WestLaw and Lexis Nexis provide this for legal search, but quite frankly, these services are subpar. It's amazing that these two companies rake in hundreds of millions but they are both slower than Google, Bing, Yandex, or any LLM service (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) while scouring a universe of text that is orders of magnitude smaller. The user experience is also terrible (you have to login and specify a client each and every time you attempt to use the service and both services log you out after a short -- in my opinion -- period of inactivity, creating friction and needless annoyance to the user). There's an opportunity there.
LN and Westlaw's real service is their ubiquity. Every law student has access to it and every firm expects proficiency. While they generally suck, the last time I used it (looong time ago), their boolean search was quite nice. That kind of text search has mostly been replaced by non-deterministic black boxes which aren't great for legal research.
They've also got the Microsoft effect going on. Usually at least one of their products like their personal information aggregator used for locating people (like when serving lawsuits) is mandatory for a firm so it's just easier for them bundle everything else in.
If you want it digitized, yes, odd as that seems. You can go find individual prints of it or perhaps digital copies of opinions elsewhere, but those are also technically copyrighted in a lot of cases too.
In some jurisdictions, like Ontario, there are secret agreements that only allow 3 organizations to have digital access to Case Law (https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/). This says a lot about our society, and how much we still have to improve.
I haven't personally used the mentioned services as they aren't in my field, however what is the accuracy of their results? Are they double checked? I don't find LLMs particularly accurate in my field (that's being kind), if anything I find they make up sources that simply don't exist.
I mean poor UX has no excuse but slow speed can be reasoned if it makes the quality of the service better.
Not saying wild things aren’t possible; designer drug glands grafted on and such would be banger and would alter human lived experience.
Another box measuring oscillations of fundamental forces will not.
Religious fear of “corrupting human nature” keeps smart people scaffolding symbolic logic in machines versus experimenting with weird science. Live, eat, mate, help line go up relative to some musty people’s political ledger, and die is all we’re allowed!
I want drug glands, regenerative tissue, and mini kaiju monstrosities grown in labs… as pets!
AOE2 is the pinnacle of the RTS genre. With the Definitive Edition released in 2019, it's still extremely popular today. In my opinion, no RTS title has surpassed AOE2 before or since in terms of gameplay (and, in my subjective opinion, graphics -- I LOVE the detailed pixel graphics much more than polygons).
AOE2 is the best-balanced, IMO. I don’t know that it’s necessarily the most fun, though. I love it, but I also love RA2. Agree on the graphics comment: I’ll take the isometric view any day over 3D RTS.
RA2 has some grossly OP units that you can crank out en masse and dominate with. A small army of Apocalypse Tanks is game over for the enemy, unless they’re France and have turtled with a bunch of Grand Cannons.
Or in Yuri’s Revenge, load Battle Fortresses with a Chrono Legionnaire or two, a Sniper (assuming British), and some GIs.
These, and the overall frenetic pace of RA2 makes it more like junk food than the fine dining experience of AOE2. Yes, it’s not the best thing ever, but man is it fun while it lasts.
I played AOE3 after AOE2 as well years ago, but it never had the same feeling despite having much more variety and content. AOE2 hit the balance between simplicity and variety for me, though might be an effect of childhood memories as well.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is the pinnacle, especially with the FAForever mod.
It puts emphasis on strategy and gives a lot of options on how to approach a match. Micro can make a difference, but it's not make or break like in pretty much every other RTS.
I would say that Dawn of War 1 is the pinnacle of the RTS genre. Still has never been topped by any game I've played, even its sequels. DoW 2 was a dumpster fire that removed most of the RTS elements and cut armies down to 1/3 of the size they used to be. DoW 3 was a step back in the right direction, but still was not really at the lofty heights the first game hit.
I used to dream that Blizzard would put Jay Wilson (who was the D3 lead while he was with them, but more importantly was the DoW1 lead before that) onto a Warcraft 4. I would've loved to see that. Alas, after D3 had a fairly chilly reception (and Wilson himself sparked outrage through unwise social media posting), Blizzard quietly demoted him (and he eventually left). So it was not to be. But I still wish it had happened.
I really enjoyed DoW2 as an action RPG but share your disappointment with it as a sequel to DoW1. I think it would have been received better with a different title.
id argue that dominion storm over gift 3 is peak. Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 stole so much from this game it's wild. from repairable bridges to unit queues and tabs on the build bar.
Agree with this. An insurance requirement would solve this problem. It would also incentivize robust security audits by the insurance companies and the data collectors.
There were a lot of regressions that upset me. The option for seconds in the system time was removed. Right-clicking the WiFi/internet connection in the taskbar no longer has the context menu option for "Troubleshoot connection", forcing me to go to options, search Troubleshooters, click "Other troubleshooters" (Because troubleshooting internet is so uncommon, right?) and THEN troubleshoot the internet connection.
From what I read, Microsoft let some designers who only use Mac OS do the design, and they plowed ahead despite hearing extremely reasonable concerns that their OS developers had with some design decisions.
Oh wow, and only two and a half years after Windows 11 was released. Better late than never, I guess. I should have heeded the age-old warning of "every other major Windows release is terrible" and not upgraded.
> Microsoft let some designers who only use Mac OS do the design
I was wondering why Win11 ripped off that central icon taskbar thing from MacOS instead of keeping their iconic and proven layout. That explains everything.
I think the reasoning is that ultrawide / larger monitors are becoming more common and it's easier / faster to access the taskbar from the center than moving the mouse to the far edge. And if it's not easier, they have an option to move it back to the left. This is one of the least egregious changes, really.
I built my first gaming pc in 20 years about a month ago. Before, I had been mainly using linux as my os of choice. Windows is so very. painful. in comparison. Windows apparently replaced CMD with the janky powershell instead of adopting literally any popular unix shell. There's advertising and web results scattered all over the OS. Windows still doesn't have a cohesive apt-get type update functionality even though debian and other distros have had that since the mid 90s (a program such as MSI aferburner could simply register a repo url like how linux distros use PPAs, etc). Window's networking is janky, and it's firewall is pretty bad.
Honestly, the only reason I'm using windows is because I want a flawless gaming / vr experience on my $2500 gaming / ai machine. If not for that, or if I was ok with a little jank from proton, I'd go back to linux in a heartbeat. Windows is a penalty box in every other domain except for gaming. WSL only makes it livable.
For me it was an overall improvement over Windows 10. Every new release of every software has some drawbacks, but I got over getting upset about those little details. I just try to find new solutions, if old ones stop working.
