meduka
11d ago
With Harris shaping up to receive 10-15 million fewer votes than Biden in 2020, has anyone here updated with regards to the chance of fraud in 2020? This graph is floating around Twitter: https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1854144250562429081
Is Harris truly so unpopular that 15 million Democrats just stayed home? Or was the overwhelming shift to mail-in ballots in 2020 the key to Biden's victory, giving barely motivated Dems an opportunity to fill in a ballot and mail it out rather than drag themselves to the polls? Republicans in several swing states managed to pass legislation tightening voting laws -- maybe that helped? Or is America simply not ready for a woman president (much less a "black" woman president)?
meduka
1mo ago
So, I was in a pretty similar position to you, though my procrastination and absenteeism started in middle school and never really cleared up. My last year of high school I was going to class less than once a week to hand in assignments or write tests and spending the rest of my time at home reading, programming, or playing video games. The school tolerated this because I got an exemption from a psychiatrist (who I was forced to start seeing after I said, basically, "If I have to waste another fucking year of my life in that place I'm going to end up killing myself," to my mother when explaining why I kept skipping class.)
The psychiatrist diagnosed me with "social anxiety" which I didn't agree with at the time, and still don't, but I played along because it at least meant being able to graduate on time.
I moved out at 18 to go to college. Predictably, it did not go very well. While the coursework was trivial (freshman CS) the profs were hardasses about attendance, so I dropped out after two semesters. Moved back in with my mom to her great disappointment and did odd jobs to make my student loan payments and help with rent. (Picking apples in autumn and a part-time gig at the butcher's shop she worked at for the rest of the year, mostly. I didn't have trouble with showing up to these jobs for some reason.)
If discipline (conscientiousness?) is a Real Thing then I'd wager I'm <1st percentile. Whatever standard script typically engenders "work ethic" in people was completely ineffective on me; the only thing that's motivated me to do things I actively don't want to do is an overwhelming sense of panic and imminent fear of disaster. This is a pretty severe character flaw, there's no sugar-coating it, and I haven't been able to overcome it except in brief spurts. I've tried a friend's Vyvanse prescription: it seemed to make it easier to initiate annoying tasks, but I wasn't in school or working full-time, so I have no idea if it would've been effective in those scenarios, and it may have been placebo to begin with.
I'm 29 now, and unfortunately I never found a satisfactory solution to this problem; I gave up on the "standard" normie wageslave life a long time ago. Post-COVID, online courses and remote work might be a viable means to cope with the issue -- when I was in college, the idea of an online class being remotely equivalent to a "real" one was pure fantasy. You can, apparently, even get student loans for them now. I found my own personal success (such as it is) in other ways: I made a decent chunk of money in crypto early on (ironically using some of the student loan money which I'm still making the minimum payments on -- the interest rate is so low, it's the only Rational(tm) choice) and multiplied it with some Wallstreetbets-tier investments. The COVID years were particularly kind, and Nvidia secured the bag, so to speak. This was enough to live independently and comfortably (though not lavishly) for the foreseeable future.
This came out as more of a blackpilling post then I expected; I don't know that I have any advice per se, as "get lucky with crypto 8+ years ago" is not exactly actionable. That said, if you aren't able to solve the root of your issue (as I wasn't) it's worth considering more unconventional coping methods, e.g., finding some way to make enough money to achieve your goal of living independently. You are clearly very literate, fluent in English, intelligent, and an American citizen: this combination alone puts you ahead of a lot of people, and there has never been a better time to make a living on the internet. If your morals are at all flexible and you have a bit of risk tolerance (and if the alternative is "getting kicked out and eventually living on the streets", well...) there are many roads available.
Probably not the answer you were looking for, but (personally) the NEET life is great, if you can find a way to make it happen.
meduka
1mo ago
It's gotten really, really bad lately. I visited my family in Nova Scotia over the summer and I was just completely stunned at how utterly the demographics of my small rural hometown had changed, even over just the last decade. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every service worker I interacted with was Indian, Pakistani, or some other flavor of subcontinental. This in a town of ~4000 that was 97% white in 2001. Both of the local pizza joints which I fondly remember from my childhood have been sold to immigrants and the staff completely replaced. I haven't really looked into it, but as I understand it most of these workers are not strictly immigrants, they're there on some kind of education visa that allows them to work (and allegedly businesses are subsidized for hiring them -- not sure how accurate that is, but it's what locals are claiming.) There have always been "temporary foreign workers" involved in agriculture but the recent changes are just categorically different. (Professionals such as doctors and other medical specialists have also been mostly sourced from India for a while, but there were generally fewer complaints about that.)
Property prices have also increased commensurately, but none of the homeowners I spoke with felt particularly "enriched" because the increase is basically global and even if they cashed out there's nowhere else to move to. Some own lakeside cottages that they plan to retreat to; most aren't so lucky.
The mood is generally quite dour. I don't think anyone expected such a rapid demographic change was even possible, and it doesn't seem like something they can vote their way out of.
meduka
1mo ago
Has anyone here used LLMs to generate useful code in a way that's actually saved you time, on net? Or if you're not particularly technical, given you the means to write code that you wouldn't have easily been able to figure out on your own? I've been playing around with o1-mini and it's impressive, enough so that I'm almost starting to get concerned re: job security and all the copium I see on tech Twitter is not quite as convincing as it used to be.
Here's a concrete example: I needed to scrape livestreams in real time and save them. This site isn't supported by any standard tools (yt-dlp, streamlink, etc). Not exactly rocket science, but I primarily dabble in C/C++/Rust and have a bit of an aversion to web technologies generally. This particular site does some wacky stuff with wasm (some kind of hand rolled DRM attempt) and after about 30 minutes of faffing around I gave up on trying to reverse engineer their API. Grabbing m3u8s from my browser's network inspector didn't work and even replaying requests with curl was serving me 403s; they're doing something trickier than I'm used to. I had some vague ideas about how to achieve what I wanted but figured I'd give ChatGPT a chance to weigh in. I outlined what I considered: maybe a Chrome extension that could capture the .ts streams in real time, or failing that, maybe something with Selenium (which I've never used), or possibly even just capturing raw packets with Wireshark or something similar.
o1-mini wrote me a whole Chrome extension in its first response, manifest et al, and provided detailed instructions on how to install it. This solution was flawed, using Chrome's webRequest API to monitor and filter for .ts files and then send a download request when it detects one. This would actually work well for most sites, but not this one, because of the aforementioned authorization shenanigans. To be fair to ChatGPT, I didn't mention anything about the authorization requirements. I asked if it was possible, with a Chrome extension, to intercept incoming network responses and just dump them to a file or something similar: it responded in the negative; apparently that functionality isn't exposed.
Fair enough! I asked for another solution. It suggested 3 options and wrote a nice wall of text with pros and cons for each one. "Use a custom proxy server," "Selenium + Browser DevTools protocol," and "Wireshark or tcpdump". I hadn't considered the first option, but it's obvious in retrospect. So I asked about it and it walked me through setting up mitmproxy (including the custom cert) and writing a Python addon for it to filter .ts files and dump them all to a folder as they come in. All of the code was perfect on the first try. Seriously, the entire process took me about 15 minutes, about as long as I've spent writing up this post about it. I ran mitmproxy -s scrapets.py and pointed my Firefox proxy settings to localhost. Then it just worked.
Now, why do I find this impressive? The solution was ultimately not that technical, the problem was not particularly difficult, and I could have muddled my way to a similar answer with some Googling and maybe 2-3 hours. Yet it feels significant. I remember spending countless hours as a teen ricing my Gentoo distro, scouring wikis and mailing lists and fiddling with configs and reading docs. It seems like we're headed to a point where if you can just clearly state your problem in English and maybe answer a few clarifying questions you'll get an instant solution, and if it's too complex, you can just continue recursively asking for more detailed explanations until you understand it fully. Now it's likely o1's knowledge is ocean wide and puddle deep, but even this is such an improvement over GPT-3 and GPT-4, the slope of the line is starting to get a little scary. When Terence Tao describes o1 as "roughly on par... with a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student,", well, I'm not that partial to Yudkowsky but I don't see any future where (at the very least!) programming isn't completely different 10 years from now.
Whatever is coming, the kids growing up with access to ChatGPT are going to be cracked beyond belief.
meduka
2mo ago
That particular phrasing was meant in jest. I had considered drawing a parallel between some hypothetical Romans clutching their pearls over the plight of Carthaginian infants but couldn't quite make it work.
meduka
2mo ago
Abortion is probably the major break between the "dissident" right and the traditional mainstream socially conservative/fundamentalist right. Despite considerable overlap on most other policy positions, abortion is a serious wedge issue. My take is that abortion is almost universally eugenic: even outside obvious cases like screened-for genetic diseases, you can just look at abortion rates by race. (From Vox: Out of 629,898 abortions reported to the CDC for 2019, Black women accounted for 38.4 percent of them. By comparison, white women made up 33.4 percent of those abortions.) What percent of aborted children would ever become net taxpayers, had they not been aborted? Given that abortions are correlated with low socioeconomic status, promiscuity, high time preference, and a whole slate of other negative things, many of which are heritable, my suspicion is the number is quite low.
When your political enemies are sacrificing their children to Baal, I don't know that trying to stop them is a winning long-term strategy. Ironically this particular savior complex pattern matches well to the self-destructive white guilt that characterizes much of the left. Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.
meduka
2mo ago
I like CK3. Probably my biggest issue is that while mechanically it's worse than CK2, the UI is so much improved (and much more legible at high resolutions) I simply can't go back to CK2.
My recommendation is to start as a viking at the earliest start date (I'll usually go with a custom ruler in Norway); raiding is a fun and easy way to make lots of money and give you some breathing room to experiment with the game's systems. And since you're tribal, you get automatic casus bellis on your neighbors, so expanding is quick. Once you've consolidated some territory, you may want to swear allegiance to Sweden before they decide to conquer you: this will let you experiment with vassal gameplay and internal politics. Usually it's not too hard to usurp the kingdom yourself if you'd like, or you can stay as a vassal, expand through Scandinavia, hand out your new territorial gains to your family members, and build up your power base. Eventually you'll be tech gated on upgrades and rich enough that there's nothing left to spend your money on: around this time, you can launch an independence war (if you haven't already usurped the kingdom) and from there invade Britain or France (if you take Normandy, you can form Norman culture, which will boost your tech considerably).
Notably, the next major patch for CK3 will be introducing interesting new mechanics, like playing as an unlanded adventurer, so if you lose your last territory it's not 'game over', you get an opportunity to travel the world, take on contracts, possibly convince some ruler to help press your claim and retake your rightful land, etc, as well as the ability to choose different characters on succession, so if you ever grow too powerful, you can choose to play as a second or third son to keep things interesting. CK3 is really quite easy once you have a handle on it so I'm looking forward to that last addition.
meduka
3mo ago
But, as I've said before, Elon has adopted just enough PodCaster Bro aesthetics to know that slight rephrasings of 1+1=2 obvious insights, combined with "thoughtful" pauses and idiosyncratic speech patterns can make you look deep to the midwits.
I don't get that impression from Elon's tweet. There's nothing deep or novel there, you're right -- he's regurgitating standard economic dogma. But stating something that is both true and obvious is not, at least in my worldview, somehow a knock against the person saying it -- particularly when it actually is a controversial statement among laymen: something like half the country supports rent control (varies from poll to poll). Maybe if he was phrasing it as if he was some kind of gigabrain genius and these were wholly original thoughts, I'd have a more negative reaction, but I didn't parse it that way.
I think I'm probably more pro-Elon than most people here, though I'm quite bearish on Tesla in particular wrt. their ability to deliver on their self-driving promises, SpaceX is just so impressive it kind of washes away those sins. Rocket companies are hard, Carmack couldn't build one, Bezos' Blue Origin is far from competitive, ULA is basically a joke, etc. I mean just look at this graph: https://x.com/FutureJurvetson/status/1792672666316665198/photo/1
Now, how much of SpaceX's success is due to Musk is a totally reasonable discussion to have, but even in the most cynical case, he at least hired the best people and set strategic objectives that led directly to capturing the overwhelming majority of the launch market and drove costs down an order of magnitude. And this is before Starship.
X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability) but some of my favorite poasters have been unbanned and I think you could argue his acquisition dragged the Overton window to the right, so I'm giving him a pass there as well. And there's something ironic about the legacy media claiming it's dead/dying when Biden announced his resignation on X/Twitter first.
With regards to Altman, he comes across as basically a grifter and technically unsophisticated, no disagreements there. I am not at all impressed by his leadership.
meduka
3mo ago
So if we're playing the blame game, we have to ask about UK culture at least to some degree. That's why I bring up assimilation. You can't just ignore it.
This is not really an argument I think the pro-immigration side wants to be making: if even a second-generation immigrant raised-in-Britain can't assimilate (an uncharitable HBD-pilled poster might phrase it as "being unable to overcome his genes") then it's an indicator that there might be a deeper issue with the UK's immigration policies. First Google result suggests 10k-15k Rwandans in the UK (https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/mapping-the-rwandan-diaspora-in-the-uk.pdf), and while I don't know the rate of stabbing sprees among native white Britons, my suspicion is that this incident alone places Rwandans well above the base rate. Giving the surprisingly helpful "List of mass stabbings in the United Kingdom" Wikipedia article a quick look (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_stabbings_in_the_United_Kingdom), the perpetrators for the 2020s are:
- Axel Rudakubana, the aforementioned second generation Rwandan immigrant;
- Kahiri Saadallah, a Libyan refugee;
- Badreddin Abadlla Adam, a Sudanese asylum seeker;
- "Jamall Walters, 18, Daneaco Reid, 19, Romeo Daley, 18, and a 17-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons", 3 black teens and a fourth whose race I couldn't find;
- Damien Bendall, a white British man;
- Joshua Jacques, a black British cannabis user;
- Charlie Ellins, a white British man;
- Jake Hill, a white British man;
- Valdo Calocane, a black migrant born in Guinea-Bissau;
- Marcus Arduini Monzo, a Spanish-Brazilian national;
- Jaydon Brown and Brandon Brown, black British brothers;
- Zephaniah McLeod, a schizophrenic black British man;
n.b.: If the news article didn't mention nationality or immigration status, I assumed they were British. Now, I'm no noticer, and the Wikipedia article that I cribbed these cases from does state that it is an "incomplete list", so I'm not going to generalize. Nonetheless, if you're going to assert that we have to "ask about UK culture" then it is perhaps worth considering the demographics of these perpetrators and how reflective they are of "UK culture".
meduka
3mo ago
I was curious if ChatGPT actually knew about and would recommend TheMotte (I admit I was doubtful) but can confirm that asking for "nuanced and respectful political discussion", while initially yielding such recommendations as /r/Ask_Politics and ResetEra (lol), when I followed up by asking for "niche forums with a high level of quality and rules around civility," TheMotte was the first recommendation.
Fact check: plausible.
meduka
3mo ago
I guess my question to you (and anyone else who is in the "bad shoot" camp): if she had unambiguously thrown the water before being fired upon, and this could be proven, would that make you update to something like, "it was an unfortunate situation but the officers were acting in self-defense," or would you still maintain that the officers were in the wrong/should be charged with murder?
meduka
5mo ago
I suspect with ZIRP on the way out we'll see more tech companies tightening their belts. The reality of it is that most tech companies are horribly over staffed (look at Twitter, where allegedly 80% of the employees were let go, with no ensuing technical disaster that was, nonetheless, oft predicted.) There have always been theories floating around as to why these companies become so bloated with dead weight employees: FAANG hires anyone remotely competent and gives them make-work to keep them from their competitors, was a common belief.
I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that and less strategic: headcounts bloat because when you're already making good money, the easiest way to increase your status is to increase the number of people "working under you". So projects which could reasonably be handled by one "10x developer" get spun out into entire teams to make the lead look better. And his boss is happier because now he is responsible for more people, which makes him look even more important, and so on. With fat enough margins (and/or a zero interest rate environment) this process can continue for a very long time. It's how a firm like Dropbox winds up with over 3000 employees.
meduka
5mo ago
This is pretty much my stance too, now. I saw the Vampyr (which was a solid 7/10 vampire RPG) devs released a new game, then noticed all the marketing was about their cringe interracial coupling. No thanks. And allegedly there's a romance between the (black) male protagonist and the (Japanese) female protagonist in the new AC: I'm sure that'll play well in Japan.
For me, it's just a strong signal that the developers do not care about making a good game on its own merits, and are (in the best case!) cynically playing to the woke gaming press. (If they're true believers, that's even worse.) White leftists writing fiction about black people is basically never going to turn out good, because white leftists worship blacks, and that worship is going to get in the way of any interesting story. In the case of the new AC game, it's even worse -- do you think a white leftist is going to competently write about anti-black Sengoku-era Japanese racism? Or even deal with the subject at all? (Actually, they might -- I think there's an argument to be made that the only people white leftists hate almost as much as other whites, are the Japanese.)
I would have much less of an issue with it all, if any substantial percent of the dev team were actually black, or blacks made up a substantial percentage of their target demographic -- but they aren't, and don't! It's retarded signalling all the way down.
meduka
6mo ago
I know basically nothing about soccer (what's an offside?) but I had a good time playing Football Manager 2024 on Game Pass. I actually subscribed to check out Lies of P (which wasn't bad) but ended up putting 50 hours into FM instead. I picked the crappiest, lowest ranked amateur Japanese team I could find and with a mix of lucky scouting discoveries and a couple of clutch third world imports, managed to drag them to the top of their bracket over a few seasons. Then we got promoted and none of my players could compete with the actual pros. Was quite tragic.
Anyway, I'd kill for something with FM-level depth but literally any other setting. There are a surprising number of management games out there but nothing compares in terms of sheer overwhelming complexity. I played a fair amount of Motorsport Manager (quite old now) and, despite also knowing nothing about F1 (though it's not licensed, so I suppose that is probably more of a plus than anything) really enjoyed the gameplay loop of poaching staff, choosing when and how to spend your very limited budget, taking big risks on race days when you have no other choice, etc.
meduka
6mo ago
The screen sharing is the most exciting part (for me, anyway): we're maybe less than a year away from opening the ChatGPT app and being able to share screen, hand control over, and tell it to get your project compiling while you go grab a coffee or something. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't jumped on this, with OS-level support you could expose a lot of context and possible interaction directly to the LLM without relying on vision (but I guess if vision is good/cheap enough then that's not necessary!)
I use Copilot a lot now that it's just natively there at all times, but it has basically zero ability to interact with the OS (I think all it can do is rearrange windows, pop up some settings, and read Edge web page content). I'd like it to have a "shared command prompt" that it can autonomously type commands into when I tell it to do things. The pasting back and forth is annoying.
meduka
8mo ago
The fundamental issue is, assuming HBD is correct, anywhere that adopts "colorblind meritocracy" will see massive disparities across racial lines. How do you expect blank slatists to reconcile this outcome with their beliefs? They will believe the system is flawed, racist, nepotistic, etc. Meritocracy + blank slatism is not a stable equilibrium: you need some kind of explanation as to why there are more losers among some groups than others, or else the legitimacy of the system will be called into question.
"Cultural differences" is the major non-HBD "defense", and personally I don't think it's robust enough on its own: e.g., even rich blacks score worse than poor whites on the SAT.
meduka
9mo ago
Eco
That brings me back. I no-lifed Eco for a couple of weeks on a public server with a few friends close to the Steam release and it was a surprisingly fun game to optimize (until our group got called into a "tribunal" for suspicion of exploiting, because our 4 players had progressed much further than the rest of the 200+ player server: supposedly we were abusing a bug that let you respec professions for free, in reality we simply specialized purely into unlocking better tech and completely ignored all of the efficiency bonuses, powering through with raw playtime). The player economy stuff was great: our currency become the de facto standard by cornering the market on higher-tier tech, and then we could discreetly mint more coins as we needed to buy up raw resources for "free". I haven't kept up with the game since, but as I understand it there were quite a few updates to prevent that particular style of gameplay.
Re: Palworld, I think your assessment is largely on the mark, though with a caveat that Palworld, mechanically, does interesting things that other (multiplayer) survival/base builder games don't. Or at least it tries to, anyway -- there are obvious issues that may or may not be addressed. Sure, Conan Exiles had a similar "recruitment" feature where you kidnapped enemies and forced them to work in your base, and you could even bring them along in a party, but it was quite horribly executed (IIRC with default settings you needed to "break them on the wheel" in classic Conan-fashion for literal hours: in Palworld you just toss a sphere and pray to RNGesus). Pals have needs and will path around your base to fulfill them: if you drop resources, they'll actually go pick them up and deliver them. This isn't technically impressive or anything like that, but it brings Palworld a step closer to something like Kenshi vs. a game like Conan where the NPCs are just crafting boosts. I recently played Enshrouded, another new Early Access survival game, and while I love the voxel-based building system (though I wish there were a few Valheim-style restrictions, like with smoke/structural support) the "NPCs" there are literally just crafting stations: you dump them in a spot and then they're completely static. At least in Terraria NPCs wander around a bit! It is shocking that no other game attempts what Palworld does. Hell, even Starfield, which is singleplayer(!!) has an utterly undeveloped base-building system compared to Palworld, and that's a game that had both Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 to build off of, but somehow managed to be a major step backwards.
meduka
11mo ago
Victoria 3 is pretty interesting. It's easy to make decisions early on that completely cripple your industrialization, leave you permanently running a deficit, etc. I'd recommend playing as one of the Canadian provinces until you have a handle on the economy: this gives you a benevolent protector (in Great Britain) and access to their market means you can drain their population via immigration once you improve your standard of living and make your "nation" more appealing.
Generally you want to look for goods that are overpriced and then focus hard on developing your production of those goods. Larger factories/extractors = better economy of scale which means you can start to snowball, so a single size 20 steel mill is generally better than various size 3/4 factories. You will want to focus on raw resources initially, and then move up the chain and start producing manufactured goods from those resources (there are efficiency bonuses for using local resources IIRC). Then you plow the resulting revenue into increasing your construction capacity (this is the engine of your economy -- employs lots of workers, but more importantly, consumes raw resources -> driving up their demand -> higher wages, richer capitalists -> more taxes, faster expansion).
Once you have an understanding of how to get your economy off the ground and into a positive feedback loop, everything else kind of clicks into place. It will take some trial and error to figure out what the optimal path is, but the many, many tooltips will provide enough information for you to figure out when something's going wrong. Depending on how well things go, you might be able to form Canada pretty early and opportunistically invade the USA during the civil war and seize some valuable territory. From there the sky's the limit.
Texas is a fun alternative semi-"challenge" start, after you have some experience with the game's systems. Mexico is a prime punching bag with lots of gold mines that, once conquered, can sustain your entire economy for decades with minimal taxation. You won't be strong enough to win a war against them immediately: your first decade or so should be focused on building up the warchest and the technological advantage necessary to steamroll them. If you stay independent (and maybe form an alliance with a European great power to ward off Yankee aggression) you can take California and Arizona (more gold!). Then you can slowly conquer your way down Central America and into South America.
meduka
11mo ago
I didn't have much trouble getting a 4090FE at launch simply through conventional means (make sure you have a store account setup, payment attached and working, etc) and being ready with my F5 key. Getting a PS5 ~6 months after launch was considerably more annoying -- I ended up sitting in stock tracking discords waiting for pings (because you'd never know when a new shipment is going to drop, or on what site) and usually those would clear out within 30 seconds or so. Which is totally doable if the ping hits while you're at your computer, less so if you're literally anywhere else.
meduka
1yr ago
I switched from using a pretty beefy "custom" Linux laptop from System76 to a shitty $300 Chromebook (old laptop was ~4 years old and I started having some trouble with the charging port and headphone jack) and while my expectations were low, I was pleasantly surprised: the experience is much better than expected.
The key thing is, I think, I mostly use my laptop for reading the internet and watching videos in the living room or in bed, or rarely when I go out. I have a top of the line desktop PC for gaming and coding, and Windows 11 has solid SSH and SMB support built right in so with barely any configuration I can access all my files, run whatever (CLI) programs I want, etc. Battery life is much, much better than my old laptop, something like 16+ hours of active use, and, while I'm sure this goes for most recent laptops, USB-C charging is great, because it simplifies cable management so much -- I can charge my phone, laptop, tablet, ereader, all with a single cable (and charge them off of each other if the power's out or whatever).
Probably my only complaint is the default out of the box ChromeOS Linux distro of choice is Debian (and an ancient release, at that), so I've run into some package issues when I try to do anything too interesting. Coming from Arch, Debian feels positively unusable, so I mostly just SSH in to either my VPS or my Windows PC if I need to do anything "serious".
I wouldn't be able to use a Chromebook as my only PC. But as, basically, a web browser/YouTube machine with a keyboard, it's great. I'm not sure what black magic optimization they've done to get Chrome with a hundred tabs running about as well as it does on my 13900k desktop, on this piddly i3-10110U chip, but it works. Best part is the price: I basically do not give a shit if it breaks or gets stolen or whatever, as I could easily get a replacement for 1/4 the cost of a decent mid-range laptop.
meduka
1yr ago
Yep, this is the right call for sure. Mumble is easy to set up and run locally, and there should be basically zero latency on a LAN.
meduka
1yr ago
I thought Fallout 4 was pretty decent, mechanically anyway. The gunplay was fine ("best in series" is not saying much, but I'll say it anyway), the settlement building and crafting were shallow but offered a decent respite from the endless "walk from person a to person b" quests or clearing what looks like the same dungeon post apocalyptic factory for the 10th time. I didn't play the story through to completion (and probably the less said of the writing, the better) but it was a reasonably memorable ~30 hours before I got bored. I liked the power armor. Solid 7/10.
Starfield seems considerably streamlined, even compared to Fallout 4. The loss of attributes means the only thing differentiating your character build is your choice of skills now, and unfortunately I have terminal RPG brain and cannot justify taking anything that doesn't grant me more utility (e.g., better lockpicking to open more doors and explore more locations, higher persuasion chance to open up new quest options, etc) and the combat isn't exactly difficult (you can spam medkits to brute force any encounter, even on Very Hard) so I can't see myself dropping a point into any of the weapons skills until, like, level 30+.
Companion AI seems even more braindead than I remember in Fallout 4, with followers regularly getting stuck on geometry, and they don't teleport to you until you change location, so they're useless in most fights. The space combat is basically just a minigame (and a hard DPS check if you're up against >3 enemies, as there aren't any useful mobility options, cover/asteroids are rare and get destroyed almost immediately) but the lego-style ship customization is still pretty fun to toy around with. Jump jets are cool, different planets having different levels of gravity makes combat feel a little different depending on where you are.
It feels extraordinarily casual. This is not necessarily a criticism, it's just a reasonably well executed AAA video game, with all that entails. My biggest complaint is that the design is unambitious: it's Fallout 4 In Space. Any time they had a choice of introducing more systematic complexity, they chose against. With the extended development cycle I was hoping we'd see something genuinely novel, but alas. I think they either experimented a lot (and cut a lot) or spent most of their time on content (and from what I can tell, there is a ton of it). Overall, it seems competent. It's not God's Gift to Gaming or whatever people were hyping themselves up for: it's a mainstream Bethesda game with as many rough edges filed down as possible. I'm still having a good time and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in an open world sci fi light RPG shooter.
meduka
1yr ago
When normies hear "ethnic cleansing" they think of ovens and Auschwitz. Hanania's (psuedonym's) actual phrasing there is much less inflammatory ("get them to leave") and while I'm sure you can find any number of progressive sources, ideologically captured historians, etc, who will claim that these things are identical, I don't think most people are going to buy it.
meduka
1yr ago
Personally I just use the built-in search plugins in qBittorrent, sort by seeds, set the filesize threshold to a couple of gigabytes so most of the awful encodes get excluded. For some really niche stuff (or if you just want more trackers for marginally faster downloads) you can run Jackett (also supported in qBittorrent), which searches more sites.
I ended up just brute forcing via log bots, but I did read an interesting post on the subreddit that suggested a "main river" architecture (compared to the typical "main bus"): all spoilables go on a giant belt that ends with a bunch of heat towers where they're promptly incinerated for power. You pull from the river, process the material, feed the results back onto the river. The result is that all your spoilables are always fresh, the "river" never stops flowing, and you avoid any awkward clogs. Viewing Gleba as, basically, a flow system vs. the stock system you see on the other planets seems like it'd greatly simplify logistics. Personally I didn't build a single heat tower until Aquilo which is an obvious missed opportunity in retrospect.
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