nfh

one man’s fizzy water is another man’s treasure, or something

Cheap garbage is cheap garbage, no matter the price they expect you to pay for it.

I’ve long had a mix of Windows and Linux machines, and currently have a gaming desktop with Win10, my old gaming desktop/media center PC on Win10, and my laptop/homelab machines all running Proxmox or Debian. At first I hadn’t migrated to Win11 because Microsoft hadn’t convinced me it’s an upgrade, but Copilot has now convinced me it won’t be an upgrade.

I haven’t decided exactly when, but the Windows 10 EOL is going to drive me to remove Windows from my remaining computers, and just use Linux.

From a cursory examination, it looks like there are at least some models where you can disconnect the antenna, for which you may get a warning you can just ignore. Seems a lot easier than a faraday cage. But a lot worse than a car not outfitted with that kind of tech.

Having one name (at least in common, using hyphenation) is easier for legal reasons too. If you have kids, and one parent doesn’t share a last name with them, you’ll have headaches at school, maybe crossing a border, unless you brought some extra legal documents with, etc.

I think you’re making a good choice Mr. Beer Belly

Not my country, but what immediately came to mind was one that has global name recognition, and minimal population: Chernobyl.

It used to have around 12,000 population, but now it’s technically illegal to live nearby, and up to 150 people are estimated to live there today. It’s famous for being toxically irradiated as a result of the worst nuclear disaster in human history

Sturgis also has a population of around 7,000, and has a pretty significant cultural awareness because of its annual motorbiking event

Cost cutting has made fast food restaurants worse in ways that aren’t essentially shrinkflation. Restaurants like Taco Bell cutting their beef with cheaper ingredients (though apparently it’s only 12% fillers). Chipotle giving you more of the cheap ingredients like rice, and less of the good stuff like guac. Even slower service and longer lines because they don’t want to pay as much staff during peak hours.

Smaller (especially privately-held) chains have been able to buck the trend, but cutting quality has been a popular option as of late.

Knowledge is what happens when you’ve evaluated enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that something is false. If you haven’t seen the evidence, but still think it’s true or false (you don’t lack belief), then you have a belief about it. As such, knowledge is a type of belief with extra justification.

If I’ve reviewed enough evidence I’m comfortable saying I can reject the null hypothesis, that is I have a belief that it’s knowledge, I’ll call it as such. If I haven’t, I’ll couch my confidence in my belief accordingly.

Not only refill your meds, but there are places where you can get 90 day prescriptions filled, so you can go into the new year with several months of pills already ready.

Dedicated hardware still has benefits, having your phone notifications separate from gaming, if your phone breaks having your console break would suck, and imo a touchscreen will never surpass physical buttons on controllers so you’d still want those.

I personally hope the future looks more like a steam deck than a gaming phone.

I don’t see this mentioned there, but that Apple has largely ignored enterprise works out as a strength; other companies wrote and open sourced pretty good tools. That can result in tools that better meet your needs, and generally will result in a lower TCO.

It’s a question of the most stable thing to use to mediate value for exchange of goods and services, right? Fiat currency is just the choice of “the state” as a stabilizing force. Certainly it’s better than trusting the scarcity of rare metals, but eventually “just trust the state” will become a problem, and we’ll need to think about rebasing currencies. In theory, computational complexity isn’t a bad choice, but nobody has come up with a solution that actually functions well as a currency.

But I agree, the finite planet has nothing to do with any failings of fiat currencies, and only makes sense as a failing of the “number must go up” mentality endemic to capitalism.

I can’t find the text of the new law in 5 minutes of searching, but from looking at a variety of reports, it seems like this law removes loopholes that were being used to get parental permission for marriages involving children. I suspect they just wrote it this way because the bulk of the issue is older men marrying teenage girls, and that is a thing it does ban.

I haven’t had this happen personally, but are you allowed to edit your hosts file? I’m assuming those IP addresses are coming from DNS resolution, and if you hardcode those DNS entries to resolve to 127.0.0.1, it’ll stop the ads.

nslookup <ip address> should give you the domain names, if not there’s DNS logs in Event Viewer that should tell you.

To me, multiplayer video games should be about having fun with friends. Couch co-op, LAN parties, online multiplayer work for different genres and depending where your friends are. I don’t care if they’re older games, newer games, as long as it’s fun and interesting.

So I’ve spent a few minutes trying to see what the internet thinks, and it looks like there’s not a clear consensus that the First-Sale-Doctrine applies to non-physical goods similarly to physical ones, and does seem to be a consensus that digital goods make it a lot messier. Seems like the law hasn’t caught up to technology, still.

And in absence of clear law, it makes sense that companies are making their own opinions, and unfortunate that some are being greedier than they could be.

IANAL, but… I’m guessing GOG is of the opinion that they’re selling you a license that you own, and can thus bequeath to your heirs, where Steam is of the opinion they’re selling you a nontransferable license, so a will bequeathing it to someone would be seeking to enforce something you lack permission to do.

To me the question is whether the result of what you’re doing makes the world around you better or worse. Would the people living in your place be better off if you were out of the equation? Then you’re a bad landlord.

If you’re making money from providing labor for the people who live in a place you own, and they’re paying your costs to do so, I think there’s a case for that being a reasonable occupation to hold. If there’s an issue with it, it’s not my highest priority, and there’s definitely some value in flexible housing stock for people.

If your goal is passive income, or you’re making money from owning housing and denying that ownership to people who need a place to live, then you’re behaving as a parasite, and I think it’s reasonable for people to give you an amount of respect proportional to that.