• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • Have you ever thought about why black people are often criminalized or why so many kids grow up without dads? It’s due to centuries of systemic injustices.

    Redlining is probably the biggest example. Redlining practices pushed black communities into areas given barely any resources. These places today have rough living conditions and rarely see revitalization efforts that actually uplift the people living there. This continued the years of generational poverty that came after slavery and the repeated destruction of any attempts for black people to get any crumb of prosperity. With little support from the government, combined with poverty, forces some into crime just to put food on the table. Now, with these areas being over-policed, you’ve got a recipe for high arrest rates.

    1: Black men are more often caught in this web. It’s not just about being targeted by the police. It’s about the dire living conditions, the lack of support, and then the heavy policing. All this means more black men end up behind bars, leaving families without fathers. The kids from these broken homes? They’re set up for a hard life from the start and some fall into the same cycle.

    2: Pulling your kids from public schools and opting for homeschooling restricts their exposure to diverse viewpoints and backgrounds. This is why many who’ve spent time in cities or universities tend to have less conservative views. It’s not about them being molded by others; it’s genuine exposure to diverse experiences and stories. This broadens understanding and breaks down barriers while leading less people to view different races negatively. I’m sharing this not to change your mind, but hoping you’ll see a different perspective, even if you don’t fully agree. Just as you believe in spreading your viewpoint, I believe in the value of diverse exposure. It’s how we learn and grow.


  • The BLM movement‘s purpose is to highlight the racial injustices black people face everyday in the United States especially in policing. Black neighborhoods are over-policed, their citizens are harassed and in the worst cases murdered in unprovoked situations by police officers. The fact that many people witness these injustices and either remain indifferent or choose to ignore them suggests that black lives do not matter in this country.

    Supporting the movement doesn’t mean you automatically think all white people are racist. All it means is that you recognize the racial injustices in society and support people, legislation and the steps it takes to eliminate as many of these as possible. This is why when someone doesn’t support black lives matter, the implication can be viewed as racist. It implies that they wish to keep these injustices ingrained in society. Highlighting the division that still exists in society is the only way to solve these problems. How can you heal the wound if you “won’t even admit the knife is there”?



  • 30% is better than nothing and for the majority of people that number would be much higher (different power mixes and climates). It’s not like power plans have to be converted before we switch to EVs or vice versa. We should be doing everything we can to reduce emissions whether that is making new solar power plants or switching from ICE vehicles to electric.

    I will add that EVs don’t actually solve the problem and other solutions like increasing public transportation and shifting away from car culture would have a much greater impact overall. The purpose of EVs wasn’t to “save the environment”, but to sell people more new, expensive vehicles with the illusion that they will save the environment while lining the pockets of those who helped to destroy it. They do help and something is better than nothing, but it still isn’t enough.


  • Unfortunately, Valve would also have to build a CPU translation layer (Like Rosetta 2) since games run on x86 architectures and snapdragon uses an ARM architecture. The steam deck uses a Zen 2 CPU architecture which is already x86 so there would be little motivation on their part to do this. Currently proton uses wine to convert windows api calls into linux calls. The big thing Proton does is allowing games that use DirectX to run on Vulkan which is natively supported in Linux. So unless Valve makes the Steam Deck 2 with ARM or another company decides to make an x86 to ARM translation layer, then I don’t see something like Proton coming to android any time soon.


  • If we are talking solely about power usage from the grid then, even in the worst case scenarios, EVs are much cleaner than ICE vehicles.

    For example, the average gas car emits around 441g or about .972 pounds worth of CO2 per mile.

    For comparison purposes, let’s take the most popular EV currently sold right now which is the model 3 long range as our test case. This car in the worst conditions (cold) goes around 240 miles (a far cry from the 300+ it’s advertised to have I might add) and uses 72kWh to do so. This means, in the worst case scenario, the car is using .3kWh of battery per mile.

    Now for the power plant. Let’s use coal as our power source. Coal power emits approximately 2.26 pounds of CO2 per KWh produced. If we take our numbers from earlier, then the model 3 driving in the cold results in .678 pounds of co2 per mile being emitted at the power plant if it is charged using coal power. This is still about 30% less emissions than the ICE vehicle per mile. If the car was powered by natural gas then the percentage grows to around 70%.

    Of course there are other factors involved such as other pollutants emitted during power productions (especially when burning coal). However, a lot of these are also produced by ICE vehicles. It’s much easier to have centralized sources of pollution rather than millions of them spread out over the place. Another thing to note is that EVs take more emissions to produce, but is mostly offset over the lifespan of the vehicles due to their low maintenance. EV batteries can also be recycled, though they are usually used in power storage instead of new vehicles.


  • The performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 GPU is already about 10-20% faster than the A16 chip, depending on the benchmark.

    Even if Qualcomm only gives the Gen 3 a 10% performance increase, that is enough to beat or even surpass the A17 in gpu performance (rumors suggest something closer to a 30% increase). The Gen 2 already outcompetes the A16 in GPU power consumption and efficiency as well. This may change with the A17 since it’s on TSMC’s 3N node, however this node has been having issues which is why TSMC introduced the 3NE and 3NP so we will have to wait for power usage numbers from the A17 to see.

    Overall I’m disappointed with the improvements between the A16 and A17. 10% on the CPU and 20% on the GPU (due to have 20% more cores) doesn’t seem like the type of upgrade I would expect from switching nodes. Hopefully next year they can do more with the improved N3 nodes. I’m also getting the feeling that Apple is trying to deploy more complex transformer models on their devices which is why we are seeing such a focus on the NPU.

    I think you hit on the main point which is that nobody will pour money into developing for android. Apple also has the ability to make deals with companies with Capcom and Ubisoft to ensure games come to their platforms. I can’t see Google doing this since they already “tried” and failed to have a AAA mobile gaming platform with stadia. The only other company with enough motivation and money to bring big games to android is Samsung, but their mobile chips aren’t doing too well (despite their RDNA 2 architecture making it easier to port games).


  • I used to work for a wealth management firm who got pre-IPO shares of DWAC. Even with the lockup period, anyone who bought those shares made an incredible amount of money. To anyone who invested at or after the IPO…they’ve lost quite a bit. Just goes to show that being good at investing boils down to having lots of money and knowing the right people. Basically the rich get richer with absolutely no risk while the average person gets fucked to line their pockets.





  • What’s interesting about homophobia in Iraq and West Asia in general is that it was originally imported by the British during their colonial rule. Prior to this these countries were much less strict about homosexuality. It was still frowned upon at certain points in time, but not violently persecuted. After these countries gained independence they stuck with the British stance regarding homosexuality. Ironically, western nations becoming more open about same sex relationships made fundamentalists in these former colonies even more homophonic and violent because it had the appearance of going against western hegemony (despite homophobia still being firmly engrained into western society).


  • The American dream is essentially trying to tell people that the United States is a meritocratic society. The more work you put in the more you get out. However, I’m sure most of us know this isn’t true. Where you were born and what family you were born into is the primary factor in determining someone’s success. So you grow up hearing stories of “hard working” billionaires and think “I can make it there if I work hard” while ignoring your family who worked their asses off and got nowhere. You see more of the lie of meritocracy as you age. People around you work hard and fail, you might succeed with less effort or fail with more. The idiotic decisions of today’s billionaires solidifies the notion that the American dream never existed and was fabricated to get people to work more for less in the hopes that one day they will make it. In reality, it all comes down to the zip code you were born in.



  • The only way Apple Maps is good is if you put in a million requests to fix all of the issues with mislabeled business, incorrect routing, nonexistent places, etc. Only then would I consider Apple Maps to be on par with Google Maps. Since I have an iPhone and like the interface I tend to use Apple Maps more often, but the terrible search (which routinely doesn’t list easy to find locations), awful routing (it loves to take the express lane which has different exits without providing a toggle not to use these lanes), and out of date mapping data (I’ve gone to multiple nonexistent locations) makes me go back to Google Maps every time. I will admit I do love their 3D maps and street view which I find to be higher quality than Google Maps. Besides this and the interface, Apple Maps is inferior to Google Maps.