Source?

I’m more willing to forgive not getting Baizhu for the promise of unlimited cheap energy…

I’d like to see more fantasy backgrounds that aren’t medieval Europe, China and Japan with the serial numbers filed off.

Perhaps trying to build something into a respectful Arab, African, Native American or SE Asian mythos is just begging for tone-deafness. But there’s plenty of opportunity to run the clock forward.

I’ll give points for steampunk and related genres, but some of it seems too prone to passing as self-parody (I know there’s an entire community devoted to Weird West stuff)

It feels like any sort of “how do we run an information-age society on magic” is surprisingly scarce outside the robust world of modern-era vampire/were bodice-rippers. Give me a world where the humane society is trying to unload a litter of gryphons. Make the Huawei corporation led by a cabal of mages. Have election deepfakes that are actually clones made of cornmeal and talismans that melt when they get wet.

Whatever else you can say, Hillary was not channeling a lot of enthusiasm outside of a very narrow group.

It felt like there were weeks in peak campaign season where she wasn’t touring or making speeches. What even was her signature issue? (Considering how she was associated with the abortive attempts towards universal health care during Bill’s term, that would have been a sensible focus, but I don’t recall it mentioned once)

The whole campaign reeked of “play to not lose” rather than “play to win”. She assumed she was the annointed favourite, guaranteed the win, and that’s not really going to excite uncommitted voters. Bernie, at least, generated buzz.

There’s a case that can definitely be made for simpler models for economies and pollution. You get too detailed and the fun factor drifts-- there’s too much to manage.

I tried Civ 6 recently when it was like $3 and found myself foundering even though I had plenty of playtime with the first one back in the 386 days-- too many new mechanics.

I’m not there. You might try a forum like Audiokarma.

Don’t toss the Technics reciever either.

Using Windows 1.x to show off your machine… even in 1985, an interesting choice.

Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.

I go to RMA and they ask “If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?”

Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I’m going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.

The first time I saw a No Frills (Yank visiting Toronto), I misread a cursive version of the slogan as “Won’t be best.” I thought there’s a remarkable example of truth in marketing.

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

Perhaps a lottery scheme would work, like hunting permits. That seems to manage a constrained resource.

I want to see stickers that say “We could have fed and sheltered a homeless person for nn days for what it cost to make and hang this sign.”

I think 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the current PRC, so a reasonable target for ceremonial goals.

No different than saying an American leader said he wanted a Mars landing for the tricentennial in 2076. It’s good symbolism, not necessarily a technical merric.

I’m surprised nobody makes an affordable PCI or maybe even USB GPIO box.

To me, the RasPi served two purposes:

• if you wanted GPIOs and the associated ecosystem of hats/shields/capes/straightjackets but a less barebones experience than a bare metal MCU
• RiscOS, because an Archimedes is far rarer than even an Amiga or ST in the Rogue Colonies

I figure we get two things out of it:

• Regaining the moral high ground; we are no longer complicit. This is, to a big degree, playing for a domestic audience, and I think it’s what a lot of protesters are after. Yes, Congress may ultimately cut the cheques, but I’m pretty sure the administration can find ways to tie up delivery of support in red tape.
• Israeli impunity has always been backstopped by the assumption the US would never turn on them. If other countries turn up their nose, it doesn’t have the same meaning. Losing American support would be a huge shock to their political system.

Alternatively, we could go to the point and publically declare what everyone knows-- Netanyahu is fanning the war because once it’s over, his administration is defunct, and his legal problems resume. We could singularly demonize HIM as a warmonger-- personal sanctions, supporting his prosecution for war crimes, or classic Cold War style encouragement of regime change.

Yes, whatever we do, we piss off Israel, but if we don’t take off the kid gloves now, then when? If they finally admit to nuclear weapons by dropping one?

I sort of understood the premise for chain-of-custody style use cases, but the other side of the coin is that these usually, or always, have a final arbiter of validity. Typically it’s a court system or an end purchaser who decides if the data is valid.

For example, an obvious use case is “record a will or deed on the blockchain, cryptographically signed and timestamped, to eliminate any disputes about ownership.” Except the same problem is trivially solved by a scheme where I could register my will/deed with the legal system itself, which is already pretty good at storing documents, and no need to cart around a big, heavy blockchain. Most of the problems in that space come from spotty, inconsistent record keeping (why aren’t these documents centrally registered in the US?) and more centralization solves them.

That’s why the fixation on decentralization is often a waste. I suspect the real appeal is fear of human institutions. A banking or legal system subject to laws and social norms might refuse to honour the documents you file, but soulless decentralized code will dance as it’s told to. For example, I could imagine wiring a smart contract triggered to irrevocably pay on the event of someone’s death, while writing “hitman fees” in the memo of a paper cheque probably raises a few eyebrows at the bank.

A lot.

It’s just unusual that they’re always held to different/unrealistic expectations.

Perhaps they’re victims of their branding/positioning.

If a Trump, or even a Romney, says “we can wash our hands of a little genocide in the middle east for political gameplay/economic convenience/religious theories”, that’s pretty much within what people expect of them. The GOP has had a vaguely evil air since at least Nixon, if not McCarthy.

The Democrats, however, try to present themselves as trying to be on the right side of history. While this is no doubt a combination of cynical “this locks in some demographics” and “social justice is still cheaper than actual economic reform”, it means people expect a little higher standards. The bar is unbelievably low here, and he’s still tripping over it.

Lots of quality of life tweaks, but the firehose of content drowned me.

Works in Lutris now too, no real hassle.