So, this is wild speculation, but I’ll tell you my guess. I think it’s about TSMC, the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturer. China has, for years, been saying that Taiwan isn’t an independent country, but is instead “Chinese Taipei,” a part of China. They’ve been using this idea for years to gradually build towards an invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan, of course, does consider itself an independent nation. The US officially holds no position on this question, which is kinda bonkers; there’s this whole diplomatic dance about whether the US would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. The US might not care if it weren’t for TSMC, which runs the plants that produce a huge proportion of the world’s CPUs and GPUs and AI chips. All the best chip-making technology and know-how is with TSMC. It’s a major vulnerability in the US supply chain.

China has been ramping things up in the past several years. It’s suspected that a big part of why they’re going along with the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that Russia probably promised to go along with China invading Taiwan in exchange. It’s all very sub-rosa, but there’s been so much military maneuvering and posturing and so on back and forth around Taiwan that it’s been kind of dizzying.

This is, unfortunately, part of why China was enthusiastic about getting Trump back into the White House. Trump’s policies of isolating the US from its military allies, instigating worldwide trade chaos, and cozying up to dictators make the conditions a lot more ripe for China to make a move on Taiwan. And since the US has never been able to actually talk about Taiwan before, it’s gonna look absolutely batshit to the majority of Americans if China invades Taiwan and the US government suddenly wants to go to war against China over this, which seems like a huge risk. But since, as Trump so eloquently put it, “everything is computer,” we basically can’t stand by and let China take Taiwan without a fight.

So he’s trying to gin up sentiment against China on his own terms to lay the groundwork for a war that seems increasingly inevitable.

Tell this to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was here legally, and was grabbed and sent to a prison in El Salvador. The government isn’t giving people any opportunity to prove their status. That’s what we mean when we say they’re not being given “due process.” There’s not a trial or anything. They’re just grabbed and hauled away.

Why doesn’t the successful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia without due process rise to this level for you? It’s true he wasn’t a US citizen, but he did have a protected status that let him live and work legally in the US. And given that he was deported without due process, but simply by “administrative error,” there was no point at which he was given the opportunity to bring up his legal status. That is, the thing that would be different if they tried to do this to a citizen is that they would have successfully done it to a citizen. Presumably the courts would order them to bring the citizen back, but they’ve already done that with Abrego Garcia, and the administration isn’t complying.

If that’s your bright line, maybe check out the boot that’s straddling it.

HID headlights were just as bad, and those go back to the 90’s.

“Oh, you don’t need to get a receipt if you give us your email address instead…”

Definitely worth a try!

That also! My sense is that for the switch it’s basically only limited by emulator compatibility, but for ps3 and xbox one it’s partially limited by the available cpu and gpu power. I may be mistaken about that though, I don’t own a Deck and haven’t tested this stuff myself.

Because being able to play your existing switch games with better performance is a big part of their sales pitch for this, but people were already starting to do that with the Steam Deck. At that point the comparison for the devices would look like:

Steam Deck: Cheaper, more ergonomic, can play more games, games cost less, games aren’t locked to the console, no charge for better performance if you upgrade to new hardware, can play any game from consoles up to some ps3 through emulation

Nintendo: Better battery life, 120Hz HDR screen, has a new Mario Kart and Donkey Kong game

In every other way it would lose the comparison.

With the emulator crackdown, people don’t perceive it that way, because they don’t think of emulation as an option for the switch. (I mean, some do, but even Retro Games Corps isn’t talking about that possibility anymore because of the strikes against his YouTube channel; they’ve greatly reduced the visibility of that as an option.)

For my part, I’m leaning towards sticking Moonlight on my existing Switch and just streaming from my desktop. It’s not elegant, but you can’t beat the price.

The “specific program” I have trouble with is Autodesk Fusion (formerly Fusion 360). There are projects that try to run it through Wine, but there’s a specific function that isn’t implemented in Wine right now that Fusion relies on as part of its authentication service, so it won’t log you in correctly, at least on the default Mint install. I think at least one of the relevant functions is currently in the Wine beta, so it may work again in a bit–I did manage to get it working briefly at one point, but I somehow screwed it up again subsequently. (I may just have forgotten how I launched it…I think I have two versions installed at this point, the Flatpak and the Snap install.) But even when it worked it was slow and janky in a much more severe way than when it runs natively on Windows.

The “specific program” my dad is interested in is Hesuvi, a piece of headphone virtualization software that also does equalization and crossover. At some point I identified a program I though would work on Linux as an alternative, but I would want to test that before committing to switching his computer over from Windows, and I haven’t got around to that yet. Other than that he mostly uses Zoom, and I think I tested that and it worked okay in Mint, though my memory is a little weak on that too.

I dunno. Basically everyone has their own little patterns they use with their computers, and switching to Linux requires changes to those patterns. It’s an adaptation. That’s not to say it’s not worth it–for a ton of people it probably is. But I’m not sure my aging parents can do it, and thanks to Fusion, I’m not sure I can do it either, because I just don’t have a good replacement.

The other option I’m looking into is Windows IoT LTSC. That omits a LOT of the problematic bullshit.

I’ll figure something out before the end of support, anyway.

One use is VR, where the field of view is huge. The industry size and distance recommendations have a TV take up about 30° of your field of view, which works out to 128 pixels per degree for a 4k screen. For a headset with a 100° field of view (most are a little higher than this at this point, or at least claim to be, but it’s a good baseline) you’d be looking at a 12k resolution to get the same level of clarity. But, of course, you’d need to run it at a very high framerate to avoid simulator sickness, whereas 4k often gets away with just 30 fps. Delivering power over the same cable also means just one cable.

Currently there are no GPUs to drive that high a resolution and framerate. But the cable was one limiting factor there, made especially frustrating by nVidia sticking to displayport 1.4 for so long.

Yeah. I’m 100% who Nintendo is trying to lure with this launch, and honestly I’m a little ticked off about it–I’ve really wanted Metroid Prime 4 for a long time, but now it’s coming out and I have to choose between playing an inferior version or shelling out over $500 to play the good version. ($450 for the system, $80 for the game, and compatible SD cards in sizes larger than the internal storage of the new system don’t even exist yet.) So I’m inclined to wait, and see if there are enough good games to justify the Switch 2 purchase eventually, but they’re going to count that as poor initial sales for Prime 4. It might kill the franchise. Replaying some of my switch titles with upgraded performance might have been enough to motivate me to make the move, but they’re also going to charge extra for that. That’s…not great. Nickle-and-diming on top of a much more expensive system with even more expensive games is just ugly.

It definitely has me thinking about getting a PC handheld instead. A lot of what I was picturing was second-screen gaming while watching TV or YouTube, and the Deck is definitely a competitor in that space. There are a bunch of people saying that “oh, the reason you buy a Nintendo system is to play Nintendo exclusives,” which, yeah, that is a selling point, but for the original switch, just being a portable system that played modern games was also a selling point. That second factor is absolutely going up against the Deck, and frankly losing, because Steam has everything. Switch 2 has to go all in on the exclusives, and that’s a much tougher sell, especially since they don’t have the gold mine of good games nobody had played that they had from the Wii U to pad the release schedule.

Maybe they’ll amaze me, but I see them being very unhappy with the revenue from this console in a couple of years, and casting about for stupid shit to blame. And I think they’re gonna blame Metroid. It’s not Metroid, guys. Metroid is great. It’s the pricing.

The White House is more than 40 hours away from here driving non-stop.

The number of people from here who could have participated in a march at the White House (maybe taking a week off work in order to get there and back traveling 16 hours a day by bus) would have been very small. Instead, thousands of us marched in our local downtown yesterday in a solid throng.

Protests at a specific location convey a message, but mass protests everywhere convey a message too.

I’m glad you asked, I was trying to figure out what Peter Sellers had in common with Musk.

https://m.xkcd.com/2566/

It’s not unheard of, though. Modern Warfare 2 had only a 70MB file on its disc, basically a license, and required you to download the actual game.

Note I’m not defending this. It’s a nightmare for game preservation and pushes us ever further in the direction of never owning anything. I’m just saying Nintendo isn’t breaking new ground with this particular outrage.

For “listened to a boombox outside,” does it matter whether you did so voluntarily or just heard it because someone else was playing one too loudly for you to ignore? In other words, I’m either 0 or 1.

I think they move too smoothly. I think it’s maybe a combination of the “ew, tiny things are parasites” and the “ew, smooth-moving things are snakes” responses, even though neither of those is appropriate for the silverfish itself. I think that’s part of what happens with the house millipedes, too.

I dunno, silverfish are smaller than flies, but they still give me that revulsion response.

Hubris is a kind of boastful pride–like a sense of invulnerability. It also implies a kind of dramatic irony, that this sense of invulnerability will eventually prove false. (The term comes from ancient Greek theater, where it’s often the Heroic Flaw that will eventually be the undoing of the tragic hero.)

Chutzpah is more…audacity, nerve, gall. A person with chutzpah doesn’t believe they can’t be harmed; they’re just willing to bald-face it out in the hopes you won’t actually call them on it. In English it can have a positive connotation, the way “cojones” tends to, but it can also have a negative connotation, like “cheek” or “gall.” It comes from Yiddish, where apparently it’s more uniformly negative. (Leave it to us Americans to interpret a condemnation of shameless effrontery as somehow laudatory.)

I guess I would say the key difference is that someone with hubris thinks they are invulnerable, whereas a person with chutzpah is aware they are vulnerable and absolutely refusing to act like it.

They’re definitely kind of related, but they just have really different feels to them

“In the game of chess, you can never let your adversary see your pieces.” --Zapp Brannigan