HakFoo @ HakFoo @lemmy.sdf.org

Posts

10

Comments

493

Joined

2 yr. ago

Pulling off a game of pretty vast scope, supporting several very different host platforms, on a multi-year development timeline, and having it thrive in a hypercompetitive market is still an impressive technical achievement.

If all they wanted was to deliver "casino for horny teenage boys", they could have done far less and still achieved that goal.

The local ones have a freezer with ice cream novelties, much as you'd see in a convenience mar. I assume there's a business synergy of having kids who have to look through 500 slightly differently sized used "size 12 jeans" to find the ones that fit, and buying their compliance with desserts.

I'm hoping for Chinese cars because the low end of the US market is a mess.

If I want a sedan, my choices are more limited than they've been in decades.

Everything is more expensive, which I blame on adding a lot of complexities and gimmicks. At this point, an ICE drive train is a solved problem. Nominally, it seems like most of the features are about making it more luxurious but plenty of use cases don't need that.

Save $500 million on engineering an infotainment fiasco; sell me a car with the legally mandated back camera and a DIN sized slot, and I'll let Pioneer/Kenwood/JVC figure put the rest. Don't replace the chirping remote for power doorlocks-- which itself can be offered one model up from the base trim-- with a cloud-enabled, app-privacy-fiasco breaking point that turns into a vector for a $10-per-month subscription. Make sure cloth seats are available since Arizona exists and nobody wants to weld their ass to leather/pleather, oh wait now it's "vegan leather", which I guess is made from the skin of pretentious pricks.

Basically, sell me a 2002 Elantra built to modern crash safety code.

The Genshin fandom is much weaker here. I miss the endless *Mains communities with their useful guides, and the remarkable thirst of some of the groups :cough: /r/GenshinGays :cough:

The problem is that we have at least two things universities could be good at:

• Actual education
• Credentialing and Gatekeeping

Plenty of situations where you might want to get Actual Education, the university's "Credentialing and Gatekeeping" mission interferes with. Free-form study tends to be expensive (often tuition costs cap out, so it's more cost efficient to take a full-load than one class per term), scheduling is rigid, and study tends to be organized around testing, papers, and other tasks useful as "proof of work" rather than or even instead of developing knowledge. If my goal is "learn enough Korean to finish my favourite manhwa" or "fix my incomplete and wrong grasp of Eastern European history", and I'm not a 19-year-old starting a degree programme and willing to commit four years an intensive study of the subject, a university is a pretty awkward way to get this knowledge.

Conversely, we've got a lot of people enrolling in university because they want the Credentialing and Gatekeeping: they need a BSc or whatever to unlock a higher tier of job title. The parts of the university that still respond to Actual Education intent will say "make sure the kid comes out well-rounded" and that means he has to spend more time and money on courses with no commercial value. This tends to race-to-the-bottom, as people seek out the easiest "filler" electives to meet the programme requirements, rather than actually indulging in the buffet of knowledge. TBH, I'm sick of hearing the "you're there to learn how to learn" sound bite. Surely that's something we should be teaching from day 1 of kindergarten-- or is it a skill we've decided is unimportant for those not on a college track?

That doesn't even consider other potential purposes, like as a research hub.

I'm not sure what a "better model" would look like; maybe if credentialing were less important, we'd move towards streams of loosely scheduled open-entry/open-exit courses designed for broader adoption-- going over to the lecture hall a couple evenings a week could become socially normalize like spending nights at a pub.

This is embarrassing.

"We fucked up." It's not hard. Blame the intern who invited the first Ukranian of the right age they could find without doing any background on him.

It's the same logic as school uniforms. Congressmen, you see, have the same miniscule attention spans and raging libidos as teenagers, and the only way to keep them focused for more than 30 seconds is to surround them with nothing but boring blue suits.

Seriously, I suspect it's tradition-for-tradition's-sake, no less surreal than powdered wigs. It's interesting how aside from a waxing and waning of moustaches, there isn't that dramatic of a change in looks between the portraits of Presidents and Congressmen from 1820 or 2020. I'd hope that by 2120, we have at least one fursuit Presidential portrait, along with a head-in-a-jar, and of course, the first Robot President, who was obsolete on day 1 because he had to wait til the age of 35 to get elected.

You could set up a ROM drive with like 128k, and that would be enough to emulate a floppy, boot DOS, and load an classic off-the-shelf game.

TBH, I could see a viable angle in livestream-style QVC... with the proviso that the presenters are usefully interactive.

"Can you turn to the side so I can see how the shirt you're selling shirt looks from that angle" or "what do those four buttons on the doodad do?" It's approaching the experience of a store with helpful salespeople, only delivered remotely a la peak pandemic.

But that wouldn't scale to a huge audience, likely filled with trolls trying to convince the streamer to do something lewd or destructive.

Weight is usually a feature for locomotives, which are sometimes ballasted for extra traction.

Occasionally you see extra-lightweight engines designed for light infrastructure-- often putting the same guts on more axles to lower the load, but it's rare.

Modern locomotives also use AC traction motors, with sophisticated computer controls to generate an AC product suitable for the desired speed and torque. Even modern diesel-electric designs have alternators and AC internals. Yes, some old electric engines were huge rectifiers on wheels, but that's no longer necessary.

Electrification is a very "capitalism won't let us have nice things" problem; it's a 25 year commitment to infrastructure and new engines before it pays full benefits (higher reliability, simpler equipment, higher horsepower per unit, using dynamic braking to return power to the grid)

I like "floundering". I suspect NATO and equivalent organizations have a message problem.

Part of the reason BRICS seems to be gaining momentum is that it seems to be establishing a community of near-equals, with a message of cooperative prosperity. That's appealing for countries trying to advance and gain global respect.

Any relationship with Washington is going to be vassalism-oriented; even if you're all the right things ethnically and socially (see Australia) Buy the expensive gear, join the sanctions party, send a few of your own into the next unwinnable war against an abstract concept, but don't expect to say much at the discussion table.

This is probably why arrangements like NATO and various "let's box in China" blocs seem to be the way the US operates-- they can focus on a perceived military threat, and use the "we're spending 4x your GDP on military hammers alone" card to claim an excessive mandate.

The weak spot is that the message tanks during peacetime. Would anyone be interested in joining NATO if Russia hadn't been reboogeymanned over the last 15 years?

Moob mousepads exist. I use an Arataji Itto one :3

If done right, it could be a positive curator. Rules like "any drivers you get off of Windows update met certain tests, are not padded with unrelated crapware, etc."

But I suspect that won't fly. My main experience with WU drivers is a tendency to replace new drivers with old, broken ones. And I doubt printer makers-- the guys who made a 600MB driver to do the same tasks that a LaserJet 4 did with a 30k driver 30 years ago-- would play ball.

• Commodore 128DCR and keyboard.
• Yamaha TX-950 tuner. Just a pretty high-end unit.
• Onkyo CP-1030F turntable; a top-of-range circa 1980 table with most of the gimmicks
• Lian Li PC-V1000 case, basically complete

The real thing that matters is if they reach "good enough". 7nm/5nm/3nm is a useful technical milestone, and a measure of the quality of their tooling, but at the end of the day, the question is if they can make parts that fulfills a real product need without foreign dependencies.

Size is not everything-- don't forget when Intel stumbled on 10nm repeatedly, yet they were still printing money with 14nm+++++ because the process was "good enough" to deliver a chip people wanted.

I also have to wonder if the music is going to slow down for some of the IC industry soon. Yeah, we can feed every transistor that can be fabbed into AI/ML, but flagship smartphones are getting both expensive and ridiculous. Are enough people buying a $1500 phone, whose main feature is that it folds into an origami crane, that it can drive new process nodes? Or will a mature 7nm design provide enough performance and battery life for 90% of customers? What's the current killer app for more than a $200 phone? Maybe the camera, but image sensors have completely different manufacturing constraints.

IDK. They seem to have a direct sales presence on AliExpress, but I bought through Newegg because the direct-from-China price was like USD65 + 250 postage. The filters look to be pretty basic plastic meshy stuff, not like a removable foam pad.

I guess I'm the only one who LIKES the latching plug.

It works on a different level than a lot of tools. You need an actual floppy drive to hook it to, but it records the raw flux data on the disc. That's the layer "below" a filesystem.

There are then tools that will convert the flux image into a filesystem that can be mounted or modified with disc image editing tools.

But even that's a relatively high bar. Wl-roots is self-described as "60000 lines of code you don't have to write yourself", and any arbitrary compositor may not use it or may not be up-to-date with it. In X11, you don't need 60,000 lines of code to be functional. Hell, the example Window Manager that was printed as a couple of chapters in the old X11R5 reference books works well enough especially considering its size.

I feel like I missed the historic genesis of this particular quagmire. Knowing that a composer was essential, you'd expect developers would want to make very robust core functionality-- a super-rich libweston or something like wl-roots, so that "real" compositors would just be paper-thin extensions that answered the opinionated parts. Did early Wayland design get bogged down on embedded-style use cases where such features were seen as too expensive (compare: no built-in printf in C), or was it a deliberate territory grab by early compositor developers, trying to turn it into a place they could to gain competitive advantage?

You can never have too many Qiqis.

I would die on this hill, but she won't let me. (Green "+5654" appears to my side)