As someone who only pays close attention to the Celtics, I am surprised that people expect them to make it to the finals. I am guessing they will get knocked out in the second round or conference finals. They have a lot of wins, but it is because they take care of business against lesser teams. When facing another top team, they fall short. They are 0-2 vs the Spurs, 0-2 vs the Nuggets, 1-2 vs the Knicks, and 1-3 vs the Pistons, though they are 1-1 against the Thunder.

They should be able to dominate a play-in team in the first round but after that, they are going to face strong competition and they have not shown the ability to rise to the occasion.

Obviously, most of those games were without Tatum, but he is not fully back either. His scoring is great but his accuracy is abysmal. He is missing badly on shots he expects to be automatic, likely because coming back from his injury took a toll on his body and he is still getting used to his limits.

There is innovation in every Nintendo system.

The Wii U had dual screen and asymmetric games.

The 3DS had a 3D screen, a couple AR games, and Street Pass.

The Switch is the first console with a docking station and being able to dynamically change the graphics settings without having to restart running software.

The Switch 2 has multiple mouse controls.

All of them are a bit gimmicky, none are totally original, and most of them did not really catch on, but you cannot fault them for trying. What innovations have there been in PC, PlayStation, and XBox? VR headsets and DLSS?

No one sold me unlimited PTO. Upper management decided to switch to it and never trained employees and managers on how to optimally use the policy. Everyone knows traditional PTO, from working at other companies or the same company before the policy, so that is what we fall back on.

I don’t understand what you mean about “getting my work done”. I have an infinite amount of work I could be doing. Every week, my manager expects me to complete about a week’s worth of work. Taking PTO is an excuse for me not to hit that quota.

I suppose there could be a policy where I need to get 6 days of work done in 5 in order to earn a day of PTO, but I would start looking for other work if that was expected of me.

I am curious why you like unlimited PTO.

I have had “unlimited PTO” on several different teams and the way it always works is that my manager decides on an amount of PTO that I get (negotiable). I then have to track that amount over the course of a year and have to discuss with my manager if/how much I can roll over. The only advantage for me is that my manager is likely gave me a larger PTO pool than corporate would. The disadvantage is that my manager and I cannot just open up the timesheet system and see how much time I am currently “owed” so it is up to me to keep track and take it for myself.

I hate the conspiracy theory that big pharma could cure cancer but they are covering it up because cancer treatment is such a profitable business. This makes no sense if you remember that big phara is a bunch of companies each of which is trying to maximize its own profits. The first company that can cure a cancer will make so much money, the Ozempic racket will look like chump change.

Not every company out there makes cancer treatment, so why don’t the companies outside the cancer racket cure cancer?

Well, only companies that specialize in cancer treatments could find a cure. If that is the case, why would a company want to be a small part of the cancer treatment market when they can have a monopoly on the cancer curing market?

Well, only the company that has the market leading treatment for a cancer can cure it. If that was the case, they would still want to cure it and sell the same amount of money as 10 years of treatment. Insurance would still cover it because it is saving them money in the long term and is, technically, better for the patient. It would immediately make the pharmaceutical company an obscene amount of money. Sure, once they cure all the existing cases, their revenue will fall off, but by that point, upper management will have cashed out.

I like the proposals. Assuming the league defines a “winning team” not as the team that wins a game but as the team that wins the championship (or the Emirates™ NBA Cup), it makes sense that the 10th worst team and worst team have the same lottery odds, since both have a 0% chance of winning. It also makes sense to let play-in teams randomly move up in the draft, since it can pull a team out of endless mediocrity. I don’t like that the 11th worst team is likely going to have much lower odds. I imagine teams that are headed for the 10th seed in their conference will try to tank down in the standings. A 5% chance of getting the first pick in the draft is probably better than getting to be the visiting team in 1-2 playoff games.

I am not sure if you can do it on a Switch, but I recall the 3DS having a feature where you could pull patches and DLC from one console to another. Not even close to what you were suggesting, but it is something.

Do any software stores support creating a local package mirror? I suppose you can make one for GoG by periodically checking for new game versions and saving the installer to a backup.

According to the box photo on the GameStop site, it does not say that it is a key card.

Nintendo has said that, for now, all first party games are games on cart, though not for games that Nintendo is only the publisher/distributor for (see Pokopia).

It is a manufacturer suggested retail price. If a store wants to sell it for more or less, it is their right (and I am not aware of Nintendo having a Minimum Advertised Price policy).

The issue is that it is just an upgrade. The biggest difference between the Switch 1 and 2 is just better graphics/frame rate. With only a few exceptions, both systems play the exact same games. Why would a customer pay $450 (minus a small trade in credit) for a Switch 2 when they already own one or more Switch 1s that play the exact same games the exact same way, except a bit uglier? Nintendo customers tend not to obsess over graphics quality (if they were, they would be playing on PC or PlayStation).

There are a handful of games that take advantage of the Switch 2 mouse controls and now there are starting to be more and more exclusives, so there will be a stronger case to upgrade, but for the first year, it was kind of weak.

Remember, only shop on Bandcamp Fridays, when all the money goes to the artists. The corporate owners are not playing nice with the employee union.

The bigger issue is not just how bright the headlights are, but how high off the ground they are. On a small sedan, it makes sense that the headlights are just below the level of the hood, any lower and they would be scraping the ground. If you take the same hood-to-headlight arrangement and put it on a pickup truck or SUV on giant wheels and then lifted, those headlights are no longer pointed at the ground but are now pointed into the cabins of sedans and the faces of shorter pedestrians.

I have not been following the Pacers this year, but how are they this bad? They made the finals last year. I know that Hali is out for the year, but he doesn’t seem to be a great enough player to turn the worst team in the league into a playoff favorite.

Did I miss the news when they sold off all of their rotation players or is the coach intentionally throwing games?

That is not sufficient cootie protection. A properly trained physician will follow it up with

Circle circle, square square,
Now you have it everywhere

A lot of the Lakers luck has nothing to do with league tampering and everything to do with the fact that players’ licensing income does not count against the salary cap. Do you think a guy would rather make $1,000 shooting an ad for Big Bill’s Discount BBQ or get $5,000 to make an appearance on opening night in Dr. Dre’s new club? Do you think a player prefers to spend his day off shoveling snow from his driveway or go swimming on Venice Beach in the morning and then film a fight scene in the next Fast and Furious? Do you think his wife would rather shop at the mall or Rodeo Drive?

The Lakers don’t get players gifted to them, they sign big name free agents at a discount and trade for expiring contracts knowing that the player will take an extension. They get traded so many players because they are on every players’ preferred list of destinations because every agent makes sure it is there because the agent wants a cut of any Hollywood cameos and rap album features their player gets.

The Pau Gasol trade is a perfect example of this. He did not get traded for nothing. He got traded for his brother, Marc. Pau wanted to get out of Memphis, so the teams made a deal with him: if he could nag his baby brother into moving from the Euroleague to the NBA, Pau would get to win a ring with Kobe.

I like the idea of allowing more teams to be draft eligible, since it gives hope to teams stuck in purgatory, not good enough to seriously contend for a title but too good to draft guaranteed talent in the draft.

I don’t like the idea of limiting the lottery eligibility of a team that finishes at the bottom for consecutive seasons (if they are not already ineligible for getting a high pick). It seems like unnecessary cruelty for a team to finish in the basement (because their best players all got old or left in free agency or something), then they lose the lottery despite good odds, and get told that next year they won’t get a good pick either. At that point, the team would have to spend 2 years with a roster of bench warmers.

Hopefully, if there are more strict anti-tank rules, they can get rid of the rules against resting star players. The restrictions are arbitrary and enforcement is random and unpredictable.

The FAQ makes no mention of Pokemon Home integration (though by saying that there is no online play, they might be implying that there will not be integration).

Also, to maximize nostalgia, I wish they ported the original Red/Green/Blue, not the remakes. I realize that I am probably in the minority on this.

Overall, I am just a bit disappointed that the FAQ all but says that none of the mainline Pokemon games will ever be released on Switch Online. I was planning to get NSO the day they start adding the Pokemon games, which I assumed was just around the corner. Too bad, so sad. One less subscription to pay for.

This was already widely known. If a Waymo taxi does not know what to do, it stops in the middle of the road and calls a support center where a human plots a route for it. The tech media has been reporting on it for years. The only fact in that article that I have not heard is that they are outsourcing the jobs to the Philippines.

It is rated as water resistant, capable of withstanding a jet of water.

Repairability depends on what breaks. If water getting into the phone fries the CPU, it does not seem fixable. Glancing at the site, I could not find a part on sale, probably because the cost of a replacement part would cost almost as much as replacing the phone.

In the US, libel requires you to prove that the writer knew that what they were writing is not true and that they did it to hurt you. Doing lazy research and trusting an AI is not going to meet that standard.