We put a pedophile rapist in charge. This was entirely predictable. Literally the king of debt who bankrupted every single company and his sales pitch to us was he would run the government like a business.

I can just barely forgive people for 2016. There is no excuse in 2024. I would love to ask Trump voters what the fuck and then get an honest answer.

Shit it's only going to get worse because the Democrats are on track to barely take the house and probably lose the Senate. If there is a fuck ton of voter turnout, so much that over suppression can't counteract it,, the dems will just barely take the Senate but there's not a lot they can do with a micro majority like that except stop the worst of the bleeding and of course voters will blame them in 2028 when things don't turn around even though they gave them barely a majority in a political system where a supermajority is needed to get anything done besides making things worse.

That's the real problem. Our political system lets the Republican party crash the economy and sabotage our lives and jobs but it doesn't let the Democrats fix it. So it's like a ratchet. And every time the voters blamed a democrats for what the Republicans did

O Lord of the Abyss, Prince of Darkness, Morning-Star, please hear my cry: I invoke thee, Lucifer! Turn your gaze toward the Vatican's operating rooms! Guide the surgeon's scalpel with your claws! Burn the tumors from the Holy Father's chest with the infernal fires of Hell! Cast your curses upon any bacterium that may seek to cause opportunistic infection! In the darkness I beseech thee.

Hail Satan, please save the Pope, Amen.

It's because of Trump. He threatened to invade Greenland for fuck sake. They do not trust America anymore and frankly I cannot blame them. We elected and known rapist and pedophile to be president twice.

One of the things Americans do not understand, and the number of things Americans do not understand could fill volumes, is that we are a military empire and that your standard of living depends on that military empire extracting tribute from the rest of the world.

We have mostly been able to get away with that by leveraging our military bases in a way that makes them appear and even at times b useful to the locals in foreign countries. Look into the Petro dollar if you're confused about what I'm talking about here.

The Epstein class over in Europe does not like this. They would like to be the ones with a nice big military empire that gets to extract tribute. And it doesn't help that increasingly the regular Americans do not see much of that tribute, although you do still see some of it.

What I'm saying is that you can't break all these complex systems that were built to build up the American economy at the expense of the rest of the world without consequences back home. Even if you're not really getting any of the money from that anymore because we have allowed the Epstein class to take it all that Epstein class is not going to sit idly by as they lose access to that wealth. They are instead going to try to take it from you because if they can't get it from parts of Europe and Asia your next on the menu.

It's a classic case of a chesterton's fence. We took the fence down and we didn't know why it was up

It's cheap and easy to audit OSS for malicious code with AI these days.

It's not really about Microsoft. Increasingly, Europe sees the US as a potential threat who blackmails allies, even a potential invader, rather than an ally.

Literally just yesterday the US shut off intel-sharing to Ukraine (which mainly helps with targeting incoming drones) and blocked all Starlink terminals in Ukraine moving faster than 100kph (e.g. terminals on air-defense interceptor drones), both in effect dramatically hurting Ukraine's ability to defend against Russia's nightly drone waves - all in order to pressure Ukraine into stopping striking Russian oil refineries while Trump seeks to buy more Russian oil and Russia keeps strikig Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

We all know that the US could do this sort of stuff to any of us. We have to move US companies out of our critical paths.

Once upon a time, when the US called for aid after 9/11, Europe stood up. More Danes died per capita fighting in Afghanistan, in a war that was not their own, than Americans did. This year, Denmark was rapidly rushing explosives and bags of blood to Greenland to prepare for firefights against invading US forces.

All of Europe got the message. We're not dining with friends - we're on the menu.

Texas is just refusing to register people to vote. Paxton and his cronies control the voter apparatus and they have just ground everything to a halt in blue districts. You combine that with illegal challenges to signatures and multi-hour wait times to vote on election Day in blue districts and the corporate Republicans win every single election even when the Democrats are three to five points ahead.

Paxton is so hated and has so many scandals there's a microscopic chance that talerico will beat him because he is pulling six to seven points ahead. But that's the kind of margin a Democrat needs now to win an election. I don't understand why they won't do anything about the cheating. I do know when anyone on the left wing or the conservative Center tries to organize against the radical right the right wing immediately recognizes them as a threat and shuts them down. Like what they did to acorn. On the other hand if you're a useless dipshit or you're getting money from China or netanyahu like those two YouTubers you can do whatever you want. Butf the moment you become effective they come down on you like a ton of bricks

It looks like they used a fuck ton of Ray traced light effects to make the game look more natural and realistic. And yeah on a base PS5 which is basically running a RX 6700 or maybe a 3060 equivalent that's going to choke out. I suspect that they thought the PlayStation 6 was going to be out. I don't think anyone saw how much damage AI was going to do to our hobby. And they probably figured by now somebody would be making more RAM but with zero antitrust law enforcement nobody is going to take any chances...

If there was competition in the market then no it wouldn't have done that but the same handful of people own all the grocery stores. Remember we put everything on the stock market and only a handful of people own enough stock that they actually have any kind of a controlling interest. Your 401k does not mean you have a controlling interest..

What does this means in practice is that there is zero competition in grocery shopping. The only limit on prices is the point where people actually start to notice that and stop voting Republican.

So they can fire a whole shitload of people and yeah it's slower for you to sit in the line ringing and bagging your own groceries and it's slower for everyone involved but you need food and they've got it so you have to put up with it.

There are a handful of alternatives but none of them at scale. You can drive an hour or two to a farmer's market I guess. There are expensive boutique grocery stores. Stuff like that. But realistically you're not going to be able to keep yourself fed with those. Not unless you have special circumstances. The majority of the population are stuck with the large grocery chains and they know it.

You could of course try opening your own grocery store chain to compete... Except they will run you out of business with low prices just long enough to bankrupt you and we don't enforce antitrust law.

We spent the last 50 years dismantling our Democratic institutions so that we could indulge in Petty moral panics. We are only just now starting to see the consequences of that. The real fun comes when the stock market finally collapses after the Epstein class is done looting our 401ks. If you're a baby boomer good luck dying before that happens because God knows you can't stop it.

Run yourself *on normal hardware*? Yeah, there's a pretty big gulf between that and a frontier model.

It's just outsourcing, H1-Bs and age discrimination fueled layoffs. AI is a great cover for that.

Also Trump is wrecking the economy and nobody wants to acknowledge that because he's a vindictive psycho that nobody will stand up to.

We all know what they're doing.

Most computer/tech hardware at least can have a second life after it's fulfilled its primary purpose.

The exception to that is Apple.

You can routinely find their iPads but if they aren't "unregistered" from whoever had the main account, they're utterly useless.

It doesn't make sense to buy products from a company that locks down its hardware like that. I can understand that for a phone, but not some old tablet.

I was one of the haters on initial release, but Hello Games 100% redeemed themselves over time and are still actively maintaining the game with new content - free new content, not paid DLC - every few months. And today, I'd rate NMS as one of my favorite games of all time.

That said, from the two comparisons you made, I suspect you're thinking of NMS as the wrong kind of game here. It's not an "escape room" style survival game, and base building is mostly meant to be a simple place to keep / display your stuff, not Factorio-in-space. There is no real plot or long-term goals beyond what you set for yourself and a few "story" missions to encourage you to at least leave the starting planet and check out the neighborhood.

If you haven't seen it since 2016, it's a radically different, and better, game. And if you have - Hey, it's not for everyone and that's okay. Some people like open world exploration, some people like puzzle games, some people like FPSs.

I really wanted to like the game but even a few hours of gameplay showed that it was repetitive and kind of bleak and depressing.

Oh I'm still bad at it it takes me an inordinate amount of time to make something that is barely presentable.

The fact that I can make something barely presentable in entirely too much time doesn't make me good at it.

I still just don't understand what Torvalds is saying here. It doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of AI. It sounds like he tried to use it and it didn't work. Maybe he just thinks it's a cool new thing and he doesn't fear it taking his job or his water and electricity since he's pretty high up on the totem pole...