Oh my gosh, similar to my story and you’re exactly right. Yeah I could totally be happier running around the forest all day but that’s not feasible when I’ve got kids getting off the school bus who need encouragement to do the things and who need to be fed more than the handful of berries that are likely smashed in my pockets because I was more interested in collecting several cool rocks. Now the kids are crying because it’s stone soup again for dinner. It’s just a damn mess.

Dang, that’s a long wait time. I hope you get some answers soon.

Completely agree, and I’ve paid this game for the upgraded storage and many piggy bank cracks over the last couple of years because I play often and appreciate them keeping the game running and updating stuff. I am not, however, paying a monthly fee to use it

I guess that depends on the person, but when I saw them it was more like a magical/otherworldly experience, kind of like being in the path of totality during a total eclipse-the world seems different. Then again, I had been living in Alaska for nearly a year hoping every day to see them. They really do dance across the sky. Really fun experience I hope you get to see them if that’s what you want.

Enshitification. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

So say you have a picture, and it’s made up of pixels, and you want to send that picture to someone but in order to do so, you have to make it smaller. You could send the most important bits and allow reconstruction on the receiver’s end, or you could some how make it smaller without changing the information. So if your picture is four blue pixels, followed by 3 red, and 2 yellow you could send the entire string like that, versus blue, blue, blue, blue, red, red, red, yellow, yellow. This would be lossless and are generally GIF, PNG, etc. JPEG is lossy compression, and it would be like telling your friend receiving the picture “I have a picture of a bird, here’s part of a beak, one wing, a tail, and one foot.” Your friend, being smart, can reconstruct the data that wasn’t sent (other wing and foot, body) because they have a good idea how the rest of the bird should look based on the parts they see. Lossy is better for smaller compression, but lossless is important if all the information needs to reach the receiver. Hope that helps.