It took several violent landgrabs and wars of aggression before Russian oligarch money wasn’t welcome around the world, and those guys were all but openly affiliated with the Russian mafia from the days of the fall of the Soviet Union. I fully expect American oligarchs’ money to be happily accepted just about everywhere for at least as long as it takes Trump to get around to trying to take Greenland by force.

Fair point. My thrust was more that the reason why things like system boot times and software launch speeds don’t seem to benefit as much as they seem like they should when moving from, say, a good SATA SSD (peak R/W speed: 600 MB/sec) to a fast m.2 that might have listed speeds 20+ times faster, is that QD1 performance of that m.2 drive might only be 3 or 4 times better than the SATA drive. Both are a big step up from spinning media, but the gap between the two in random read speed isn’t big enough to make a huge subjective difference in many desktop use cases.

Femme V really nails the emotional arc of V’s story in ways that the VA for masc V doesn’t, to the point that I’m truthfully less invested in my current playthrough (male street kid origin) than I was in my original (female corpo).

That said, everybody who did voice work in BG3 did fantastic in ways that have made other things I’ve touched feel hit-and-miss – I nearly dropped Avowed due to some early mid voice work making me worry about the overall quality – but Neil Newborn has been rightfully getting acclaim for Astarion, and you have to hand it to him – they gave him the character, but he was the one who decided “I’m gonna chew the scenery so hard I shit splinters” and made it work so damn well.

The trouble with ridiculous R/W numbers like these is not that there’s no theoretical benefit to faster storage, it’s that the quoted numbers are always for sequential access, whereas most desktop workloads are more frequently closer to random, which flash memory kinda sucks at. Even really good SSDs only deliver ~100MB/sec in pure random access scenarios. This is why you don’t really feel any difference between a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive and one of these insane-o PCI-E 5.0 drives, unless you’re doing a lot of bulk copying of large files on a regular basis.

It’s also why Intel Optane drives became the steal of the century when they went on clearance after Intel abandoned the tech. Optane is basically as fast in random access as in sequential access, which means that in some scenarios even a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive can feel much, much snappier than a PCIe 4 .0 or 5.0 SSD that looks faster on paper.

In anything like a competitive district, a progressive Independent challenger is more likely to split the vote for a milquetoast Democratic incumbent and hand the seat to the Republican challenger. Working within the Democratic primary system has its challenges, but also clears the field so that there’s one clear choice for left-leaning voters rather than two.

First past the post sucks ass, but it’s what we’ve got to live with until we’ve got enough power to change it.

Have you seen who’s writing code these days? Everything is computer, computer is transgender, ergo everything is transgender.

Elon in his Cave Johnson era and we’re here for it

I won’t lie, the fact that Americans got a taste of this and then voted to go back for another bite of the apple (not to mention the global rightward shift that’s been happening along with it) has soured me a bit on representative democracy. Democratic modes of government seem to be fundamentally incapable of defending themselves against demagoguery, and too large a percentage of the population prefer to be told what to do and who to hate rather than put in the work of engaging seriously with the civic duties required to make a democracy work. I’m at a loss as to what a viable alternative might look like – various forms of autocracy are what we’re trying to avoid, and I’ve never seen any anarchist ideas that seem like they could work at scale, but clearly democracy falls apart when too many of the people participating in it refuse to participate in good faith.

Worse than that… The commercial weather services aren’t doing much more than repackaging or (questionably) refining NWS forecast data, which is derived from a global weather simulation that runs on a supercomputer cluster four times a day, incorporating data from NWS radars, government weather satellites, ground stations, etc. Musk and company want to blow this up because providing all that sophisticated data free of charge undercuts the ability of commercial services to charge for the same thing, but there’s no private infrastructure capable of generating the data underlying the base NWS forecast. Unless they plan to simply privatize all of that (a distinct possibility) destroying the NWS just means that there will be no high quality national forecasting at all, and even if they do privatize the infrastructure the expertise to make it all work won’t necessarily follow.

Look, I’m in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren’t “make my website prettier!” feels very much like a bunch of “webmasters” dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren’t looking and rebranding as “developers” whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.

Point me towards systems that don’t have a human in the loop, particularly any that utilize fully-autonomous swarms, and I’ll agree. Scary as the former are, there’s a world of difference between a handful of FPV suicide drones, and a cloud of HL2-Manhack-esque things operating on face-recogniton-guided autopilot.

I’ve low-key started to think the only reason we haven’t seen autonomous hunter-killer drones yet is that nobody’s willing to break the seal, and I’m scared for what happens when somebody finally does.

If there were quick and easy pathways for that to happen, my family and I would be gone already. Unfortunately, for most places you’d want to move to, the options are pretty much:

1. Go to college on a student visa (that window of opportunity closed for me about 15 years ago)
2. Marry a foreign national (just have to break the bad news to my wife first…)
3. Get posted abroad by your employer (about as likely as winning the lottery, even if you do work for a multinational firm)
4. Already be a dual citizen by descent (my wife can get this for, uh… Israel and the Philippines, but neither are great choices right now if you’re trying to escape conservative authoritarians)
5. Be fucking loaded already and buy a golden visa.

Past that, you can either take your chances overstaying a tourist visa or waiting for things to get bad enough to claim refugee status.

I was the last of my immediate family on Facebook, and I only stuck around to keep in touch with a couple hobby groups. I decided to cut the cord once Zuck went mask-off, and honestly I haven’t regretted it. The family group text is still chugging along fine, and most of the people I actually want to talk to are on other platforms at this point.

I don’t blame anybody who feels like they have to keep Facebook to stay in touch with loved ones… but man, it feels good not to have that spammy time suck on my phone anymore.

Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it’s quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody’s hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.

I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu’s star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don’t have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday’s hiccup) Nobara was much closer to “it just works” out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.

I’m an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh… twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that’s what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.

Say it with me now: model collapse! I think this approach is especially insidious in that rather than dumping obvious nonsense into the training corpus that can then be scrubbed, it pushes the downstream LLM invisibly towards spontaneously imploding.

This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don’t understand why the former is objectionable. It’s not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art… nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers’ part

I also grew up in Missouri, though I live in Kansas now, and I know several people who fit that description.

The thing that kills me about Missouri is that it used to be a competitive state for moderate Democrata, but the rural chunks of the state fell victim to right wing populism during the Tea Party wave in 2010 and now there’s a whole generation of Missourians whose defining political characteristic is rancorous hate for “liberal” city people. Kansas’ politics aren’t great, either, but at least the rural voters care about farm issues here… In Missouri, particularly south of I-70 where the only real industry they ever had was lead mining, all that’s left is the hate they’ve been fed from right wing assholes.