Thanks for the concise explanation! Sounds like quite the hassle indeed.

My home country is Australia and it’s basically the polar opposite. A direct deposit (what we call a wire transfer) is always less than 24 hours and never costs anything to the account holders. Even for hundreds of thousands of dollars (such as when purchasing property).

There’s also a secondary system called Osko and if both banks support it the transfer is instant (and still free). Salaries must be paid using direct deposit (to ensure an electronic ‘paper trail’). No one with a job or government benefits is unbanked. For at least the last 35 years everyone opens their first bank account at elementary school, where the (former) government bank attends and sets up a fee free account for each child. There are no account fees. Only 15% of transactions in Australia involve cash money, and almost all others are direct deposit or direct debit with about 0.1% being cheques.

If for some reason an individual doesn’t have an app with their account info on it they will carry it in their wallet. Many people have an email address attached to their account anyway and you can use the email address instead for sending a direct deposit. Most businesses still require the Bank/Account number instead though.

The number of people with a cheque book is statistically insignificant. The government will cease using cheques by 2028, and they will be completely abolished by 2030. I haven’t seen a cheque in the last 20 years in Europe, Asia or Oceania. The last time I saw one was in 2023 in Las Vegas.

having to deal with a wire transfer

What’s the process and why is it so arduous? Here it’s just account name, bank number, account number and you can expect it next day (or instant using modern methods). Sure beats going to the bank…

Yes for Google Translate at least. It’s still possible to inject prompts in your “translation”, too. I’ve noticed a considerable drop in accuracy translating to English, too… The English is more natural but “forgets” to include some information in the original text. This stuffs up my old workflow because now I can’t rely on Google translate at least translating all the nouns (e.g. it will drop some names in a list of people)

Iya, ore da.

Just need to find Benjamin Franklin to charge your patented Super Battery, and wash your carriage to ensure precipitation!

I think the main issue was that Mint doesn’t have good power management tools (so I used a third-party utility). Not a ‘gaming’ laptop but it does have a dedicated Nvidia GPU and I got the drivers working fine, and most games ran better than than they did on windows. I’ll check out CachyOs! Thank you for the suggestion. I haven’t tried Fedora in a decade (and not on this PC, obviously), so I’ll take a look at that, too.

Last time I tried (Mint) the dealbreaker for me was battery management. I tried various utils and settings but I couldn’t get as much juice of of the same charge using Mint and still have good performance. If anyone has any suggestions I’d be grateful!

As someone regularly uses Japanese and sometimes uses node.js, this is a handy library to know about! Cheers!

That’s why I employ a staff of a few dozen multilingual interpreters to follow me to the supermarket to translate the ingredient labels in the import isle.

Thankfully, lunchtime is pretty well enforced by law in Australia… didn’t prevent the “reasonable overtime is included in your base salary” contract clause, where “reasonable” is defined by the publisher, though.

When I worked for a big game studio, we had a clan, as did many of the other big studios in the country. Every lunch we’d join the same servers. Battlefield, TF2, StarCraft… good times. Well, good lunch times.

I think the battle sprites look amazing, but in the field, the details on the models get squished into too few pixels, and it’s a jarring juxtaposition against the beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds. I can remember some reviewers sharing my opinion at the time, but you might be right that calling it ugly is a bit much.

Original VII is great how it is. I was happy to have an alternate telling for the remakes.

Unlike VII, VIII has always been ugly and needs a graphical upgrade to match their over ambitious models for the hardware. Also needs a combat overhaul so it’s not so super easy, and draw is not so tedious.

Tactics original is pretty, but could use some QoL updates.

16 might break it… 四四 makes no sense as 十十 makes no sense… you’d write 百 (100) instead.

And you get the same problem each time you go higher.

You’d need base 4 equivalents of 100 = 百, 1,000 = 千, 10,000 = 万, 100,000,000 = 億,.

Hmm, on the other hand you can have 十万 (100,000), so why not 四四 (16)? What’s 20, though…

In Arabic numerals base 2 has 0 and 1, and base 10 has 0 to 9, which is also 10 numeric symbols. Chinese has 10 numeric symbols for base 10, too, just a “10” symbol instead of a 0.

Spot on. Good example! And 十 is indeed just X on it’s side :D

In Chinese/Japanese, there’s 四 rocks in both base 10, and base 4. (8 rocks would be 二四 in base 4).

I think the concept of “base” is easier to understand when you include a numeral for the highest base (10 = 十, 20 =二十).

Of course, arabic numerals are more concise, using position to imply meaning (21 = 二十一).

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Pre-home internet I remember running a line-in to my soundblaster card from a clock radio and recording Tool’s Sober to my HDD.

The wav file took up a good chunk of the HDD. After a good amount of funking around with encoding it was barely comprehensible and still took up too much room. Was exciting and felt like a glimpse of the future.