Very happy with it. $400 MSRP feels right, I don’t think I would feel so positively if it was more. I’m on vacation right now and using it a lot to wind down in the evenings.

The Bible as lame as it is to say. Particularly Ecclesiastes and Job. Absolutely brilliant, beautiful, full of humanity.

Poorly written essay title. She’s not rewriting Nazi history on WP, she’s correcting Wikipeda to be in line with current historical consensus.

Damn, that’s awful. How allergic? Like anaphylaxis?

This is just using a digital solution to an analog problem for no real gain in efficiency. In theoryland sure, you can replace books with ereaders and possibly save money. And at certain levels of education this works out, middle/high school. In earlier levels, there are two issues. One, kids break things. Cheaper to replace a book than an ereader. Two, kids associate the tablet form factor with entertainment. Kids rely a lot on symbols for interpreting the world. It’s hard to get them into education mode when the symbol on front of them puts them into entertainment mode. Books signify learning, it helps the kids get into the right headspace.

No, getting rid of smartphones in classrooms is the only way to actually teach critical thinking. Using devices in classrooms teaches kids that all the answers are on Google and that they don’t need to think, only search.

Google/wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool, but before you learn to use them you first need to be taught basics. The scientific method is the first things kids need to learn: how to observe the world around them, form ideas of how it works, test those ideas, change them based on further observation. This kind of reasoning is sabotages when the kid learns that if they just use Google they can get the answer without learning how to do the work.

Takes like yours generally come from a place of well-meaning but are far removed from the actual reality of the classroom. Kids need to learn first how to figure out information in the real world hands-on before they are introduced to the abstract digital world.

You actually can successfully ban devices in the classroom through a variety of methods.

Twitter isn’t and never was useful as an organizing tool. Arab spring was a failure. Twitter is actually more useful to the ruling class than not because it gives a way for the masses to expend it’s restless energy without changing anything.

I use vanilla gnome. Dead simple, no nonsense, gets out of my way. Perfect DE for me.

One of the other interesting twin cities facts is that we have a very large theater scene, one of the biggest in the nation outside NYC.

You should think about Minneapolis. The winters are gnarly, but very few climate change related problems on the horizon, reasonable cost of living, one of the most bike friendly cities in the U.S.

Switched recently and using Nvidia. It’s a headache either way but I’ve had less issues with Wayland than x11.

I mean it’s still a soulless piece of corporate propaganda.

It’s okay to be angry, and to have big feelings. But also, remember that your parents are people. There’s two sides to that, everyone has biases and perceptions that they can’t see past, but there is also the spiritual and beautiful things that transcend all of that.

Beauty and love surpass all the other stuff. Look for the ways that there can be love between you, even when it also means holding the tension of love and anger together. It can work like that, and sometimes that’s just what family is. Also before you know it you’ll be on your own and that will give you a whole new perspective on family as you build a new life for yourself.

I remember when I still lived with my parents it was impossible to see past their flaws. But now as an adult on my own, I have a much greater appreciation for how easy it is to be shitty and how hard it is to be good.

At the end of it all, sometimes you just gotta feel your feelings, hoping that at the end of it you’ll be a little bigger and a little more expensive, able to hold more of life together and not less.

Crickets are more sustainable than plants as a source of protein.

What I dislike about these threads is that it always devolves into shitting on blue collar workers. Of course pickups are useless city cars but have you all ever met somebody from a town of 1,000 people where every single person works in a blue collar trade? These things do work that you can’t do in a different type of vehicle.

Threads like this are echo chambers of privilege. Maybe instead of shitting on tradespeople, shit on car and oil companies who enshittify the whole system.

Also pickups in 2023 that look like this are more powerful and more fuel efficient than more modest looking pickups from 90s or 00s. You may not like the aesthetics of it, but who fucking cares, you’re not driving it, you’re just the one judging someone else for having different taste.

Modern genres don’t really apply to ancient literature. Mythical, historical, symbolic and real are mixed and you’re expected to be reading or listening to the literature from within the tradition which would give you the context for knowing which is which.

Beowulf is myth, but also history. It has references and genealogy to real figures, but it is embedded within a myth that records the meaning of that history. It’s full of symbolic retelling of that history.

From your source:

With the exception of recently released blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales

Denuvo is used almost exclusively in exactly the scenario where the study supports the idea that piracy hurts sales. I don’t think the study helps your case.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue.

I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.

Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.

This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.

So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.

Because you didn’t make it. I’ll grant that western ideas about intellectual property are weird and inconsistent, but I’m taking it as a given that we hold that idea in common. If a writer writes something, that sequence of words in the order they wrote is their “property” and they get to determine who gets to see it.

I am cognizant that in this kind of space a lot of people probably won’t hold this view of intellectual property and there are good arguments as to why it shouldn’t exist at all. I suppose at this moment I’m not really in the mood to go down this rabbit hole, so forgive me if that is where you want to go.

You know these are valid concerns, and I have two thoughts about this. The first is that I don’t understand how this doesn’t also apply to Steam or Epic Games or any other basic storefront (except GOG of course). I see a lot of headlines about Denuvo but none about Steam. People seem to selectively apply their hate in this matter.

The second thought that I have is that I agree that this is a problem, but I don’t see any other way around it. This is just the trade off of getting AAA games. These are big, complex pieces of IP that require millions to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment that the company making them has to recoup. To ensure that you actually get paid, you have to have DRM. Companies wouldn’t shell out the millions of dollars on DRM unless it was proven to actually work. As I see it, if you like AAA games you just gotta weigh the cost on a game by game basis.