I meant active computing.

As long as those robots keep thinking with their tiny sixties electronic brains, they're as close to humanity's living children outside of the solar system.

When they stop thinking, sure, they'll carry data for aeons for someone or something to discover one day maybe, but no differently than a dead body would carry information in a side pocket. It's useful but it's not alive anymore.

I might very well stop thinking before they do. I'm a few years away from retirement and I smoked for 25 years. So it's certainly not impossible.

Who needs Doom when we have Duke Nukem...

Need to be celebrated loudly and publicly - those who are still alive.

The engineers who keep this thing going too.

The Voyager probes are literally part of my life. I've always known them. For me, they're a fixture of the sky like the Sun and the Moon. They're precious little bits of living humanity far out there. If they die, something inside would die too, and I sure hope I kick the bucket before they do.

It's pretty hilarious that the best set-top device you can buy for media playback, is one that was released 4.5 years ago and hasn't had a hardware update since.

4.5 years ago? The original NVIDIA Shield TV was launched in 2015. It turns 9 years old this year.

The Shield is really starting to show its age at this point (the Android TV home screen lags hard on 4K displays), but NVIDIA made a couple of key technical decisions with the SoC that have kept it relevant for so long. Making sure to include a cutting-edge media decoder block with full 8/10-bit HEVC decoding support, as well as VP9 Profile 0 support, has kept it from being obsoleted by newer video codecs. AV1 is just now taking off, and even then it's going to be years until it's commonly in use for home media (be it legit or pirated media).

Though NVIDIA was also the beneficiary of a free SoC porting, thanks to Nintendo. Since Big N paid to get the Tegra X1 ported from TSMC 20nm to 16nm, NVIDIA hasn't needed to take the risk of investing in a major new revision of the SoC to keep production going. Otherwise, they would have needed to stop selling the Shield TV since 20nm is no longer available.

And not to discount their software support, either. 9 years of updates on an Android device is practically unheard of. Even flagship Android smartphones aren't getting that kind of support!

It's a side project that has been far more successful than it has any right to be. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that NVIDIA will build a successor based on the Switch 2's SoC.

if he hadn't posted in the Fediverse through fucking Facebook. I would have been more impressed if he had done it directly on Mastodon or Lemmy.

This is sending all the wrong messages. Thanks whoever-runs-Biden's-internet-PR :(

Amazon can suck my balls.

Anybody who thinks this new normal is normal ain't normal in the head.

but I don't brag about it.

Dude... A website that costs nothing makes you the product. That's what they need cookies for: you-the-product aren't allowed to refuse tracking.

But more prosaically, cookies are also used by websites to tracks the state of your sessions. Cookies were literally designed for this genuine, legit purpose, and they're still used for that when they're not used to invade your privacy.

If they want to make Pluto the state's planet, and the Sun the state's official black hole, I don't really care.

What I do care about however is that my tax dollars pay for those bozos to work on idiocies like this instead of on real issues.

I did mention Patrick Stewart didn't I?

Although you never know, I might actually like the theater. Because Patrick Stewart is a superb thespian.

He's not a very good actor. He's not a particularly interesting person. His only claim to fame is having been Captain Kirk - something Patrick Stewart was orders of magnitude better at - and as Shatner himself says, it was only 3 years of his life.

But at least he's not obnoxious.

You should try Lemmy.

He's never made any money in his entire life. He means well, but he's a bit of a hippy, he doesn't like to work much and he has two left hands.

One day he bought an old minivan and told us - my sisters and I - that he'd start a small business delivering groceries to old people in remote villages, and would we like to invest in his company.

Can you guess how much we gave him?

We love our brother, but we'll never see our money back. Been there, done that. So we passed up this investment opportunity.

Well guess what: we ain't big shot Wall Street investors, but Reddit seems just about as adept as my brother at making money - and just about as likely to turn a profit for anybody investing in it.

Nah... Only regular people and billionaires who scam other billionaires go to jail. All the other super-rich criminals just put on a 3-piece suit to go apologize and promise it won't happen again in front of a senate hearing committees.

but I watched Dune I and I found it really awful: Timothy Chalamet is to Paul Atreides what tofu is to meat, Jessica Ferguson has about as much acting range as a lettuce and Oscar Isaac - the only Star Wars character ever to manage the feat of making Jar Jar not so annoying after all - is as convincing a Duke Leto as Cheech Marin would have been.

It's truly a mystery to me how Villeneuve managed to make such a meh Dune after his absolute Blade Runner 2049 masterpiece. I expected so much of him after Blade Runner - because really, THAT was the challenge of the century and he pulled it off brilliantly - and all I got out of his Dune was an urgent need to rewatch the godawful Lynch movie from 1984. That's how bad it was for me.

So I'm very happy to give Dune II a pass.