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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Marques has a decent chunk of his fan base that’s…kinda rich? That’s the only thing that can explain why he reviews supercars and expects people to use their phone without a case. So if he’s directing some of that fan base’s money toward artists, I’m all for it, assuming the profit sharing is reasonable (and I have no reason to believe it’s not).

    I mean, I’m not going to pay that sort of money on a wallpaper (I almost always use photos of family or friends anyway). But if the people who buy it like it, and the people who sell art for it are treated well, you go MKBHD.



  • They have to maintain backwards compatibility for 40+ year old applications so that they don’t lose big corporate and government customers, but they also have to chase the newest trends in order to keep their shareholders happy. They built their business on selling their software, but most of their competitors are giving functionally-equivalent programs away for free. Their software runs without incident on literally billions of devices for decades, but one or two high-visibility bugs or design missteps and public perception of their brand totally tanks.

    And so, their business model sucks. Moving Windows to become a data-harvesting SaaS was a terrible choice, their pivot to AI is going to crash and burn, and rent seeking software subscriptions are a scourge.

    But I think they’re just too big and too vertically integrated to actually be any better at this point. I just don’t think it’s possible for their executive team to make good decisions anymore, not because they’re dumb, but because the good decisions literally don’t exist. It’s like a black hole, where the closer you get to the event horizon, the more possible paths point toward the singularity; likewise, the bigger Microsoft gets, the more possible decisions point toward “devastatingly bad.” They honestly should have been split up 25 years ago; for the industry’s sake and for their own.



  • Yeah, I’ve been trying to make a switch over to Linux for a lot of reasons, but honestly Paint.NET is the one thing that keeps me tethered to Windows that I’m not super grumpy about (Adobe also keeps me tethered to Windows, but that makes me angry every time I think about it).

    If *Nix has a decent image editor with layers that isn’t super over-engineered like GIMP is, I haven’t heard of it yet. Maybe that’s all become web-based.






  • Sometimes, with caveats (I researched this a while back). tl;dr: probably yes, if you get puzzles manufactured by the same company around the same time.

    • There are “puzzle companies” that are actually just design studios who farm out the manufacturing process to a puzzle printer. Depending on the printer, they’re very likely to reuse puzzle dies even between design companies; so you might even be able to remix two puzzles by different companies, if they use the same print company.

    • Certain high volume printers rebuild their puzzle dies from scratch every so often (so the design would be entirely different depending on which print run you’re working with). Ravensburger in particular had a thing on their website (it might still be there) about how they can’t get you individual replacement pieces because they’ve almost certainly already rebuilt the die since your copy was printed. And most companies end up just replacing the entire puzzle if they leave out a piece.

    • Some puzzle companies make puzzles where the design and the cut are related somehow (Magic Puzzle Company built a whole line on those). Those are unlikely to be reused between designs, though you do end up paying extra for them.

    • Even if you get a pair of puzzles that were cut using the same die, they might not line up the way this image shows. If the die was removed and flipped around between one puzzle’s cutting and another, the cut would be “upside down” on the other and they would fit together in a very different way.