So the space obsessed man-child generated his own stupid encyclopedia, and for this generous all-giving knowledge resource he chooses a stylized BLACK HOLE for the logo.

It feels like the nerd equivalent to that quote about how the anti-semite arguing in bad faith enjoys seeing others frustrated by their hypocrisy. Here lemme just find that pasta…

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Jean-Paul Sartre

As somebody who (1) loves the beauty of the natural world and (2) lives in the USA, I’m hearing that NZ might be a most excellent place to retire, or even move to earlier.

Yeah the “shopping around” aspect isn’t even close these days. I remember ~25 years ago using price aggregator sites to pick up individual PC parts from all different websites.

Today the situation is flipped. It isn’t difficult to find a really good price. If you buy all your parts from the same retailer, you’ll be way closer to the minmaxed optimal price than in the past.

The problem is that right now the “good” prices are crazy.

I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I’m building for my son for xmas. And I’ll have some uses for it too.

I didn’t really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I’m a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.

And man it HURT. The RAM isn’t anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.

I’m tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that’s not a big part of my computer usage.

I was just watching some informative stuff about jet engines the other day, so I appreciate what you’re saying even more than I normally would, lol.

Look at Sweden over here punching above its weight class!

(going strictly by population size)

impossible! I checked!

Oh I’m well aware, that’s why I threw in the part about needing to be utilized. Because even if the engineers are good with their finished product, some VP will eventually ask their director why the team’s output has dropped or why they have so many people for so little work.

I’m an engineer working on a new product right now. Fortunately we’re a small outfit with niche customers.

That’s one thing I love about FOSS, that the only stakeholders are the devs and the users. The goal is to make software that’s good at what it does.

When it comes to any tech company’s product, you not only have all the stakeholders that corrupt the end product, but you have giant teams of marketers, designers, engineers, and managers that need to constantly justify their existence and or be efficiently utilized at all times.

Honestly it’s like lesser version of enshittification, the tendency of commercial products to always be changing things.

Well, like any decent VR game there are settings to help with that. I’m pretty sure I used the teleportation movement the whole time even once I was used to it and didn’t get nauseated.

Getting used to it was a huge factor on its own. Back then, I had been playing so much VR that in the flying game Ultrawings (think pilotwings for VR) I worked my way up to where I was flying the stunt plane with full FOV and no anti-nausea measures enabled.

That whole article reads like he was a reasonably intelligent person who was born into a christian family. So he’s been conditioned to automatically see homosexuality as bad, and been educated in writing eloquent arguments to support his position, but he’s just aware enough to not take a stand and actually say what he thinks because that would get him in trouble.

Even just considering your snippet:

I’m pretty sure there are genetic dispositions towards different kinds of sexual behaviors and patterns—just as there are genetic dispositions towards such things as alcoholism, racism, elitism, etc.

This is just an opinion and the logic seems sensible. But why make the comparison to only negative traits and vices?

A genetic predisposition towards homosexuality does not make homosexuality a ‘good’ or a ‘right,’ or even ‘okay’ for some people.

Stating the obvious then referring to 3rd party opinions. Doesn’t seem to do much other than keep up the negative tone.

Just as with every other human behavior, a wider worldview must be used to judge the righteousness of a human action or behavior—including acting on homosexual tendencies.

Whoa, I agree! And using my view of the world and society at large I hereby judge that we need to lay the fuck off of people who act on their homosexual tendencies and focus on actual problems! I wonder if the author can say the same.

Also, I just want to point out and give a “fuck that” to the heavy focus on “choosing” and “acting” rather than simply existing. In my experience that is a very common step in the short process of dehumanizing somebody and mentally writing off their concerns and rights.

Dehumanizing somebody for a trait they were born with is obviously doable, but it is still a tougher sell for some people than dehumanizing a person for an intentional act. Even if that act didn’t hurt anybody or anything.

I’ll leave the whole train of thought of “how can you punish people for acting like the thing they were born as” as an exercise for the reader.

If there was one organization with the motive and resources to help develop an open phone hardware platform, Valve sure seems like a good contender.

C’mon Gabe, make a name for yourself in computer history. Secure a place in the history books next to Torvalds and Stallman rather than Gates/Jobs/Zuck types.

Make “steam compatible phone” become the new “IBM compatible PC”!

When I look at this announcement, the hardware is very exciting, for sure. But it is Valve’s dedication to Linux that really has me smiling. I don’t see three hardware devices to buy. I see two big proclamations for which the hardware is the message:

1. SteamOS on desktop! It seemed inevitable but it’s still great to see.

2. STEAM VR USING LINUX AS ITS TARGET PLATFORM?!?!?

I will grant that it’s very possible I buy all three pieces of the hardware, even though I like building my own PCs. I will also grant that Valve’s support for linux probably would not be what it is without the enshittification of Microsoft’s ecosystem. But in this world I’m gonna go ahead and accept the imperfect good news.

House of the Dying Sun is a space sim with a strategic map view in addition to piloting a fighter yourself.

It is so good in VR.

My 200 hour playthrough of Skyrim VR back in 2019 justified my headset purchase and GPU upgrade (gtx 1080, oooh, aaah) all by itself.

The juniors on my team at work have been productive as hell lately while we olds ponder over the more obscure runes.

Yeah it’s right in the amendment:

Thou shalt keep thyself strapped at all times when around shady electronics. What will YOU do when your printer makes a noise you don’t recognize?

In a previous job I once evaluated some returned product that wasn’t having the best battery life or wasn’t working right. It was specialized expensive equipment that used regular alkaline batteries.

TL;DR: ordinary batteries can have negative voltage if you don’t give a fuck and just mix your old and new ones in a drawer before you put them into your high-cost life-saving equipment.

I think it was only like 6 billion, right?

A huge number on its own, but in this context it’s nothing.

Auto correct.

They meant to say suck a fuck, not fuck a duck.