telchior

Fun fact since you bring up treasuries, Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to have moved several hundred thousand dollars (probably most of her assets) into treasury bills a few days before the tariffs announcement, pretty much like she knew exactly what was coming. I noticed that tonight with a new site someone else here made: https://www.capitoltrades.com/politicians/G000596

I suspect there's real corruption to be found, anyone who knew the contents of "Liberation Day" could make millions off a very obvious bet. Too bad we don't care about corruption anymore!

> unfathomable that a nation in such a privileged position would decide it's tired of such a systematic set of advantages.

That's just the thing, you've got it exactly backward! The US has been "looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far," and it's far less rich than it should be.

Icarus is taking flight, the rest of the universe better watch out. And for those stuck getting carried along toward the sun... tough shit, there's not going to be enough time to convince a population of born and bred narcissists that it's really hot up there before the meltdown.

If you went looking in China, you'd find plenty of really stupid or bad things that happened as a result of the government's ability to easily requisition land for public use. Ruined ecosystems, displaced families, corruption, the works.

Just this wikipedia page will give you a sense of the scale of just one of those issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_evictions_in_China

But it's quite obvious that any large-scale building would result in at least some of that. There is no way to "figure out" how to avoid all harms or how to avoid at least some broken eggs in the basket. Personally I'm all for North Americans figuring out what a "greater good" is, but the idea that it'll actually happen is laughable; we can't, we won't, we'll simply fester in what we have.

If someone changes and begins to continually insists that something plainly untrue is true, does that mean that they possibly still have the values they used to? How long do you continue defending the "well, maybe..." case?

Throw out the Jan 6th example, it's now ancient history. As a party, Republicans are, at this very instant, claiming that judges are acting illegally for... using their constitutionally mandated legal powers. Simultaneously, but separately, the party apparatus is repeating on a daily basis a new conspiracy theory that the judges they don't like are being controlled by some nefarious power.

And it's a very, very well established playbook. We have many examples of countries that dismantled their systems of transition of power and division of power starting with the courts. It's a move that could pretty much make it into a "For Dummies" book.

"The value is still there." I can't see it. But maybe I'm too focused on judging on the entire scope of action and speech, rather than a very narrow bit of speech that isn't at all reflected in actions.

Thanks, I checked out Tripo. It produced some absolutely laughable trees for me, but a pretty decent looking barstool. Refused to rig it for me for some reason, though.

I'd say it'll take them some years to finish figuring out 3D, it's a good stretch beyond 2D image generation.

Re: same thing not being able to happen a decade ago, perhaps so, but I'd argue that the signs were clear that it was about to happen. Some of the most powerful people in SV have been visibly showing hard right attitudes for at least that long. Not generally on social issues, but more of a muddy libertarianism. The social issues of SV just turned this into a pressure cooker; people who absolutely knew that they were brilliant revolutionaries, standing far above the masses, simultaneously had to put up with people telling them that the closest city had to be a haven for people on the lowest rung and that rich white men were essentially flawed and bad.

But I think whether that pressure cooker creating the most extreme examples had existed or not, the "Do no evil", utopian phase of tech was always destined to be a blip, caused by a sudden, massive influx of cash to people who hadn't been inculcated in the culture of how to defend and grow such a cash hoard. They learned. No surprise at all to see, for example, Zuckerberg tossing the president a $20 million "legal settlement" bribe a few days after he was voted in; he has his priorities in order for his role.

What / who is the leading edge of 3D AI? I took a look into it last year and the best tools were still a very long away from producing usable results (couldn't keep tri count under control, spiderweb rigging, shape jank, etc).

I agree with the idea that you can't get rid of all the cracks, and I'm not particularly salty that I did manage to fall through one of them (for a while). It's just one minor problem in, as you said, a complex system that is full of them, as all systems are.

However, I think you're descending a sort of contemptuous name-calling with the "useless hand-wringing for the sake of doing so", considering that the subject was an attempt to make a very large change to the way the system works. That change was rejected (and, as the OP to my comment said, called by many "hysterics"), but it was nonetheless a proposed solution. Now... we're in the process of a massive change of a very different type, with the DoE getting chopped into pieces and universities being threatened (very vaguely for now, since the focus is still on other areas, but I think there's no doubt that their time will come if the current admin can maintain its momentum).

In general, the populace is aware that there are quite a lot of cracks and is, in the haphazard way that democracies do things, trying to apply solutions.

"There are many people" is a useless platitude to any number of people who fall through the cracks.

Personally I had to wait until I was 25 to get some loans I needed to finally finish a degree, because my family was paper rich, wasn't paying anything, but was still on speaking / visiting terms with me. The system doesn't accept that as an answer; you have to show an extreme degree of alienation / separation (I can't remember the specifics, but a loan counsellor basically told me to give up).

Honestly, no idea; but I'd certainly wonder why the question flipped from what pages were removed that shouldn't have been, to whether they got enough traffic to merit talking about at all. Maybe acknowledge the prior answer before moving the goalpost?

The blanket removal of all pages in the women's health category is certainly an interesting choice. I guess the next step after denying that there may be more than two genders is to ... deny that there's more than one? Or that gender exists at all? Equality at last!

(for reference: https://www.cdc.gov/womens-health/mhh-continuing-education/i...)

My grandfather wrote a short autobiography, just for his immediate family. It's a really nice thing to have.

Length of remembrance aside, the idea of fame as immortality has always confused me on different grounds. It's not how fame works: we remember factoids, not people. It's a bit different if the fame is a work of art, but then the thing with immortality (sort of) is the art, not the person that made it. I might remember 7 things about Teddy Roosevelt, which are admittedly very cool and impressive things, but those things do nothing to represent the complex individual he actually was.

This may be something I'm making up, but I have the feeling that the fame = immortality concept came out of legacy: people wanting to create a family that continues on after themselves (and is rich, powerful, etc). Which makes sense, because then we're talking about a logical extension of the reproductive instinct. But in the modern world even that seems unreachable to me: we're so utterly different from our grandparents that we might as well be aliens, and the same will probably hold true for our own grandchildren.

I guess all that puts me in the Mike Tyson school of thought on legacy: "We're just dead. We're dust. We're absolutely nothing."

Jonathan Wild would be proud!

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild)

Unless the reason for the death of the paid content deal is because of AI vacuuming up all the content and spitting out an anonymous slurry of it.

Why would anyone, especially a passionate hobbyist, make a website knowing it will never be seen, and only be used as a source for some company's profit?

The problem seems much less simple than people just "taking it".

The first line of defense against these shenanigans is provider choice. If you've got employer insurance, you have no choice. If you are unemployed or have the kind of poorly paying job that has no insurance, you must prioritize one of a few cheap plans, all of which have bad reputations. The number of people who can really choose is likely quite small.

The second line of defense is knowledge of your rights. However... these rights are quite squishy. The insurance company has quite a number of methods, and people trained in using them, for creating and assigning debts. The customer typically has no knowledge, no time to obtain that knowledge, and nowhere to turn for help. Most people also know that if they're in a situation like yours, the company can very quickly make it MUCH worse by sending the imaginary debt on to a collector; this may be "illegal" but that's a nasty swamp to dive into for a regular person with time constraints.

The third line is just... persistence. This is most accessible, but you're probably underestimating the number of people who either flat out don't have the time / mental bandwidth for it, or have a fear of going against authority which more or less prevents them from repeatedly pushing back.

The insurance industry is an evolved parasite, and it has taken its current form after decades of evolutionary pressure in the system. You may not believe that people should "take it", but it is nevertheless specifically evolved to have the maximum number of ordinary people do exactly that.

I have vertigo issues and have wondered whether scuba might have contributed to the inner ear damage that causes it. It was either that or, also like you, sinus issues.

During the diagnosis phase of my vertigo I learned a few things about how primitive medicine still is when it comes to inner ear issues. If the problem isn't BPPV, some large growth they can cut out (e.g. a fistula) or something that can be "solved" by just destroying your inner ear (gentamicin therapy) there is almost nothing they can do -- and in fact they can't even really diagnose the issue, just test out different therapies to try to find anything resulting in some mild improvement. Most doctors have no idea what the possible diagnoses even are; the specialist who eventually helped me was a neuro-otologist, which already seems unreasonably specialized, and he said he only really had an idea because his son had the same issue as me.

I think what I'm probably dimly remembering is Arthur Young's "Travels in France" (a Brit crossing the channel). There are various others out there, a lot focused on criticizing the cultures they're visiting; if you want the opposite check out Goethe's "Italian Journey" (a German going to Italy).

To be fair, sometimes the "Japan is backwards" spiel is focused solely on their technology. And I don't think that one is wrong, even today. The keiretsus have continued to do a very poor job at innovating.

It's interesting to consider that these "Japan is backwards" takes might persist in part simply because it hasn't melded with the global first world culture. I can go to various countries and very similar experiences at an electronics store, a hotel and a gas station. In Japan all of those (and many others) are distinctively Japanese.

I've read travelogues from the 17th-19th centuries, and in a lot of them, all of the countries are described like Japan. "Look at these weirdos, they insist on ______!" A tourist going from France to Italy would be constantly amazed, offended and puzzled. No longer.

It's a weird thought for me to have. I'm not a conservative; I view xenophobia, fear of change, and cultural/economic death grips by an older generation as negatives. But it feels like most of the world that doesn't have those things is increasingly homogeneous, in a way that's also uncomfortable to see.

I didn't know that! Pretty sure the enterprise license didn't exist when I bought it.

I like these honour system enterprise licenses better than never-ending subscriptions, but they are becoming too common in the game industry.

Spine is really lovely. It was great back in 2019 when I used it to release a game. They released the 4.0 version a year later with a lot of updates and while I have no plans to make another 2D side-scrolling type of game... this one piece of software is what makes it tempting.

The thing I REALLY appreciate is the lifetime license. Checking my emails, I bought the professional version in 2015 for $289. Now it's almost a decade later, still getting awesome updates, and I can still get the latest version. Totally unlike the current trend... I'm looking at you, $20 / month for Speedtree.

I'm told that fried lungs are one of the great street foods. Haven't had a chance to try them yet, since North Americans tend to only use organs for dog food and haute cuisine, nothing in between.

By random chance I recently had a flight seated next to a coach for a young player who was in the women's Future bracket. The coach had been a Future player once too.

I've never really understood, at an emotional level, why pro sports exist. So after a while of conversation, during which he mentioned a few times how difficult life was for them, I finally felt like I could ask:

"If it's like you've described, why do it at all?"

He stared into space for a good few seconds, then responded:

"Glory."

I've wondered a few times since then whether the girl he was coaching would think that glory was enough; she had a look that, following the article, I'd describe as glassy-eyed loneliness. But maybe in a few years, she'll be the coach for someone in the next generation. For myself... I still don't really get it.

"Society" in this context can also mean "a tiny number of primarily self-interested individuals". That tends to be evident when the most powerful or influential people also happen to be strict authoritarians.

This was wildly annoying. For anyone that has been procrastinating on fixing it, all you need to do is open the command line and enter:

reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

That brings back the legacy right-click menu.

I recently "upgraded" to Windows 11, which began with going into Add/Remove Programs and removing everything I could, then going into settings and turning off all the Windows options I spotted. A method that, as far as I could remember, worked pretty well in Windows 10.

But I was stressed about some work stuff so I quickly moved on to pulling my project's repo and getting back to work. A week later, my project goes absolutely berserk with warnings and failures, which trace back to files / lines that shouldn't exist.

Turns out, I had dropped my repo into a directory managed by Windows OneDrive, and OneDrive had backed everything up and subsequently decided (for some reason I still haven't figured out) to start restoring and reverting deleted / changed files. My realization of this began with "What the fuck is a OneDrive?" tl;dr it's Microsoft trying to sneakily take over all your data / force you into its cloud services. I'd actually briefly spotted the name and turned it off, but it had taken that to mean "until tomorrow", of course.

Anyway, it's on me, right? I was distracted and lazy. Sometimes it takes a good old mugging to get back in the right defensive mindset.

There's also Sparkel, which uses a baking soda + citric acid powder in a separate reaction chamber. The cost is pretty low per bottle if you buy the bulk powders and mix it yourself; has been a while but when I had a Sparkel, I think I worked out that the cost was somewhere under 10 cents per 750ml bottle.

I've been using paint.net for years now and it does have some pros.

- Sufficient even for mid-complexity art tasks

- Nice, simple interface

- Plenty of plugins

I don't mind the proprietary format -- since I'm usually just doing quick tasks in it, I'm either saving as jpg or png, or don't expect to need to open the pdn file at some later time or in other software.

However for anyone looking to start with something new, I'd really recommend using Krita or some other more recent program. Paint.net's available plugins are wildly disorganized, spread across at least one forum and hundreds of threads, often out of date or not working as intended, etc.

Great community and they deserve all the praise for maintaining free software for many years, but much like Gimp, it's just not the best free option available anymore.

Arguably, Unity could survive without the game engine -- they just need to survive the consolidation of the mobile ad business. Many companies already used Unity Ads without using Unity engine, even moreso after the acquisition / near merger with Ironsource. That acquisition was entirely about staying a step ahead of the consolidation wave, and nothing to do with the engine.

Of course, while that idea may be arguable it's also absolutely idiotic. But I won't be at all surprised if Unity continues to steer in that direction, especially now that the Ironsource people comprise a large part of the company.