I don’t think that’s true. He was especially bad for the first bit of it but throughout he was stumbling over words, mumbling, he was hoarse. And then he got worse at the tail end too and forgot what he was even saying during his closing. Also what’s up with the listing things in numbers over and over and over? The whole thing was really awful to listen to and I’ve never heard him sound older honestly.

Not sure if my brain just works differently but I’ve always felt isolated by the laugh track. It’s always made me very uncomfortable to watch a show that isn’t funny and hear people that aren’t me laughing and clapping constantly. Makes me feel like I’m being manipulated by aliens into feeling fake joy or something, I hate it.

I mean, that’s partly true. From my keeping up with politics, some of the candidates actions are their own but about 80% of the job is what you described. Your party recommends actions to you and congress sets you up for most of your actions. Vetoing things is only common when the opposition holds congress.

I’ll highlight though that lately the presidents have seized more and more power and continue to do so. It started with Bush basically declaring war without congress and lately it’s been Biden doing things like canceling student loans and blocking the border up. Which I get that’s all power they’ve always had, but they’ve been reluctant to use it improperly because it’s so abusable. Now those robes are off and so trump will come into office and immediately write laws by himself basically

My prediction is that one of them doesn’t make it to Inauguration Day and the country panics as a result. Is likely? No. But on this timeline it makes the most sense

Aren’t the brand new LCDs still in stock an 15% off? Still a decent deal

Yes but that doesn’t have much to do with what I was speaking on. In the short term, we should be heavily investing in solar and wind but we shouldn’t have an anti-nuclear stance.

So when people come along with an educated view of nuclear energy and talk about disasters and what not, I’m just making sure they know that’s not the sticking point. Nuclear isn’t dangerous, it’s just expensive and takes time to build.

Nuclear needs to be invested in for the long term, that’s the clarification. Until then, it’s wind and solar all the way. However, I’m concerned that we could end up in a future where wind and solar rely on these massive batteries which aren’t much better for everyone involved unless we recycle.

I’m not a nuclear absolutist, it’s just uneducated to say that nuclear is bad and shouldn’t be supported. It has applications, just later in our future

Nuclear disasters are becoming incredibly rare and plus a nation like the US for instance has plenty of wide open and otherwise unused land. Ask the military. So even if there were a disaster, they could be pushed far away from cities.

The only disaster in recent memory required a tsunami to cause it and its effects are very minimal. Mostly it just cost a lot to clean up which again, is miles better than the radiation from coal and spills of oil and release of natural gas. The standard for which nuclear must meet is way higher than any other energy source when it comes to contamination.

I also didn’t say that mining of other types didn’t matter. Coal has always abused its workers. Oil is bought from nations with large human rights abuses procuring it. Meanwhile Uranium is often easily accessible to nations and doesn’t even need to be traded for.

Using nuclear energy is such a brain dead easy decision. Only barriers are upfront costs and public perception.

Solar power, as great as it is, is only available during the day and wind is also not a constant source of electricity either. Solar panels are also made through slave labor in China. The cobalt needed for a lot of our batteries to store renewables also comes from slave labor, though we’re working on that part. And almost all of the renewable sources don’t have parts recycled and instead put their heavy metals into landfills.

They’re still a lot better than fossil fuels but they’re by no means perfect. That’s why we need at least some nuclear to help with those issues

I didn’t say they weren’t banning people, I said they aren’t really playing the cat and mouse game. VAC is a known system and it doesn’t actually affect cheating in any meaningful way since the game is free, steam accounts are easy to create, and time between VAC waves is extremely long.

Go play a few matches of CS2 on competitive without buying the premier and tell me that they’re doing anything at all that is effective. It’s gotten so bad that playing on non-premier games I will get a cheater in the lobby about 75% of the time. And premier isn’t immune but it’s about 20% of the time.

Most of what needs to be done is that their servers need to clean up and stop sending so much data to the client and also the servers need anti-cheat. There’s been some suggestions of this by people getting banned for moving their mouse to fast repeatedly, but that’s about all they’ve done of note.

If you think that the company who has almost entirely abandoned TF2 and left it to rot to cheaters is doing much with CS, I think that’d be a bad assumption.

And yet they really don’t do anything about it, I have yet to see evidence that they engage in the cat and mouse game. A lot of cheaters have full inventories of skins and have been cheating for many years at this point with the same cheats

Look the perk system was bad but it’s wasn’t Fallout New Vegas bad. It was okay for a Fallout game but they probably should’ve done level ups by doing each 5 levels gives you 2 SPECIAL points to spend rather than spending normal points on the core stats.

Obsidian is off doing things and making games better than Fallout, they’d only come back because their studio isn’t extremely profitable and needs the cash.

Really though, please just go buy their games and play them. Outer Worlds got slated as pretty average but I’m still really excited to play that and Outer Worlds 2.

Okay so in plain terms (from what I can tell) they’re arguing that Spotify isn’t paying them enough because they have product A and product B. A bundle of A and B has their prices raised but only costs a dollar more than product A with its costs raised. So they’re arguing that they deserve a larger part of product A since B clearly isn’t adding much value to their platform.

Then additionally they claim that by offering product B as a standalone subscription, the price they’re setting for product B only serves to allow Spotify to pay them less for A in those bundles.

This makes sense because it’s a good way to reduce the money paid to the music side of the business by inserting new things into their services and then claiming that the new rate increases are due to that new service (that they don’t have to pay out as much to audio book companies for).

There’s a fan made mod for the original, but HL2 has official RTX support I believe

Well, they did think of this. George Washington himself wrote about being weary of factions becoming too strong so that exactly this could happen. Madison also wrote about it and so did Jefferson. He actually suggested that this is the entire reason the judiciary needed to not be factionalized.

I think ultimately their interpretation boils down to that the mechanics needed to take over should have the bar as high as possible for the time. And then as time went on, these protections were eroded. The democracy has in fact been able to reign in really bad presidents before and quiet down large factions. So relying on good will and good duty is a recent thing.

Things have only gone off the rails entirely in the last 50 or so years. But I’d argue that George Bush did a ton to result in this. Keep in mind, executive orders were not meant to be used this way. They’re currently being abused to hell and that’s a loophole the same way that pardoning yourself as president is a loophole.

These loopholes are intentional because it’s sort’ve a “if you can’t keep these powers in check as a populace, it’s your fault” type of mechanism.

I bet they’re thinking about covering up a big political scandal before an election with an illegal hush money payment. Or maybe they’ll scheme to use fake electors to prevent the verification of the election. Maybe target the vice president to use political power incorrectly. Or maybe they’ll break into our capital building to stop the election from being verified. Or maybe they’ll promote Russian misinformation campaigns.

Anyone who thinks they won’t be interfering in the election is bananas. They’ll start declaring it fake and rigged a full 2-3 months before it even takes place and the Russian bots will help them do it.

Wouldn’t say completely. The notice of intent to sell is not there to prevent CEOs from selling when they want to, it’s to notify you that they could sell this much if they wanted to.

The purpose is just to say that you need to be prepared for a potential sale. If the CEO keeps backing out of a sale, that does hurt your ability to predict when they will but not how much they could sell and therefore how much those sales could potentially affect your investment.

All of that is strategic because otherwise investors could conceivably do the opposite and sell before the CEO is forced to sell and then buy his shares at a lower price. That would mean the stock would tank every time the CEO went to sell. The problem exists because most of the solutions are even worse

They’re reporting 1.00 billion in gross profit as of Q1 2024 so yeah, they make money. It’s kind of impossible to compare much though since they’re the only freestanding music competitor that’s popular.

The closest comparison I can make is using Apples reported figures of making around $9.2 billion in revenue for its 93 million user base.

Meanwhile Spotify is making around 2.63 billion in revenue for its near 3x subscriber base estimated around 240 million. So I wouldn’t say they’re not making money, but maybe you can see why they think they can squeeze a lot more. Best to just unsubscribe honestly, they’ll keep doing this

Alternate theory: The human brain is reacting to unfamiliarity and not alien features. We strongly associate Uncanny Valley with things not-quite human but it’s my thinking that it’s a tribal thing. Nowadays we see a ton of faces of all variations but I bet when we were hunter gatherers, we only saw features of our own tribe. The moment you meet another tribe, I’d bet this response is to create fear of the unrecognized human. It’s also probably there as a punishment mechanism for us seeing faces in everything.

The times that the uncanny effect hit hardest is when you think something is human or is a face potentially before finding out you’re wrong. So that’s my basis for thinking its there to keep us from being mistaken.

Most people may have just wanted a less crap version of Reddit, but how you make Reddit less crap is that you spread out the moderation and also don’t grow power in admins. That’s what federation (mostly) does. I just think we need a way to transfer a user and also to load multiple profiles.

I also don’t understand why federation needs to be the way it is. I feel like instances could present a “read-only” version of themselves to defederated instances so that users could at least read the posts but not interact.