A company borrowing money to buy it’s own stock makes sense though, doesn’t it? A share buyback reduces the number of shares, so remaining shareholders are holding more equity (as a percentage) than prior to the buyback. It’s just the reverse of issuing new shares. If the company has no productive use of the capital, then a share buyback is a way to make the company more “lean”, shedding unneeded cash to increase (relative) value.

Borrowing money to do so just means that they are deemed credit worthy by enough bond investors that they can borrow at low enough rates that the debt repayment costs are less than the value shareholders would expect from a dividend payment and/or that they don’t want to issue dividend payments for some other reason (like the idea that dividends should be consistent and only ever increase or they’re valuation gets slaughtered.)

The whole stock market is a bubble now, anyway, so this is the heart of our problems. About 2 decades ago, financial reporting allowed companies to shift their PE ratio away from Price-to-Earnings ratio and instead report on Price-to-Forward-Earnings ratio. This is the company’s projection of their future earnings potential, but investors just seen to accept that a “PE” ratio means the same thing it did for the preceding, like, century. A PtFE ratio of 25 is insane, on historical contexts, yet that’s completely normal now.

Insanity. And yet the market keeps going up. Even the '08 crash was just a small blip, compared to what it should have been.

I’ll just put my tinfoil hat back on over here.

Exactly this.

It’s deeply ironic that replacing private server lobbies with “competitive matchmaking” is the direct cause of rampant cheating.

Back in the day, you’d find a server with a ping, map rotation, and culture you liked and add it to your favourites list. Then, you’d choose the server you wanted to play on.

I was a huge fan of the 24/7 Hunted server in Team Fortress Classic and a pair of Warcraft Mod Counter Strike 2 servers back in the day. Playing a night elf with life leech and the root special (prevent enemy movement for a few seconds) or an orc with up to 8× grenade damage? So much fun.

Fuck Teams. The buggiest, most crash prone mess I’ve even been forced to use. They keep bolting on new, unnecessary “features” that only selectively work on some of their “supported” platforms.

I mean, it sort of is, but only for the specific question of asking for agreement with the preceding statement.

“This weather, eh?”
“The Leafs actually have a chance this year, eh?”

But not like “What’s your favourite colour, eh?” (Unless, maybe, it’s in the context where it’s obvious, like someone decked out head-to-toe in pink.)

I tried it. Joining the group gave me the option of joining anonymously, so that was easy. Installing from the Play Store just worked once I was able to join.

My biggest issue was that the controls being in the corner as a historic didn’t make any intuitive sense for me, so I kept going in directives I didn’t anticipate. I have no idea what the “🎥+” button is for, but it gets in the way of having centre-of-screen controls, which would mean dragging to the left actually moves left instead of still being up/down because I didn’t go left enough to get past the midline if the joystick.

Are you left handed, btw? Because it’s weird to have the default control on the left side of the screen. I’d suggest the following UI changes:

• Default: centre control, no video+ whatever button
• Options for right-joystick or left joystick.
• Change the default for horizontal orientation devices, or tablets, to default to right-have-side control with options for left or centre controls
• The right- and left-hand-side joystick should be moved more centrally to give more space to go to the outside edge of the joystick
• Whatever the video+ thing is should be explained. Does it Trevor video of your attempt, I’m guessing, in the hopes it will go viral? In that case, it should have options:

1. Record every run
2. Record only daily runs
3. Keep n most recent daily run recordings
4. Keep m most recent random run recordings

• The graphics are a bit too simplistic. Some lighting would help, I expect. I get that you’re going for a clean aesthetic, but the ball doesn’t have any roll animation. If it was something like an 8-ball, then there would be a sense of speed and rotation as the texture rotates—granted, that greatly expands the scope of your engine. I haven’t ever tried animating a sphere, but maybe take some cues from other genres to see how they impart a sense of motion instead of what could be a static sprite.

My biggest challenge with the concept is that the 3D view + first red walls doesn’t allow seeing enough of the maze to give a realistic chance at skill affecting some maze solutions—important parts of the maze are a blur of light/medium red, so it’s impossible to quickly scan for blocking walls between the start and the exit, so it’s impossible to use skill to win.

Instead, fast run times depend on luck—if you go in the wrong direction right at the start, you can be screwed, and because you can’t even see the exit as you move towards the side corners, you have no way of using skill to resolve this until you’ve wasted as long as it takes to fully solve the needed the correct way (and then it feels extra shitty to need to backtrack, eating even more time).

So, when I have a great run, I’m not proud of the score because it was lucky. And when I have a really bad run, it’s just frustrating.

The visuals need to be clear enough from the start that it’s actually a skill game, for your conveyor to work. A higher camera angle? Or maybe start with a 1-second animation that drops the ball, with the camera angle pointing down, then increasingly flat as it falls, until it ends with something similar to what you have now. Then there’s a quick chance to scan the maze before the run starts.

The red-on-red needs higher contrast, too. It’s frustrating and inaccessible for gamers with visual challenges. I’m not a designer, so idk about colour theory too much, but the walls and top of the maze you need to run through a contrast checker, imho, and maybe use Canva’s colour wheel complimentary colour picker or a palette from Lospec to get colors that gel.

It has potential, but it takes flat in its current iteration, imho.

I hope that feedback is helpful!

I’ve copied and pasted other people’s Bookmarklets before. ;)

I’ve had a couple decades of eclectic, self-directed tech learning. There’s no money for technology in education, so I’m always kludging things together, and there’s nobody at any school I’ve ever worked at who can teach me much, so I need to figure shit out myself.

It’d have been nice to be a junior to a greybeard for a few years, but I’ve made it work.

Just FYI, ReviOS is a playbook (set of system changes) that strips all the crap out of Windows 11 while still being almost entirely functional (I believe it disables automatic driver downloads, but it still gets Windows security updates.) I use it in my VM.

It’s super easy—install Windows 11, run the ReviOS playbook, then a Ninite to install all the essentials (including Classic Shell I think? Although I prefer one called something like Start Back.)

I know enough to parse the code, especially with the comments. It was a logical algorithm, it worked, and it was just for reformatting a page to print cleanly, so there was basically no risk if it didn’t work. I code for work, I just don’t know JavaScript syntax or functions.

Anyway, I was impressed it actually worked. I’m an AI skeptic, which is why I thought it was noteworthy to get well documented, clean, functional code from vibe coding—even in such a trivial context as swapping a head tag and removing script tags.

I actually got really clean, well commented code from Copilot earlier this week.

I have no experience with JavaScript to speak of, but realized a Bookmarklet would be a perfect solution for reformatting a particular web app for printing. I already had a head replacement with CSS to do all the formatting, and I was using a RegEx to strip all script tags.

Anyway, I asked Copilot to write the Bookmarklet to replace the header, with full contents explaining the training behind the code, and an explanation of how the script functions below. When I got an error, I asked if to fix the error and or identified that Bookmarklets work better as single lines, so it fixed it. Then I added the requirement about replacing scripts, and it did that too, but for commented and a clean one-line version.

The one-live versions even up getting truncated, so I need to copy/paste from earlier (correct) endings, but otherwise it was an incredibly smooth experience.

I spent longer writing the guide for how to use it than the time it took to vibe code it and test it. I was super impressed.

(Granted, that’s a pretty easy coding task…)

I’m liking Krita and Photopea (web app), but I’m not heavy into photography. I haven’t looked for a Lightroom replacement.

It will also likely work really well, apparently. I think you just need to be careful to pick a distro that comes with NVidea drivers, like CachyOS, and it will likely just work. Test with a live USB boot.

Shitty timing for the Gabe Cube launch to have all these market forces fucking with hardware prices. There’s going to be some massive sticker shock when the price is announced.

If you have an AMD GPU and don’t care about playing games that require kernel-level access for anticheat (ew), then Linux might just work better for you than Windows, for most games.

Like, getting Minecraft installed and working with mods in CachyOS just required installing Prism Launcher from the CachyOS repos (1 easy step) then launching it. I didn’t even need to open a web browser to download an installer.

Heroic Launcher is amaze balls, too. It pulls all the free games I get on GOG, Epic, and Amazon (iirc?) into one library that looks and works like Steam’s (amazing) library. So slick. (I think it’s preinstalled in CachyOS, too.)

Windows Search Service (or whatever it’s called). Every time my VM completely locks up, it’s that fucker.

Thankfully, I can then just switch back to butter-smooth Linux for a while to do another task while Windows un-fucks itself.

Indoor clean farms are pesticide free. Currently only economical for some crops, of course, but likely a good option in the long run for sustainable food production in general without using up all our land.

This looks like a perfect game for me. Civ is great, but I don’t have One More Turn amounts of time or focus available in my life right now. And I’m a professional spreadsheet wizard.

“Playable” on the Steam Deck just because of KB/mouse controls, too. So this sounds like it could be a great game to play in the Deck while watching TV… Imma try this tonight while watching Taskmaster reruns.

Edit: Plays great on the Deck with the touchpad. I imagine it will play even better once I configure shortcuts.

That headline…

The Beaverton is consistently cutting through the bullshit to give us satirical news that’s more accurate than “real” news.

Edit: Solid gold!

Ma was asked if he felt that his actions might spark other Conservative MPs to cross the floor. “I know others want to, but they’re either afraid, or not quite committed. I think if the Prime Minister ends federal pharmacare or dental care like he promised he wouldn’t, it would really open the doors.”

Costco produce ordered online can be a bit hit or miss, unfortunately. You know how when you shop at Costco, it’s usually better to dig down a layer with produce since the top box always has everything that’s been rejected by someone else? I’d guess, based on our mixed success, that some Instacart shoppers just grab from the top of the pile. We’ve had some shops with bad produce, but most have been great.

What sucks is that if you return it to the warehouse, you don’t get the full price back because of the Instacart markup; on the either hand, you can sometimes return things at a net profit because of Instacart offers (like the $10/mo. Executive Members thing.)

NVidia is down 3.7% today, for a net ~⅐ pullback from its peak ~a month ago, to what it was trading at in September.

There’s still a very long way for this to fall.

The Liberal platform is a PC platform, so that makes sense. The CPC is already the Reform Party.