My friend bought an ODROID and an SD card at the recommendation of some tech YouTuber for Home Assistant. Within 3 years the SD card was dead, and I had to help him re-set-up all of his stuff (this time, with a more resilient storage medium and remote backups).
YMMV certainly applies but I feel like the warning is important.
The M1 is indeed too good. It seems like the best tool that Apple has to force users to upgrade is ending macOS support on it.
I keep telling people that the best laptop value on the market right now is to buy a refurbished MacBook Pro M1/M2. I stand by that from a usability and performance standpoint, but I feel weird about recommending a laptop that could only get security updates for another 3 years.
My two cents: The Keychron Q11 is a decent choice for a split keyboard which also has a traditional layout and therefore doesn't require any learning. If you don't like the distance, you _can_ push the pieces back together and they'll just resemble a traditional keyboard. And it's definitely the highest build quality of any keyboard I've used this far in my life.
It seems to have this issue (or maybe Macbooks do? I don't know..) where, waking my computer from sleep, the right side of the keyboard doesn't work. It's quickly fixed by unplugging and replugging the right side of the keyboard into the left, or unplugging and replugging the entire keyboard into the computer.. it's a shame that I have to do that sometimes, though.
I have the Q11 too (and I fully agree with your appreciation of it), but I'd like to say that I never had this issue with the keyboard. I _do_ have it connected to the laptop (tested both on a M2 macbook air and a M4 Pro macbook pro) through a `ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock Gen 2` -- not sure if that may be what's avoiding your problem.
One of the great injustices of music. As a bass voice, both pop music and theater is _dominated_ by tenors (or maybe they're baritones? The point being that it seems no one wants to hear you if you can't belt a Bb4).
In John Adams' Harmonium, I was surprised to learn the basses go into treble clef for a second. I hadn't sung untransposed treble clef in many years! I think it was only an F#4 or A4 or something but it felt real strange to be singing in the treble clef again.
It cost me over $3000 to be married on my 2024 taxes.
I used to be able to declare my house, and my parents' house (I own it). Because of these two things, I have been able to itemize my deductions. In 2024, because I got married, the itemized 'threshold' to reach was higher so I had to take the standard deduction, which ended up costing me a lot more in taxes. It's making me ask questions like "is it worth $3000 every year forever to stay married?"
I had the same conundrum. It costs me far more to be married than to not be married because of the itemized deduction loses. I used to be able to itemize about $21k. But now that I'm married, the standard $24k wins out, which means our household went from $33k deductions to $24k, and our effective rate ends up being about 30%, so that's about the $3k your are penalized. Plus state income taxes and county surcharges on income above $200k at 1%.
It makes me terribly sad each and every year. And each and every year I have to reconsume stories about the man that flew his plane into an IRS building, and the guy from NJ that threatened an IRS agent on a voicemail and then called back immediately and apologized but still got 12 months. Every year I make a decision to not throw my life away. And every year it's a really tough decision.
If it helps you in talking yourself down from domestic terrorism, IRS is just law enforcement. Killing IRS agents won't lower your taxes, in the same way killing police officers won't legalize anything.
I agree. Which is why I have not yet performed a domestic terrorism. Usually I express my disgust by writing things like "domestic terrorist" in the job title box on my tax return.
But I do give it serious thought, with the quandary normally being: do I have the capacity (and the willingness) to inflict such an impression that I can terrify people from choosing to work for the IRS?
NEETs are, by definition, people who are either unwilling or unable to do anything productive, so I don't think they are a good example. I expect you'd get better results if you include the people who are employed today.
The generic, ad-ridden wikis are everywhere, unfortunately, because the terrible service they provide is free. However, there are also lots of passionate people who pay to host their own MediaWiki servers, and then communities that populate it with accurate information! I think they deserve special applause for providing a really cool service that we mostly take for granted.
..only after I started putting together the list, did I realize that a lot of them are hosted by the same individual or community (https://meta.runescape.wiki/w/Weird_Gloop). Interesting!
I don't think you're _wrong_ for wanting these things, but I think the largest game developers avoid them and provide more "on-rails" experiences for good reasons.
The thing you described about events occurring out-of-view reminds me of the "Radiant AI" system which Bethesda promised, and greatly underdelivered, for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Allegedly the game was going to be full of NPCs with their own wants and needs, and they would take actions to fulfill those wants and needs regardless of whether or not the player was even watching. It sounds like it would lead to a very interesting world, but in practice it led to criminal NPCs being dead before the player can meet them. (The truth to this story is debated: https://blog.paavo.me/radiant-ai/)
Likewise, the concept of an MMO where you aren't necessarily safe from other players in a town sounds interesting, especially in a game with a relatively small community. Applied at scale to something like World of Warcraft, I think that it would either be penalized so heavily that no one would do it, or not heavily enough so that new players have difficulty getting anywhere in the game because they are murdered by high-level trolls as soon as they log in.
Dwarf fortress proves you can totally do things off script without player interaction. Poor Ragnar.
As for the scale issue with criminality. You are describing exactly what happens when you put people on rails. They all end up in town. At the same time.
If a game cluster has a population of 200,000 players monthly - it should have the space for it. No instancing. No sharding (other than maybe regional boundaries). Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time. Change it depending on their character creation choices, backstory, profession, etc. Let them naturally come to towns. Let there be enough land to support 200,000 inhabitants. These kinds of things I wish for. Space games are the only ones that manage to have enough room for everyone to live angrily ever after.
Ashes of Creation is trying its best in this area.
Land scarcity becomes a thing. Like in UO. You see what Eve has done, just let structures live so long as no one blows it up. In UO, they introduced decay timers so if you abandoned the game, you forfeit your lot. Games were smarter back then.
Real cities have redundant opportunities. I live in a city of around 120k people. We have three Walmart's spread across the city and two Target stores. These are just the main big players obviously. There are dozens of smaller stores offering various goods. In game settings there tends to be one primary shop of a type per "area" forcing people to congregate around very specific places. Same with quest givers. There is zero reason for every warrior to have the exact same "warrior mentor/trainer". There could literally be dozens of different warrior trainers spread across the city and you're randomly assigned one of the lower utilization trainers on character creation. You get to know the local shops and resources around your particular trainer before branching out.
> They all end up in town. At the same time. ... Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time.
I hadn't thought about that. The perspective I am coming from (Runescape, Final Fantasy XIV) has players starting in one (or three) locations when they begin the game.
Thanks for the Ashes of Creation name-drop. I don't know if I'll play it but I'm definitely interested in watching the trajectory of this game.
So, Adam of "AI Village" ordered a fleet of AI bots to do "acts of kindness". And the AIs are basically just a 'loop' where an LLM comes up with a goal and then uses a virtual machine to try and accomplish this goal. What did he expect the AIs to do, if not bother people?
Is Spotify "featuring" the AI band clone, or did they just put it on their platform because some opportunist uploaded it to CDBaby / DistroKid / some other music distribution service? Feels like we're trying to make a headline about Spotify when something much more mundane is happening.
Maybe the headline is that there is absolutely no curation happening, so if KGATLW remove their music from Spotify, you can probably get a few streams from unwary listeners by uploading song covers under a similar moniker. This has been happening forever though--lots of people identify music that isn't on Spotify and then release their own covers to try to capitalize on the vacuum (this is especially common with video game and anime music, which doesn't always have a label release).
Not that Spotify is innocent of all wrongdoing. I don't know how if this has been proven but there is theorizing that Spotify loads their own featured playlists (specifically ones like 'ambient study music' which people might consider to be fungible) with bogus, probably-AI 'artists' who don't need to get paid at all.
YMMV certainly applies but I feel like the warning is important.