"The air leaks escalated on Friday from a pound of air per day to two pounds, according to a senior NASA official who asked not to be named.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev were using a saw to break into an area where they believed they could access the crack leaking air, the NASA official said.
NASA officials disagreed with this method, the NASA official added, prompting mission control in Houston to order safe-haven procedures."
Why would I steal a link from someone who submitted a story first and take credit? I know it's normal behavior in tech to stab everyone in the back but...
> We envision 2.1 as our last major update of Factorio, and we will shift the focus onto long term support. So things like bug fixes, platform support/compatibility, modding features, etc. Other than that we feel we've reached a good place to conclude the active gameplay development.
Also embedded in mention of the departure of a few team members.
I feel like this is truly the end of Factorio.
What a game, and what an effort. It is what, I consider, the game that kicked off the “automation” genre of video games.
And in my mind, is to this day still one of — if not the — best automation games.
This sounds similar (but not quite) to Ready Set Bet [1], which is probably a lot easier to find than this.
This game, as the title suggests, is pure luck, based on the cards you were dealt.
In RSB, it’s real-time, and as dice are rolled to move horses forward, you can place bets on a number of spots, based on how the dice are being rolled (always by a designated player that is either part of the betting or not — recommended that they don’t bet if you have enough players).
Obviously still a lot of luck, as with most dice rolling games. But a decent amount of strategy in timing your bets, especially since bets freeze once horses get to a certain line in the game.
Came to the comment(s) looking for this game. I've played this! Fun!
It's interesting to explore the spectrum of what people find fun. In large groups, it seems like games that tilt heavily towards luck can be a great deal of fun for everyone, while "board gamers" (like me) enjoy games where you can learn and leverage strategies to gain advantage, and the role of luck is diminished (to varying degrees).
As a board game host, you have to get that spectrum, gauge group size and preference, and pick a game that will work for them. Strategic games, in particular, take learning the rules, learning the strategies, practicing them, learning your opponents... it can take a dozen games before you're competitive. And for a lot of people, almost none of those games will be any fun.
A few games kind of nail this with an unexpectedly even playing field, where strategy helps, but luck offsets it. If luck really offsets it, very strategic players will also find that it's no fun.
Some luck-based games I really like include Lords of Vegas (not to mention... just Vegas), Bunny Kingdom, and Flip 7.
A lot of card-based strategy games like Terraforming Mars and Wingspan certainly have some amount of luck in them, but it can be dwarfed by good synergy / strategy.
I think for big groups it’s not so much luck/randomness that is the key but complexity. Low complexity games are going to play better. They can be pure skill games. Many drinking games are (beer pong etc).
Luck/randomness is directly against determinism. A way of making feel less mechanical and opening up the combinatorial state space? Essentially increasing the fun/interest without introducing high complexity necessarily? As well as narrow the skill range as you say, but not necessarily over longer time horizons.
Like you can do a 2d matrix of luck and complexity.
Being allowed to place bets makes it actually not a pure luck game. That game can be optimally solved given knowledge of the world because there are choices involved.
TFA's base game, however, is pure luck - you place no bets, you discard no cards, you make no decisions. Perhaps you influence things by how you roll, but probably not consciously. If the same die roll sequence and same card shuffle sequence is replayed, the game is the exact same.
+1 to Camel Up. If you haven’t played the 2nd edition, they added two crazy camels going the wrong way. Lots of fun and playable from age ~6-7 onwards.
If we're listing modern games vaguely similar to this, we can't let the thread go without mentioning the fantastically entertaining (yet _mostly_ random) "Hot Streak" (2025)!
I see. So I escaped the experience of the nasty drink, then. I thought it was just "the standard" because it was also word for word what I saw when I googled it at the time. (Gatorade + Miralax.)
Honestly, AI may pollute online interactions to the point that people give up trying to interact online, and force people to talk to each other in real life.
I fear a lot of the web will become like the old USENET newsgroups filled with spam garbage which made the whole thing unusable in the end. The ability of AI to pump out slop to any forum from unlimited accounts will kill the internet.
> Today, we’re introducing Gemini 3.5, our latest family of models combining frontier intelligence with action. This represents a major leap forward in building more capable, intelligent agents. We’re kicking off the series by releasing 3.5 Flash.
I'm not sure I follow/buy the premise of moving second-hand sales to a physical building as beneficial to eBay.
If I'm looking for X, I'd much rather go to an online store, where I have access to several listings of X at varying prices and condition, vs. make a trip to a physical store, see if they have X, and hope that the condition and price matches my expectations.
Maybe if I'm not looking for X, and just want to browse a bunch of stuff (e.g. yardsale/flea market style), then a physical store could make sense.
But, to me, having this middle-man physical presence was already a problem, and eBay solved this.
I just don't feel like eBay needs GameStop.
Now, whether GameStop needs eBay is a different story. But GameStop is in trouble for two reasons:
1. Video games -- and therefore video game sales -- are moving to digital.
2. Physical stores are becoming a thing of the past for retail transactions.
I could see it potentially be something like the Walmart pickup service? Last mile delivery is pretty expensive, so conceivably they could offer faster and/or cheaper shipping if you picked it up at a physical store.
I don't know. I don't think this acquisition would be a good idea.
^This. The crazy part is that in today’s PE-style system of things, the incentives…
- GameStop shareholders
- GameStop the company - e.g. employees
- eBay shareholders
- eBay the company - for example its employees
…aren’t necessarily aligned.
If GAME buys EBAY - it’s an exit for the EBAY shareholders, which is easy for them to evaluate as it’s presumably a $ premium over the share price today. If GAME then runs the company into the ground trying to free up the cash to pay off the acquisition debt, as most leveraged buyouts do (especially where retail is involved), that’s not a problem for those already-exited shareholders, though it is probably a problem for employees of either company.
My understanding is that existing Ebay shareholders would get half cash and half stock. In order to actually profit, those shareholders would need to believe that the combined company's stock could be sold off without taking a significant loss.
If this deal does eventually go through, then it might be a good time for someone to start working on a competitor to take over the online auction space.
That's what those huge ~10% final value fees they charge are for. And other revenue such as sponsored listings (pay to boost your item in search results).
As long as they keep the fraud volume below like 5% of sales, I feel like it's just a numbers game, where they just need to get as much sales onto their platform as possible to give them enough operating margin to cover their costs (including fraud) and provide profit.
Admittely, I have no idea how well they're doing at that, I haven't looked at their financial statements or anything.
Yeah my main point was it's a complete pain in the ass to deal with if you want to do it properly in a way that actually prevents fraud on either side. eBay has kind of just erred one side or the other for most of it's existence and right now the complaints are mostly from the seller side that I see.
I guess that’s why the Amazon model works: if you warehouse and deliver, then you cut out a lot of the fraud.
Sellers gotta deliver one way or another anyway so building out that logistics doesn’t add much friction to the whole process at scale. If things turnover quickly enough, the first mile benefits exceed the warehousing expense.
Amazon's return policy is also getting pretty bad. There's a lot more third party sellers on the platform and occasionally users sent incorrect items get their refund refused because "item not returned" which is extremely frustrating when it happens. They're also kicking more people off for returning large numbers of items.
And as to GME trying to shift to that they did attempt that already, it was one of RC's first attempts at pivoting back in 2022, they added something like a million square feet of warehouse and fulfillment and it didn't really work.
https://www.reuters.com/world/nasa-live-international-space-...
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