Just out of frame there are a hundred shareholders cheering him on. The miserable look is an act.

Coffee all morning, because sleep. Iced tea all afternoon, because Atlanta.

I was listening to some pretentious film critic yesterday complain that modern films have stopped being artistic or intellectually challenging, because there’s a huge audience of people who are exhausted all the time. They don’t want media that makes them think, that challenges their assumptions, or even requires their full, sustained attention. Comfort media, like mac & cheese for the brain.

Fallout has become exactly that - some vague, nefarious organization as antagonist; raiders & feral ghouls as unambiguously bad cannon fodder. Just move it to a new city, put in some iconic landmarks, and let the money roll in. I can’t honestly think of a franchise that gets past 2 without falling into that trap, but I just started another run through FO4.

fd00:: is the new 192.168

When I went to college in 1987, I got sent with a $2000 computer. That’s around $5600 in 2024 dollars. An Atari 2600 was $200 in 1980, which is around $1000 in 2024 dollars. Computer gaming in the 70s and 80s was for kids with rich parents. You could get a little sample, at $0.25 for a few minutes in an arcade, but most of those games would play well on a phone platform today, and you’d be paying something like $15/hour in 2024 dollars.

Today, a desktop computer or laptop is nearly ubiquitous. It may not play the latest AAA at 4k, but neither do most gamers. Even if you exclude mobile gaming, PC and console games are wildly more accessible today than when the 55+ crowd were coming of age.

Aren’t we all born on 4/20/69, in our heart of hearts?

Depends a bit on screen size and placement, too. I play on 27", 1440p, about 3 feet from my face, and my eyeballs are definitely the lowest resolution link in the chain. 32" screen on my desk, 60" screen in front of the couch, and 1080-1440 will start showing their pixels. I’m not anxious to upgrade my screen, because 1440p gives me great framerates with a cheaper video card. Also a 32" screen at a viewing distance of 3’ is hard to actually see everything.

I’d much rather have a good game that runs fast at 1080p than have to get a $700 card for OK framerate and style-over-substance gameplay just to get 4k.

Agree that using VR to get immersive, wide-field graphics from fewer pixels is a great alternative.

You can hire writers instead of visual artists.

Even if you ignore all the neuromodulatory chemistry, much of the interesting processing happens at sub-threshold depolarizations, depending on millisecond-scale coincidence detection from synapses distributed through an enormous, and slow-conducting dendritic network. The simple electrical signal transmission model, where an input neuron causes reliable spiking in an output neuron, comes from skeletal muscle, which served as the model for synaptic transmission for decades, just because it was a lot easier to study than actual inter-neural synapses.

But even that doesn’t matter if we can’t map the inter-neuronal connections, and so far that’s only been done for the 300 neurons of the c elegans ganglia (i.e., not even a ‘real’ brain), after a decade of work. Nowhere close to mapping the neuroscientists’ favorite model, aplysia, which only has 20,000 neurons. Maybe statistics will wash out some of those details by the time you get to humans 10^11 neuron systems, but considering how badly current network models are for predicting even simple behaviors, I’m going to say more details matter than we will discover any time soon.

If you’re going to have any non-linux clients, samba will be an order of magnitude easier. MacOS handles nfs pretty well, but Windows just wants SMB

I think about the Vision like I think about a new Gucci bag or a new set of Air Jordans. There’s a small, but very visible, community that is super into that product, probably for reasons not related to its actual functionality. The difference is that there’s a lot of overlap between Apple fans and broader technology enthusiast groups, where we’re more isolated from the Gucci and Jordan communities. There are lots of brand-based fan groups who will happily accept branded merch or content, but not interpret that as ‘advertising.’

The rest of the world tolerates spyware and especially ads if they feel like the product is worth the intrusion. There’s a reason Meta doesn’t have a logo watermark foating in the corner of Quest view field. There’s a reason VR is still very niche, almost entirely limited to gaming.

Maybe Vision’s AR experience will change that. Maybe viewing your entire life through a video camera with overlaid graphics has real-world value beyond privacy in co-working spaces. I doubt that value is $3000 and think Vision is more like Apple’s Newton than Apple’s iPhone.

Graphics aren’t as good, but my favorite single-player MMO is http://progressquest.com/

If you have VR headsets, Walkabout Mini-Golf is surprisingly fun. In fact, I’d argue that it only becomes fun with 3 people.

US Garcia frigates (1960s) were 2600 tons; Knox (1970s) 3000; Brooke class FFG/heavy frigates (1960s) were 5400 tons, and Oliver Hazard Perry class FFGs (1980s) 4100 tons.

This wasn’t the Nordstream pipeline. This was a Finland-Estonia pipeline and telecoms in Oct 2023.

I don’t even think that deceiving donors was the line. I think it was exactly what he bought. OnlyFans? Scandalous. Botox for a man? Shameful. If he’d bought guns and an F350, or just Venmo’d a high school student, he’d still a congressman.

Also, Federal agents wear black, or plainclothes: they’re not part of “the blue.”

Just because she’s the author, doesn’t mean she wrote it.

Like “Trump’s” Art of the Deal: when you’re a celebrity, you can slap your name on any ghostwritten/AI-generated bullshit and get some sales. Guess MTG is not the celebrity she thinks she is.

Nuts are super nutrient-dense. Just a handful gets you a decent amount of calories & protein. You can crush some up and mix with your oatmeal if they’re too much to chew.

If we’re dreaming, it’d be great to do away with OASDI as a separate, non-progressive, capped income tax and just roll it into the regular Federal rate. Bump the 10% bracket to 12%, the 22% to 26% and 37% to 45%. Hell, add a couple points to the CG rate.

But they sold OASDI to Americans like some kind of insurance policy - it’s right in the name - and they’ve been trying to turn that fiction into a personal savings account for decades. Social safety nets just don’t fit the mythos of strong, independent American who don’t need no gubmint.