Wizcat

I deliberately break my streaks once they start getting high. There are no additional incentives for the really long streaks, I believe they always work out at x/day, so it's arguably better to keep grinding and then breaking short streaks rather than miss one day in a long streak and get zip. The weekly streaks on the xbox itself are a different kettle of fish though. It's worth keeping that streak going as long as possible as the 10 weeks = 2500pts beats the individual rewards on the way up to 10 weeks.

New season of Homeland is on, but unless you're fluent in Arabic it's painful to have to keep switching subtitles on and off. They've goosed this up for sure.

I'd be wary of automating it. I expect it would be fairly trivial for them to check you're maxing out your daily rewards in an unusually swift manner. A good while back there were stories in this thread about people being banned for typing garbage into Bing searches (just mashing the keyboard then searching). You could argue that junk searches do screw up their metrics, whereas just cheating the quizzes maybe not so much. Either way, worth being aware they have banned people for similar in the past, so yeah. Beware!

I wouldn't say it was reliable, but when I rope stun the shopkeeper I usually try to pick up the shopkeeper and then immediately throw them out of the door. Depending on the level they sometimes jump/fall away, giving you time to pick things up. Good effort on the Sunken City run too!

Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang, who first cracked the Xbox protection wrote a pretty incredible book on the steps he went through. It's a great read for anyone even mildly interested in hardware hacking (and currently free in ebook format here https://nostarch.com/xboxfree ) The main take away is that, for a certain subset of extraordinarily talented people, tinkering and finding exploits is just part of the game. And the depths these people go to, such as literally sanding down microchips and examining them by electron microscope, or developing custom hardware to log electronic pulses as they move across the board... is astonishing. Bunnie ended up being recruited by Microsoft to try and help them improve their next generation of security. But it's interesting the way MS has gone on the latest Series S, which seems to be to give developers a separate sandbox within the architecture. This allows people the freedom to tinker with the hardware programmatically with very few restrictions, and hopefully alleviates some of the desire for these people to start picking away at the hardware security. Linus did a little video explaining it recently here. The whole thing is probably worth a watch, given it covers how to add emulators to Xbox Series S, but the discussion on 'why' starts around 7 minutes in

Clunk, Cunk, whatever

I thought it was ok, but would have preferred the old Brooker presented format. This new format seemed to just have celebs 'acting' Brooker's lines, but if you can ignore the awkward acting (ahem, Hugh Grant) it was still the same great writing talent. Clunk describing Biden as looking like a ticket inspector on a ghost train nearly made me choke. I'm glad Clunk was still in it, possibly my favourite bits.

In fairness, the thread starter did ask why AAA studios use Agile instead of Waterfall. He just didn't know that was what he was asking

The waterfall way, where you ask the client to make all the decisions up front sounds great in principle. You explain to the client that you absolutely need to know everything EVERYTHING that needs to go into this project, because if they change their mind later, it's REALLY expensive. So the client sits down and stresses the details. Like ALL the details. And they come back with this huge list of things. And it takes years and years to build it to spec, and at the end of it half of the things the client said they wanted end up being redundant because you/they weren't able to prototype and discover what was valuable and what was not. Agile helps here by building what the client says is important first, and iterating on that before moving onto the next thing. You can still have a list of ambitions ( backlog items in Scrum terminology), but this list is dynamic depending on what the client decides is valuable after evaluating the current state of the product. The reality is that the lower priority items are often not required at all, and via prototyping the client is able to realise this and not waste time developing them.

I've not worked in professional game development, but I have been a software developer for over 20 years now. I think a few of the game devs here have explained the process now, but perhaps not the origins. The origins are rooted in Agile development ( https://agilemanifesto.org ) where as developers we want to iterate quickly on a product (or an area of a product) to improve it, whilst focusing exactly on what the end user wants. To do that we make a quick and dirty prototype based on what the customer told us they wanted. We're able to let the QA dept test that, show it to the customer. The customer then feeds back 'yeah this bit is good, but this needs tweaking like this' and we iterate and repeat the process. At some point this great idea either makes it through to the final product, or if it's not going well it will be scrapped. The whole idea of fast iteration like this though is that you get the valuable/important bits done first, and if something isn't working as expected you find out sooner than later. As developers this is however much MUCH more preferable to the old way we used to do things, which was the 'waterfall' methodology where all the decisions were made up front and set in stone. https://manifesto.co.uk/agile-vs-waterfall-comparing-project-management-methodologies The danger of the waterfall method where decisions are made early is that the cost of changes later in the lifecycle are INCREDIBLY expensive and often times impossible (short of a complete rewrite). An analogy might be if you were a building architect and just as you've finished the building and putting the carpets in, the client comes back and says 'I want a balcony there'. If the foundations can't support that dream, you either scrap it and start over or smash their vision. For software it's not so much different. If you're a professional dev and haven't come across any of this before (or perhaps are new enough to not have experienced the nightmare of waterfall based development) then I can highly recommend this video by Ken Schwaber : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyNPeTn8fpo

Did not expect to see Les Battersby in one of the episodes of The Ripper. Interesting twist. https://thetab.com/uk/2020/12/16/bruce-jones-coronation-street-the-yorkshire-ripper-case-netflix-185012

I tried watching the "Elf" episode on "Movies that made us" Christ it's annoying. There's probably a really good story there, but they can't go more than three or four words without the chirpy narrator interrupting "and then finishing" the sentence.

Looks like those mods got blitzed. As did 'Mayo2' and 'Fries2'. I'll keep an eye out for the third release https://www.trueachievements.com/forum/viewthread.aspx?tid=1180227&page=28

There are loads of good youtube videos covering that case too. The interrogation process I thought was really well done, and barely covered in the Netflix doc. The woman interrogator really manages to pile the pressure on over the polygraph and how he 'failed' it, which is ultimately what causes him to cave and confess. Really good watch. Polygraph stuff is in part 2, but the whole thing is fascinating