For me personally, there has been a turning point in the last couple of years once I really accepted that the intended experience matters more than the actual physicality of a lot of these things and that authenticity is a lot more artificial and arbitrary than I used to give it credit for. I have been collecting and hoarding retro consoles and retro computers for over a decade. I would pay a lot of money to buy them, have them shipped to me, sometimes have to fix them, then pay a lot for extra equipment to make it more functional in this era, sometimes pay for flash carts or disk emulators and all for what? The C64 I played a bunch with trying to give it more modern capabilities, but in the end even that tends to require some degree of willful blindness; the wifi "adapters" I connected to the C64 were often computers of their own with much higher capabilities than the C64 itself.
And ultimately your Paralympics example is a great analog; we like to think that the two-legged guy with one leg tied is the only one with an artificial limitation, but the one-legged guy as well, in that at any point he could hop on to a (accessibility modified) motorcycle and easily beat the two legged guy. How realistic a recreation of running from Marathon to Athens in Ancient Greece is a modern marathon? The ancient greeks didn't have modern running shoes, energy gels, nipple guards... Why are we restricting motorcycles and not those then? How "realistic" is my "nostalgic experience" with an old computer? Even if I didn't "cheat" by connecting it to more modern equipment, and kept only to vintage accessories so as to not give it capabilities it didn't have back in the days, isn't it STILL cheating if I can access the wealth of ressources of the modern internet that people didn't have access to in the 80s? After all, a large part of the experience, perhaps the most important one!, back then was not so much the equipment people had but the way they had to discover how to use it, by trading floppies with people, going to computer stores, posting on BBSes. The equipment is secondary.
Once I accepted the arbitrary nature of those restrictions, I changed my way of indulging in retro computing/retro gaming nostalgia. I decided that original hardware is not what I really care about, but creating something that makes me feel like original hardware is actually what matters. I put my original hardware away and I'm building up my "retro setup" centered on a MiSTer that has the aesthetic appeal of of the late 80s early 90s, with modern amneties that I feel are not impeding on the feel and aesthetic.
pigeonburger
3d ago
Now, there's a lot of contempt for america in europe, but from what I've seen there's also admiration, especially among the working class. My wife and I went to New York last december and my Spanish in-laws were quite jealous. They wanted as keepsakes american one dollar bills and statue of liberty merch. I think that's because despite all they hear on the news, the US remains a place they admire. Maybe for the people who can afford to visit it, it has less cachet, but from other europeans I know that have visited, I still see that they, on some level, admire it. The USA they hate is a construct created by the news media (both theirs, and the US blue tribe media).
pigeonburger
4d ago
Easy to say when there aren't any concrete dollars on the table yet, and not necessarily a bad strategy to claim it if you want the offer to be as high as it possibly can if it comes. But not really indicative of a real preference, especially if, as you point out, their principles seem to be subordinate to their material conditions.
When the Greenlanders turn down a real (not a poll) direct payment of 200 000 american dollars per person to join the US (not to sell their land and leave, to join a wealthy country that will likely invest in building up their island!), I'll consider they've actually rejected it. And even then, it might be negociating for a higher number.
pigeonburger
5d ago
Fun fact: I am not, actually, American. I just recognize that there is still some vitality left in US, unlike Western Europe and the other Anglosphere countries, who have nothing to contribute and make every decision they can seemingly with the goal of smothering their economy, of replacing their culture and demography. Maybe it doesn't always do so in the wisest way, but the american beast still moves and thrash about. Western europe is inert, it hasn't moved in a long time. At this point we should really check for a pulse and just call it.
pigeonburger
5d ago
I think the point is to delegitimize the regime, he will declare soon who that "New Regime President" is and the hope is that iranians are going to go along with it.
pigeonburger
6d ago
It's okay, you're allowed to call them "clankers" here, yes, even with a hard R.
I feel a lot of it, from Europeans and also from the other anglosphere countries (Canada and Australia), is what we refer to as "coping". Mostly coping with feeling less agentful and capable than americans are. Japan and China seem to be more positive because Japan learned a long time ago (and China in the last half-century) that the more productive reaction to being humbled by someone else is not to find excuses but just to learn what gave that person an edge over you and then doing that even better than them. Europeans and (and other anglos) seem to be averse to doing that, they seem to want to double down on what kept them inferior, and wear that inferiority as some kind of weird badge of honor.
pigeonburger
9d ago
The reason I feel it's doomed is because a shared group identity, a "us", can only exist in a contrast against a "them", otherwise it's amorphous and fails to inspire. Which is why I believe a united earth will only realistically happen when there will be something else for it to be contrasted against, be it other human colonies or aliens.
pigeonburger
10d ago
284, though I don't really know english/american litterature much, so my litterature score is (I hope) understandably affected. 91st percentile non-anglo western.
You could also script the download to run every day for a set of approved channels. And you could also, if you are so inclined, set up something like ErsatzTV and create your own TV channel (complete with EPG) with youtube videos, music videos downloaded with yt-dlp as well from playlists of best 80s, 90s and 00s music videos, ripped TV shows from DVDs (and not torrents, that would be piracy!), movies and even 80s and 90s ads as padding between "shows" (there's channels with lots of ads on youtube). And then serve that through Jellyfin.
*EDIT: The perils of new comments browsing! I missed the part in the OP where he wanted a specific channel and nothing else! Still, he could make a curated channel with a specific schedule for his kid; piano lessons run from this time to that time. Having to follow a hard schedule probably teaches kids a valuable lesson about punctuality and understanding that the world doesn't revolve around them.
They're not talking about inflated stocks, but about the technology.
Indeed, we can see that when the dot com bubble burst, internet technology and adoption did not step back, it kept accelerating, probably it was even helped in the long term by capital becoming more careful and not just throwing millions and millions at every e-commerce under the sun.
But... Maybe those people are more hoping for the bubble to burst not because it will save them, but entirely because they believe it will hurt the "tech bros" they see as responsible for their current predicament.
In my city that has a large Iranian diaspora, the "protests" are actually pro bombing with iranians carrying american and israeli flags it's surreal. The small anti bombing protests tend to be white college kids.
You can take the stated reason at face value; it's not like it's false. But it's a bit hypocritical if you consider that it is quite certain the US has either intentional backdoors and/or undisclosed vulnerabilities to achieve surveillance on its domestic networking equipment, but they aren't wrong to be suspicious of chinese made routers.
And on its own, this measure is not gonna achieve much as the horse is already out of the barn when it comes to consumer network security. What normies even keep their router updated? When people keep their 10 year old router that's never been updated, has tens of known exploited vulnerabilities and is configured with a WAN facing admin panel, who even cares where it was built?
Sadly, the realistic solution is to incentivise people to let their ISP take charge, which as someone who prefers personal responsability, I hate. Subsidize ISP sold/loaned equipment, enable auto-updates. I'd even make it so that the router has a hardware switch enabled VPN to let the ISP in to the LAN-facing management if they need to do some work (I'd make a hardware switch so that clueless customers can be reasonably certain when it's on or off). Convenient but security nightmare networking options need to start being disabled by default and users should not be encouraged to enable them ever (I'm looking at you UPnP). I'd probably ask or heavily incentivise ISPs to have all of their customer facing techs to have a security certification. If you had all of this taken care of, then banning hardware backdoored (by state adversaries as opposed to domestic intelligence agencies) might have an effect.
pigeonburger
13d ago
"God made Man, Sam Colt made them equal"
In that case, God tried real hard to make that guy harmless, but the score's God 0, Colt 1.
pigeonburger
13d ago
I'm also left to wonder how many side effects were not identified as caused by the vaccines because the message was broadcast loud and clear to every doctor that if you question the vaccines you risk becoming a pariah and a crank.
My wife got a condition that could have also been blamed on the vaccines, but since there was another plausible explanation for it, doctors clung to that other one. I'm not saying they're wrong, but I'm saying I'm not confident that they gave the possibility that the vaccines were the cause a serious, scientific look. Multiply events like this all over and who knows what the death rate/side effect rate even is? That's what happens when achieving political objectives is more important to politicians and the high level medical establishment than achieving the correct medical outcomes.
I'm always kind of impressed at just how cheap gaming can be compared to other forms of entertainment.
It's not just gaming, I could watch a lot of movies and shows for free on Tubi, or endless Youtube videos or live streams on Twitch. A single subscription gives you access to almost all of music. And there's a lot you could listen to for free online as well. And public libraries have been making reading essentially free for longer than any other media.
But yeah, even gaming now. There's pretty reasonably free to play gacha games. Competitive online games that can be played for free unless you desperately want cosmetics (DOTA2, Fortnite, Overwatch 2...). Epic Game Store has its weekly free games (most of the time it's unknown indie stuff, but around the holidays in January and December they give some pretty big ones; last holidays people got Hogwarts Legacy, Total War Three Kingdoms, Bloodstained, Disco Elysium...). If you already pay for Amazon Prime, you get free games on Epic Game Store, GOG and their own service Luna, and you get free streaming for some free games. You don't even really need gaming hardware anymore! There's Luna as I mentionned, but also Geforce Now lets you stream many games you own on PC games stores for free! So you can get a game for free on the Epic Game Store and then stream it for free on Geforce Now! Not every game, mind you, but I bet you could easily find games for every taste.
And that's just the free stuff, if you're willing to pay "a little" you get a lot! Ultimately, if you're able to resist FOMO, and aren't a Nintendo only/mostly gamer, you can spend very little and play a lot of games. Eventually, everything (except Nintendo games) ends up on deep sales.
pigeonburger
17d ago
It wasn't a frivolous lawsuit, just a stupid one.
Indeed; I can easily see how that suit could win on its own merit. But the cops did a severe injustice to Afroman and in trying to get justice for a much less severe retaliation they gave a jury the power to make things right.
pigeonburger
17d ago
He was kind of stuck there; if he said yes he'd admit into court being a cuck, and if he said no he'd weaken his claim that the songs are to be taken seriously.
I got a new phone last weekend and I got one of those stretching controller grip for it (Gamesir G8), and put some effort into building a nice cosy gaming console with it at the center. I also finally have a phone with a relatively generous amount of storage, so I can stretch my legs. I have installed a few weeks ago a ROMM instance, so emulation roms are shared and downloadable from my phone at the press of a button, I have Gamenative installed with a bunch of PC indie games, my main mobile game I'm playing these days (Arknight Endfield) and a whole lot of game streaming services setup.
When it comes to game streaming, it's become more viable for me than I originally thought it would. In December and January I had to prepare to go to visit my mother-in-law in europe for about a month and obviously I couldn't take my gaming computer or Xbox with me so I gave Nvidia GeForce Now a try and was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked. I obviously wouldn't play fighting games on there, but most everything else worked fine, provided it's supported by the service (the business model for GeForce Now is that you can play games you already own on digital game stores there if they are supported by GeForce Now, with some popular recent games requiring a subscription fee and additional performance, queue priority and gaming session length limit on paid subscriptions). I also have Amazon Prime so I do have some additional games included with Luna, that's nice. On my previous phone I couldn't get a low latency enough connection to Luna to make action games playable but now on my new phone I do, so I might play through the recent-ish Indiana Jones game there, and maybe Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, that's included too. My wife wanted to play some horror games and I have an Xbox but didn't want to pay the extortionate rate for new games, so I got a game pass subscription that was on sale, and honestly the cloud streaming there is solid as well; if someone who didn't have an extensive Steam catalog and had no console wanted to play some games I think they could be quite satisfied by that service.
But the most interesting to me is how much local streaming improved. I put some effort into getting Apollo (Sunshine) setup on my gaming PC and action games are totally playable on there, no problem. Even streaming over the internet, on a VPN (Wiregard) has negligible latency for shooters. Works well with HDR (or as well as Windows ever does), 120hz... Only concession I make is that I play at a ratio of 720p since the way I hold my phone it makes no difference whether it's 720p or QHD and it helps my aging gaming rig. I also tried in the last months streaming from my Xbox Series S, but that had been disappointing, but I think maybe my new phone might be doing better there now too. I have also set up streaming the other way around with the Xbox, from my PC to it, so at least when Microsoft finally gives up on it, it'll still be useful to stream PC games to my TV.
So on the subject of games, since this is the gaming thread, I got Marathon recently; for those unaware it's yet another extraction shooter, but from Bungie. I had played Ark Raiders for a few months before, so it wasn't my first extraction shooter, but Marathon immediately came up with the reputation of being the opposite to Ark Raiders when it comes to player interaction. TBH, it also works for me. I mostly play solo, and there's no additional mental load from interacting with the players since you can pretty much just turn off your mic and treat them all the same as you treat PvE enemies, the only interaction modes seem to be shoot on sight or avoid you, I've yet to see a single interaction that wasn't that. The Rook class is also an interesting mechanic for solo players like me; you can chose to play as a relatively weak class that can only play solo, starts with free kit and are dropped later into an already started team game. There's lower stakes for you, since you don't lose your own loadout, so you run around and pick the bones off the fights that happened earlier in the game, maybe once in a while you can also ambush some players. Since you are a Rook, other players know they are unlikely to find anything worth the fight on you, and you have an ability that allows you to avoid PvE fights. It's a nice way to build your kit.
The shooting feels good, it's Bungie, no surprise that they know what they're doing with that. It's very different in shooting feel from Ark Raiders, the guns all feel very lethal. In Ark Raiders, I felt like if I didn't have my favorite guns I was useless, but in Marathon any gun you pick up feels like it'll do the job just fine. The gear advantage can certainly make a difference, but it's also easily neutralized by just shooting better. The visual language of the game is also gorgeous (again, it's Bungie). I'm not sure yet if and how it slots in with the fever dream that is the existing Marathon lore, but what is there feels mysterious and meaty.
pigeonburger
20d ago
Eh, it doesn't necessarily have to be, you just need one documentary to get mainstream traction and then the vultures will swoop down to make more content about it (or re-emphasise old content that wasn't too popular at release) "while it's hot". The same happened in recent years with the MJ child molestation accusations and the Chernobyl incident.
pigeonburger
22d ago
I see that kind of attitude a lot and my personal impression is that it's one of the ways for the people on the left who are unable to ignore the negative externalities of uncontrolled immigration to express opposition to it in a way that preserves their "compassionate" self-image. See, the problem is not the heckin' enriching immigration we've been supporting, it's that evil capitalists perverted it into modern slavery.
pigeonburger
25d ago
but that they are unwilling to accept the steps necessary to get there. So we're trapped in a permanent state of exception.
Are they even, or are they insufficiently critical of media reporting yet?
pigeonburger
27d ago
I've been aware of this phrase for years, mostly from Reddit. Is there a canonical definition, however? I say this with genuine curiosity / bewilderment. Capitalism, to my mind, is an economic condition bounded by certain conditions. I didn't know (and I am dubious) about there being a temporal aspect to it.
The people who use the phrase use it in the way you would say "late-stage cancer". You can infer what they think of capitalism from that. It's usually college-age people or redditors who used that kind of phrasing initially, though it's become common enough that you see it pop up elsewhere from people who don't necessarily hate capitalism (often in the way capitalism is blamed for the excesses of consumerism). In general, it expresses that capitalism is unsustainable and that the thing that's called an example of late-stage capitalism is an example of how a dying capitalist system will break down and fail, or of how capitalism ends up killing its host.
pigeonburger
27d ago
Reviews in general have that problem, but if you focus on the text instead of the score you can usually get some useful information. Ignore the Karens complaining about rude employees or the manager not taking their problems seriously, or the 5 star reviews probably prompted by employees or bots and focus on unique information. A Google Maps review recently warned me off an automated carwash that was malfunctioning on one side, with the reviewer having pictures of his car half washed as proof.
The main advantages to carmakers is that it's a lot easier to make and especially to scale across multiple products and that it's easier to make changes after production, etc, even if you don't add any new functions or telemetry vs, say, 90s cars.
For a car to drive smoothly requires a lot of things to happen just right at the right times, in the right way, like a complex ballet performance. You can get there with exquisitely engineered mechanical parts, electrical parts, electronics, discrete computers or centralized computers (and yeah in a physical way, computers are electronics which are electrical parts, but the degree of complexity and flexibility is different). Having mechanical parts do all of this complex ballet is possible, but difficult; tolerances have to be extremely precise, the materials quasi perfect... It's slightly easier to fudge some of the things with simple electrical parts. For instance, instead of smooth high quality gears and cranks just put an electric motor and limit switches to control a window (it's also easy to make a cheap, bad window crank tho). It's even easier to have electronics like purpose made chips do some of it instead; a servomotor doesn't need to have as much complexity built into it to avoid decapitating a child whose head was out of the window when it started closing. And a computer makes it all even easier, you can start producing the car first and worry about how much strength the motor for the windows are able to push after, and if a regulatory agency changes it (or if different jurisdictions have different limits) you can still use the same part and just change the programming.
The big change from the 90s and early 00s to now is that we're going from multiple discrete computers, which can be limited and hard to access, to less, but more powerful, central computers. That's easier for the dealership to access (according to the industry though, giving independant mechanics access will get women raped in parking garages*).
For consumers, there's some advantages. You can have "modes" that change the throttle response of the car, you can have simulated shifting on CVT transmissions, you can have more complex features for controls like locking window controls for the back row from the front row, more complex security and safety features, a mechnical or electrical car is trivial to hotwire. You can also have features like accident detection that can, on top of calling emergency services on your behalf in some of the more advanced cases, in simpler cases it could automatically unlock the door so it's easier to evacuate. The cases where the consumers are (rightly) complaining is when manufacturers, following Tesla's lead, are replacing physical controls that are easy to use without looking with modal touchscreens (which require more attention from the driver to use). Part of this from the manufacturer is because it's cheaper, part of it is because there's the impression that futuristic means clean means no buttons.
And then of course, they like getting their telemetry data.
*Sadly I can't find the actual ad anymore.
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