sylver_dragon

The base is taking about Iran and not the Epstein files. I’d say Trump’s done a fine job fooling his base.

When you get to doing division and multiplication, it can make sense to look at what is being done to what and see if operations cancel out or simplify. E.g. if you are multiplying by 6 and dividing by 2 and bother operations are going to affect the same number/group/etc. there is no need to do both operations, you just multiply by 3 since that’s ultimately what you are doing. Really, any place you can simplify operations, do that. Same goes for addition/subtraction. The Commutative Property is really handy for making hard math easier.

Do any of you, living in the US, vote?

Yup, everyone does. If someone chooses not to vote, they have cast a voted for “I don’t care”. And have decided to let everyone else choose for them. They may not like any of the choices, but politics has always been “the art of the possible”. If they want perfect solutions, they need to start their own dictatorship. If they won’t or can’t do that, voting is the only bit of control they’re going to get. And that means some type of compromise with everyone else in society. It’s a terrible system, but history hasn’t provided a lot of better examples to follow. Don’t like the system, change it. And unless you have the force of arms to do it the violent way (and it’s really unlikely you do), you’re only real option is to do it via the soap box and ballot box.

Would you ever consider voting DSA/Socially democratic[?]

Sure, though not any time soon. One of the things I’d like to change about our system is the First Past the Post nature of elections. But, until that happens, the math just doesn’t work in most elections. I vote in primaries and vote for the options who most closely match my views in those. But, come the general elections (especially at the federal level), third parties are basically DOA. I’d rather vote “not Nazi” than sit on my thumbs and watch “Nazi” coast to victory because I’m stuck letting “perfect” be the enemy of “not a fucking Nazi”. Should the DSA reach a point that they aren’t an “also ran” in an election I’m voting on, sure I’d probably vote for them.

Would you ever vote for someone like Trump just to make things intentionally worse in the hopes of sparking off a revolution?

Well, it hasn’t happened with Trump. And looking at history, I really don’t think revolutions are such the clean and wonderful things people in online forums like to make them out to be. History provides lots of example of revolutions ending up with groups like the Taliban in charge and basically none ending up as egalitarian utopias.

Not sure if I will ever vote again at this point

That’s your choice, but you’ve made the choice to let other people decide your government. You can sit on the sidelines and stew in your own smugness. But, no one cares. And no one will ever care about your opinions if you’re not willing to enter the political milieu and fight for them.

The same place they came from.

They’re “cutting back” because States are starting to push back by criminalizing civil arrests without a judicial warrant in courthouses.

Dead men have won elections before. In 2000, the people of Missouri had an election for a US Senator. Their choices were John Ashcroft and a dead man. And the people of Missouri said “Sorry John, but the dead guy scares us less”. 1

Steam made it easy to buy, download and play games. So much of the competition was focused on preventing piracy to the detriment of the user experience. Steam was buy, download, and play all your games in one place with a minimum of bullshit. Then they implemented Steam Greenlight. It let some smaller studios get onto a major platform and proved out that there was a demand for those titles. They were then smart enough to realize that trying to gatekeep those studios with the “Greenlight” process was stupid and opened the flood gates.

Really, this goes back to Gabe Newell’s comments about piracy (a decade and a half ago [1]):

We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

Steam was a real competitor to LimeWire/Kazaa/etc. The other options, at the time, were stuck in the mentality of treating their customers like pirates. And once people bought into the Steam ecosystem, getting them to buy into any other ecosystem was almost impossible. Steam’s main trick wasn’t building a community, it was building trust. Users trust Valve to not fuck them over. That’s a hard thing to create and it’s fragile. If you look at a competitor like EA’s Origin, many folks won’t even consider it. EA’s reputation of fucking customers is well established. No one wants to sink hundreds to thousands of dollars into a storefront with such an anti-user reputation.

Got about half way through the article before it became obvious that it’s just “DOOM, DOOOM, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” in prose form.

Gaming is changing, which is different from never. I mean, I could bemoan the death of 2d puzzlers ala King’s Quest because Sierra is no more, but there are still similar games being made by smaller studios. We may hit a slump, and the main actors may change, but gaming isn’t going anywhere. AAA titles will continue to mostly be money chasing shovelware, indie titles will continue to be where the real development and experimentation happens. But making games, especially PC games, has become so accessible that even the death of a major studio will amount to nothing more than some IP changing hands. And there is still a lot of money to be made in games, so companies will keep chasing that.

Magazines have been predicting the death of PC gaming for decades now. And yet, PC gaming is still incredibly vibrant. The current RAM shortage is just a hiccup. We’ve had RAM shortages before. If the demand for RAM stays at the current level manufacturers will respond by bringing new fabs online. More likely the AI bubble will pop and we’ll be flooded in used RAM and GPUs. The economy will cycle, hiring will pick back up and markets will move on to the "Next Big Thing"^TM

But ya, a headline of “Markets in down cycle, RAM supply currently constrained by high demand” doesn’t motivate clicks.

I have two:

1. Waves glowing with bioluminescence during a red tide. We didn’t know it would be going on and were just camping by the beach. Walking on it at night, we all saw the waves glowing and weren’t sure it was real. As we got closer, our footsteps in the area where the waves were rolling in and out were glowing as well. Just surreal.
2. A house blowing up. Guy opened a natural gas valve in the house and touched it off. Insulation shot way up in the air and the house itself bowed outwards in basically every direction, stayed standing though. At least until it burned down.

one day when we will hopefully be living in more peaceful times without imperialists

You don’t read much history? Humans have never lived in widespread peace for any length of time. We have evidence of violence between groups of humans well back into the Stone Age. We are not a species prone to peace.

What a shite take from the man who has no sense of real-world costs.

He also has no understanding of inflation. Lowing interest rates with rising inflation will, almost certainly, drive up home prices. As there will be more dollars chasing a limited supply. The problem is that this sort thing has a bad habit of going poorly. Investors have just gotten addicted to cheap credit. The US Fed is supposed to be the adult in the room, but The Pedo in Chief is doing his best to undermine that safeguard.

A-fucking-men.
I’m in a similar boat house. We bought in 2011, used a USDA loan and were able to pick our place up for a song ($160k). It now has a “value” of ~$360k. And all that extra “value” is doing for me is increasing taxes and insurance costs. I’m not planning on selling any time soon, so my home “price” going up is a net negative. Sure, we might sell in a decade or so, but today’s price won’t have a major impact on that.

What I’m getting at is, this doesn’t benefit homeowners, it benefits housing investors, who are the group Trump really wants to prop up.

What? You’re telling me the pedophile, racist, Nazi sympathizer, billionare son of a racist, Nazi sympathizer who made the family’s billions by wartime real estate profiteering is more interested in protecting real estate profiteering than helping people? Color me shocked, absolutely shocked, I say. Well, not that shocked.

While it’s not a service I would use, if it helps move the needle away from Windows’ dominance of the gaming market, that’s a good thing. The more people who can ditch Windows, the better. It probably means an Eternal September for Linux. But that is ultimately a good thing. If Linux becomes the default choice for gaming PCs for the mass market, more games will be released with Linux Native versions, driving further Linux adoption. It’s the type of virtuous cycle which is needed to kill the giant that is Windows.

I trust every AI group to do their level best to separate me from my money. Beyond that, I wouldn’t trust them with a stolen identity.

Oh look, it’s Vietnam all over again. How long before the Administration manufactures evidence of an attack on a US Navy asset and uses that to justify “limited” operations on the ground?

A what now?
I’m just here to read memes and rant about crap no one else cares about. I can’t be arsed to dig into all the random profile crap the developers poured hours of blood, sweat and tears implementing.

You’re one of those folks who are too stupid to understand probabilities and what polls are actually saying, aren’t you?
The polls in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election were actually pretty good. The final aggregate error was right around 3.4 points [1]

Anyone who suggested that there was a clear favorite was lying about what the polls said. That’s not a failing of the polls, its a failing of the media reporting on the polls. Sure, there were some particular, individual outliers. The Anne Seltzer poll comes to mind. But, credit where it’s due, Seltzer published an outlier poll, because that was the outcome of the poll based on then methodology she had been using for a long time. Like with scientists publishing null results, it’s actually really important that such things are published and not hidden, but they are usually hidden.

Go talk to people in the real world, instead of reading articles written by fellow shut-ins, and realize that the narrative is FAR different for the average person.

Then plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. And quite the opposite here, if you’re out talking to people within your own social bubble, you’re far more likely to get a warped view of reality. This is one of the reasons polling is so hard, getting a truly representative sample of the population is hard. It is also likely a reason polls keep underestimating Trump. People with low social trust seem to favor Trump, and those same people are very hard to poll. They don’t often pick up the phone and often aren’t willing to divulge their political choices to strangers on the phone. So ya, expecting the polls to “miss” by 3-5 points, underestimating Republicans isn’t all that out of line.

My prediction is the Dems will pick up just barely enough seats to take back control of the House. Not a snowballs chance in hell of taking back the Senate.

This is funny, because this is very much an opinion which will have been informed by polling. It’s also what most analysis are coming up with:

• House
• Senate

Articles like the one posted by the OP are just pure hopium. Dems may make some gains this year, but a rational analysis of the current polling data tells a bleak story. They might get the House, the Senate is basically out of reach.

I’ll extend the truffle hate to all mushrooms. If I wanted food covered in fungus, I would have waited for it to start rotting.

Replace the screen, maybe? And now you have an extra laptop.

Wait, I’m conscious enough to have questions? So, now what?