In the Canadian military they don’t say “Idiot proof”, they say “Yank proof.”

I have no comment on this product, but i respect their music choices. Meds absolutely fucks.

Your division between intent and capability is meaningless here. As is your quibbling over the specifics of imperialism. While there is, potentially, some room for argument over Iran, Russia fits your definition of Imperialism perfectly. Russia is a strong advocate for exactly the world of imperial spheres of influence that you describe, and it’s absolutely wild that you can’t see that. As for the question of intent vs capability, this is an irrelevant distinction because they are actively working towards the creation and reinforcement of imperialist power structures. As the strength of competing imperial powers in their respective sphere wane they will expand - or at least attempt to expand - to fill the gaps. That is imperialism.

The outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is misery and oppression. They are not aiding the oppressed, they are oppressors. The Iranian regime engage in the oppression of their own people and if given the opportunity they would engage in the oppression of other people as well.

It’s frankly ludicrous that I even have to explain any of this. You - and just about everyone else here - are operating on a childish morality. You haven’t actually unpacked the propaganda you grew up with, you’ve just swapped out the heroes and villains in a global meta-narrative that still demands the existence of heroes and villains.

I’m aware that I’m trying to offer reason to a cult by even trying to convey any of this. I probably won’t bother replying further, there’s little value in trying to convince a wall not to be a wall.

Russia and Iran are totalitarian imperialist states (Iran’s imperialist ambitions are extremely constrained, but they would still gladly overrun their neighboring states if the opportunity existed). They’re not undermining imperialism, they’re perpetuating it. That’s like arguing that GameStop is undermining capitalism by trying to buy eBay. Competing within the bounds of a system isn’t undermining that system. Cancer isn’t good because it sometimes kills bad people.

Looks very rough around the edges right now. This is a let’s play from only 4 days ago; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puiQqT5AQ8g

Clicking and dragging doesn’t work. Items are labeled confusingly. Some stuff isn’t translated. Graphics are a mixed bag. Oh, and no settings customization, at all.

Nice idea, I hope they can address the issues, but seems underbaked.

Anyone who hasn’t actually watched the interview, you really, really need to. “Combative” doesn’t come close. It’s a train wreck. Ryan is repeatedly pressed on where the fuck they’re getting the money for this, and he not only fails to answer the question, he doesn’t even seem to understand it. There are long stretches of silence as he gormlessly stares at the camera before repeating, endlessly, “Half cash, half stock” like that somehow explains anything. I’ve seen Trump pressers that were more coherent.

MOASS is definitely right around the corner this time!

Very few of the job losses attributed to AI are really because of AI. Mostly it’s just a bloated tech sector shedding weight and using AI as an excuse because it plays well with shareholders. The reality is that they over-hired when credit was cheap and now they’re looking at their bottom lines and trying to find ways to be more efficient.

I’ve worked at a company where the entire billing system ran on a Windows Server 2003 machine, running in a Vmware Workstation Player 15 VM on a Windows 8 PC.

The billing software wasn’t actually billing software, it was a kind of build your own software toolkit heavily customized. Like, a sort of simple scripting engine. The actual program was no longer available and would only run on older versions of Windows even if it was. There was no installer available for it. If any part of this setup failed they would be unable to process invoices. The data format was totally proprietary with no way to export it to any other platform.

The whole setup was accessed by remote workers using an unprotected RDP connection. No VPN.

I really feel like you’re actually being too generous to this proposal.

Let’s be clear, when this administration says they want to vet new models, what they mean is that they want to turn them into right wing propaganda engines. This is “reprogram ChatGPT to say the 2020 election was stolen, white genocide is real and trans people are all sex predators, or we won’t certify it.”

Radar doesn’t work very well on cardboard. Ukraine has already been using drones like this since 2023.

I’m sorry but I really don’t see how anyone working in that environment is going to “develop the skills” to do semi realistic 3D rendering at scale. That’s not just skill, it’s access to resources, manpower and time. It’s not the same thing as encouraging someone to learn to draw or write instead of using AI. These just stuff aren’t comparable situations. I wouldn’t tell someone to hand craft their own injection moulds instead of 3D printing.

No arguments on Roblox being horrible and exploitative, I’m not encouraging anyone to use it, but that’s not really the point here, is it?

A standard, official Xbox controller is $85 CAD. This thing is $150. That’s almost double. I agree, the features sound great (especially having used the original steam controller, I know how good their touchpads are), but still… Almost double.

I’m gonna be honest, in this specific context, I don’t hate this.

DLSS5 sucks because it takes all the hard work that goes into making games and flattens it out into this kind of uniform pastiche of an art style. It turns every game into the same bland, generic slop.

But if we’re talking about kids building experiences for each other in Roblox… Yeah, why not? I don’t buy the idea that a group of twelve year olds should just suddenly develop the skills required to make photo-real graphics in between homework and bed time. Yes, this is the equivalent of slapping an Instagram filter on everything, but if that filter allows someone to realise an approximation of the idea that was rattling around in their head, I think that’s pretty cool. And if they really get into this stuff, I think they’ll start to notice the limitations of these tools and get interested in learning how to do it from scratch so that they can get a result that’s even closer to their vision.

I’m aware that a lot of this stuff does get taken pretty seriously and actually sold as entire games, effectively, but even in that context, you’re not exactly going to stand out if you’re using the same glow-up filter everyone else is. And for the people who really are just making a cool dungeon crawl for their friends to play, being able to just kind of cheat code a baseline level of graphical fidelity seems pretty OK.

I guess my point is, yes, this is a crutch. But it’s pretty damn silly to complain about crutches when you’re standing in a hospital.

No, that’s only allowed if you’re super wealthy or part of Trump’s cabinet. Regular people don’t get to play at the big boy table, they’ll come down on you like a hammer. Just look at the soldier who bet on Maduro getting “removed”. He’s facing charges while guys like Lutnick are making bank.

Where I live people genuinely commute by snowmobile.

So far they’ve sold out the first three batches already, so either they’re lowballing their production runs or demand is strong.

This is the sort of thing that sounds like it wouldn’t work until you realize that it’s literally Microsoft Flight Simulator, but with cars instead of planes.

Here’s a fun fact about Flight Simulator. Years back I used to work in a computer store, and we’d do custom builds. My best sales, by far, were always to the smartly dressed guys in their late forties who came in looking for a gaming PC. You’d ask what kind of games they play, and they’d tell you “Just Flight Simulator.” They really meant it. They were building a gaming rig for one game. And then they would drop the most heinous stack of cash to build a gaming rig that would make the gods weep in envy. Massive towers with double or triple GPU, maxed out RAM, best CPU on the market. Liquid cooled? Sure, fuck it, why not. Their parents built model trains. These guys had Flight Simulator.

As a franchise, that game has 22 million sales. The Forza franchise has 16 million.

All of which is to say that I do think there’s a missed opportunity here. I hate racing games, but I’d play an open world driving game and I know at least one friend who would play it with me. Cruise down a mountainside in Italy, navigating hairpin bends with the hammer down and a beautiful sunset in the distance? Yeah, fuck it, sign me up.

Absolutely. One of the really nice things about Immich is it stores your files in a normal folder structure. Nothing obscured, very easy to backup.

If you’re willing to self-host, Immich is a fantastic replacement.