Skirmishers as in “Light Cavalry”, designed to catch closing archery and ride them down? I’m not big on RTS (I suck at multitasking), but I’m always fascinated by gamified implementations of historical dynamics.

I don’t suppose they also support “recruit auxiliary specialists” as option?

Announcing the new “Royal Stables” DLC: “Marauders & Massacres” is sure to spice up your medieval farm simulation!

They were also rare. To effectively pull off horse archery, you needed good horses, good riders that also happened to be good archers (both of which weren’t trivial on their own, let alone combined) and good coordination. Bows are more effective the closer you are, so to get the most out of your arrows, you’ll want to close in, but then you also need to wheel off again without your riders getting in each other’s way, so you needed to drill maneuvers for that.

So you either need to have a sufficiently large body of soldiers with the leisure to train both archery and riding instead of working the fields, or you needed a society that treats them as basic skills anyway and only needed training in the military application. Nomadic peoples like the Scythians or Mongols often had the former, so they were notable sources of dangerous mounted archery, particularly where the raising and support of a professional army wasn’t feasible. Rome had the Equites Sagitarii, but they were part of the distinct social class we would call Knights, so not your rank-and-file soldier (and those were already more professional than later levy- or retinue-based militaries).

So if we were concerned about accuracy*, these units should be expensive and require good management to make the most of them, but be very dangerous too. The point about open / closed terrain certainly fits as well.

What’s a bit more foggy is how games usually handle bow effectiveness at range, but that’s its own topic.

*I do care about accuracy, but not at any cost - games need to be fun too, and that’s worth sacrificing some accuracy for.

For the right jobs, it’s a good tool.

This isn’t the right job.

Sounds like they did the lookups by hand actually

cries in data analyst

Did you know our company is over a thousand years old, possibly even two? Recent dives into our digital archives have unearthed invoice records dated to the year 1021, though we’re also investigating the validity of one dated to 215.

Whoever decided to make dates a manual entry text field without validation should be forced to write SQL by hand, without syntax highlighting, autocompletion, syntax checks, reference or looking up stuff, querying a database with no schema or data dictionary.

Well, it’s ““This””, not “This”, so I’d say it’s fine.

I share your hope. I’m just offering the caveat that it might not go as quickly and smoothly as you expect (unless I’m reading your comments wrong - do correct me!)

It’s my perpetual gripe with many of those open tools that I love ideologically, but practically find lacking in some respects, typically UI/UX (including the pre-experience of the decision whether to use them). I don’t have all the skills or knowledge to fix the issues that bother me, as it’s often far eaiser to know what’s wrong than how to fix it.

I understand and endorse the philosophy that it’s unfair to demand things of volunteers already donating their time and skills to the public, but it creates some interdisciplinary problems. Even if capable UX designers were to tackle the issue and propose solutions or improvements, they might not all have the skills to actually implement them, so they’d have to rely on developers to indulge their requests.
And from my own experience, devs tend to prioritise function over form, because techy people are often adept enough at navigating less-polished interfaces. Creating a pretty frontend takes away time from creating stuff I’d find useful.

I don’t know if there’s an easy solution. The intersection between “People that can approach software from the perspective of a non-tech user”, “People that are willing to approach techy Software” and “People that are tech-savy enough to be able to fix the usability issues” is probably very small.

It’s so big that it can take a lot of bleeding before it dies. It doesn’t help that there is no significant enough consensus yet on an alternative.

It seems like some people are flocking to bsky, probably because it has better visibility and seems more accessible than Mastodon (“What’s an instance? How do I pick?”). Others are heading to Threads just because it’s there already.

If enough people move to some other platform to generate a critical mass, they’ll pull others too. Until then, inertia will keep X rolling a good while to come.

I prefer Mastodon to what is ultimately still a for-profit corporation (“public benefit” notwithstanding), but both are better than Twatter.

The value of distributed redundancy

For the elites: conserve their hierarchy and the structures that enable the gradual accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

For the rest: conserve their place in the hierarchy and the comfort of the familiar.

I appreciate that you took the time to supply the nuances I omitted. While there is value in a positive framing, it’s important to acknowledge potential struggles as well. We can’t effectively tackle issues if we’re not aware of them.

In any case, while I’m not qualified to help you with your difficulties, I hope you find - or have found - a way to work on overcoming them. Dealing with insecurities, from my own experience, can be a tough process, further amplified by setbacks and a lack of perceived progress. But if you persevere, even if you might not feel that you have improved much, you may find yourself looking back at a time when it was worse and, by contrast, see the progress you’ve made. May that hope, that your future self will look back and be proud of your hard work, give you the strength to keep going.

Hourly wages for school teachers? I’m worried I might know the response, but does prep work outside school hours, in breaks etc. count as hours worked?

I considered that option too, but opted to go with the more positive guess. I’m not qualified either way, I just wanted to say something nice.

Well, you sound like a team player. You place the common good (fun together) higher than individual ambitions (or maybe place your own worth very low, I can’t tell from one sentence, but the outcome is the same).

Saying deliberately sounds like it’s not just a thing that you find yourself doing again and again, but a conscious choice. That suggests there was a choice to make; that the option of playing a self-centered character was something you were actively aware of, but were sufficiently repulsed by it to make a point of being better than those people.

I think you’re a nice person, empathetic, while not so entirely innocent as to not even consider the possibility, still principled and caring enough to actively defy it.

I think you’re a net good for this world.

Linux in general and Arch in particular are kinda laissez-faire in that they’ll allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. Some distros may put barriers in your way, others practically hand you the gun, but at the end of the day, the gun is freely available and it’s your own foot that you’re shooting.

That… that’s what they were saying, no? Companies should worry about their shit.

Butterfly gang