Up to* $2k. Just for the sake of clarity.

The tax credit is 30% of the total project price, up to $2k. If the HPWH is over double the cost of NG, you’re still paying quite a bit more even with the tax credit.

Man I haven’t thought about kkrieger in a looooong time. Thanks for that!

I agree though. I think it’s been happening for years. Hardware has gotten so fast compared to where we were a few years ago. But it hasn’t caused rapid innovation like everyone thought it would. It’s just made devs lazy and we get massive unoptimized piles of shit released that take hundreds of gigs of space, require 8gb of vram and 16gb of RAM and still run like trash.

I’d love to see another era where we have game developers truly innovating and really trying to get the most out of hardware but I wonder if things have gotten so complicated that those days are gone.

That’s a good question. If I’m honest I haven’t seen UT in probably 15 years.

I think it was the cornfield chasing parts? I also recall just being super creeped out by E.T. himself. The way he made sounds, the way his fingers move, etc.

The biohazard stuff you’re talking about scared me, but I think just the sounds E.T. was making, not the guys in suits specifically.

E.T.

I saw it when I was probably 4 or 5? I had recurring nightmares for YEARS. Like, well into my mid teens. I’m pretty sure I even had one or two as an adult. I’m recovered now and I’ve watched the movie without incident, but I don’t like it and I don’t really want to willingly watch it again.

I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid and convinced my parents to let me see it in the theater when I was 6. I was so fucking terrified at the opening scene I pretended I needed to pee so I could step out for a minute.

I did come back and loved the movie though, so I guess it wasn’t that bad.

Don’t focus only on reddit users. That unnecessarily narrows the scope of the issue.

Lemmy has significant barriers to joining that other sites or services do not have. And then once people manage to join there are basic usability issues with simple things like finding communities.

Until these core issues are solved it feels pointless to try to target users from a specific site.

Multi comms are a good idea, agreed.

As for weak discoverability encouraging tendency to gather on larger comms…I agree, but I would just add that it does require motivated and proactive users. This isn’t a given. In my hypothetical, those people started their own communities about something they like, and had a few users but not many. Do they at some point decide to give up and search for another community? Or do they just forget about it because there’s never any activity and they don’t go there? How many searches should they do without finding anything?

As a real life example of my own, I’m a Green Bay Packers fan. I wanted to find a place to take part in active discussions about the team. I joined what seemed to be the biggest community and posted a few things, commented in threads. Most would get one or maybe two replies. Often nothing. A month or two later I searched again and found a few more communities that had popped up. All around the same size and activity level. Joined them, also crickets. The members there didn’t congregate around a larger instance, they created more small instances and then all of them ended up largely abandoned.

I don’t know exactly why that is, but I’ve had this experience with other topics too. Maybe instance tagging with a recommendation algorithm that suggests similar communities in the fediverse based on the community you’re in?

The problem really is that lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass of users to support many small communities that are all self sustaining. And discoverability is so bad for communities it’s entirely likely that if there are 8 people out there that want to discuss X in the fediverse, 3 are in one community, 2 in another, and 3 in a third, and none of them ever finds the others. The lack of users causes a lack of content and they all the up not engaging at all.

If you have enough users the idea of multiple communities holds water a little better. But I think it’s a significant barrier to actually gaining those users.

Fully agree with you on artists not getting their fair share, and I would argue that the issue is sadly endemic across the entire music industry and was that way long before streaming services even existed. Spotify is merely the most visible representation of a long festering issue that spans generations.

I can only speak for myself but I do actually still buy CDs for bands I really like. I will also occasionally buy merch or go to shows. Some of these bands I very certainly would never have discovered without Spotify (or a service like it).

Ultimately I agree that I’d like people to understand their options. I think the biggest likely barrier is convenience. I have a NAS server, and a virtual host set up that runs a Linux server with Plex on it, and I have that open so I can use Plexamp to play live albums or any other stuff I own that isn’t on Spotify. But like… That’s a massive barrier to entry to simply create something close to the experience Spotify offers out of the box. And it’s definitely not as polished. I do it because I’m a hobbyist, but most people aren’t like that. So then if you want to buy music individually, you’re stuck listening to actual physical CDs, or ripping them and loading them on your phone or mp3 player. Old school cool for sure, but new school convenience is sure hard to beat once you’ve had a taste.

This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.

We do not care that we don’t own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it’s almost a perk that I don’t because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify’s library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.

I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don’t want to go pirate it, I don’t want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.

And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I’m a member at our local zoo. I don’t expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I’m a member at our museum. I don’t feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don’t own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.

Spotify is the exact same for me.

Probably.

I should point out that RCV wouldn’t at all prevent people from running “spoiler” campaigns like this, it would actually encourage them. But they wouldn’t actually be spoilers the way they are now. They would just allow people a way to vote for candidates that more closely align to their actual beliefs without that also meaning that the lesser of evils would get a de facto vote out of it.

I think it would be disastrous for the GOP in particular, but honestly even Democrats are often against RCV because it would remove many of them from power as well.

I agree but I’ll take it a step further. I’ve been in IT for almost 20 years. I never took a math class after high school (age 18). I took math up through calc 2 in high school.

I’ve never used a single lick of anything beyond basic math for my work. None. And I don’t know anyone else who has either over the course of 4 different employers and working with hundreds of people.

In my opinion it’s the logical thinking and the process of problem solving that are the parts of math that translate to IT. Doing proofs, understanding all the reasons why something is the way that it is. So in that regard sure, math is important. But I feel like OP is implying that actually knowing how to do complex math problems is important for a career in IT, and it really isn’t.

Is it wrong to buy my kids “read banned books” shirts?

Joking, but only sort of. I’m so irritated that this is the world they are growing up in. That I’m going to have to have conversations with them about why people are trying to restrict what they can learn based on bigotry and why that is wrong. There are so many other things they could be worrying about, I hate that we have this as an additional and completely unnecessary distraction.

Completely understand Scholastic’s move here. It’s unfortunate in a vacuum but on the other hand I’m very glad they aren’t simply dropping these titles entirely.

If we are trying to dig into the root cause? Then yes, honestly. It is Google. And don’t call them the “search engine guys”, that’s not what they are about. They are the “mass aggregation and correlation of user data guys”. Search has been a means to an end for Google for a very long time.

All those other things didn’t exist when google was developing their model. Google paved the way for the internet no longer being free, but being “free” with payment rendered in the form of user data. That in turn directly led to all those other evils you referred to. It is not an exaggeration to imply that Google is ultimately at fault for the way the internet functions today.

There’s already been a new flavor of coke developed and allegedly chosen by AI. If that’s not some kind of singularity moment, I don’t know what is.

Yes ranked choice would be a huge benefit for many reasons.

Ok but the two party system is why he can be a spoiler. He might be a dickhead, but he isn’t wrong that our first-past-the -post election system (which begets two party races) is a huge problem.

5900HX: mobile Radeon CPU 6800M: mobile Radeon GPU

This game looks roughly equivalent to TW3 because it is roughly contemporary with TW3. (2015 vs 2017). HZD was well known for being a very pretty game in motion when it came out, though this video doesn’t really do it justice to be honest.

I imagine the point of the video is seeing the framerates on mobile hardware in Linux.

“The postal service is losing money!”

No, the postal service costs money. It’s a service. It doesn’t aim to make a profit. It costs money, and we are in turn rendered a service that is useful.

I swear people are delusional.

From a pure graphical fidelity point we’re there now.

From an animation standpoint we are light years away. The absolute best animations or facial expression renders I have seen are nowhere near good enough to actually pass for real. And honestly I am not sure I’ve even seen meaningful improvement in this area in a long time. Even in this demo videos the cars don’t look quite right as they move, and cars are much easier than people, or the way cloth moves when on someone who is moving.

I’d like to think this is the next big focus for graphics, but animations are a lot harder to get right than pure visual fidelity. I hope studios start focusing on it because it will take take us to that next step.