Don’t know if it’s just me doing crappy human pattern matching or when I was studying art history, I noticed that “peak” art periods were often “late” republic/kingdom/empire eras where the political structure was breaking apart and inequality was growing while the last generation raised on previous generations wealth focused on art/entertainment/self-care. That’s how I feel right now today. Leftists have been mostly trying to live their best lives for the last like 40 years with entertainment while conservatives have been chipping away more and more power. Leftist art doesn’t direct action. Mostly just commentates and serves as mental exercise. Very opaque in purpose and audience. Conservative art is comparatively simple but suggests simple solutions, actions, identity. Art made for targeted audiences

iPhones are too locked down for the hardware they have. I’m writing this on an iPhone 15 …

The foldable I like the most I’ve seen are the Motorola razrs. That’s vertical. The best fat foldables are going to be Android because of all the video game emulators for Android

I’m of the opinion that neither whiskey nor bourbon are worth it even tariffs or country of origin. Became real trendy for a long time now. Overpriced. Drink rum

The bill passed to ban TikTok was terrible bill. A bunch of people ate up the marketing for it and it didn’t take even 2 years from passing to start getting abused. Easily predictable outcome

As others, my basic home lab NAS plans are grounding to a stop because of worsening prices. Next up, phones are going to be even more expensive. Video game console price increases again

I loved last.fm. Used it for like a decade until I stopped caring about logging every time I listened to something. Was real good at finding music I liked. I used to view it as a reflection of me and then I got older and stopped caring about public reflections of myself

sequel to ego draconis

This year competition excuted well in the same launch window. Arc Raiders and Battlefield, I have played neither, people seem happy with. Looking at Steam charts, Delta Force looks popular too and CS is always popular. It’s taken like 15 years but the not Call of Duty and not sort of weird gunplay in modern times/military shooters compared to Counter Strike (I play counter strike and I know it’s gunplay and movement are weird and harsh for newcomers) are hitting their strides. Call of Duty is facing the best most suitable amount of competition since the first modern warfare

The article doesn’t read as very concerning. Too much of anything usually means bad. Under the right conditions anything can be bad. Figuring out what can be bad and when it can be bad can often take decades. Don’t stress too much on trying to optomize out anything that can do you harm in a diet. You’d have nothing left to eat and even the greatest collective of biologist getting together to make the greatest nutritional shake meal replacement would probably miss something that causes issues decades down the line or people drink too much and overdose

From my memories, the price of appliances haven’t changed much in the last couple of decades. They maintain or increase margins with cheaper parts, less QA, looser performance tolerances while keeping the same sticker price. Whatever the quality sacrifice equivalent word for shrinkflation

Most obvious thing to ever happen since ads being added to Instagram feeds. It’s a search engine replacement. It was going to end up with basic advertisments eventually. Then targeted advertisements. Then sponsored results as sneaky as they can be in the case of suggesting the best solution/product. Free open source models and stuff like proton and duckduckgo if you really want to use AI search engines

Paradox has lately been really good at admitting fault and then mismanaging the next big game outside of their bread and butter grand strategy games. They need to shake up their management because it’s becoming clear they’re giving unrealistic timelines/budgets/demands for these games

Practically everyone I’m friends with hates imperialism and colonialism but loves the benefits of visiting poor countries that were victims of imperialism/colonialism and feeling special because of the money they bring and the lack of developed domestic entertainment/art industries so that theirs and their countries artist/entertainers are way more competitive there

Everyone’s pretty hypocritical. People that get mad at other people for working for Google are extra and easily ignored. Damn all those Boeing and Airbus employees for working for huge military contractors. When a company gets big enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re lobbying for something terrible to benefit themselves.

I’m continuously confused how these standards don’t seem to apply to bank tellers, finance in general, large chain retail, fast food, large agriculture companies, fashion industry, film industry, music industry, alcohol, pharmaceutical, … etc

Some people fight the most inconsequential battles. If you work for JP Morgan Chase and someone gives you the cold shoulder or lectures you because so, ignore them. It’s such a small crowd that’s like that that it won’t change your lifestyle. It’s not like if you quit and struggled to find work and started to teeter on ruin that they’d be there for you. And someone like that probably fights so many small inconsequence battles that they’d be exhausting to be around anyways. And fighting such small inconsequential battles produces so little. Tagging, down with the oligarchy in a bathroom stall or sidewalk day to day. It’s small bubble activism

Besides myself being on Linux, I used to mix Linux and Windows since like 2010 but fully transitioned like 3 years ago, I’m still regularly using a laptop from 2016 as a zoom calls and internet browsing laptop. It gets too hot to have in my lap and the battery lasts like 30 minutes. That’s a dual core integrated graphics chip from 2016. Anyone with a discrete graphics card easily has a solid workstation PC. If you’re not gaming or your not doing something that really benefits from strong hardware, you’re good. No need to upgrade. If you’re not playing new AAA games at 4k maxed, you may be good. This is just same news as how people are holding onto their cell phones longer than before

It’ll be about as significant as chromeos so good for schools while professionaland enthusiast stuck working on them will do so by running regular Linux applications like you do on chromos. I’d say it’s a stronger plus for Linux desktops than Android. Google really can’t get out of their way with their NIH syndrome for desktops. Like 15 years of attempting to do desktop Linux but in a way users likely won’t use the Linux desktop designed and often free software. I’d love to see this introduce people to Digikam, Darktable, Krita, GIMP, Kdenlive at the expense of Google Photos and adobe apps

It’s certainly just going to end up being used as an advertising tool. Like the recent hype of trying to get people let AI do holiday shopping for them. Like the AI saw you opened paint, have you considered a subscription for Adobe cloud. You searched for cake recipes on Google and clicked links, why not sub to copilot+. It’ll have text to speech AI as well

It’s still worse than before. Really need to break mobile away from Google and Apple. Preferably as close to standard Linux as possible

T&T not giving this energy about verifying whether all the people killed by the US on small boats are drug traffickers. Maybe they want to be the next Israel or Rwanda as the regional hammer for the the US

Chat control is definitely going to pass eventually in my lifetime. Resiliency for secure and private communications will continue to develop. Anonymity will be needed too. Right now our governments instead of trying to inspire patriotism through improving living standards for the masses are focusing on information and communication control

The US hasn’t technically been at war since WW2 by US definition technicalities, a system that many Americans seem to enjoy stating when talking about the millions of people killed by the US military and allies since in various invasions and occupations