Today, Nintendo hosted the first of what appears to be a new, regular format for the company going forward, the Nintendo Direct Mini: Partners Showcase.

At eight minutes long, today’s show gave us a very quick look at just a small handful of games, providing release dates and content updates for titles on Switch, as well as several more announcements in the Japanese-specific video. The reaction, however, has been mixed to say the least.

Now, it’s worth noting that Nintendo came out with a warning right from the off, saying that the Direct would be “focused on titles from our development and publishing partners” – so no Mario, Smash Bros., etc. In its announcement posts for the show, Nintendo said, “We’ll share a few updates on a small group of previously-announced Nintendo Switch games”, clearly attempting to dampen the levels of hype such an announcement would usually spark.

Still, though, a quick search for ‘Nintendo Direct’ on social media brings up plenty of comments from those who have been left feeling angry after wanting and expecting more. For every angry comment, you’ll find another from those who are in disbelief that any anger can even exist following Nintendo’s hype-killing comments, and a similar story can be seen across our very own comment sections.

So, we hand it over to you. Were you happy with the show? Did it meet your expectations? Or were you hoping for more?

Feel free to expand upon your answer in the comments below, and make sure to check back later to see the poll’s results.

Less than a week after a protected Twitter handle for F-Zero was discovered – featuring a recovery email that seemingly matched Nintendo’s ‘nintendo.co.jp’ address – it now appears to have been confirmed as a fake account.

Since then, the Twitter page has tweeted its first message in the form of a video, and let’s just say it’s not very family-friendly, at all – this indicates it has no connection to Nintendo. According to Google translate, the message attached to the tweet is “I did it” – in other words, it’s likely a cruel joke.

The reason this Twitter account caught the attention of so many in the first place, is not only because the attached email looked like a Nintendo one, but the fact it was created in March 2020 – the same time as the SuperMario35th Twitter page. As one reply puts it:

@Horhey_FF Imagine creating an account 4 months ago just to create a fake leak months later
That’s some next level s***

While some F-Zero fans remain hopeful, others say they were never convinced in the first place:

@HydraBravoWC F-Zero fan here, you never fooled me. All leaks involving F-Zero are fake.

Of course, now all the attention has turned to the Super Mario Twitter account that was discovered earlier last week. As previously mentioned, it was also created in March of this year and has a similar looking email address linked to it. At the time of writing, no tweets have been made by this account.

Is the Mario account also a fake? Or is it the real deal? We’ll leave you to discuss this in the comments below.

In January, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, President Brad Smith, and Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood launched a bold new environmental sustainability initiative focusing on carbon, water, waste and biodiversity. We began this work by announcing one of the most ambitious carbon commitments put forward by any company: Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030 and remove from the environment more carbon than we have emitted since our founding by 2050. We outlined a detailed plan to get there and committed to providing updates on our progress. We have been working hard to turn our commitments into action and, today, we are announcing seven important new steps on our path to be carbon negative by 2030.

Enabling cross-sector business transformation

Together with eight other corporations leading the way to a climate-stable future, we have launched a new coalition, Transform to Net Zero. Guided by science and transparency, the coalition will work to accelerate business action toward a net zero carbon economy. Once an organization sets sustainability goals, the hard work of transforming its business to meet them begins. We have heard from both those with carbon goals and those that want to engage but don’t know where to start that they need information and tools to close the gap between intention and transformation. The coalition will begin by bringing together industry leaders with some of the world’s most ambitious carbon goals and will work to create playbooks on how to achieve net zero. The founding members are A.P. Moeller – Maersk, Danone, Mercedes-Benz AG, Microsoft, Natura & Co., Nike, Starbucks, Unilever and Wipro. The Environmental Defense Fund is the founding NGO member and BSR will serve as secretariat.

The Transform to Net Zero coalition will focus on moving beyond commitments to business transformation. Working together, members will work to enable all businesses to achieve net zero emissions by: sharing the business transformation each company is undertaking to achieve net zero emissions by 2050; delivering robust emission reductions across the business and value chains; working jointly with our partners across supply chains; innovating and investing at scale in products, services and business models that amplify impact; and engaging with policymakers to incentivize progress toward net zero. Importantly, the coalition will also focus on ensuring that the coming transition to a low-carbon economy is an equitable and just one.

Empowering our customers

Today, we’re also announcing the private preview of a new product offering, the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator. It’s challenging to make and meet meaningful carbon reduction goals without the ability to measure carbon emissions. The Microsoft Sustainability Calculator provides our cloud customers transparency into their total carbon emissions – Scopes 1, 2 and 3 – resulting from their cloud usage. Microsoft is the only cloud provider to provide full transparency to customers across all three scopes of emissions.

Using AI and advanced analytics, the Microsoft Sustainability Calculator provides actionable insights on how to reduce emissions, the ability to forecast emissions, and simplifies carbon reporting. It uses consistent and accurate carbon accounting to quantify the impact of Microsoft cloud services on your environmental footprint. It calculates how moving additional applications and services to the cloud will help further reduce your emissions. It easily identifies and compiles reports for voluntary or statutory reporting requirements.

Reducing our own carbon emissions

To reduce our Scope 1 and 2 emissions to near zero, we need to change how we operate. We’re on the path to obtaining renewable energy power purchase agreements for 100% of the day-to-day power of our data centers by the middle of this decade. Today, we’re additionally announcing that we’re aiming to eliminate our dependency on diesel fuel by 2030.

Cloud providers around the world rely on diesel-powered generators for backup power to support continuous data center operations. While diesel fuel accounts for less than 1% of our overall emissions, we believe it’s important to help accelerate the global transition away from fossil fuels. We’re charting a new course using low-carbon fuel sources, including hydrogen and energy storage. We recognize the challenges this might entail and that we need help in developing a robust supply chain for these fuels and advancements in battery technology, but we’re ready to work with partners across the world while leveraging investments from our Climate Innovation Fund to make this a reality.

On July 1, we extended our internal carbon tax to every part of our operations, including Scope 3. Additionally, we’ve updated our Supplier Code of Conduct. Suppliers will now calculate and report their Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas emissions data. In the upcoming months, we’ll be working with our suppliers on a phased approach to develop a timeline, new ideas, tools and processes. This reporting is the first significant step toward helping our suppliers reduce their emissions in alignment with Microsoft’s goals of transparency in emissions reductions.

Removing our own carbon emissions

Our climate commitments require us to reduce our carbon emissions by more than half by 2030 and remove the rest, while also removing all of our historical emissions since we were founded in 1975 by 2050. We aren’t waiting until 2030 to get started. This fiscal year, Microsoft is taking concrete steps to remove 1 million metric tons of carbon from the environment. As the first step, this week we will issue a groundbreaking request for proposal (RFP) to source that carbon removal from a range of nature- and technology-based solutions that are net negative and verified to a high degree of scientific integrity.

To ensure that our funding will maximize carbon being taken out of the atmosphere, we are doubling down on scientific verification of each project, and using this RFP to harvest and share best available science and market intelligence on carbon removal. Each project will be rigorously vetted and verified by Microsoft as well as our third-party scientific and market advisors, including NGO Winrock International and the advisory firm Carbon Direct, which brings together leading climate science academics.

This is a first-of-its-kind approach and we don’t expect to get everything right. We will learn what works and doesn’t, improving our approach along the way. We will also publicly share our learnings from this process so others can accelerate their own carbon removal efforts.

Using our balance sheet

We’re announcing our first investment from the $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund that Amy Hood announced in January. We will invest $50 million in Energy Impact Partners’ (EIP) global platform for innovation of new technologies to transform the world’s energy and transportation systems, the two sectors that account for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. EIP is a leading venture capital firm focused on decarbonized, decentralized energy industry transition that shares learnings among partners and facilitates collaboration.

Investing in climate equity and environmental justice

Finally, we’re taking a step beyond what we announced in January. We recognize that climate and environmental issues don’t affect every community the same way and that we need to address environmental equity as a broader issue. Today, we’re announcing a new innovative partnership with Sol Systems, a renewable energy developer and investor, for 500 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy that includes investments in communities disproportionately affected by environmental challenges.

This is the single largest renewable energy portfolio investment Microsoft has ever made, and is about a quarter of all of our previously procured renewable energy. Prior to this partnership, the total amount of renewable energy Microsoft has procured is approximately 1.9 gigawatts. To put it in context, 500 MW would power more than 70,000 homes in the US per year.

Some communities are disproportionately affected by environmental issues. The data shows that black and African American people in the United States are exposed to 1.54 times more hazardous pollution than white people and to 50% higher rates of particulate pollution than the general population. Researchers connect exposure to these increased level of pollutants to higher rates of asthma, lung cancer and heart disease.

Our work with Sol Systems is a first-of-its-kind initiative tying the purchasing of renewable energy to environmental justice and equity in under-resourced communities. Putting into action planning that started in December 2019, this partnership will:

• Develop a portfolio of 500MW of solar energy projects in the US in under-resourced communities, working with local leaders and prioritizing minority and women-owned businesses
• Provide at least $50 million for community-led grants and investments that support educational programs, job and career training, habitat restoration and programs that support access to clean energy and energy efficiency
• Focus on communities that are economically under-resourced, disproportionately impacted by pollution and/or lack access to the benefits of the clean energy transition
• Ensure that community benefits are realized with accountability measures, including using third-party evaluators to quantify and document social and environmental outcomes of the initiative

As a result of this agreement, Microsoft will be closer to achieving its goals of shifting to 100% renewable energy by 2025 and help address issues of climate equity and environmental justice.

Conclusion

Our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. This is in line with our belief that “the purpose of business is to produce profitable solutions to the problems of people and planet.” That’s why we’re working every day to address the climate crisis. It is good for the planet and it is good for Microsoft.

We cannot achieve our sustainability ambitions alone – this update reflects an extraordinary amount of hard work and dedication across Microsoft and with customers, partners, NGOs and others around the world. Working together, we can build a more sustainable future.

Tags: carbon emissions, carbon neutral, Environmental Sustainability, sustainability, Transform to Net Zero

A brand new horror game, Mundaun, has been revealed for Switch. It’s expected to launch on Nintendo’s platform in Q1 2021.

Mundaun is the first full-length title from Hidden Fields, a one-man studio founded by Swiss programmer and illustrator Michel Ziegler. The characters, scenes and environments you see in the trailer above have all been hand-pencilled, with the game being influenced by dark, mythical folklore from the Swiss Alps.

It’s still early days, but we have an overview, feature list and a piece of promotional art for you to check out below:

Overview: After learning of his grandfather’s mysterious death in a fire, the protagonist travels to Mundaun for the first time since childhood. He will soon discover that something old and diabolical is haunting the remaining inhabitants. The quest to find out the meaning behind these sinister events takes players on an odyssey up Mundaun mountain, across steep meadows to stony fields and snow-covered peaks.

Mundaun is a lovingly hand-pencilled horror tale set in a dark, secluded valley of the alps. Players will explore areas full of secrets, survive hostile encounters, drive vehicles and solve a variety of hand-crafted puzzles in the search for truth.

Key Features:
●Inspired by the dark, mythical folklore of the Swiss Alps: Mundaun’s mysteries unfold in an alpine world, taking players across meadows and snowy peaks where reality and myth intertwine-beware of the creatures roaming the landscape.
●A hand-pencilled aesthetic: A lovingly hand-drawn tale told in greyscale, with every character, scene and environmental textures sketched by Swiss programmer and illustrator Michel Ziegler.
●Fear resistance factor: A “cause and effect” system that affects gameplay. The more intense the feeling of fear, the more slowly the player will move.
●Puzzle-based action: Solve puzzles that are integrated into the game world to make your way up the mountain.
●Interactive environment: Speak with eccentric inhabitants who even have their own obscure spoken language, and traverse the landscape in vehicles such as sleighs and hay loaders.

We’ll keep an eye out for more on this one as we get closer to that 2021 launch, but feel free to share your early thoughts with us in the comments below.

This tutorial will teach you how to write one-line for loops in Python using the popular expert feature of list comprehension. After you’ve learned the basics of list comprehension, you’ll learn how to restrict list comprehensions so that you can write custom filters quickly and effectively.

Are you ready? Let’s roll up your sleeves and learn about list comprehension in Python!

List Comprehension Basics

The following section is based on my detailed article List Comprehension [Ultimate Guide]. Read the shorter version here or the longer version on the website—you decide!

This overview graphic shows how to use list comprehension statement to create Python lists programmatically:

List comprehension is a compact way of creating lists. The simple formula is [expression + context].

• Expression: What to do with each list element?
• Context: What elements to select? The context consists of an arbitrary number of for and if statements.

The example [x for x in range(3)] creates the list [0, 1, 2].

Have a look at the following interactive code snippet—can you figure out what’s printed to the shell? Go ahead and click “Run” to see what happens in the code:

Exercise: Run the code snippet and compare your guessed result with the actual one. Were you correct?

Now, that you know about the basics of list comprehension (expression + context!), let’s dive into a more advanced example where list comprehension is used for filtering by adding an if clause to the context part.

List Comprehension for Filtering (using If Clauses)

You can also modify the list comprehension statement by restricting the context with another if statement:

Problem: Say, we want to create a list of squared numbers—but you only consider even and ignore odd numbers.

Example: The multi-liner way would be the following.

squares = [] for i in range(10): if i%2==0: squares.append(i**2) print(squares)

# [0, 4, 16, 36, 64]

You create an empty list squares and successively add another square number starting from 0**2 and ending in 8**2—but only considering the even numbers 0, 2, 4, 6, 8. Thus, the result is the list [0, 4, 16, 36, 64].

Again, you can use list comprehension [i**2 for i in range(10) if i%2==0] with a restrictive if clause (in bold) in the context part to compress this in a single line of Python code:

print([i**2 for i in range(10) if i%2==0])

# [0, 4, 16, 36, 64]

This line accomplishes the same output with much less bits.

Related Article: Python One Line For Loop

Python One-Liners Book

Python programmers will improve their computer science skills with these useful one-liners.

Python One-Liners will teach you how to read and write “one-liners”: concise statements of useful functionality packed into a single line of code. You’ll learn how to systematically unpack and understand any line of Python code, and write eloquent, powerfully compressed Python like an expert.

The book’s five chapters cover tips and tricks, regular expressions, machine learning, core data science topics, and useful algorithms. Detailed explanations of one-liners introduce key computer science concepts and boost your coding and analytical skills. You’ll learn about advanced Python features such as list comprehension, slicing, lambda functions, regular expressions, map and reduce functions, and slice assignments. You’ll also learn how to:

•  Leverage data structures to solve real-world problems, like using Boolean indexing to find cities with above-average pollution
•  Use NumPy basics such as array, shape, axis, type, broadcasting, advanced indexing, slicing, sorting, searching, aggregating, and statistics
•  Calculate basic statistics of multidimensional data arrays and the K-Means algorithms for unsupervised learning
•  Create more advanced regular expressions using grouping and named groups, negative lookaheads, escaped characters, whitespaces, character sets (and negative characters sets), and greedy/nongreedy operators
•  Understand a wide range of computer science topics, including anagrams, palindromes, supersets, permutations, factorials, prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, obfuscation, searching, and algorithmic sorting

By the end of the book, you’ll know how to write Python at its most refined, and create concise, beautiful pieces of “Python art” in merely a single line.

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Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory, let’s get some practice!

To become successful in coding, you need to get out there and solve real problems for real people. That’s how you can become a six-figure earner easily. And that’s how you polish the skills you really need in practice. After all, what’s the use of learning theory that nobody ever needs?

Practice projects is how you sharpen your saw in coding!

Do you want to become a code master by focusing on practical code projects that actually earn you money and solve problems for people?

Then become a Python freelance developer! It’s the best way of approaching the task of improving your Python skills—even if you are a complete beginner.

Join my free webinar “How to Build Your High-Income Skill Python” and watch how I grew my coding business online and how you can, too—from the comfort of your own home.

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