The increase of male births can be linked to a historical preference for sons, a decline in birth rates driven by gender selection preferences and advancements in technology, such as ultrasound, that facilitate gender selection, according to the report.    The report also emphasized that the prolonged period of a skewed sex ratio at birth since the 1970s has had a significant impact on marriage rates. Regions with high marriage rate imbalances are characterized by particularly skewed sex ratios at birth during the 1980s and 1990s.

So basically a lot of people saw a vagina in the ultrasound and decided quit and restart the level.

Yeah, I wonder why they never added the option to combo new visuals and old sounds. MCC will only allow old audio with the old graphics.

That said, it’s still one of those games where I get together with my middle aged friends, and no one thinks much about the game’s in-game presentation until someone toggles the graphics, then people suddenly realize a LOT more has been updated that they realize.

IMHO, they did a better job than most at recapturing how the game felt when you played it back in the day. Not all of the creative choices were perfect, but nailed a lot of it.

Puppies destroy your furniture for a few months if you’re not paying attention. Cats demand sacrificial furniture that they can fuck up life.

IMHO, it depends on the game and the remake. The old Halo games are probably the best case study on what to do and what not to do.

Halo CE - Don’t do that. The game was old enough to warrant major texture, geometry, and animation upgrades, but the developer also completely changed the art style.

Halo 2 - Do this. It’s the old art style, but with more detail. The game looks like how you think it looked, until you toggle the old graphics on and see how it ACTUALLY looked.

Halo 3 - Do this. The game was in good enough shape to just need a few frame rate, texture, and resolution bumps. New animation and geometry wasn’t needed, and avoiding that was the right call.

I guess talk show hosts did get about a decade out of that dick joke.

Why is Robert De Niro there?

A reference that no one under 40 will get.

IMHO, part of the big problem is that this is a state budget. State budgets are much more restrictive than a federal budget. States can’t print money, and they’re stuck in a race to the bottom with other states in “incentivizing” big business to stay in the state and pay taxes. I feel like we need some proper income laws at the federal level to really fix this.

Apparently the museum used outside investigators, and Fox / Nat Geo used internal investigators.

It wouldn’t surprise me to have a media company’s bias being toward protecting their content investment. That person’s face is in every show set to run, rerun, and stream. A museum is kind of different. It’s the in-person exhibits that are the main draw, and a their bigger risk is probably the litigation from substantiated allegations.

I work in this risk / ethics space, and I’m not surprised that the museum was more motivated to look into the claims, as opposed to simply saying they looked into the claims.

And that said, I’m also just some rando on the internet.

Paywall

Some Microsoft insiders worry the company’s AI strategy has become too focused on its partnership with OpenAI.

A few even grumble that the software giant has turned into a glorified IT department for the hot startup. These comments were part of a recent exclusive story from Business Insider in which Microsoft insiders shared candid views on the company’s AI future and its new Copilot tools.

The group at the center of this is Microsoft’s AI Platform team, run by Eric Boyd. This sits within Scott Guthrie’s Cloud + AI organization.

Insiders say Microsoft is focused less on the internal services that previously made up Azure AI Services and more on the Azure OpenAI service.

One former executive who left as a result of the changes said products like Azure Cognitive Search, Azure AI Bot Service, and Kinect DK are practically gone. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said these services exist in some form but either aren’t part of the Azure AI org, have been renamed, or have been bundled with other products.

“The former Azure AI is basically just tech support for OpenAI,” a former Microsoft executive said. "Eric Boyd is effectively maintaining the OpenAI service. It’s less of an innovation engine

Hopefully their parking lot isn’t too much farther away.

To be fair, she looks pretty good for almost 50. For a parking lot cosmetic surgeon, she must be one of the better ones.

Coffee, one of the important tools in any fartographer’s satchel.

Better than OP could do

https://archive.ph/GNgAe

This shit makes a LOT of sense for the north west. A lot of places in NorCal and up don’t have AC because the climate used to be much more temperate a few decades ago. In door temperatures can get pretty bad in places without AC, and it’s only going to get worse.

It’s particularly miserable when everything is on fire, and the county is advising people to close windows and doors because of bad air. Your options are cook to death, or inhale toxic particulate from burning homes.

Is No.11 your scent as well?

https://www.fastfoodclub.com/p/kfc-launched-bbq-cologne-and-sells-out-instantly/

Ahh yes - the political strategy of taking one on the chin with voter confidence, by staring into space and becoming a viral meme, so your opponent thinks you’re slow, and lowers their guard during the debates, that the persuadable independent voters totally ignore.

Bullet proof strategy. I’m fired up!

That and changing your name is actually pretty annoying, and it only gets more annoying when you have a lot of assets with a particular legal name tied to them.

She has lawyers and accountants that will do a lot of the heavy lifting, but it’s still an obnoxious pain the butt.

It’s pretty common to see people change their name when they get married, but come divorce time say “nah, fuck that, I’m not doing that shit again.”

If she’s smart, she’ll leave the hyphen out. Anyone with a hyphenated name will tell you that’s it’s annoying as fuck. A lot of digital products and records don’t support hyphens and throw errors when they see the character.

Transportation in general usually has a lot of public funding and government involvement. Tend to be common for air, sea, rail, and car transport solutions.