashes, instead of killing the passengers right away, they only get hit after a month or so, and it is hard to link the deaths with the flight they took a month before), and affecting their business, then I bet that flying will no longer be very safe as companies will start cutting expenses with maintenance etc and paying off regulators/inspectors..
A stock market crash is also a pretty big event that cannot be suppressed or silenced, but they still happen regularly. The sad truth is that people (and companies) are greedy and will gladly cut corners with safety if it means making more money. So regulations (and enforcement of those regulations) are needed to prevent a race to the bottom that will eventually lead to a crash. Coming back to aviation, you only have to look at countries like Nepal (https://kathmandupost.com/money/2025/11/10/nepali-sky-remain...) to see what happens when there are no regulations, or regulations are not enforced.
Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible.
(I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there)
Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because:
1) Many vaccine clinical trials only monitor outcomes for a few days to a couple weeks.
2) Most vaccine clinical trials have no placebo control. If they have do have a control group in most cases the control group gets a different vaccine.
3) Most kids in vaccine clinical trials are also getting 10-30 other vaccine injections during their first two years of life during the period that they're being monitored for the one vaccine in their trial. So the only way this could even produce a signal would be if the one vaccine under trial was the only one that caused harm and all other vaccines did not.
I am not saying that vaccines do cause chronic disease in 1% of kids - just that it seems to me we don't have a good way to know.
Furthermore, even if it was proved that vaccines caused harm, vaccine manufacturers are not liable for harms from vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule.
Your claims about vaccine trials are not true. I’m not an expert and don’t have time to go and find citations to argue each of your points one by one, but I’ve read enough studies to know that vaccine trials aren’t nearly as sloppy / poorly designed as you believe.
For example, even when speed was extremely important and everyone was trying to get Covid vaccines out as fast as possible a few years ago, they still ran large randomised placebo-controlled trials (in places with high infection rates so they could get good comparison data relatively quickly).
So please stop spreading false claims about this stuff / spend time actually learning the facts. Claims like these do real harm by undermining trust in vaccines and helping fuel avoidable outbreaks of diseases like measles.
I'd be much more inclined to believe they were holding genuine, consistent opinions of that if they applied the same concern to the other end: unstudied long-term problems from measles infections. But they don't. It's the same for COVID/vaccines. Endless concern over spike protein or long-term risk in the vaccine, but happy to get the spike protein or long-term risk from the viral infection.
That's a good point. I would like to see long term problems from measles infection studied and better understood, but I also understand how they really can't be studied in the US where measles is extremely rare and I wouldn't advocate bringing it back to find out.
It is similar with covid but I wouldn't say it's quite the same. The measles vaccine seems very effective at preventing infection, while the covid vaccine is not. It might reduce harm from the infection, and whether this reduction in harm outweighs potential harm from the vaccine is not well understood. It may have done so early on when covid itself was more dangerous, and it might not with current strains of covid. I would similarly like to see long term studies comparing two similar populations where one took the vaccine and the other didn't. It's complex.
With covid, in the beginning there simply wasn't time to know if the vaccine was safe. And now that we've had some time, it turns out that longer term placebo controlled studies just were never done, so we still don't know. Once it became clear that the vaccine was very ineffective at preventing infection the choice became a lot easier - get the virus, or get the virus and the vaccine, which are categorically different things.
I'm not happy to get either of them, but I'd rather the one than both. The virus itself appears to have been modified and was certainly novel to humans. The vaccines are novel and hard-to-understand in many many more ways than.
There is also a point to be made about the body being a complex system and introducing novelty to a complex system can have consequences that are unpredictable and hard to understand. Still worth studying though.
But that’s “natural.” This is the underlying idea, that nature absent human influence is inherently more pure and good.
I used to associate antivax with the loony left and with primitivism, which is the idea that if we abandon technology and civilization we will get to LARP as the Na’vi in Avatar. Then this stuff jumped across the horseshoe gap to the far right.
Or… maybe the new age and certain types of greens always were far right. If you dig into the origins of the new age you run into figures like William Dudley Pelley and Savitri Devi.
Disease, disability, pain, and death are also natural.
That does not bode well for German car makers either I'm afraid. Take BMW for instance: they started off with two "pure" EV models, the i3 (a compact car) and the i8 (a sports car). Both of them promising, but neither a particular bestseller. So they switched to offering electric drive as an alternative to IC engines in several (most?) "regular" models. But I agree with TechCrunch that this is more of a cop-out than a winning strategy...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
Here's an idea: what about making an EV free from this enshittification? One where you can decide yourself when to install an update, like in the "olden days" a few years ago? One that doesn't pretend to have an "autopilot" which isn't really one? I think there would be a market for such an EV.
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