I didn't bother with pots for a fair bit of SL.

And sure, if your goal in life is to have a lot of WoW gold, the most efficient way to get it is to buy it, but no one actually buys gold cap with real money so they can get a mount off the BMAH. They're spending gold. Gold isn't money. You can't easily convert gold into a car payment, so no rational human treats them as interchangeable. Gold is like a special form of money you can only spend on one particular hobby.

There are of course people who convert gold into real money for the specific purpose of paying the real-money cost of a subscription, but those people are obviously not then using the saved money to buy the gold back.

There's a buyer and seller for every token, but it's a highly asymmetric marketplace. A much smaller number of people are spending gold on a larger number of tokens, and those tokens are bought by a larger number of buyers with real money. That is, lots of people are willing to buy a token or two to bootstrap enough gold to be comfortable. You certainly don't have significant numbers of people buying so many tokens that they can spend all that gold on the most expensive BMAH items.

I have no idea how people make money "idly playing the game". Sure, there is some income from playing that way, but most of it is spent on repairs, consumables, enchants etc.

All my gold comes from just random crap that really is just side-effects of stuff I'm doing anyway. I don't even have gathering professions on my main. If I am on an alt with herbalism, I pick the herbs I see while I'm doing whatever I'm doing. Or I get them from the satchels that your soulbind drops. I sell a raid BoE or two if I get lucky each patch. When I happen to notice I have a few hundred enchanting crystals or sinvyr ore or whatever, I throw them on the auction house. The rest is just vendoring crap and opening whatever rewards are thrown at you.

Shadowlands is getting close to a year old. A million gold is like 3000 gold a day. You can get 2000 of that just doing the damn callings that take 10 minutes. If you leveled your mission table, there's probably a couple thousand gold a day you can make with your phone not even logging into the actual game. I haven't leveled mine enough to care, but I definitely see a lot of missions that reward ~300 gold for pressing a button.

The game throws gold at anyone still logging in and playing. My raid provides cauldrons and food. I make my own flasks and pots for things like M+. For that matter, I tend to buy crap to make feasts for the raid too.

The WoW economy these days is essentially buy tokens or sell carries for gold.

It's really not. I bought the longboi having never done either of those things. I've probably made another milllion and a half gold in Shadowlands just idly playing the game. I don't even seriously play the auction house, which is how most actual WoW-rich players do it.

I don't believe any significant number of people (and I would be surprised if the number is not literally zero) are spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on tokens to buy things like mounts or T3 from the BMAH. It's astronomically more likely that these items are bought with gold by people who made the gold in-game.

This is all spot on, but I especially wanted to pile onto point #3. It's a really common misconception that you're going to be expected to follow whatever thread your dissertation was building after you've graduated, and for sure, some people do that. But the idea is 100% that the PhD is about training you to be an independent researcher. I did a PhD in Computer Science focused on search and optimization. If I wanted to be a biologist now, all I need to do is start publishing biology papers. I don't actually know much about biology, but that's my problem, not anyone else's. I could start up a collaboration with some biologists, apply my skills to their domain, coauthor some papers, and if I did that long enough, I'd learn a whole lot and at some point I'd be a researcher with a track record of publishing in biology journals, and that's the effective definition of biology researcher.

My PhD advisor in my CS program had a PhD in Anthropology. At some point he realized that the kind of quantitative models he wanted to build weren't really valued in anthropology, but the techniques were an important part of computer science. So he became a computer scientist.

You mostly aren't going to sound like the people doing reviews, but that's true whether they're playing a Blues Jr or a $6000 Two Rock. But I can say the Blues Jr is a really good amp for the money. I have the tweed version of the Blues Jr IV, and I like it a lot. A lot of reviews say the IV is noticeably nicer than the III, so that might be something to look out for, but honestly I suspect any of them are going to be solid choices.

I'm over both data science and data engineering teams. I'd describe these as mostly not relevant for the latter, but if you're in an organization where a significant part of the data engineering team is specifically involved in taking prototypes built by data scientists and making products out of them, then it's a nice perk to have your engineers able to speak the same language. But that's not really what most of the rest of this chart is about. The people building your data warehouse by ingesting Kafka streams and writing to Redshift don't need to know what a conjugate prior is.

I'm old, and I've worked a long time in large corporations. People have some weird idea that big companies are these tightly coordinated perfectly efficient machines. I've literally never encountered that company. Marketing is trying to figure out why no one clicked on the adwords campaign they bought while misspelling their own company name. Legal is responding to the 227 class action lawsuits, letters from a congressperson trying to grandstand for attention, and the random assortment of frivolous claims that come in every day. The dev teams can't even get iTunes to work on a Mac properly because three people are doing eight people's work on a timeline that Marketing thought would make for a good back to school sale.

I'm also a programmer, and I can assure you that the job of reverse engineering a clean-room implementation of Win32 is hard enough that you don't need to look for a reason why something doesn't work perfectly. You sound like someone who thinks that golf club manufacturers are engaged in a conspiracy to keep you from hitting a hole-in-one on every par 3. It's a ridiculous idea. First, why would they care, and second, what possible justification do you have for thinking there needs to be any explanation for a ball you hit from 200 yards away not landing in a 2 inch circle? The result is explained by the difficulty of the challenge. That's it. That's the whole thing.

This is just an enormously silly take.

Apple doesn't care about Wine. Apps crash because Wine is the best efforts of people without access to the source code of the systems they're emulating, and those systems are constantly moving targets.

If you're OK throwing money at the problem, just pay for Apple Music. Your library will be synced to their cloud and then you can just use the web based service at music.apple.com.

Battery life is almost entirely a function of how much time your hardware can spend in a sleep state. Usually differences of greater than a few percent are caused by some piece of hardware (well, hardware and driver I guess) keeping your CPU awake or waking it constantly.

Sometimes a Linux install will just automatically work great. Sometimes, you have to tweak things using a tool like powertop to figure out what's not letting you sleep properly.

I think that's true of a lot of "hard" fields (or at least fields that are generally perceived as being hard). I've heard the same comment about physicists, computer scientists, engineers, etc.

It's a horrible system for people who weren't actively playing the expansion when it was current. It's fine if you were. Pathfinder's been in the game for three expansions. I've basically never consciously thought about what I need to be doing to unlock flying. I get that a lot of people won't be happy until flying is available day one for gold, but given that Blizzard doesn't want to do that, there's nothing wrong with Pathfinder except it should go away for old expansions faster.

you're against the idea of old raids even being possible to be fun content for some god forsaken reason-- probably because you're obsessed with the "everything has to be tied into progression and player power" trap that WoW itself has fallen into.

To be clear, I'm not expressing any personal preference here. I'm trying to objectively describe reality. If you want to call that reality a "trap that WoW has fallen into", then cool, we can treat it that way. I don't see how that changes anything. It has fallen into that trap. That's the world you're living in. And in that world, there are two kinds of things: required, and not required. That's all the shades of gray that exist in WoW.

There are certainly exceptions like the mage tower. But they're few and far between.

People already do run old raids for transmog, pets, etc. I do too. The point of the post is to say that they need to do more than that to encourage many more people to do these raids in a way that is not just blasting through them solo. And I'm saying that I don't believe there is a way to do that that doesn't create the problem of a bunch of people feeling forced to run them when they don't really want to.

Lots of people are interested in cosmetics and transmog. Those people already do old content. To get the rest of the people, you have to create a reward those people want. And if you create a reward they want, they will chase that reward. If it requires an extra 6 hours a week, they'll do it. But they'll complain bitterly about it and you'll have a problem on your hands.

I'm not saying it's impossible. The mage towers were a fantastic success as a solo challenge. They could certainly build more things like that that reused old assets as part of a newly created solo challenge. But I'm not sure that's what's being asked for here.

In the US, they're mostly interchangeable. Students routinely call whoever is teaching their class "Dr X" or "Professor X" and I've never known anyone to care one way or the other. There are actual ranks of professor that people do care a lot about (i.e., Assistant/Associate/Visiting/etc.), but those aren't really used as titles. No one raises their hand in class and says, "Associate Professor X, can you explain XYZ?". Outside of a university setting, if I were forced to give a title (which is rare already), it would be "Professor", because "Doctor" is usually understood to be a medical doctor, and avoiding confusion is the best policy.

In other countries, "Professor" can function like a protected title where it confers the recognition that the person is actively involved in academic research at a university.

You’re assuming that there’s a difference between “required” and “has a point”. Mostly, there isn’t. Most of the player base does what they have to do to increase power. It’s that binary. If X makes me more powerful, it’s required and I’ll do X. If it doesn’t, it’s pointless by definition and I won’t do it.

There’s nothing they can put in an old raid that is between those extremes because there’s no middle there. Does the gear make me more powerful? If so, I’ll chase it and bitch every day about mandatory grinds and alt unfriendliness and the rest. If it doesn’t, no one will do it. That’s it. That’s the ball game.

They have cosmetics and pets in old raids. A lot of people run them every once in a while. But no one is confusing that for a core part of the game, and the only way to make it into that is to make it required for progression, which kills the game.

One problem is that the two hours of busy time today doesn’t have to be coordinated. I don’t want to have to be online at 7:30 six nights a week because everything the game provides for me to do requires 20 people to agree to not go out for dinner Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, or Sundays.

Any solution that starts with “all we need is for millions of people to suddenly change” is dead before it even gets out the door. If you put a BIS trinket on the last boss of Ulduar, people will run it every week and hate it.

No idea why you’re being downvoted. Players will do literally anything that gives a power reward, even if they hate every minute of it. They’ll do it anyway, be miserable, and eventually quit.

It isn’t self sabotage. It is excelling at delivering its intended result — shareholder returns.

When he says "factor it in", the idea is just building the hardware and software to not blindly trust one source of information. Something might randomly flip one of the billions of bits of memory, but it probably won't flip two or three of them exactly in the way it would need for each of those flips to come up with the same wrong answer.

You can buy off the shelf consumer computers that use "ECC" RAM. That stands for "error correcting codes". Let's say you want to send your wife the grocery list, but you're worried that one of the items might not get to her. You could send the list, and then at the end, send the number of items or the number of bytes in the list. If the potatoes somehow got removed from the list, the list will be one shorter than what you told her. She won't know what's missing, but she'll know that something failed somewhere. There are cleverer systems like that, but that's what highly fault-tolerant systems are about. They're doing things like recording the parity of each word in hardware so that the hardware itself can detect when something went pear-shaped.

People generally read legal proceedings too broadly. Is it an anti-competitive move? Maybe, and if a body like the FTC (lol) or the EU equivalent wants to start a complaint, they can. But it’s not in any way relevant what happened 20 years ago. The specifics were different, and there’s no legal ruling that Microsoft has to not be gross. They met the terms of that settlement. This is a new thing.

Also, everyone does it now. Apple isn’t exactly subtle about spamming you to try safari or iCloud. Annoying, but such is life.

I'm guessing it's easier to map five players down to the numbers that were real at the time than it is to scale every dungeon mob up to a level they've never been before. But that's just a guess.

Honestly I think it depends on what you mean by "remember". I'm a computer scientist, not an engineer, but I can tell you what I've found important to remember is what things mean and intuition about things like geometric interpretations. I would probably fail a calculus II exam if I walked into a classroom to take one today. I don't think I'd even come close to being able to solve the average integral without help. But I know what an integral is and I have a lot of intuition for how to set up a real problem in a way that integration is part of the solution. Same with linear algebra -- I have a pretty solid mental model of how to think about things like vector spaces, eigenvectors, etc. The technical ability to solve equations is not something I can reliably break out on command, but I can set up the equations that model the problem I actually need to solve, and then I reach for tools to fill in the things I suck at.