I’m so confused. Whose dishwashers are you talking about? I’m in the US, you’re describing every dishwasher I’ve ever had, except that we always hook it up to the hot water line. Our unit takes very little water, it takes hours to run a load due to efficiency features. It has a heating element inside to take whatever water it gets and keep it hot for the cycle.

I don’t really see why it’s any less efficient to use the hot water we are already heating with our water heater (which heats much more efficiently than a small electric heater would). The water originally arrives to my house cold, it has to be heated one way or another. My dishwasher is less than 10 feet away from my water heater, water is not losing appreciable heat on the way to the dishwasher.

Up to* $2k. Just for the sake of clarity.

The tax credit is 30% of the total project price, up to $2k. If the HPWH is over double the cost of NG, you’re still paying quite a bit more even with the tax credit.

The movie, despite being unrelentingly bleak, actually isn’t quite as soul crushing as the book. At least it wasn’t for me.

I’ve just started dipping my toes back into the waters again too, also after many years of downloading absolutely nothing. It’s a combo of things prompting me.

First, costs have gotten out of control and prices just keep creeping up. This is happening at the same time as content libraries per service dwindle. I make more money than I used to, yet it feels like it goes not nearly as far these days with prices of everything skyrocketing.

Second, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to find things. Part of the issue for me is interfaces (though I can get around that, generally). Part is content shuffling from one service to the next. But a big issue is all the trash content companies like Netflix are shitting out to pad their libraries. You have to wade through oceans of garbage to find a single thing worth your time. This experience is exactly why I dropped traditional cable years ago! I hate endless filler trash. I don’t want the illusion of a large library to make it seem like I’m getting value. I just want actual good content.

I totally get wanting to play the game when it’s fresh. You miss out on being part of the buzz of a new game if you wait to play it. Every gaming site is full of memes about a new game for the first few months after release and it’s definitely part of the experience to be on the “in” side of that.

With that said, I just pick and choose which games matter to me for that nowadays, and I commit myself to actually beating the games I buy (assuming I don’t hate them). Committing to beating them before buying a new game has really cut back on my buying of new games only to have it languish in my backlog and see price drops before I ever play it.

This way I do get to be part of that community for the games that really matter to me, but I also am not just buying everything out there at full price.

Fully agree with you on artists not getting their fair share, and I would argue that the issue is sadly endemic across the entire music industry and was that way long before streaming services even existed. Spotify is merely the most visible representation of a long festering issue that spans generations.

I can only speak for myself but I do actually still buy CDs for bands I really like. I will also occasionally buy merch or go to shows. Some of these bands I very certainly would never have discovered without Spotify (or a service like it).

Ultimately I agree that I’d like people to understand their options. I think the biggest likely barrier is convenience. I have a NAS server, and a virtual host set up that runs a Linux server with Plex on it, and I have that open so I can use Plexamp to play live albums or any other stuff I own that isn’t on Spotify. But like… That’s a massive barrier to entry to simply create something close to the experience Spotify offers out of the box. And it’s definitely not as polished. I do it because I’m a hobbyist, but most people aren’t like that. So then if you want to buy music individually, you’re stuck listening to actual physical CDs, or ripping them and loading them on your phone or mp3 player. Old school cool for sure, but new school convenience is sure hard to beat once you’ve had a taste.

This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.

We do not care that we don’t own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it’s almost a perk that I don’t because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify’s library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.

I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don’t want to go pirate it, I don’t want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.

And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I’m a member at our local zoo. I don’t expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I’m a member at our museum. I don’t feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don’t own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.

Spotify is the exact same for me.

If we are trying to dig into the root cause? Then yes, honestly. It is Google. And don’t call them the “search engine guys”, that’s not what they are about. They are the “mass aggregation and correlation of user data guys”. Search has been a means to an end for Google for a very long time.

All those other things didn’t exist when google was developing their model. Google paved the way for the internet no longer being free, but being “free” with payment rendered in the form of user data. That in turn directly led to all those other evils you referred to. It is not an exaggeration to imply that Google is ultimately at fault for the way the internet functions today.

There’s already been a new flavor of coke developed and allegedly chosen by AI. If that’s not some kind of singularity moment, I don’t know what is.

5900HX: mobile Radeon CPU 6800M: mobile Radeon GPU

This game looks roughly equivalent to TW3 because it is roughly contemporary with TW3. (2015 vs 2017). HZD was well known for being a very pretty game in motion when it came out, though this video doesn’t really do it justice to be honest.

I imagine the point of the video is seeing the framerates on mobile hardware in Linux.

From a pure graphical fidelity point we’re there now.

From an animation standpoint we are light years away. The absolute best animations or facial expression renders I have seen are nowhere near good enough to actually pass for real. And honestly I am not sure I’ve even seen meaningful improvement in this area in a long time. Even in this demo videos the cars don’t look quite right as they move, and cars are much easier than people, or the way cloth moves when on someone who is moving.

I’d like to think this is the next big focus for graphics, but animations are a lot harder to get right than pure visual fidelity. I hope studios start focusing on it because it will take take us to that next step.

The Typing of the Dead

First, sure. It could be that. My opinion is that it’s awfully likely that a photo in this format was a paparazzo. And if it was a random neighbor it’s pretty rude of them, too.

Second, the title of the post had zero indication that this would be a photo taken from the bushes of a celebrity and his child. Comments here in the form of “engagement” are doing absolutely nothing for the person who took the picture. I’m certain the person who made the meme didn’t pay for the shot. We don’t need to feel guilty because we accidentally viewed it for free on a website that generates no revenue. The people taking the picture are the ones who are wrong.

There are lots of groups out there who could use random people on the internet defending them. Paparazzi are absolutely not in that category. They are terrible people.

Seriously, this.

All I could think of was wow, this poor little girl can’t even have a normal childhood experience trick or treating with her dad because some fuck head paparazzo is chasing them around snapping pictures of them. That’s so sleazy and shitty. She didn’t ask for this. She just wants to be with her dad.

I highly doubt Nintendo is attempting any kind of gap closure with the deck, because how could they and why?

The only thing they share is a form factor. Nintendo is well aware that the reason they sell consoles is as a dedicated platform for their own games. I truly believe that is their bread and butter and all they really care about. If the system gets popular enough, then it will get some third party support which means it will have some very limited library crossover with PC/PS/Xbox, but I think we are past the point where Nintendo intends to rely on that as a selling point for this or any future generation of consoles. Ports of games that come to switch are pretty uniformly the worst version of the game to play, and it’s pretty clear that doesn’t bother Nintendo at all.

Which is all to say, I don’t think Nintendo and Valve think of each other as direct competitors, because they serve entirely different markets. I have both a switch and a deck. I love them both. I use my switch to play Nintendo games, I use my deck to play pretty much anything else. I don’t think I’m unique at all in that regard, and frankly it never would occur to me that these devices have anything to do with one another.

Huh. I always heard 3 copies, 2 locations, 1 of the locations offsite. Yours makes sense though.

This has to be a new meme format. It’s too good not to be.

That is my assumption as well. That’s kind of the trend with most new flavors of soda it seems. Very few actually stick. This one is just so much more obnoxious in origin than most that I want it to die quicker lol.

It’s really true. I’m actually annoyed that MS is starting to feel this way, particularly with some Azure related services. MS was always the one you could count on to at least be stable, well tested internally, and predictable. At least in comparison to Google and Amazon. But it feels like they have been leaving some of that behind with their cloud stuff as CI/CD becomes more prevalent.

I was really hoping this was an article with early sales numbers showing it’s a flop. I already assumed it was going to taste bad, that feels like a given to me. I want it to be a failure in sales so this kind of thing stops happening.