You son of a bitch, I'm in!

A couple years ago I bought several of the Raspberry Pi alternative boards to play with. This was before the Pi 4 so they all boasted more compute power or memory than the Pi 3. All of them are sitting in a fucking drawer and I reuse my pile of Pis for projects. Getting them to boot and run is just so much more of a hassle than a Pi. For these types of boards built-in eMMC is a nice feature on paper but in practice a pain in the ass. My goal with little boards is to make a fun or cool project, not spend my time fucking around getting the board working.

Yeah and just grab all the purified silicon wafers from out back. Then grab some of that natural Martian acid to etch away excess. Then wire it all together with some wires that grow freely on the Martian surface.

This guy's work is really interesting but it's still tied to a long complicated logistical base you're only going to find on Earth in relatively developed areas.

NFTs are just a way of authenticating ownership of something on a publically auditable ledger.

No. NFTs do not in any way authenticate ownership. They only show that some particular wallet address "paid" for a note field in a transaction. Whatever blockchain that transaction occurred on has zero legal authority over anything. No copyrights are assigned, no physical ownership changes, there's not even a guarantee that the same digital artifact wasn't sold on multiple blockchains or modified imperceptibly such that its hash changes and is "sold" all over again on the same blockchain.

NFTs have all the utility and intrinsic value as a hat in Team Fortress. The only difference is anyone with access to the blockchain the transaction lives on can verify that you're an idiot that paid money for the hat rather than just TF2 players.

The inverse square law largely prevents detection of unintentional signals. While it's certainly not impossible, it's extremely difficult. Even our most powerful omnidirectional broadcasts won't be discernible outside our solar system even if we parked our most powerful receivers out there. The only thing that might be detectable would be military or weather radar and those are very narrow beams. So not only would the signal be difficult to detect, being narrow beams with the Earth is constant motion, any receiver might only receive a single blip that never repeats because the beam never exactly sweeps over it again.

Oh wow, the whole network could possibly do...as many transactions as a single old IBM mainframe. That's not in any way impressive. Not only is the whole network slower than an old mainframe (at best) it burns orders of magnitude more power for that shit performance.

I swear cryptocurrency is the fucking Wimp Lo is finance. "I'm bleeding, that makes me the winner!"

Unless the NFT is transferring all copyrights to you, you don't "own" a damn thing. You have no legal authority to the item a token points to. Moreover your claim is only valid to people that accept the authority of whatever blockchain you conducted the transaction on.

Your comparison to baseball cards is ludicrous. Some baseball cards are worth money (to some people) because they have actual physical scarcity. Limited numbers were physically produced and a small portion even exist. A yet smaller portion of extant cards are in good shape. The rarity of the card, condition, and the notoriety of the card's subject all influence the value someone is willing to pay. Physical cards are literally non-fungible. If you have physical possession of a card you control all access to it.

An NFT has none of those properties. It's just a fiat token someone made. The token itself doesn't confer any benefits of physical ownership and rarely any copyright reassignment. Ergo an NFT doesn't give a buyer any control of the item so there's no ownership.

NFTs are pump and dump schemes. They're endlessly hyped up by hucksters to get people to spend real money on them in hopes they're buying a winning lottery ticket.

It's like you're striving to be wrong with your comments. I commend your commitment.

It used Firewire rather than USB. You could connect it to USB but it wouldn't charge, and the battery would die before you could load all your music on.

The first two generations of iPod only supported FireWire. FireWire charged it fine while loading music. The third generation added USB 2 support. An actual USB 2 port would charge it just fine. But good job juxtaposing two generations of a device years apart and still making a bullshit statement.

but back then it had a really nasty habit of deleting music off your iPod if it wasn't also in your library with the exact same metadata

You couldn't even connect the iPod to multiple computers if the autosync was enabled. So there was no way iTunes was deleting files with different metadata unless you did it by hand.

The low resolution meant they used the old Chicago bitmap font on it.

The iPod's screen was larger than a majority of other PMPs. It was pretty low resolution so Apple used a font originally developed to be readable on low resolution displays. Oh the humanity!

The iPod couldn't have been a good product! It was released into a crowded field of competitors and initially only supported Macs with FireWire by a minority player in the home computer market. Apple must have used some sort of cheat code or monopoly (in 2001 no less) to get people to buy iPods. It must have been bad because you've been telling yourself that with half-remembered frontier jibberish for twenty years.

The Magic Link devices did not have cellular and would in no way be considered a smartphone. They had a few interesting ideas but they were terrible devices. The UI was clunky to the point of unusable which was done no favors by the vastly underpowered hardware. Also Tony Fadell (of General Magic) was brought in to work on the iPod and then became SVP of that division.

When the iPod was released the cheaper players were flash based giving them a fraction of the storage of the iPod and other HDD players. So they might be a third of the price with less than a twentieth of the storage. The iPod didn't cost much more than the Nomad Jukebox while being similar in size to flash based players.

The iPod's overall UX was way better than other HDD players of the time. The device fit in one hand and could be navigated with one hand. It also did the library management with iTunes on your much faster computer so it didn't need to figure out broken ID3 tags and weird file names. This meant the UI was very snappy and wasn't wasting CPU time reading metadata from files but instead from it's pre-processed library database.

These things combined meant you could have days worth of music you could easily navigate one handed on a device that fit in actual human pockets. Just having a feature list on the back of the packaging isn't all that meaningful if those features aren't implemented well. Even a well implemented feature with a terrible interface might as well not exist as far as the user is concerned.

Apple sold a good product for a relatively small premium over competitors. The iPod definitely didn't fit any definition of a Veblen good. It's disingenuous to compare iPods to the far less capable flash players of the day and claim it was overpriced.

Psh, kids these days.

And whatever the answer is, it should explain something about how it is that Japanese comics specifically are so attractive to people.

There's a lot of contributing factors to low demand for western comics but a huge one is they tend to hew towards giant tits and muscle action titles. To find western titles that aren't cover to cover tits and muscles you need to head to one of a dwindling number of comic book shops.

Manga, even what's found in chain stores, is far more diverse in subject and content. There's a huge portion of the population that's not super excited about tits and muscles and thus are ignored by a majority of western comics. There's a larger audience interested in comics than just teenage boys and manga publishers are doing a much better job serving it.

You might say they're...hyper-expensive.

You don't like what they say? Argue with them. Inform them, and the people they're trying to convince. Asking for Reddit to ban these groups achieves nothing. Conversation and education might.

The hardcore anti-vaxxers aren't looking to be educated. They're not making good faith arguments. They do not want a conversation. They didn't reason themselves into their position and so cannot be reasoned out of it.

The problem for the rest of us is two fold. First the hardcore anti-vaxxers aren't concerned with the veracity of their position, just the attention/money/power it gets them. Because of this they can say absolutely anything they want from blatant falsehoods to baseless conspiracies. Their only goal is to convince people to pay them or pay attention to them. Because they sound so sure of their position they can be compelling voices for people that are genuinely hesitant to get vaccines for any disease, especially COVID. Large unvaccinated populations are the source of COVID variants and the current surges of infections all over the country.

This leads to the second problem for the rest of us, having a crazy belief that doesn't materially affect other people is pretty harmless. You could believe the sky is composed of a shell of blueberry jam. You could spend all day trying to convince people this is true. It's a pretty harmless belief. Belief (or supposed belief) in lies and conspiracies about vaccines, especially the COVID vaccines, on the other hand are extremely dangerous. Vaccines guard against infections and in cases where they don't fully protect an individual from infection (breakthrough infections) they reduce severity and viral load. Convincing people to not get vaccinated against a deadly and very communicable disease will not only keep the virus spreading around and allow for further mutations. They're killing and crippling people and causing billions of dollars in economic damage.

It's the damage the anti-vaxxers are doing to others which makes it dangerous to give them megaphones to spout off their bullshit.

I'm sure that's not because the "conservative narrative" has drifted into alternative "facts" fantasy land. Surely not. It must be some liberal biased conspiracy. It just has to be! The Conservative ethos cannot fail, it can only be failed.