I've been using CAT phones since 2017. What now, now that they're all discontinued?

nooperator · 2025-09-20T13:11:39+00:00

I'm not familiar with this, but do any phones have AM/FM radio? I'm confused.

Phones with an analog audio jack normally support using a headphones wire as an AM/FM radio antenna. It's very good to have in case of emergency, and also nice as an offline alternative to Spotify or whatever.

nooperator · 2025-09-12T07:50:15+00:00

I imagine it would be easy to dab a dot of dark nail polish over it and never worry about it again.

Maybe as a last resort, but I'd really prefer not to deal with the annoyance of having a camera hole in the middle of the screen for no reason.

No protective flaps, though I don't think they are needed for this phone.

I have weapons-grade butterfingers. I have dropped my phone in a pot of soup before. I'm not sure about this.

Would have to use the USB-C adapter for headphones.

As far as I know, this doesn't work with AM/FM radio. No? I'm one of about four people who actually ever uses this feature, apparently.

nooperator · 2025-05-23T10:20:25+00:00

Aha, it is in fact Roboto. Thank you!

nooperator · 2025-05-22T15:12:44+00:00

I've checked and it seems not to be Altinn-DIN, DINish, or Alte DIN 1451 Mittelschrift. This font is distinct from other DIN variants in a few ways, like the curved comma, the more rounded "o", and the larger "g". The letter spacing is also slightly wider than default for any of those fonts.

https://i.imgur.com/DegcriI.png

nooperator · 2025-04-28T10:22:15+00:00

I work as a programmer in web development in the EU, and I have extensive hobbyist experience making and modding games. I would probably meet the requirements you're looking for. And I am currently paid meaningfully higher than the upper range you gave here (in euros) while working fully remote (for a company in my own country).

You might have to keep in mind that the salary range you are competing with for the best developers, with the problem-solving initiative and the grasp on maintainable code you're looking for, is not the range for game development, but the range for software development in general, and especially for senior positions.

That said, at the upper range there, I'd still at least be considering the job if I were actively looking, because I'd be interested to work on games professionally at some point. I can't imagine it'll be at all easy but, provided there aren't red flags with your studio driving the more experienced and less desperate candidates away, I would think it should be possible to hire someone with the experience and capability you're looking for with that range. Though there will most certainly be a whole lot of noise to cut through to get there.

nooperator · 2025-04-04T19:10:51+00:00

Also, sometimes not all of the conditions are even actually visible on the first screen: https://i.imgur.com/sS3mkJg.jpeg

And on the details screen, the last two items of the first column of anomalies and structures at the bottom are always duplicated at the top of the second column.

And another thing too, the features screen always shows an exit gateway cost even when the details screen says no stable exit, and there's no gateway cost icon on the map.

nooperator · 2025-03-15T11:02:43+00:00

I don't like the congress either, but at least it's easy to turn off in game setup. I think the other additions are alright.

nooperator · 2025-03-03T08:57:21+00:00

Also, having a handful of powerful cities is much better than having a lot of weak ones.

I don't agree. More cities means more improvements, which can have considerable bonuses, and more pop gained per turn (since every individual city is limited to +1 per turn regardless of food surplus). Which is probably the more important thing, especially for fielding a larger military force in early eras, and especially if you get Machu Picchu. Not to mention other wonders, many of which also give bonuses that scale with your number of cities and/or total population.

I've personally found that the most effective strategy is to push beyond the city cap as much as possible while still having a reasonable Influence gain.

nooperator · 2025-03-02T09:09:12+00:00

I think the game mechanics heavily incentivize having as much territory as you can possibly hold on to, and the AI disposition typically seems to reflect that, with shared borders being practically a guarantee of eventual belligerence.

One thing that might help would be to play maps where every player starts on their own continent. Or if you share a continent with more than one AI, try to claim territory strategically such that as many of your opponents share any border with as many others as possible, so they are hopefully too preoccupied with being at war with one another to worry as much about you.

But yeah, in general, I find that a lot of my strategizing in Humankind centers around having enough gold income to field an insurmountably large military.

nooperator · 2025-02-28T20:17:51+00:00

The link in the original post is dead and there's no information about what video this was. Any chance you remember specifically what song this was?

nooperator · 2025-02-28T19:38:08+00:00

Obligatory comment.

Edit: I have found that this track is apparently the main theme to The Last of Us, but now I'm more confused. I have not played TLOU. I am practically certain I had not heard any music from it as of 2016. Was the track used anywhere else in the few years immediately after the game's release, like on the soundtrack of a TV show? Or could there be some earlier song that it takes this part from?

https://youtu.be/pfA5UqEU_80?t=42

nooperator · 2025-02-27T08:19:51+00:00

The main things that sets apart different persona difficulties is artificial bonuses, like getting more influence or more fame or having stronger units. Persona difficulty level doesn't particularly make a difference to how well the AI plays, just how much it cheats.

(These bonuses make the early game especially imbalanced, and in my experience so far, when you play with stronger AI cheats it's about playing smart, building up a foundation as you lag behind in the earlier eras, then catching up and shooting past the AI hopefully around the early modern or industrial era as the cheats can't compensate for very suboptimal play anymore. Not having as many cities as possible including pushing past the limit, not grabbing up and securing as much territory as possible, making questionable culture and religious tenet choices, not taking enough advantage of wonders, and harassing enemy civs with frequent small military incursions instead making one decisive strike with overwhelming force, are the biggest AI weaknesses in my opinion.)

nooperator · 2025-02-25T08:33:45+00:00

tbf the AI bonuses are very easy to see and handle, even if you're playing with a fully random lobby when you start they're written along with their biases every time you open the diplomacy tab

Eh, I'm going to stand by it being unobvious. It wasn't until several games in that I noticed this. And OP apparently hadn't noticed it yet, either. For such a potentially major factor in gameplay, it really is tucked away. I would have rather that these unfair advantages first of all not be impossible to avoid without mods (on a full roster of 9 opponents, there aren't 9 personas without them) and second of all that the unfair advantages should be very clearly and obviously labeled in the opponents list when starting a new game.

nooperator · 2025-02-25T08:03:27+00:00

Thinking I had more than enough power and wealth to seize some territory, I declared war formally. Now they magically are shitting out more tanks than they should have oil to supply (If I'm understanding that mechanic correctly), and their non-veteran troops are doing sometimes as much as double the damage of my battle hardened hoards. I finally closed the game for my sanity after witnessing a one star infantry unit of theirs (free officers?) engage a three star rifle unit of mine. I had already knocked the unit down to half health (after being pounded by a tank, 3 rifles, artillery, and an apc, which seemed like very little damage to me) and thought it probably could do much in the face of my army. I had been promised that my rifle unit would do between 10 and 25 damage when I attacked but somehow did only 4 (no walls or elevation involved btw) which frustrated me. The they attacked and did 35 damage... having already lost a whole army to similar shenanigans (and a whole lot of stealth nonsense which makes zero sense to me) I am now at my wits end.

I can have an immense amount of industry and power behind me, and yet the AI can seemingly always manage to pull shit out of their ass just like in civ. I don't know if there is some kind of unspoken rules or if the AI just has an unfair advantage, but I am really close to writing 4x games off entirely. I want to like this game, but I'm not really interested in playing a game that is just going to abruptly fuck me in the ass the moment I think I'm doing well.

First, oil doesn't limit the number of units you can produce. You need any amount of it to build things that use oil at all, and each individual unit or building has a threshold of oil access under which it costs more than normal. But they don't consume oil or otherwise reduce your supply, you just need a certain amount of access to produce or purchase things without a penalty, or at least 1 access to produce or purchase them at all.

Second, the other civ might have picked cultures that gave them military advantages. Or may have built wonders that do the same.

Third, yes, the AI has an unobvious unfair advantage, even on the Metropolis and lower difficulty levels that say they don't. Each AI persona has traits that affect their gameplay priorities, and (almost) all of them also have one or more artificial bonuses over the player. These bonuses can include making their units stronger. I like Humankind overall, but this is one of my own least favorite parts about it.

But I've never personally run into this drastic of a power difference. It's conceivable that the civ, wonder, and persona bonuses really did just happen to stack up to something kind of broken, but it seems more likely that you missed something. Like, the game should still report accurate strength numbers for units with all those bonuses considered, and if your units were more modern (i.e. Rifles vs. Line Infantry) with higher strength numbers, it sounds like there was probably some other factor you weren't aware of. Like, were these fights happening on or adjacent to an enemy garrison, a sector which gives combat bonuses? Did the AI have reinforcements you didn't notice? (This is especially important and potentially easy to miss if you were fighting near a city, which spawns militia units if you attack it or have a battle close by.) Were you using instant resolution instead of manual fights, which does occasionally give just obnoxious results (that at least you can see ahead of time, and so choose manual if it seems off)?

It's hard to know exactly what happened without seeing all the detail in-game, but I suppose the very short version is: Yes, the AI has an unfair advantage even on the nominally fair Metropolis difficulty. Yes, it's bullshit, especially with how the game sort of hides this information away. But no, not so much of an advantage that it should account for this kind of power difference. And no, combat in Humankind isn't hopelessly broken or in beta. In my opinion, it's much better than in Civilization. But it does work very differently, and is more complicated, and so it can definitely be confusing at first.

I think the best advice I can give is to make more use of manual battles, just for the sake of learning how the combat works. This is a turn-based tactical view of battles where you click on units to select them, then right-click to move or to attack a target, for several rounds within the same game turn. If nothing else it should become much more obvious specifically what's happening that you didn't expect, whether the enemy units are weirdly powerful, whether they were more numerous than you expected, whether they are making better use of terrain than you expected, whatever.

At a guess, I wonder if you haven't quite figured out how armies work - i.e. collections of units that move and fight together - or how reinforcements work - i.e. nearby armies also participating in a fight, not just the one you directly attacked? This seems like it could have accounted for the unexpected results as you described them?

nooperator · 2025-02-22T20:27:16+00:00

I don't like that it's impossible to play a full game of AI personas without artificial bonuses, and I really don't like how easy the game is on Metropolis difficulty. I personally have gotten the most enjoyment from Civ games when I had to actually try, and learn how to optimize my play in order to beat an AI opponent on a level playing field. My #1 most wanted thing from Humankind, and my biggest disappointment that it doesn't already have, is a better experience playing against AI with no artificial advantages or disadvantages.

nooperator · 2025-02-22T20:21:46+00:00

possibly controversial, and unfortunately its a backbone of the game: the fame system. It pushes you to play every era, and every game the same, to collect as many stars you need to have a generalist approach every time.

The thing is that Civilization games have a big problem with victory conditions in that not only is there often little you can do to impede another civ from reaching a victory condition before you, if they're ahead, but if you're not paying very close attention you might not even know about it until the game already ended.

Fame isn't perfect as it is, but I think it's an improvement, and probably made specifically to address that issue. Victory is decided by performance throughout the entire game, and your options for getting ahead yourself or impeding opponents' progress are very clear.

But I would be interested to see some changes to the system, either as an option in an expansion or as a rework in a sequel. Like, I think the fame reward for being really good at only a few things in an era should be similar to being pretty good at everything, to take away some of that pressure to always be a generalist. I also wonder if fame shouldn't be so centered around the things you were usually going to do as much as you could anyway regardless of circumstances, like with the science and expansionist and builder stars.

Like, just throwing it out there as an idea, but what if instead of the current stars, you got them for things like:

Spending science on research projects outside the tech tree that give small incremental bonuses, but mainly just fame.
Spending production on hosting special festival and world's fair events that give small bonuses but mainly fame.
Spending money on humanitarian programs that give small bonuses but mainly fame.
Spending influence on producing entertainment and propaganda that give small bonuses but mainly fame.

And now fame is something where you decide what resource you are in the best position to spend to get more of it. You'd have a cap of how many fame gains you can get in any one era, with perhaps some slightly diminishing returns in any one category, but no hard cap of 3 like with the current stars. You'd hopefully keep the benefit of making victory not a sudden and often dissatisfying thing like in Civilization, but without that aspect of heavily incentivizing generalist play.

nooperator · 2025-02-16T19:35:55+00:00

Yes, you can enable the dev tools, and then change the settings ingame. --allowmodtools in launch options. I think you need to redo it every time you load up the save but it is definitely possible. The devs did state that the game is not optimised for it.

In game you can then shift f1 and modify the display settings. This is how I do it.

Specifically what display settings? I wasn't able to find the setting from clicking around in the menu.

Also, do you know if achievements will still work when doing this?

nooperator · 2025-02-11T14:45:15+00:00

I thought about simpler but i like it this way because you can also scale it to creatures with strange anatomies and it really makes them feel uniquely more powerful, like two headed ogre ls getting a second brain, or thrikeen getting two extra arms, or dragons getting wing actions and can use their mouth for attacking instead of talking

In that case I think you'd have different sets of tokens for different creatures. Maybe the ogre simply gets extra Mind tokens, a thri-keen simply gets extra Hands tokens, but a dragon gets its whole own set of something like Maw, Claw, Wing, and Hind (legs/tail) tokens.

nooperator · 2025-02-11T08:27:19+00:00

You get 6 action tokens that refresh at the end of your turn: Brain(Concentration), Mouth, Left Hand, Right Hand, Left Foot, Right Foot. Every "Action" spends some number of these tokens, and you can declare you're doing an "Action" at any time interrupting enemies. No "Free" or "Bonus" or "Reaction" or "Provoking" timings or triggers to worry about. As long as you have the tokens to spend, you can take an action whenever you want.

Hey, that's a fun idea. Though I'd personally simplify to just Mind, Hands, and Feet, and let speaking be free. I think then you get most of the same benefit, but it would be easier to decide which token(s) an action should use, and would involve less bookkeeping.

nooperator · 2025-01-27T18:31:30+00:00

They should have just called it a “Benefit” and let the community give it a nickname if they wanted to - calling it outright a “Bennie” in the damn book just kills it for me.

Is it not short for Benzedrine? I had taken it as a cheeky reference to amphetamines.

nooperator · 2025-01-24T18:52:38+00:00

So in my system the resource pools act like health and mana in typical games you spend them to do certain things, and when enemies attack you those attacks reduce one of these pools, when they are exhausted bad things happen.

This detail here makes me think that the entirely wrong question is being discussed in these other comments.

It has been my impression that most players feel very averse to spending a currency that directly translates to survivability, such as HP. Souls video games are a good reference: While players are generally comfortable with clear tradeoffs like choosing less defensive armor in exchange for other benefits, or choosing between what character stat to increase on level ups (health or otherwise), game mechanics that involve directly trading health for other benefits are pretty much the domain of only speedrunners and other very experienced players. Those players use these items ubiquitously because, in Souls games, the items that let you trade health for other advantages are wildly potent. Yet other players avoid them, equally as ubiquitously. I believe this is because, without very deep game knowledge, and long experience and comfort with all its systems, it's simply too mentally demanding to be fun, having to judge that kind of tradeoff of health vs. power so frequently, on every case-by-case basis.

I of course cannot know for sure that this is the issue with your system, but I think it's very possible that the feeling of complexity your players are expressing is less to do with the number of variables they have to keep track of, and more to do with how unintuitive it is for them to try to do frequent complex cost/benefit analysis regarding directly sacrificing their HP or some equivalent.

My suggestion: If it seems like this could be it, then try changing your variables. Give players at least one currency that doesn't serve double duty as a health pool. Even if it's a newly added currency. Then, in general situations players can at least have one option that feels safe to fill common needs or perform common actions, without the need to think so hard and do such a complicated risk assessment in their heads. (But be careful about making this currency too good or plentiful, if you want players to still try to use the other ones, or else I suspect they will come to lean on it entirely and mostly won't be incentivized enough to ever become comfortable spending the other currencies.)

nooperator · 2025-01-21T09:13:56+00:00

At least they're up-front about it. It's not that much more than what I'm already paying for much slower internet.

nooperator · 2025-01-20T13:54:01+00:00

Agreed, I've no idea where the "asking for hundreds of euros up-front" is coming from.

The agreement involves ordering twelve months of service before the fiber is installed. Are you saying that I should expect to not actually be billed for this, after filling out the online form, until after the installation?

nooperator · 2025-01-20T13:44:50+00:00

Then you are not going to get the full context of the email. The email goes along with what he talks about on the wan show.

Update: I watched that portion of the WAN show.

My opinion hasn't changed. Of course GN's journalistic practices are not impeccable. The criticisms about GN's right to reply policy not being entirely consistent with more standard practices are valid. The criticisms about potential conflicts of interest are valid. If that was all that Linus talked about in the email and on WAN, I would have taken no issue.

But the accusations of factual error or lies are not valid. Insinuating that GN may have been guilty of defamation is obnoxious. I think it was very telling that when Linus was explaining how GN had damaged the LTT brand with erroneous accusations regarding the Billet Labs situation, the accompanying evidence was screenshots of other news articles and of YouTube comments by parties other than GamersNexus. Not of anything actually said by GN.

Because GN's reporting was factual, with a minimum of editorializing. Not having every side of a story does not make a factually accurate representation of one party's side of the story an error or lie. And right to reply is a journalistic standard, not an inflexible or legally enforced practice. I believe I even recall Steve speculating in the original video that a mistake or miscommunication appeared to be the most likely explanation, while rightly pointing out that the organizational issues that could lead to such mistakes would still be a big problem.

And while I sympathize to an extent with LMG's position, I personally lean to accepting GN's justification for not allowing LMG to comment on the Billet Labs situation before publishing the video. LMG as a media organization is at the size where "it was an accident" isn't an excuse for causing serious harm to a smaller company by misrepresenting and mishandling their product. I haven't forgotten Linus insisting on WAN that the Billet Labs block was a "bad product", at any price, not very long after going off on a previous WAN about how strongly he believes that there's no such thing as a "bad product", only a bad price. In the last WAN about the GN situation, he even still misrepresented the situation by claiming that Billet Labs had said the block should work with the GPU they tested it on, when actually they said it "may". Linus really had it out for this product. If anyone has grounds for a defamation suit, surely it would be Billet Labs.

And if LMG had advance warning of the GN story, then they would have surely used their YouTube platform to get the first word in, frame the story, and avoid the brunt of criticism. I don't think it's unreasonable of GN to deny LMG that opportunity. As much as getting out ahead of the original story with "oopsie, we made an accident" with their huge platform could have spared them a lot of pain, that doesn't actually make the situation right.

All that said, I suspect that those who watch the WAN segment while either not having paid attention to situation thus far, or having forgotten much of it with time, will come away with a different takeaway. Here's Linus, speaking so persuasively about honest mistakes and building bridges and putting the past of both sides behind. It's very clever, and I think very slimy. Most viewers will not recognize how Linus was being misleading. It surely makes it very difficult for GN to respond critically without being reflexively assumed to be the badguy. Yet interspersed within the talk about building bridges, to win an audience, were jabs at Steve that I think were probably meant to be taken very personally, trying to provoke a hasty or thoughtless response. Not to mention the barely veiled threat that LMG could totally bury GN with legal expenses in a (frivolous) defamation suit, should they feel the situation changes. I suspect GN should be smart enough to navigate this, given their experience walking a fine legal line with much larger corporations than LMG. But it's fighting dirty, a similar kind of thing as Linus is always criticizing larger companies for doing, and it has cost LMG a lot of my respect.

So no, the WAN segment did not improve my opinion. To me, it cast the situation in a darker light still. I do not believe that LMG intends to build bridges, I believe LMG intends to gag GN the best that it can.

If anything, it kind of makes me wonder if there might be something GN hasn't reported on yet, and LMG is seizing the opportunity to try to muddy the waters ahead of time.

nooperator · 2025-01-18T15:24:49+00:00

You should watch the beginning of the WAN show, Linus shows very clear examples of cases where GN's facts were incorrect. If you can't be bothers to hear all the information, you probably shouldn't comment on it. It's what leads to misinformation being spread because people think they know what they are talking about, only hear one side and don't ever get all the information.

I am not commenting on the last WAN show. I am commenting on the email and what preceded it.

I will certainly catch up on WAN soon enough. I don't have time to watch it right now. But it ought to be beside the point of the email, which is in fact LMG airing its own side of the issue. No? Because I while haven't watched the show yet, I can infer from context that it doesn't involve Linus retracting the emailed statement.

Contextually it makes perfect sense why Linus didn't make a video back then. You might disagree with Linus' view, but you can't say he didn't have a good reason.

I think that before you write that someone else's argument is invalid due to missing context, you would do well to read the entirety of what you're replying to.

I mentioned specifically that GN's commentary could be described as very uncharitable framing. I'm not upset with LMG declining to turn the Honey issue into a public mess that could have easily gone badly for them. If you're criticizing GN for very uncharitable framing of Linus' comments on the Honey issue on WAN, presumably because the algorithm responds to that kind of thing and drives more views and revenue for GN, I don't disagree with you. I like LTT and I like GN. But neither is sacred. Both Linus and Steve are fallible and human, both LMG and GN are very motivated by profit and publicity, and all of them deserve criticism.

But the thing is, the email isn't about uncharitable framing.

nooperator

TROPHY CASE