• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • In 6 your buildings in cities are categorised into districts. The districts take up a hex on the grid and receive bonuses based on adjacent hexes. A large part of the game revolves around planning your districts in every city as once they are placed, they cannot be moved. This is a slightly different playstyle compared to 5 where only the city location itself matters.

    Some other changes were around science, policies and eras. You unlock policy cards which you can swap out for different bonuses when needed instead of a constant effect. Policies are just as important as science this time around, and researching science and policies is boosted by actions in the game instead of only using Great scientists/writers. Every set amount of turns the world enters a different era, which also offers different policy cards for that period.

    There are no (or few) multiplicative bonuses. Having more cities is always beneficial.










  • Take the pill and be a good, docile citizen. It’s insane for me to think that a quarter of the UK has some sort of mental illness, that requires medication. Either this is a wild amount of overperscription, which wouldn’t be that surprising, after having had some experience with the NHS; or things are very broken at a fundamental level.

    Then again whenever you hear something about the UK in the news it is either some overbearing, authoritarian, conservative bullshit or some ultra liberal nonsense, there seems to be no middle ground. Lived there a few years and have no intention of going back.


  • Eh, kinda. The macbooks still come with 8gb non replaceable memory and the upcharge for another 8gb is $200 (not just for the air but the $1600 pro too). These are still great laptops but the pricing feels hostile.

    IPad hardware is brilliant but what’s the point? You’re stuck with a neutered OS and a handheld formfactor that is not especially suitable for work or for gaming (the fields that usually need more power).

    The baseline iphones are still lacking basic features like a high refresh screen purely for product segmentation purposes. And once again a slew of hostile, anti-user and anti-developer decisions like banning sideloading or alternative browser engines mainly designed to lock down the OS so they can retain all control of what goes on on your device. Another way this control is used is to funnel you to use icloud which offers an introductory free tier of 5(?) GB of data. I don’t think I had a single relative that didn’t have the “your icloud storage is full” popup every day until we disabled photo backups or they started paying a monthly subscription.

    The app store is also a disaster. Just open it and search for something, I’m not even going to say more. This is an obvious profit vs user experience tradeoff.

    Airpods are more or less fine. I had a gen1 Airpods pro which were kinda category defining at the time. Competition has caught up however, also better repairability would be nice. I’m actually surprised you were allowed to use them without an iPhone.

    Apple watch seems fine, still no 3rd party watchfaces. The locked down OS is somewhat more justified in this case.

    I haven’t tried the vision pro but that is also locked down software wise.

    Overall, as you said, the hardware is good to best-in-class but it feels to me that at every turn you are being pushed and manipulated into giving more of your cash to Apple sometimes in the form of product segmentation, sometimes via artificial software limitations.

    You don’t get to be a trillion dollar company just by making good products.