So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent…

I dunno how common a use case that would be. I’ve a laptop that makes a great job of Dwarf Fortress but gets a bit hot and choppy when doing 3D, and a gaming desktop for ‘everything else’. I certainly don’t want those settings synchronised. My friends with Steam Decks like the cloud saves but need to set lower settings than their ‘main computers’. Strikes me as unusual to have multiple machines with roughly equal capability, unless you’re an internet cafe from the 90’s and have multiplayer Doom set up.

I quite liked how the original Linux fix for the Spectre-style speculative execution bug on Intel processors was called “Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines”, but alas, in the interest of diplomacy it was renamed to “Kernel Page Table Isolation” (KPTI) rather than “FUCKWIT”.

Doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, but of course, all search results are dogshit in this new age: https://wccftech.com/intel-kernel-memory-leak-bug-speculative-execution-performance-hit/

You are not joking. Comparing a $2000 Purism Liberty with eg. a $200 HMD Fusion. The Fusion has somewhat better screen and battery; much better processor and camera. More RAM, the option of more storage, has NFC. It’s also designed to be easy-to-maintain, but is somewhat thinner and lighter despite having a larger screen area. Are ‘made in USA’ and ‘open-source drivers’ worth paying 10x as much for a noticeably worse phone? (It’s not really ‘made in USA’ either - it’s a mix of US, Chinese and Indian parts assembled in the USA.)

I think that the people who believe a US-made iPhone will also cost $2k are kidding themselves - economy of scale and all that, but it must be substantially more.

Yeah, mine was similar. Had some old Win95 machines from work that were getting thrown away; scavenged as much RAM as possible into one case and left Red Hat Linux downloading overnight on the company modem. Needed two boxes of floppy disks for the installer, and I joined up a 60 MB and an 80MB hard drive using LVM to create the installation drive. It was a surprisingly functional machine - much better at networking than it was as a Win95 computer - but yeah, those days are long gone.

Loved it, but absolutely hit a wall with it until they released the “take half damage” difficulty patch. Then I found it fun again. I love a challenging video game, but the “slightly loose dodging controls” and the requirement for basically perfect execution to defeat the bosses didn’t sit well with me. The Garden Knight was bad enough, the ones that come after it were just silly.

Nothing to me says ‘sexy’ quite like your grandad and your great-grandad being the same guy, or your (great * 5)-grandmother / grandfather being one man and woman, when most people have that responsibility spread between 64 people.

Close family. Must have made Christmas easy - having the in-laws round isn’t so bad when they’re your own blood relatives too.

Three months of using Arch and you’ve not included your ‘btw’ when claiming to use it? Most suspicious.

But yeah, agree completely. I made a new-years resolution about five years ago to try ‘Linux only gaming for a month’ rather than dual booting; worked so well that I wiped Windows a few months later and have never missed it for a minute. That was for Mint, which is great but hard to keep cutting-edge. Decided to try Arch instead, and after a couple of false starts (hadn’t read the install guide carefully enough to have networking after restart, that kind of thing) it’s been absolutely superb - rock solid, got everything I want at the very latest versions for work and games, best documentation of any distro.

Although you should give the egg to the thief (he can open it and you can’t) and then kill him and retrieve it from his dead body later, otherwise you can’t win the game. Obviously.

Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.

Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I’ve grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.

If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.

I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.

Does make me think about the story of Thales of Miletus; ancient Greek philosopher, got asked what use was philosophy if it doesn’t make you any money. Predicted good weather, and monopolised all the olive presses, made a fortune.

For a modern example; shares in Rheinmetall (German firm who make, amongst other things, the turrets for tanks) have gone through the roof after the recent US debacle. I could have told you a year ago that Trump getting in would have meant the US abandoning Ukraine; obvious in hindsight that that would mean a boon for European arms manufacturers.

I don’t think you need to be quick to take advantage. I think you need insight. If there’s a topic that you’re knowledgeable about and you can see which way the wind is blowing, then you can make your own boat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presses

Well; I was one of the people that bought Minute Of Islands when it came out. Nice game - mournful tone, but beautiful in places. Bit of a “walking simulator” disguised as a platform game, though - not much replay value, I don’t think.

What does surprise me is that Fizbin had hundreds of employees to lose, however. MoI had a really “art school indie” feel to it - I’d have guessed at more like ten employees having played through it. Gris (by Nomada) is the kind of *art platformer" that I’d draw as a comparison - Gris has much more action - and they look to be about forty people.

Obviously this is bad for everyone involved, but I suspect that the mismanagement that got them here might have been “dreaming too big” rather than purely “screwed by the publisher”.

Presumably whoever took this picture was sat on top of the beer fridge? Otherwise there’s a pretty serious omission here…

True. I’d mentally envisioned it as a whole series of “bread powered water wheels” down the side of the building, with a furnace at the bottom. Nothing actually going fast enough for friction to matter. A machine that only tried to convert all the kinetic energy at the bottom would be wasteful, as you say.

Plainly, we’re going to have to put some engineering design time into the concept of this.

Well, there’s your problem. You’ve plugged a Romantic Robot into the place where your Kempston joystick should be. Never going to win at Daley Thompson’s without perfecting your waggle. Also, the Speccy will probably crash from hammering the keyboard if you try.

Midnight Resistance is one of those weird games where the first level is the hardest; it’s not too bad to finish it if you do the first bit. Fair play on Robocop, though - that’s a hard game.

A kilogram of bread is about 2000 calories, about 9 kJ. Your body “burns” food too - probably more efficiently than you could make a steam engine for the same, but it’s about that much.

Energy from gravity is equal to mass * gravity acceleration * height. 1 kg of bread in a 9.81 m/s/s field has the same gravitational potential at “about a kilometer”.

If you’re throwing magic stake baguettes off the top of the Burj Khalifa, the energy would be about equal.

AI does give itself away over “longer” posts, and if the tool makes about an equal number of false positives to false negatives then it should even itself out in the long run. (I’d have liked more than 9K “tests” for it to average out, but even so.) If they had the edit history for the post, which they didn’t, then it’s more obvious. AI will either copy-paste the whole thing in in one go, or will generate a word at a time at a fairly constant rate. Humans will stop and think, go back and edit things, all of that.

I was asked to do some job interviews recently; the tech test had such an “animated playback”, and the difference between a human doing it legitimately and someone using AI to copy-paste the answer was surprisingly obvious. The tech test questions were nothing to do with the job role at hand and were causing us to select for the wrong candidates completely, but that’s more a problem with our HR being blindly in love with AI and “technical solutions to human problems”.

“Absolute certainty” is impossible, but balance of probabilities will do if you’re just wanting an estimate like they have here.

Made worse in nu xcom because shooting generally ends your turn and leaves you open to retaliation - sixty percent shot implies forty percent chance of death, and death of an experienced trooper is extremely bad. Old xcom, you could duck out of cover, take a shot, and duck back in, so “bad” chances to hit aren’t such a problem.

Which leads to my other part of the problem with nu xcom. The original, you could load fourteen dipshits into the skyranger and they could all take their 14% shots; if half of them came back alive, then it’s promotions all round. A meat grinder for sure, but the loss of a couple of soldiers isn’t a disaster - your fault for sending your most experienced guys first through the door if it is. The new one requires exceedingly cautious play and luck. Nothing like as bad as Phoenix Point, of course, but spoiled it a bit for me.

Tactics is choosing who to send in first. Strategy is being able to recover if that goes wrong. Nu Xcom is all tactics and not enough strategy.

Well yeah. You barely use groups on a personal machine - maybe once and done for audio and VMs, depending on what distro you use - and at work you’d automate that shit, probably have it centralised.