I grew up near a place called the “McGuffin Lumber Company.” It was just a tiny storefront business, and I never saw anyone go in. And, of course, “MacGuffin” is a Hollywood term for an arbitrary thing that motivates the plot of a movie, like the Maltese Falcon in that film. So it was a running gag in my family that it must be a front.

Does it really? That’s batshit.

Especially since he’s already been on TV talking about how “these are people who will never pay taxes. they’ll never hold a job. they’ll never play baseball. they’ll never write a poem. they’ll never go on a date. many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” He’s explicitly pushing the narrative that autistic people are useless.

Seriously, I was thinking about getting evaluated, and this gives me the chills. I will not be seeking an evaluation at this time.

Honestly this isn’t really all that accurate. Like, a common example when introducing the Word2Vec mapping is that if you take the vector for “king” and add the vector for “woman,” the closest vector matching the resultant is “queen.” So there are elements of “meaning” being captured there. The Deep Learning networks can capture a lot more abstraction than that, and the Attention mechanism introduced by the Transformer model greatly increased the ability of these models to interpret context clues.

You’re right that it’s easy to make the mistake of overestimating the level of understanding behind the writing. That’s absolutely something that happens. But saying “it has nothing to do with the meaning” is going a bit far. There is semantic processing happening, it’s just less sophisticated than the form of the writing could lead you to assume.

HID headlights were just as bad, and those go back to the 90’s.

Definitely worth a try!

That also! My sense is that for the switch it’s basically only limited by emulator compatibility, but for ps3 and xbox one it’s partially limited by the available cpu and gpu power. I may be mistaken about that though, I don’t own a Deck and haven’t tested this stuff myself.

Because being able to play your existing switch games with better performance is a big part of their sales pitch for this, but people were already starting to do that with the Steam Deck. At that point the comparison for the devices would look like:

Steam Deck: Cheaper, more ergonomic, can play more games, games cost less, games aren’t locked to the console, no charge for better performance if you upgrade to new hardware, can play any game from consoles up to some ps3 through emulation

Nintendo: Better battery life, 120Hz HDR screen, has a new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong game

In every other way it would lose the comparison.

With the emulator crackdown, people don’t perceive it that way, because they don’t think of emulation as an option for the switch. (I mean, some do, but even Retro Games Corps isn’t talking about that possibility anymore because of the strikes against his YouTube channel; they’ve greatly reduced the visibility of that as an option.)

For my part, I’m leaning towards sticking Moonlight on my existing Switch and just streaming from my desktop. It’s not elegant, but you can’t beat the price.

The “specific program” I have trouble with is Autodesk Fusion (formerly Fusion 360). There are projects that try to run it through Wine, but there’s a specific function that isn’t implemented in Wine right now that Fusion relies on as part of its authentication service, so it won’t log you in correctly, at least on the default Mint install. I think at least one of the relevant functions is currently in the Wine beta, so it may work again in a bit–I did manage to get it working briefly at one point, but I somehow screwed it up again subsequently. (I may just have forgotten how I launched it…I think I have two versions installed at this point, the Flatpak and the Snap install.) But even when it worked it was slow and janky in a much more severe way than when it runs natively on Windows.

The “specific program” my dad is interested in is Hesuvi, a piece of headphone virtualization software that also does equalization and crossover. At some point I identified a program I though would work on Linux as an alternative, but I would want to test that before committing to switching his computer over from Windows, and I haven’t got around to that yet. Other than that he mostly uses Zoom, and I think I tested that and it worked okay in Mint, though my memory is a little weak on that too.

I dunno. Basically everyone has their own little patterns they use with their computers, and switching to Linux requires changes to those patterns. It’s an adaptation. That’s not to say it’s not worth it–for a ton of people it probably is. But I’m not sure my aging parents can do it, and thanks to Fusion, I’m not sure I can do it either, because I just don’t have a good replacement.

The other option I’m looking into is Windows IoT LTSC. That omits a LOT of the problematic bullshit.

I’ll figure something out before the end of support, anyway.

Yeah. I’m 100% who Nintendo is trying to lure with this launch, and honestly I’m a little ticked off about it–I’ve really wanted Metroid Prime 4 for a long time, but now it’s coming out and I have to choose between playing an inferior version or shelling out over $500 to play the good version. ($450 for the system, $80 for the game, and compatible SD cards in sizes larger than the internal storage of the new system don’t even exist yet.) So I’m inclined to wait, and see if there are enough good games to justify the Switch 2 purchase eventually, but they’re going to count that as poor initial sales for Prime 4. It might kill the franchise. Replaying some of my switch titles with upgraded performance might have been enough to motivate me to make the move, but they’re also going to charge extra for that. That’s…not great. Nickle-and-diming on top of a much more expensive system with even more expensive games is just ugly.

It definitely has me thinking about getting a PC handheld instead. A lot of what I was picturing was second-screen gaming while watching TV or YouTube, and the Deck is definitely a competitor in that space. There are a bunch of people saying that “oh, the reason you buy a Nintendo system is to play Nintendo exclusives,” which, yeah, that is a selling point, but for the original switch, just being a portable system that played modern games was also a selling point. That second factor is absolutely going up against the Deck, and frankly losing, because Steam has everything. Switch 2 has to go all in on the exclusives, and that’s a much tougher sell, especially since they don’t have the gold mine of good games nobody had played that they had from the Wii U to pad the release schedule.

Maybe they’ll amaze me, but I see them being very unhappy with the revenue from this console in a couple of years, and casting about for stupid shit to blame. And I think they’re gonna blame Metroid. It’s not Metroid, guys. Metroid is great. It’s the pricing.

The White House is more than 40 hours away from here driving non-stop.

The number of people from here who could have participated in a march at the White House (maybe taking a week off work in order to get there and back traveling 16 hours a day by bus) would have been very small. Instead, thousands of us marched in our local downtown yesterday in a solid throng.

Protests at a specific location convey a message, but mass protests everywhere convey a message too.

I’m glad you asked, I was trying to figure out what Peter Sellers had in common with Musk.

It’s not unheard of, though. Modern Warfare 2 had only a 70MB file on its disc, basically a license, and required you to download the actual game.

Note I’m not defending this. It’s a nightmare for game preservation and pushes us ever further in the direction of never owning anything. I’m just saying Nintendo isn’t breaking new ground with this particular outrage.

For “listened to a boombox outside,” does it matter whether you did so voluntarily or just heard it because someone else was playing one too loudly for you to ignore? In other words, I’m either 0 or 1.

As kids my sister and I found a set of old 1950’s World Book Encyclopedias that a family in our neighborhood was throwing out. We brought them home on a wagon. We used them for years. They were definitely kinda dated–like, in the article about guinea pigs, it claimed they were the perfect animal for scientific research because they don’t feel pain, which is obviously bullshit and/or propaganda. But that was actually kind of eye-opening for me at the time, because I didn’t have a lot of experience of seemingly authoritative things that were also in error. It still had a lot of useful info, too.

Hubris is a kind of boastful pride–like a sense of invulnerability. It also implies a kind of dramatic irony, that this sense of invulnerability will eventually prove false. (The term comes from ancient Greek theater, where it’s often the Heroic Flaw that will eventually be the undoing of the tragic hero.)

Chutzpah is more…audacity, nerve, gall. A person with chutzpah doesn’t believe they can’t be harmed; they’re just willing to bald-face it out in the hopes you won’t actually call them on it. In English it can have a positive connotation, the way “cojones” tends to, but it can also have a negative connotation, like “cheek” or “gall.” It comes from Yiddish, where apparently it’s more uniformly negative. (Leave it to us Americans to interpret a condemnation of shameless effrontery as somehow laudatory.)

I guess I would say the key difference is that someone with hubris thinks they are invulnerable, whereas a person with chutzpah is aware they are vulnerable and absolutely refusing to act like it.

They’re definitely kind of related, but they just have really different feels to them

I never actually played Fable 2 (it never came to PC) but 1 was decent for its time, and yeah, 3 kind of fell apart. (You get to what seems like the halfway point, then the rest of the game plays out in a few minutes, entirely through menus, and is super boring.)

But mostly I’m finding it hard to imagine how a new take on this would stand out in today’s market. It’s, let’s see, a third-person action game with RPG elements tacked on. The setting is…generic western fairytale fantasy. I’m not saying the game couldn’t be good, but what would be distinctive about it? Having people call you “chicken chaser”? What is the contribution of the “Fable” pedigree here, apart from Molyneux baggage?

The one I thought was a good compromise was 14 years, with the option to file again for a single renewal for a second 14 years. That was the basic system in the US for quite a while, and it has the benefit of being a good fit for the human life span–it means that the stuff that was popular with our parents when we were kids, i.e. the cultural milieu in which we were raised, would be public domain by the time we were adults, and we’d be free to remix it and revisit it. It also covers the vast majority of the sales lifetime of a work, and makes preservation and archiving more generally feasible.

5 years may be an overcorrection, but I think very limited terms like that are closer to the right solution than our current system is.

Sean Duffy is the transportation secretary.

I should preface this by saying I don’t actually have a steam deck yet, so I haven’t tested these on there. So I’m only commenting on the games themselves. These are listed as deck “verified” in the steam store, though.

One I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Yoku’s Island Express. Breezy summer vibes, not much difficulty. It’s kind of a pinball metroidvania.

Tinykin is another game with a very cozy/low stakes feel. It’s an exploration/collectathon platformer with cute environments made up of household objects.

Littlewood is a life sim sort of game, kind of like Stardew Valley, but it’s extremely chill. There’s no time limit or anything like that.

And others have mentioned these, but Toem, Alba, and Donut County are all very good and gentle games too.

Oh, and Tchia. That one has some dark moments at times, mostly in cutscenes, but when you’re actually playing it’s mostly gentle and island-y.

Maybe also Wuppo? It’s a strange one. The story and humor and animation are pretty great in that one, but there are some boss fights that can get a little frustrating. It’s mostly a fairly chill platformer, but then it’s got kind of bullet-hell-adjacent bosses. I still really like the game, but it’s not quite as purely relaxing as some of the others here.

Pikuniku is kind of in the same position as Wuppo, but I liked it a bit less. The humor feels a little more forced or stilted, and the frustrating bits are because the controls are kinda floaty. My niece really liked it when she was 8, though, so it had that going for it.

Hope this helps! I’ve been looking for this kind of game a lot the past few years