"It's the end of a rocky journey..." writes the Verge. After six years of developing the free first-person shooter game Crucible, Amazon launched the game in May, yanked it into closed beta in July, and then 14 weeks later cancelled the game altogether. Ars Technica reports: This followed the game's formal delisting from Steam in July, which followed painfully low concurrent player counts (as low as 200) that made it difficult for players to successfully matchmake with each other. Though the game launched with considerable attention, including a promotional blitz on the Amazon-owned game-streaming platform Twitch, it only briefly maintained a player population exceeding 10,000 users. "...ultimately we didn't see a healthy, sustainable future ahead [for] Crucible," explains a blog post from Amazon's Crucible team. The Verge reports: The developers will be hosting a "a final playtest and community celebration" in the next few weeks, according to the blog. Once that's done, matchmaking will be disabled, but you'll be able to play custom games (which are expected to be available in the coming days) until 3PM ET on November 9th. The company also says that it will be offering a full refund for any purchases you might have made... Crucible developers will be moved to other Amazon Games titles, including New World, Amazon's upcoming massively multiplayer online game. That game, which is currently set to launch in spring 2021, has had its own set of challenges, including two delays. And we're also still waiting on the release of Pac-Man Live Studio, a version of Pac-Man that you can play directly on Twitch. Amazon said in May that the game would launch in June, but it's still not out, and the game's website only says that it's "coming soon."

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The source for this story is a post on Reddit, which Jalopnik argues "was corroborated with this remarkable video of Tesla's new Instant, Unplanned Convertible feature." I know we've covered Tesla's chronic quality control issues here before, and I realize that among hardcore Tesla-stans this may feel like we're picking on Tesla unfairly but in our defense, Tesla really does have some terrible quality issues. Sometimes we get a really dramatic and baffling issue, like this one where the fucking roof flew off a brand-new Model Y while the car was being driven home. "The Tesla service center in Dublin did not return a message seeking comment," reports the Verge, adding "A spokesperson for Tesla also did not respond." Leaving them with nothing but the Redditor's own story: Nathaniel Galicia Chien was driving down Interstate 580 with his parents in their brand-new Tesla Model Y when he started to hear a lot of wind. "I thought a window was open," Chien recalled in an email to The Verge, "but half a minute later the entire glass top of the roof just flew off in the wind." Chien said the incident occurred hours after he and his parents picked up the new Model Y from the Tesla dealership in Dublin, California. Right off the bat, they noticed some minor "fit and finish" problems, such as "spacing issues and unevenness in the gaps that are pretty well-known issues with new Teslas." But they didn't expect any problems with the crossover's mammoth panoramic glass roof, and certainly not on the same day they drove it off the dealer's lot. For years, Tesla has been plagued by quality issues, but it seems to have grown worse with the release of the Model Y in 2019. Just this past summer, Tesla scored last in a survey of customers by researcher JD Power. Owners have flocked to online forums to complain about paint and trim problems, indentations in the seats, and loose seatbelts. But an entire roof flying off on the highway is a new kind of problem for Tesla... Chien said Tesla's service representatives said that "either the seal on the roof was faulty, or they somehow just forgot to seal the roof on entirely." "They gave us a free rental to use in the meantime and offered to get it serviced," the Redditor posted this week, "but we just opted to wait for a brand new one."

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Yesterday I did a podcast and blog post about the View From Nowhere. I just realized that Joe Biden may be The Politician from Nowhere. I can't think of a single issue that he's associated with. Oddly I think that's exactly the kind of president we need in 2021.

This week's release of Python 3.9 "brings forward significant changes to both the features of the language and to how the language is developed," writes InfoWorld — starting with a new yearly release schedule and performance-boosting parser improvements: - Python makes it easy to manipulate common data types, and Python 3.9 extends this ease with new features for strings and dictionaries. For strings, there are new methods to remove prefixes and suffixes, operations that have long required a lot of manual work to pull off. [The methods are named .removeprefix() and .removesuffix() and their return value is the modified string] - For dictionaries, there are now union operators, one to merge two dictionaries into a new dictionary and one to update the contents of one dictionary with another dictionary. - Decorators let you wrap Python functions to alter their behaviors programmatically. Previously, decorators could only consist of the @ symbol, a name (e.g. func) or a dotted name (func.method) and optionally a single call (func.method(arg1, arg2)). With Python 3.9, decorators can now consist of any valid expression...provided it yields something that can function as a decorator... - Two new features for type hinting and type annotations made their way into Python 3.9. In one, type hints for the contents of collections — e.g., lists and dictionaries — are now available in Python natively. This means you can for instance describe a list as list[int] — a list of integers — without needing the typing library to do it. The second addition to Python's typing mechanisms is flexible function and variable annotations. This allows the use of the Annotated type to describe a type using metadata that can be examined ahead of time (with linting tools) or at runtime... - Python extension modules, written in C, may now use a new loading mechanism that makes them behave more like regular Python modules when imported.

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Slashdot reader omfglearntoplay shared this article from Science Alert: A cross-sectional analysis of 11,489 children, 655 of whom were exposed to THC in the womb, has found cannabis use during pregnancy is tied to a small elevation in psychotic-like behaviours later in life. These include aggression towards others, as well as attention and social problems... the relationship stood even when other confounding factors, such as genetic predispositions, were considered. Whether or not this link is causal is another matter — after all, there are many other factors the researchers may not have considered — but in the context of other research, it's an interesting link worthy of further exploration... [S]everal other lines of evidence have shown prenatal cannabis exposure is associated with decreased attention span and some behavioural problems in children... While research on the health effects of cannabis is slowly catching up with legalisation, data on cannabis use during pregnancy is still lagging far behind. And that could be inadvertently harming the next generation. A 2019 study of over 450,000 pregnant women found cannabis use more than doubled between 2002 and 2017, reaching 7 percent... Cannabis is reportedly used to deal with nausea and vomiting in early pregnancy, but there's little evidence to say whether this actually works or if it's safe... There is currently no known safe level of cannabis use during pregnancy or lactation. The potential risks have led the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics to both advise against using cannabis in early pregnancy or while breastfeeding. Even the U.S. Surgeon General advises against cannabis use during pregnancy... While alcohol and tobacco during pregnancy are also linked to adverse health outcomes, these are already well documented. But many women don't know these are risks that might also come with prenatal exposure to weed.

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"Most users don't seem to realize the severity of the risks they're subjecting themselves to while using hotel Wi-Fi networks," writes Windows Report, noting that America's FBI "issued a Public Service Announcement concerning the risks of using hotel Wi-Fi networks while teleworking." Apparently, more and more U.S. hotels started advertising room reservations during the daytime for those who seek a distraction-free environment. This comes as a blessing for teleworkers who can't seem to focus on their work environment while at home. On the other hand...there are a few quite serious risks you may expose yourself to while using Wi-Fi networks in hotels: - Traffic monitoring: Your network activity could be exposed to a malicious third-party - Evil Twin attacks: Cloning the hotel network, misleading clients to connect to the fake one instead - Man-In-The-Middle attacks: Intercepting and stealing sensitive information from one's device - Compromising work" Facilitating cybercriminals to steal work credentials or other similar resources - Digital identity theft - Ransomware Among other things, the FBI points out: Guests generally have minimal visibility into both the physical location of wireless access points within the hotel and the age of networking equipment. Old, outdated equipment is significantly more likely to possess vulnerabilities that criminal actors can exploit. Even if a hotel is using modern equipment, the guest has no way of knowing how frequently the hotel is updating the firmware of that equipment or whether the hotel has changed the equipment's default passwords. The hotel guest must take each of these factors into consideration when choosing whether to telework on a hotel network. Or, as Slashdot reader SmartAboutThings puts it, "Using hotel Wi-Fi, in general, is not safe at all, and if you have no other choice, then you might as well give VPN services a try." Or, just don't use the hotel's wifi (using your cellphone as a mobile hotspot instead).

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California's elections include grass roots propositions that change the law directly while bypassing legislators. Uber, Lyft, and Uber-owned Postmates (as well as DoorDash and Instacart) have spent $185 million — the most ever spent — pushing a proposition that would keep ride-hail and delivery drivers as independent contractors, reports SFGate. "If it passes...gig corporations won't have to contribute to Social Security, Medicare or unemployment insurance. They won't have to offer paid sick leave, workers compensation or unemployment benefits to drivers." But the site also investigated what happened shortly after the Uber/Lyft PAC reported an $128,000 expenditure on mailers: Political mailers masquerading as progressive voter guides and endorsing Proposition 22, the initiative backed by Uber and Lyft, are showing up in Southern California voters' mailboxes. The fine print on one mailer says it was prepared by the "Feel the Bern, Progressive Voter Guide," which is not an actual organization. Neither are the "Council of Concerned Women Voters Guide" nor the "Our Voice, Latino Voter Guide," whose mailers make the same endorsements as Feel the Bern. Mailed political fliers typically identify the organization that paid for the literature. But that information was conspicuously absent from Feel the Bern and the other two mailers... The measure would allow ride-hail and delivery drivers to continue to be treated as independent contractors, although with some new benefit concessions. If it fails, these employees would likely be considered workers entitled to a minimum wage, overtime pay, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance and paid sick leave. The California Democratic Party has endorsed a "no" vote for Prop. 22.

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I also changed my Twitter profile picture from a 2003 OPML Roadshow picture to the Biden/Harris ad. My online front lawn extends to Twitter too.

Today is 10/10/20. Interesting fact. It's the same in Europe as in the US. Thank you.

Poll: Suppose you could only subscribe to one of the following online news orgs. Which would it be?

"Google LLC is reportedly planning to relinquish direct control over its open-source Knative project to a five-seat steering committee that will have rules to prevent any single organization from having more than two seats," reports SiliconANGLE. "The plan is designed to stymie criticism that Google is secretly planning to retain control over key open-source projects it has developed, according to a report today on the tech news website The Protocol." Knative is an open-source project first developed by Google that provides components for deploying, running and managing serverless, cloud-native applications on top of Kubernetes, a container management platform that was also built by Google and open-sourced in 2015... Google is planning to make some major changes to Knative's governance structure, according to the report. Seats on the committee will now be held by individuals rather than specific companies, and elections will be held later this year to select two new members. In addition, the report said, Google is considering eventually expanding the committee to seven members as a way to include representatives from Knative's user community. The plan comes just a few months after Google angered some members of the open-source software community when it reneged on a promise to hand over control of another project, Istio, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology. In July Google said that it instead of transferring Istio to the CNCF, it would create a neutral organization called Open Usage Commons to manage its trademark policies, while control would be maintained by the project's steering committee. That decision upset many of Google's partners, most notably IBM Corp., which has also contributed greatly to the development of Istio.

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Something unusual. There's a Biden/Harris ad on the home page of my blog. In a desktop browser it's in the right margin. It was tricky on a phone, so I just had the ad overlay the page, at .5 opacity. You can still read the text underneath it, but it's better if you scroll it out of the way. A blog version of a lawn sign.

Yesterday's Daily podcast is an eye-opener. They interview Trump supporters in the middle of Pennsylvania. They don't think Trump is racist, and that he did the best he could with Covid.

The net is not good at shades of grey. Or accepting different perspectives. Or compromise.

Happy to see John Naughton quote my howto on breaking up tech monopolies. He calls it radical. It's the kind of judgment courts issue all the time. Look for ways to set things right. The web should have remained open. Google and Facebook didn't respect that. So undo what they did. It's the way a programmer looks at things, and imho that's the right way, because it's tech we're talking about setting right. Usually they don't consult techies in these things, however.