Your video player “can” account for latency if you configure it correctly which I imagine the majority of people don’t do, and simply put up with it. Ditto with your music playback always lagging 1-2 seconds behind your control inputs. I have never used a media player on any platform that automatically figured out audio latency. Maybe the iDevices do if you pair them with Airpods, I don’t know; I don’t own anything Apple and I never will.

It also matters for music production, and makes life a lot more pleasant for audio/video editing. Plus, latency is just annoying in any setting.

And also no latency. Even expensive Bluetooth headphones and earbuds have crap latency. The systems that don’t are either proprietary and not widely supported (e.g. aptX) or expensive 'phones-and-dongle arrangements that must always travel in a pair and still don’t compete on latency with a pair of dollar store earbuds.

We’d love to, but manufacturers keep trying to force them down our throats. And when we express a different prererence or use case a bunch of trolls feel the need to pop out of the woodwork and tell us that no, we’re actually wrong and our use cases don’t actually exist.

How about you all don’t worry about what headphones other people are using?

Zoomer Parker will not lug around an SLR camera in the next reboot; he’ll simply be a drone operator.

I have. My former bank disallowed reusing any of your previous passwords, and also did “clever” things like flagging you for using sequences of characters from your old passwords as well.

All provisos that revealed that they were storing passwords (including old passwords) in plain text, because there’s no way they’d be able to make those determinations if they were irreversibly hashing passwords correctly.

TL;DR: They’re no longer my bank.

More likely it’s happening because the password change field silently truncates your input and the login field doesn’t, or vise-versa, because whoever designed the web page or system is stupid.

When they say “repopulate,” what they really mean is “reproduce faster than the brown people.” As usual it’s racism all the way down.

Yes, and possibly also so they can’t get sued or have to license the Michelin name somehow if they can point to the fact that their stars are clearly not the same thing.

Based on the popular trope of Hispanic guys hanging around outside of Home Depot (or other American big box hardware stores) every morning looking to get picked up as day laborers.

Which everyone always gets wrong, since there’s apparently a deeply ingrained cultural misconception that a restaurant can achieve up to five Michelin stars. Even Ratatouille got this wrong (although possibly deliberately), with the implication that Gusteau’s was a “five” star restaurant, its downgrading to four is the event that caused Gusteau himself to lose his will to live, and afterwards it was downgraded again to three. Which is already the maximum. Either Gusteau’s was just originally so good it broke the scale, or it was the sole and singular haute cuisine establishment in all of Paris that was not ranked by Michelin for some reason.

The various hotel ranking schemes have a one-to-five stars scale, though, which is probably what most people conflate the Michelin stars with. Unlike the Michelin ratings there is no central or consistent authority on hotel rankings so they’re pretty arbitrary to begin with and to a certain degree just a marketing ploy.

Planets have at most four “biomes,” but how much you think the differences between these actually counts is really up for debate. They have:

• Their main land mass
• A “barren” variant which appears in blotches has different rocks and little/no plant life and spawns fewer animals
• An underwater biome, if that planet has water
• The underground/cave biome

That’s it.

Furthermore, the cave biomes of all planets are virtually identical to each other with the visually interchangeable stalactites and stalagmites, the same types of bulb plants, identical hazardous flora, and hexagonal rock pillars. This is so even where it makes absolutely no sense, i.e. on the various specialty “anomalous” planets which have implied artificial or non-organic surfaces or even sterile ones, the caves are all the same. Including presumably organic mushrooms and bulb plants. The climate, color, plant content, surface terrain etc. of a planet has no bearing on what its caves look like other than their size and frequency.

To answer your question, all you need is the above. The rest of my observations got rather long. Here they are:

Planets can have different terrain generation algorithms that will broadly determine the shape and height of their mountains, and one optional geographic feature (like mesas, or big land spikes randomly but fairly uniformly distributed around the surface) but these will not change appreciably with your location on a given planet except possibly the prevalence of land vs. ocean basins. You can read more about this here.

Biome type, terrain archetype, and the planet’s terrain feature vary only from planet to planet, and apply to each planet as a whole. They do not vary within the same planet. I’m using “biome” here in how the game defines it, i.e. as that planet’s particular theme: Ice planets are ice all over their whole surface. Toxic planets are toxic all over their entire surface. Desert planets are the same desert all over their entire surface. Etc.

There is no difference in climate at different latitudes. Waterbound planets may have differing proportions of water to land masses in different locations, which is visible from space. Creatures (especially aquatic ones) can sometimes be flagged to be found “mainly in the North” or “mainly in the South,” but otherwise the distribution of plants, rocks, and animals is statistically uniform all over the planet’s surface regardless of location. The only differentiator is whether they spawn on the ground, in the water, in the air, or in caves – and that they spawn a lot less on the barren patches.

You will notice in fact that your location pin on your Discoveries tab doesn’t even bother to track your longitude, just your latitude. I.e. planets don’t even truly have an “east” or “west” in any way that impacts gameplay whatsoever. This also means you will never see a creature flagged “found mainly in the East/West,” because as far as the game is concerned there is actually no such thing.

Yes, all planets have the same gravitational constant except airless worlds, which have moonlike gravity. This is regardless of their diameter or implied mass. (Airless worlds also lack flora and fauna except cave flora and hazardous plants. Because that makes sense.)

Yes, all planets always have the same day/night cycle and are always implied to be perfectly vertically aligned relative to their orbits. The length of day and night is always the same for all planets, regardless of size or their implied rotational speed. They are furthermore never tidally locked to anything (nor are their moons) nor have a tilted rotational axis, and will still exhibit their day/night cycle even if they are e.g. completely obscured from their host star(s) by their parent planet (in the case of moons) or a gas giant planet, and in that sense will behave as if you are standing on their equator regardless of your latitude. You can race the dusk line around a planet in your ship and indeed even outrun it, and take off at night landing in the day or vise versa, but this is an illusion. As soon as you make landfall you’re bound to the same day cycle clock regardless of what the planet looks like from space.

In this way NMS is very rudimentary. It’s easy to complain about superficially but even as unrealistic as it is there’s really no gameplay detriment. And making its orbital and planetary mechanics truly or even partially realistic would actually be quite annoying and force you to think about things a lot more than you currently do in some specific edge cases, which would be silly for not much benefit. Would it be cool if all planets of the same type weren’t a single climate stereotype? Sure. When you’re going to visit multiple tens of different planets in a single play session, does that actually matter? Probably not.

For another example, there is also universal gravity in deep space. Taken from your player’s viewpoint, the bottom of your screen is “down” when you’re standing upright on a surface, regardless of logic. Don’t believe me? Warp your freighter to open space far away from any planet, stand on the exterior deck of any of your frigates, and then jump off.

I’m pretty sure the way that planet surfaces are stored in the game engine is toroidal rather than spherical, i.e. there is no true North or South pole on any given planet’s surface, and the surface is actually a rectangle with the edges wrapped around, that’s got the illusion of being mapped to a sphere applied to it. (This is rather akin to how it works in Minecraft, for example, where if you stand at a high enough elevation the engine renders the horizon as if it is curved to imply that the world is spherical, but it is in fact rectangular and geometrically flat.) If you walk to the spot that should North pole on any planet your compass should act like one does on Earth, i.e. all directions are South. But that’s not how it works in game. You can line the compass in your HUD up to North and walk all the way “around” the planet if you have enough time on your hands until you wind up back where you started, but your compass will remain showing North the entire time. On a sphere, this would be impossible.

Your location on a planet can be expressed in a two dimensional X and Y coordinate which is even visible, e.g. on the screens in your ship, but you can observe that while flying around an ostensibly spherical planet the lines of both latitude and longitude appear to be perfectly straight and neither of them are curved or convergent at any point which is also impossible on a spherical surface.

Etc.

The layout of all normal space stations is the same, but the props scattered around them are subtly different based on I believe the economy of the system as well as the dominant species there. Other than those details they are indeed functionally identical. Calling them all “different” from each other because of this is a huge stretch.

Station interiors used to be different than they are now, but they were still all the same. The floor plan of the stations in abandoned systems is the same as what the old stations looked like. The pirate stations are by and large based on this design as well. The addition of various additional vendors including the maps trader, starship fabricator, scrap merchant, etc. necessitated changing the station floor plans.

• All normal stations have the same layout.
• All pirate stations have the same layout as each other.
• All abandoned stations have the same layout as each other, which is the old station style.
• The Space Anomaly is always the same.
• Atlas Stations are always the same, with the only differences being the semi-randomlized locations of the “warts” and what resources are on offer at the pedestals near the interface.

So tl;dr: No. Other than trivial minutiae, the same type of station is the same as all the others of its type.

I’ll bet you it does, but you’ll need to put a new battery in it.

I bought it on Dealextreme back in the day, which was kind of the precursor to our current Aliexpress/Wish/Temu/Shein arrangement. It’s therefore possible that it is a knockoff (or a knockoff of a knockoff?) but the fact remains that it was absurdly cheap, is fully mechanical, and against all expectation and reason it continues to function and also keep pretty good time. It’s actually just a hair fast, and requires me to knock a minute off of it about once per week.

If you’re not squeamish you can get a thoroughly generic – or perhaps heavily “inspired” by some particular name brand – wind-up timepiece from any of the usual suspects for pocket change. $10-20, and other poster in here mentioned they bought theirs for $5.

There probably actually isn’t an alternative. Whatever piece of software you might otherwise use to encode or convert video is probably using ffmpeg behind the scenes anyway.

Nice. It is astounding what you can get for just a couple of bucks, and even more astounding that they genuinely work.

I just took a more detailed look. They do still make quite a few mechanicals but they have indeed shot up in price. $80-90 nowadays, it seems.

My old one is definitely mechanical. I wind it up every morning.

It’s also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.

This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.

If we’re doing watches today, here’s what I’m rocking lately.

I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That’s a big old nope from me, dawg.

Marbles are too inconsistent in diameter and most of them are too small for paintball guns, and certainly wouldn’t chamber or feed right. What’s more likely is that these punks were using one of the myriad crop of nylon or aluminum “jawbreaker” ammo sold online these days specifically for use in paintball guns.

In addition to the dubious legality of this sort of thing if you actually did light somebody up with a hopper full of them, for anyone considering these for deterrence of ne’er-do-wells in the night, I’d give it a second think only because mostly what you’ll accomplish is holes in your drywall and denting up your own stuff.