Folks aren't even able to get out of debt. Considering debt generally has a higher interest rate than savings, folks are even held back from saving. OP even mentioned that straight out. If you're a disaster away from destitution, you aren't investing money. Money years from now isn't worth more than money today when your bills are due today.

easily gauge how it was going.

Except virtually everyone got it wrong still. Even the head of Larian thought it'd top out at 100k max. That's currently it's average now with it's max being more than 800% higher.

BG is a big IP, but it's never had this level of success. Look at Diablo III's release (similar IP with a long break between games). It had better advertising campaign and still kind of became noise fairly quickly. Game news sites barely covered BG3 until it hit it big.

Microsoft definitely undershot, but it was likely basing it on a lot of the aggregated news as well. It had barely any coverage prior to its official release. This is usually a sign that the game will be mediocre.

Larian is a big studio but its last expected game from its really only known IP was cancelled after being put on hold for four years (granted BG3 was also being developed during this time). It's biggest games prior to this got at least partially funded on Kickstarter (not a knock against KS, but it's not generally seen as the sign of a strong studio to exec-types).

I don't blame an executive for not seeing this coming.

Executives obviously didn't see this coming. But neither did game journalists or even gamers.

Its a mistake in hindsight, but with what everyone generally knew at the time, it was the expectation of most.

Only a few libraries announced dropping support due to their requirement generics. It's not that big a deal. TS is still popular.

You realize that's how most privacy policies word their collecting, right? Microsoft may collect data from Windows. Google may collect the sites you visit. Etc etc etc. "May" is used because they may not collect it in every instance. But it definitely means sometimes they do. There's no purpose to open up legal liability unless necessary.

The example given was if they filtered by schools that accept low grade scores, that was a sample of data that was sent. This could allow them to target you with study aids or even for-profit colleges that are like, "we don't care you're failing, we'll accept you"

It's recognizable only if you know what it's supposed to be. I don't think anyone could hear that and say "hey, that sounds like Another Brick in the Wall". I feel like the brain fills in what's missing and almost forces it to match the same pattern in our head. So it's definitely cool, but still clearly a science in its early days.

"anyone". I hate when people use this word knowing full well it's not true in meaning. "Nothing is stopping you from spending millions of dollars on your own LLM." Ok.

The web is a bunch of information that is public, sure. People don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy but they used to have a reasonable expectation that their information would be used in a very specific fashion. Especially in the US where there is a default copyright claim on data. And crawling the web may ignore text that states you can't use the data. Even if you include a clause saying by accessing the data you agree to the claim. That only works against little people. The "anyone" that can't actually just go and build a LLM.

If you think folks only had one bill (school loans) so had no reason to work until it comes back, you're kind of out of touch. Unemployment is fairly low and it's not because people aren't looking for work.

Pretty sure that's an SMBC comic. https://www.smbc-comics.com/

Reading the description, it does appear to regularly require internet connectivity. It says the purchase comes with a dataset of known locations and regularly gets updated.

If anything, the crack would have to be somehow getting it to use a different dataset, one that I don't know if it even exists offhand (ie some open sourced red light/speed trap dataset). And that dataset would need to be in the same format as Cyclops.

If they just used a better election format, that could have fixed so much. I don't think they envisioned such a large population. More than two parties can work at small scale but fails at large scale. And getting that changed is such a task I'm not even sure how it could happen right now.

When a crime is just too good so the government legitimizes it.