I love hardware that doesn’t require sideloading. I bought the whole house, including the front door, and I will use the front door. If they don’t allow me to use the front door, then I don’t really own the house after all, do I, so what did I even pay for?
I’m Canadian, so I instinctively just round 5 bucks up to 8 bucks instead (adding exchange and tax)
I think he makes a good point. Nobody is asking anybody to take superhuman, over the top actions to stop this, when we say you are responsible it doesn’t mean you are responsible for fixing all of it on your own, we are all responsible, yes, but we are all responsible for fixing just a little bit of it. All anyone is asking for is for people to provide a little resistance. Even token resistance helps. Do something, try to think of something you can do to apply the brakes, put up obstacles, even small ones, to do anything that slows this train down. It may seem inconsequential but it isn’t. The more people who do that, the more resistance they face, the harder it’s going to be for them to continue. Minneapolis has the right idea, watch them and learn. Yes there are risks, and the risks are not fairly distributed. Some people will pay the price for no obvious fucking reason, and that’s really scary and horrific.
Unfortunately, even more will pay the price in the future, the more desperate they get, and that will be true whether we do anything to resist or not. Don’t get hung up on “what am I supposed to do, I have no power to stop them” yes you do, we all do, in very small ways, there are at least 100+ million other people who will have to do their part too, and eventually we hope they all will, but you can at least make sure you do yours. Do something. There are so many people who have been made to feel helpless, overwhelmed, scared, or convinced to just wait until something or someone else fixes things and that’s on purpose, to make sure they don’t try anything. But we have to. Just try anyway.
This is what it looks like when a house is still desperately trying to hold itself together in some semblance of proper working order but is relying on a foundation that is no longer there. The house still looks alright on the surface, maybe a little warped and misshapen, some cracks here and there, doors that don’t close anymore, but the really severe damage is underneath, and it’s damage that can’t be repaired. The foundation has collapsed. The systems the house is relying on to be there to allow it to do its own job aren’t there anymore. It keeps trying to do its job anyway, but it cannot succeed. There is no hope for the house being salvaged. The house is gone. It may take 20 years for it to collapse completely, but there’s no way you’re ever going to really fix it. If we had the equipment we could lift it up, build a new foundation underneath and set it carefully back down and then patch up all the damage that was done, but that’s going to be a lot of work, with no guarantee of success, no guarantee it will ever be as good as it once was, and I’m not sure we have the equipment we need to pull it off. Bulldozing it and starting over starts to look more and more appealing every day.
I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
Forced marriage to a violent, abusive bully, vs study group with a disorganized slightly autistic nerd who’s really smart. I don’t want to spoil the endings, but I think we should all be able to figure out which one is going to have a positive impact on our lives and which one’s going to turn us into a domestic violence statistic.
Distro-hopping is very fun and educational, but don’t dump a working system for an experiment unless you’re forced to or you’re just a masochist.
Play around with it, try and recreate your current setup within it, and once (if) you’re comfortable enough to do that, then consider replacing your main server with it.
There’s plenty of more wild distros out there too. I love Debian, I use it a lot, but you’ll also learn a ton by trying to wrap your head around Fedora Silverblue, NixOS, Arch or Gentoo. It used to be a rite of passage to build your own LFS (Linux From Scratch) distro, not sure if people even do that anymore, but you’ll probably learn a metric shitton if you try.
Yes, I am very aware of this, I have known this since I started paying taxes. It’s very, very abundantly clear. Legal loopholes are fine, I don’t have to agree with the laws, but I do agree to follow them until we get them changed (which we must). But illegal tax dodging? Are you trying to convince me I should respect anyone for that? Even if I believed they have good motives or reasons, which I don’t, there are lots of better ways to practice civil disobedience than withholding taxes like it’s a fucking tip for good government.
It is definitely incredibly common, yes. Like I said, the laws are generally not effectively enforced, and they’re also intentionally limited. For some reason, we have decided it is totally acceptable to do that when you don’t have a recognized monopoly position, which Sony doesn’t in that market. It’s very particular, it’s very specific, and it’s very subjective, which is probably a huge part of why they aren’t effectively enforced. Also, companies know all the ways to get around the ways the laws are written if they really want to.
We still don’t really follow them even when the laws probably do apply though, it’s just vestigial at this point. We’re supposed to believe the antitrust laws were only meant for those old, bad monopolies like Standard Oil and Ma Bell. We don’t really have monopolies like that anymore, all our monopolies are the good kind of monopolies that don’t harm society, or they’re not monopolies at all, they’re coordinating oligopolies that constantly partner with and all own chunks of each other, which means they’re also perfectly fine and not any kind of bad monopoly at all.
I didn’t write the laws, there are lots of things about them that I think could be vastly improved. But I do agree with their intent, and we shouldn’t forget what their intent is, just because our current financial and political environment is not interested in them.
In general I agree it’s overblown, but as far as closed loop cooling, that’s a misdirection. Even the so-called closed loop systems usually rely on a secondary cooling loop with evaporative cooling towers that cool the primary closed loop. While it is an improvement that they aren’t just treating the primary coolant as single-use and dumping it after it’s heated, the inclusion of the secondary cooling loop means it does not eliminate water usage. Basically, in the secondary (open) loop they continuously flow water onto the radiators, typically using large arrays of cross-flow cooling towers like this until the combination of heat and forced airflow turns the water into vapor and that phase change sucks the heat out much faster than airflow alone would allow. But the water becomes vapor and has been blown away, so you need to add more water continuously. True “dry cooling” implementations do exist using only air cooling and direct heat exchange in the final stage, but they are rare and very much the exception, not the norm, especially in the southern US where most of the data centers are being built. If the air is cool enough on its own, or your heat load is low enough, you can get away without evaporating any water, but most of the time especially in the hot climate of the south, you’ll need that water to satisfy the cooling demands, and quite a lot of it.
Granted, I don’t think the water usage is as big a problem as people make it out to be, water is something we can create sustainably and straightforwardly when we have enough energy, and at the end of the day it boils down to just being another form of the massive energy problem created by these new facilities being foisted upon us at a time when we are already desperately struggling to make sufficient energy and meet our energy demands in an environmentally friendly way. Meanwhile, fossil fuels will “helpfully” fill those needs effortlessly, undoing all the hard work we’ve done and the progress we’ve made and of course making certain people and countries a lot more money.
It was shallow because he was bleeding out at the time from all the gunshot wounds, give him a break, he did his best.
Mario has a brother, who I’ve heard of recently.
I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know that’s actually incorrect, selling a product below cost is considered predatory dumping, as it means literally nobody can afford to compete with you on anything resembling a level playing field. How is any competitor supposed to release a competing product when Gabe is using his own financial resources for “eating the price spikes”. Unless you have your own financial resources or massive speculative investment, you cannot also “eat the price spikes” so your own products will have to be priced at realistic levels so that it is something that actually earns you some level of profit in order for your business to continue and grow, and thus those products will be far more expensive than Valve’s subsidized product, and thus, you probably won’t sell any unless you have some significant further advantage, which you shouldn’t need to have in order to simply compete with the market leader. That’s a clear barrier to entry, and is the definition of anti-competitive.
Usually, this would be done to lock the subsidized buyers into a particular ecosystem, or even just to bundle that ecosystem by default (aka illegal bundling, like Microsoft did for years) from which additional profit can later be expected. In Valve’s case, this would be Steam, and it pretty clearly would profit them in the long run, and this strategy also keeping all competitors out by dumping hardware below cost, thus abusing their Steam distribution monopoly to fund a second monopoly on the Steam Machines market to maintain their first monopoly. That’s literally what antitrust laws were designed for. Just because we don’t really effectively enforce them anymore I feel like people have started losing sight of what they mean and what they are supposed to be for and I don’t think we should just normalize that this is how businesses are supposed to operate.
And that’s why Valve probably won’t do that. (at least I suspect they won’t, based on my view of their history, I have no insider knowledge)
I love paying my share of taxes and I will always do so to the absolute best of my ability, whether the amount is justified or not. Taxes are wonderful, represent an investment in your country and your society, and can be used to create great things that benefit all of us.
My anger is not for taxes, my anger is exclusively reserved for those who do not pay their share of taxes and the shamefully dishonest politicians who porkbarrel those taxes into things that mostly benefit themselves and then sabotage other politicians attempts to do actual good because they’re not benefiting themselves.
Taxes are not the problem. Those people are the problem, and we are going to have to do something about those people. I am working deliberately and relentlessly towards that goal instead. I believe in civilization and society and I will rebuild this fucking thing from the ground up, brick by brick if I have to.
Also there’s a big part of this that is intentional sabotage and manipulation by a wide network of chaos-creators that mostly seem to lead back to Putin. When a former-KGB kleptocrat steals and controls everything in the world’s largest country and becomes effectively probably one of the world’s richest men, and then starts playing 4d chess with all the world’s other richest men, I guess it turns out you can probably cause a lot of chaos and quite possibly completely destroy the international global order.
I’m willing to bet that is one of Putin’s goals, but it’s not his only goal, and just because he’s evidently accomplished it with gusto still doesn’t mean Putin is actually capable of accomplishing all his other goals of building or being part of any sort of new world order, because this chaos only destroys and tears things down. He’s got destruction down to a science, and I’m sure he thinks he can leverage that to create what he wants in the world, but he’s failed at that and will continue to fail. But he has proven he can fuck things up pretty badly for the rest of us, whether we want to admit it or not, so, personally I’m willing to give him credit where credit is due.
The real question is, are we going to accept that what came before is irretrievably broken, and if we are willing to do that, what are we going to build in its place? Because with chaos comes opportunity, but those opportunities are few and limited. The chaos will continue, and the chaos can worsen. Significantly. If we’re going to turn this around, we have to be smart about it. There are a lot of paths that lead to very bad places, and only a few that have good endings. And you’d better believe that Putin and other forces of chaos are still going be trying to sabotage those too, even more aggressively as they realize their own dreams will never come to fruition.
I think we’ve got to start by rooting out all the elements of corruption that have allowed this to happen, or else anything we try to build in its place will be built on quicksand. What exactly those are? I have a bunch of opinions, but that’s where the debate will start to happen, and I think we’re going to need to start having those conversations before we can really address this. We need to establish our philosophical foundations and values, agree that we all value human life, that we value all lived human experiences, and that all humans are created equal, and I think we can go from there to try to define and refine exactly what those things mean and how we’re going to implement those values into building a civilization that we actually want to live in and that other people want to live in too, where we can all agree on these things and find ways to pursue equality and happiness for all.
There is really no general answer to this that applies in all cases. It depends on a lot of factors, including what body shape and size you have normally, and what kind of clothes you’re willing to/normally wear, and who you’re hoping to hide it from, and how far you’re willing/able to go to try to hide it. There are always ways to hide it if you’re willing to go to extremes, in Victorian times people would just head off to some remote country estate and allow no visitors until the baby was born and they were ready to “return to society”. Of course that kind of pattern of unusual behavior can also reinforce any suspicions, so it’s always going to depend on who exactly you’re trying to hide it from and how much they already know about you or how much they might suspect that you’re pregnant.
A casual stranger on the street who has no context about who you are or what you looked like before your pregnancy and only encounters you a single time might have a much tougher time ever confidently identifying you as “pregnant” beyond a reasonable doubt unless it’s really obvious and it’s not always going to be obvious for everyone with every body type even in the late stages of pregnancy, it may not even occur to them. On the other extreme, if you’re living with and trying to hide it from your mom, or your partner, or even a close friend, and they’re vigilant for the possibility that you might be pregnant and are paying careful attention? Good luck, they’re going to figure it out sooner or later and probably a lot sooner than anyone else because they have so much familiarity with you as a person, and even your habits and behaviors, and they might even start noticing some changes intuitively even if they aren’t visibly obvious, including changes that you might not even have noticed yourself. And that just snowballs into more careful attention and analysis until they figure out what is probably going on with you. Sometimes they might even know or suspect it before you do. It happens.
Sure, potentially, that’s an interesting theory but what difference does it make? That doesn’t change his guilt or responsibility. Even if that were the case, being willing to own your mistakes publicly is a perfect antidote to blackmail.
Elon chose instead to try to weaponize the very Epstein files that apparently implicate him, against other people (who are granted also guilty and vile reprehensible individuals, so he gets a pass for that) while trying to convince everyone that he was completely innocent, and, assuming your theory is true, felt protecting his own reputation from the blackmail threat was more important than contributing to the death of over a million people to try to avoid the blackmail. Zero accountability and lies and murder, and we’re supposed to forgive Elon even a little and direct more of the blame to evil Russia instead? I don’t think so. There’s plenty of guilt and responsibility to go around, we don’t need to ration it. Elon is evil, Russia is evil, neither of them have done anything to deserve any sympathy from me. I don’t care what was going on behind the closed doors of those dirty, dirty people, the things they were doing to each other and why are irrelevant factors to me, all I care about is what they were collectively doing to other, innocent people, and that is what I will judge them for.
Welcome to fascism! Enjoy your stay!
Death to AAA, long live indie passion project shareware nonsense.
And don’t forget the part where, whether they get a bailout or not, they’ll still have to double the prices of everything to make up for all the money they lost on that stupid AI bubble exploding in their face (which all of us are somehow to blame for, obviously, which is why we have to pay them back for it)