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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • This was one of the really interesting plot elements in World War Z, where towards the end of the war where they couldn’t really afford to be wasting resources on prisons, they brought back corporal and public punishment. They’d put people in stockades to let the entire community know they were caught doing something like stealing their neighbor’s firewood, or publicly lashing executives who were war-profiteering, and only imprisoning the absolute worst offenders who were incapable of integrating back into society.

    For a silly zombie novel, it honestly has a phenomenal amount of prettt interesting social commentary, and is absolutely worth a listen to the unabridged audiobook.



  • This had an interesting part in Westworld, where at one point they go to a big database of minds that have been “backed up” in a sense, and they’re fairly simple “code books” that define basically all of the behaviors of a person. The first couple seasons have some really cool ideas on how consciousness is formed, even if the later seasons kind of fell apart IMO






  • Those features cost almost nothing to implement at this point, and wouldn’t add more than $1000 to the end price, if that.

    Really, the main issues is that it likely is an absolute deathtrap in terms of impact safety, doubly so with our Truckasauruses everywhere. Not only that, but the reality is that, no matter how much people claim they want these barebones $10k cars, literally no one actually buys them.

    Americans don’t look at MSRP, they look at payments, and that makes ultra cheap cars extremely uncompetitive for both the consumer and the lender.

    They might only be willing to finance that $10k car for 3 years, and that’s a $300/mo payment, and they only make about $800 over the life of that loan. However, you move up to the $22.5k Corolla, they’ll gladly finance it for 6 years, and for only $50/mo more you get a much nicer car and they make 6x as much in interest at $3500.



  • That’s honestly what’s been happening. When we were shopping around there, I’d been seeing neighborhoods being fixed up one by one by contractors, because you’ve been able to buy places for literally $1k, and have been selling for $250k. It’s pretty wild to see, especially when some of these neighborhoods get completely gentrified and suddenly all the houses jump up another $100k. You’ll see a neighborhood of houses that might have a couple sales for $20-50k, and then 1-2 of the renovated ones selling for ~$200k, and literally on the other side of the road those exact same homes are going for $300-400k.



  • Which is honestly hilarious and sad, because you can basically just spend a weekend going to estate sales and get a phenomenal amount of gorgeous old books for less than what they probably paid for those fake ones. I’ve picked up so many cool turn of the century science/engineering books that are sometimes hilariously outdated, but they cost like a dollar or two at most, the majority being like 10/$1, and at the very least look really nice on the shelves if that’s all you care about.



  • If you’re on single phase power, you almost always need something like a start capacitor, at least for large-ish motors. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the reliability of the grid, and moreso how single-phase AC motors work.

    If that is a start capacitor, OP might actually want to shut it off once the motor is running, as they’re typically not meant to run continuously. Usually, there’s a mechanism that disconnects the start capacitor once the motor is up to speed, but it’s not strictly necessary



  • Which is one of the things that people seem to forget about with Microsoft when they think that them pushing Linux is some nefarious plot to kill Linux and get everyone on Windows. At this point, it’s like 12% of their total revenue. Not insignificant, but they’re likely going to see far more growth pushing products related to Azure, which most instances are going to be running some sort of Linux VMs.

    Microsoft saw the writing on the wall a while ago, and knows that the desktop and even embedded environment is a small slice of the computing pie. They would obviously still prefer to own 100% of that, but they also saw that there’s a finite number of users and devices that’ll use Windows, while there’s effectively an infinite number of things that people can put on their cloud services. Even if it has to be a “competing” OS, they’re making a shitton of money regardless.


  • And see, this is the kind of bullshit response that drives home why, even using it for a ton of things myself, I absolutely hate having to use Linux. Any time you ever encounter a problem, you always get the absolute shittiest responses imaginable from people. It’s always your fault for being such a filthy uneducated peasant, and never the OS’s for being incredibly unintuitive and esoteric at times.

    “How do I do ‘thing’?” invariably receives a response of “What kind of fucking idiot are you for wanting to do ‘thing’? No one should ever do ‘thing’. Thread closed”

    After using Windows for nearly 25 years at this point and doing thousands of installs, do you know how many times I’ve encountered some basic thing that’s utterly broken, and hasn’t been fixed by one of the basic commands like dism or some other relatively painless fix? I can probably count it on a single hand. Do you know how many times I’ve used even very “friendly” distros of Linux and spent at least tens of hours having to fix something that completely shit the bed after doing something basic like Linus did? Damn near every single time.

    Here’s the thing: I don’t mind dealing with those issues (aside from any time I have to ask questions, see the aforementioned community behavior), because I like fixing things and appreciate the incredible power and flexibility Linux offers, hence why I use it for my dev machine, homelab setup, etc. But 99.9% of the population is never going to put up with that shit, and the insanely toxic community doesn’t help things either.

    Also, nice ad hominem there. I had no idea that being a shitty person made it okay for the OS to nuke the desktop environment when trying to install Steam. I guess if it only happens to asshats, then it’s totally okay then.


  • Because if you’re like me, I can use my phone in a nuclear fallout shelter or at Point Nemo in the Pacific and still have 2 bars of 5G, but the moment I step into the Home Depot or Kroger by my house, my phone barely manages a single bar of non-data service. If I need to make a call or look something up in the store, I have to use the in-store Wi-Fi.