topgrain2

Even with extensive assistance (which is way too expensive to widely deploy) outcomes are weak.

Last I checked, researchers in the specific area of high-touch weight interventions were excited that they finally had a tool that might more-than-barely work… in glp-1 agonists.

People talk past each other on this because for an individual it technically can work, and sometimes does, but on a population level, as extensively studied by people whose job it is to study that, it definitely does not work. Even with tons of regular attention from professionals and a cohort selected to have above-average motivation, it’s surprisingly poorly-performing (and that’s a crazy expensive level of intervention)

Think about how we describe contraceptives, medically speaking: a failure rate is tracked and promoted that’s the in the wild rate of failure, not the ideal-use rate of failure (which can be effectively zero!). The diet and exercise equivalent of a contraceptive couldn’t be sold, because its failure rate would be way higher than its success rate.

So “we” (people who’ve paid attention to the science on it) know it doesn’t work (on a population level), like for-sure definitely does not work, but a person reads this assertion of fact and goes “but wait it worked for me, this person must be dumb or something” but that’s not it. It’s two different perspectives on what it means for it to “work”.

> Were you able to find coverage?

Never fucking do this. It's the manager's job. Like it's their actual job. If you just want to last-minute swap a shift for fun? Sure. If you're in the hospital or otherwise have an actual crisis to deal with? Nope. [Incidentally: also not your goddamn job if it's actual policy-granted leave planned in advance, "oh you can have those days next month, just find coverage" NOPE that's why you make the "big" bucks, jackass]

An enormous proportion of low-level managers of poorly-paid employees are (I'm choosing these words deliberately, not just to throw insults) really stupid assholes, so they are very bad at managing schedules (that's the "stupid" part, this is not rocket science) and also think that's somehow your problem (that's the "asshole" part) but it is not.

> What do you think that pay is for? Stop being weird.

Not for me to cater to the needs of some adult-babies who don't want to hear my actual baby on a "late night work call". Zero of the dollars are for that.

So you bowl the ball against the wicket so the batter can try to hit your bowl? And then if the ball you bowled hit another thing that is also a wicket, you got a wicket?

Not confusing at all. :-)

Nah, Catan's among those. It's very common for an initial set-up to leave 1-2 players with no realistic path to victory by turn 2 or so, even if they've made the best choices available to them. Once you learn to spot it, the game kinda sucks. It's not fun to play a game as one of those players, and it's not fun to play a game where some of the other people at the table are just filling space less than 25% of the way through the game. It's not as bad as some others for early player elimination (as world-domination-mode Risk is infamous for) but it also doesn't officially eliminate them, which is arguably even worse.

> Instead of 3 outs there's 10 outs (called wickets).

> An out is having a ball caught after you hit it (same as baseball) or the ball hitting the wickets when at bat (kind of like strikeout)

I thought a wicket is what you call an out? Now it’s something else, too?

(This kind of thing is why being a baseball fan having cricket explained at you by a Brit feels exactly the same as listening to people play mornington crescent)

> When we get over the beachhead drop out of formation and land on the strip. We’re told the Nazis are fouling the drinking water, so it will be appreciated. There’s no trouble finding the strip, the battleship Rodney is firing salvoes on Caen and it’s immediately below.

Oh god. Yeah just follow the path of the 9 x 16" gun salvos from Rodney blowing big-ass holes in the ground, you can't miss it. LOL. Now those are some directions!

Yeah I’m a huge fan, lots of linen and thin, fine cotton that’s not been formaldehyde treated (so, not “non-iron”) on me in hot months. I even have an open-weave linen sweater that’s comfortable into the 90s of degrees F. I’ve got a few high-twist wool pieces that are nice in the heat, but they’re more specialized, less everyday wear sorta of things.

Dedicated summer clothes in trad fabrics are a ton less durable than their winter counterparts, though, for the simple reason that they’re much lighter-constructed. Individual pieces can be had plenty cheap if you bargain-hunt and shop used, but you cycle through more of them than, say, heavy-weight denim or a hefty tweed. Still, mine usually last a few years. Cycling them out seasonally means they don’t wear as fast as some synthetic-blend shirt you wear year-round, so you may not get more wears out of them, but they last a good long while in calendar time.

But man, do they breathe better than just about any of the fancy “tech” fabrics. And feel nicer. Durability, though, is an issue, and you have to get the fit closer to correct than many shoppers may be used to, because most of them won’t have much stretch (no cheating by blending in some nylon or whatever, like a “tech” fabric would)

Keyboard layout specific. Macs with their default English layout use “option-shift-dash” which is really easy to remember (and relatively discoverable, as such things go) which is why using proper m-dashes (not just double-dashes) used to be a strong indicator a poster was using a Mac, before LLMs took the character over.

On iOS you type it by pressing dash and holding until alternative options come up, same way you type e.g. accented characters.

Linen clothes are awesome. Long trousers and long sleeves and almost as cool as short sleeves and shorts in shade, and cooler in direct sun.

All I can figure is they’re running it with some dirt-cheap tiny model. It’s wrong just about every time I bother to read it. If their idea is to get people interested in their “AI” results, this effort is doing the opposite. Even my kids, with zero input from me, jokingly equate Google AI results with being wrong about things.

An excellent argument for advocating to Make the Bastards Pay when they get away with some unfair bullshit.

> What AI firms are trying to build is the artificial equivalent of a human brain.

We should probably leave this here, because I don't think this is even close to true (that it's what they're trying to do, or that it's what they've done—I do believe it's the sort of claim their marketing departments and investor-hype-meisters might make, though).

Yeah, they did it quite a bit in the 20-teens. Wasn't uncommon to see an event where they finished announcing an upgraded model of something, then had a slide where the current price fell away to reveal one $100-$150 lower.

Alibaba's asking for things, and receiving what they asked for.

> If it was the underlying data, that's freely available.

A bunch of it is not, but was pirated. And "underlying data"—JFC, that's billions of person-hours of thoughtful work by real people, practically infinitely more worthy of respect and care than what these LLM companies have done, without which they would have nothing. Alibaba's being more above-board about this than the major American firms have been (are they in general? Oh no, I doubt it, but in this particular case, yes). Extra accounts to get around TOS restrictions is the lesser evil here, and it's being done to companies that did worse. This is the least they should suffer, and their complaining about it is as comical as a professional fence crying about how unfair it is their shop got burgled.

Live by the sword...

> Isn't that a bit like saying if you read books in a public library to pick up a new skill you should work for free?

Only if you’re trying to muddy the waters. No, obviously it’s not. One can also support licensing for driving a car on public roads but not for walking, even though both involve traveling. This is only confusing to people pretending to be confused, for effect.

> Would it be an attack to take your meal by force if you used a public recipe to prepare the meal?

“You wouldn’t download a car…” (unless it worked like copying an MP3, then, of course, you would, everyone would)

It’s as if you’re using terrible analogies and comparisons because stronger ones don’t exist. Great news for the AI-should-be-open crowd.

> What games do you play now that this specialized piece of hardware would better?

It'd likely be better as a living room TV PC than any PC I've ever owned or have seen for sale before, and it's likely to enjoy years of good support and frequent updates for its entire software stack by the same vendor that's selling the hardware, which is something I've never seen from anyone but Apple (aside from Valve, of course, for my Steam Deck) in more than 25 years of buying PCs and PC hardware. I tend to use my gaming PCs for five or so years at a time, despite never buying any parts that are top-of-the-line, so I'd expect to use this at least five years, and if the steam deck is any indication, it'll likely have 1st-party support for exactly the device and software I am using that entire time.

It'd be better for approximately all the games I play now than the power-hungry giant tower I have (it's effectively a lateral move on everything except 3D processing speed, which'll be roughly double what I've got now), plus, unlike this bazzite-running franken-PC, I expect it won't do stuff like have a weird whole-screen momentary color-shift every couple minutes (multiple monitors, it's the software, not the monitor's fault), constantly forget how to connect to bluetooth devices it's paired with (this, with a USB-attached bluetooth chip that's allegedly "really good on Linux", LOL; incidentally, it also can't pair with some devices in "desktop mode" [KDE] but can connect to them there once paired in "Gaming Mode", it's so weird), freak the hell out and scream like the damned(!) if a game tries to output something other than stereo audio, et c. I expect it'll have fewer "minor" problems like that on account of the 1st party vendor support and their having very few total hardware configs to test against.

I want it to play video games. Who in god's name would brag about something they merely bought? Especially if that something is mass-produced electronics.

... holy shit, why are they so high used, I'd never have guessed?! Thank you for pointing this out, as someone with a Steam Deck I almost never use and a desktop gaming PC running bazzite that I do use, a lot, but wanted to replace with a Steam Machine, I'll probably do exactly his.

I'm in the "steam deck that I never use" camp but it's because I've been too lazy to take a Saturday to repurpose it into a dedicated console piracy device, it turns out I hate playing basically any PC game "on the go" (their touchpad-thingies seem to please some people as a mouse replacement but I find them entirely unusable), and it's just weak enough that I've found it worth keeping my old gaming PC around for now for 1080p+ gaming at OK quality & frame rate (and if I've got that plugged in, why plug in the steam deck?)

For me the Steam Deck proved to me that Linux gaming was viable (finally! I've been trying since the days of Unreal Tournament being a current game and having an official Linux binary, LOL) and that I like the idea of an official Valve device, but that I needed a little more power and a desktop-alike form factor to reach a point of "good enough" for me (well, portable would still be fine, I just wouldn't use it that way so it'd be better if I didn't have to pay for the extra parts or have the added complexity and jank-risk of a dock)

Like if my gaming PC broke I would't replace it (at least not for quite a while) but I would plug my Steam Deck into my monitor and start using it again, it's not that the device is wholly useless to me. It just wasn't quite a fit for what I do & want, it turns out. I do use my gaming PC, and that's what a Steam Machine would have replaced. I even have Bazzite on there so I for-sure would have used the Steam Machine, as I basically have a somewhat rougher-edged (and way bigger, with obnoxious "gamer light" horse-shit all over because that's hard to avoid for some reason) version of it already.

End-to-end (hardware, OS, UI software) support from a single vendor for a narrowly-configured gaming PC, with actual serious support in terms of software updates and such, not just "we'll maybe honor the warranty if it breaks", including for TV-attached use cases where PCs (windows or Linux, either) tend to be kinda wonky[0], was appealing enough to me that I planned to buy it day-1 if it was under $700, and probably would still have bought it up to $800, to replace my giant gaming tower with Bazzite on it, even though performance-wise it would be roughly a lateral move or slight downgrade. I was really looking forward to the day I took that thing out of my house, but now... nope, gonna be a while because a few billionaires bid PC hardware up to the Moon.

I'm not aware of a single other product on the market that offers what Valve's device does. Tons of companies offer gaming PCs and you can slap Bazzite on lots of them, but that won't get you everything the Steam Machine offers. It's, AFAIK, unique.

[0] "But I've been running a PC attached to a TV literally for decades..." yeah, you've probably been missing some HDMI features that you don't care about but others do, or had trouble with them, while any gaming console or media player will have those features and have few or no problems with them; do you have surround sound over HDMI to a proper audio receiver, with non-broken mode-switching depending on current output? Use CEC features to wake your PC from sleep? What's your color gamut like? I've done this before too, a lot, hell I did it all the way back when I needed a composite or S-Video out on my video card to make it happen, on a CRT TV before HDMI ports were really a thing. Really good support for the use case looks a lot different than what you usually get by just plugging a PC or laptop into a TV.

The game series that creates a whole fresh world and story for most of its games, and that has shifted across and flirted with genres other than the one it started with? That resisted “when’s the final fantasy 7 remake?!” requests and a guaranteed pile of cash that started almost as soon as the original game was released, until very recently finally releasing a remake that actually does interesting things with the game rather than just being a lazy cash grab?

They risk alienating fans (and, often, do so-alienate them) way too often to put them in this category, I think, and specifically for the reason of having failed to play it safe and target nostalgia.

I can vouch for this still not really being true even in Apple-land, since almost any peripheral, external disk, printer, whatever, that I'll want to plug in isn't gonna be from Apple.

In 2026 the single most useful port to add to my Macs would be USB-A, with no close competition. On any device with 2+ USB-C ports, it'd easily be worth sacrificing a USB-C to get a USB-A.

I just bought a few 8bitdo controllers, wired and bluetooth, both. These are basically the best-bang-for-the-buck low- to mid-priced controllers around, super-popular in gaming circles. Best you'll get without bumping up to modern 1st party console controllers at $70+ each. I bought these within the last 30 days.

The wired controller is USB-A. The bluetooth controllers "are" USB-C... but came with A-to-C cables, not C-to-C.

Approximately every time I want to plug something in to my laptop that's not a charging cable for another device, it's USB-A.

Probably interpreting it that way because “bad for running” and “needs shoe polish” can’t possible be describing sports shoes with leather components.

Almost all my dozen or so pairs of shoes and boots are leather and the only of these that I find true is that they’re not great for running. At least none of the ones I have.

If they fit poorly, you bought the wrong size or a pair made from a last that is very wrong for you. Ditto if they hurt your feet. Past a the first 3-4 wears of break-in neither of those should be true, they should fit and feel awesome. They’ll shrink if you soak them in water, and I mean soak, but even that’s usually not fatal to them, they’ll stretch back out. I have a beater pair of camp moccasins that I’ve straight-up walked down a waist-deep river in three times, and I regularly wear them for kayaking and briefly submerge them when getting in and out, and they still fit fine.

Also you don’t need to polish most of them. Hit ‘em with leather soap and conditioner a couple times a year if you want them to last a decade-plus, yes. Polish? That’s only necessary for certain types of shoes for certain purposes, and even then, you shouldn’t need to do it all the time or anything. I don’t put polish on any of mine.

(All this void if we’re talking reconstructed or fake leather like most of the “leather” shoes at the median Macy’s or other common department store, those are terrible, yeah)