That’s some beautiful language there- “particularly fashionable scars.”

I do wonder about the nature of some toxic fandoms. Are they not aware that their behaviour harms the overall fandom? Or are they so committed to self-satisfaction that they don’t care? Or do they see themselves as an isolated outcrop, that their actions shouldn’t affect the whole community?

WRT Pokemon, how much of the franchise’s Flanderization was actual response to objections of touchy content, and how much is due to risk-averse people being handed a huge money printer, fueled by parents who are easily mobilized against “problematic” content. It’s interesting that they never tried to manufacture a Palworld-style product themselves-- a deliberately independent universe where they don’t need to worry about keeping it rated “E for Everyone”, but using their proven engines and mechanics.

I thought the two states were Donetsk and Lukhansk.

What’s Argentina? Do you mean Falklands West?

I think 3D printing has potential because it can close the gap between hobbyist crafts and commercial grade manufacturing. Print the item for a run of 25, then you can move up to a real mould for 25,000.

It also leans into repairability-- replacement parts that might not be feasible to whittle one at a time from wood can be reliably made in a plastic comparable of strength to the original, and tge designs shared widely

“Us versus them” politics are asking for a complete washout on the international stage.

In the end, when the shit hits the fan, are you going to align yourself with the country that makes All the Things, or the one that can’t even pass a budget? COVID proved that it wasn’t just good-times, low-stakes gridlock: even existential crises weren’t enough to get America to cooperate and discipline herself.

If real life were a survival movie, we’d be getting to the scene where the secondary characters decide whether to follow Grandpa Sticky, who’s in the midst of full-blown dementia and was at best a vaguely racist philosophy professor when lucid, or the 22-year-old trained soldier with a fully stocked supply line. And we’d be throwing popcorn at the screen and deriding how terrible the writing is.

Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

• A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
• a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
• followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
• a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)

When do we get people wearing calendars to finish the crew though?

What are you using now? Every few months I go on a binge of trying new text editors and file managers.

I seriously switched because I was fed up with the choice of messaging. Xnedit isn’t great, but it does have a delightfully 1994 aesthetic.

Hobby programming or electronics projects?

The frustrating thing is, if we bounded the problem correctly as “Techbro wants a catgirl sexbot” we could probably just build the freaking catgirl sexbot for the price of a Corolla and be done with. For the job it has to do, a 486 and some sound clips from anime DVDs could provide sufficient “personality”.

I wonder how much of the quest for The Singularity is that they can’t just ask for that, and instead have to chase something that would, if it delivered on the promises, reshape the entire world, and incidentally also produces the catgirl sexbot.

Of course part of it was that they can leverage the capitalist urge to displace labour as a source of endless funding and status to chase this vision.

If the market wasn’t in an arms race fueled by a bubble and multidimensional greed, I think there’s probably a modest market for a real “treat printer.” Small scale tools that do some things people enjoy about AI products, but likely far more efficient since they can be scoped to actual needs rather than open ended future “I can’t believe it’s not general AI” use cases. A script that generates a new wallpaper each time you log in, randomized bedtime stories or skeletal TTRPG quests, or an endless melody for background noise. I’m sure you can do all those things without a data centre the size of Nunavut.

I rarely downvote, but the actual Voyager probes are an inspirational story of real scientific triumph. I will not hear them smeared!

Somehow, the first thing we sent out of the solar system intentionally wasn’t a conquering fleet, a self-aggrandizing tyrant/cult leader/gazillionaire, or a swarm of mining bots thirsty for lanthanides, but rather a sincere artifact of curiousity. We’ve kept it running long past its intended service life, and indeed the best-before date of many of its designers. It’s a “Humanity, Fuck Yeah” story that’s heartwarming instead of jingoistic.

My budget platform is “ask how much NASA wants each year, and put a zero behind it.”

I guess Fairy Tail… now if only using Grey Fullbuster as a fitness inspiration, instead of just a “why bother with clothes” inspiration, worked.

Do you need to materially wear out a $5000 GPU for that? I’m pretty sure there have been books full of “roll some D20s for random encounters/scenes/etc” for years.

Still friend shaped. <3

I want to feed him treats and scritch under his neck.

Don’t mind me, I’m just the crazy reptile person on a good day.

You’re reading too much into the “people love to push big red buttons, regardless of what they do” joke. :)

The problem is that the act of pressing a red button makes up a significant degree of the appeal. It throws the math all off. With the right button, you’ve got MLK and Mother Theresa taking turns to punch it.

If they had to mush an old resistive touchscreen like some 2001-era carrier-branded slightly-pre-smart phone to trigger a genocide-- the ones willing to go that far are the truly bloodthirsty.

I always figured this was a very effective way to deal with the wealthy who would scream about appropriation in the early phases of a social realignment.

They’ve done experimental communities for dementia patients set up to look like normal towns, but the shopkeepers are all staff, and the busses loop back at the end of the run, so there’s the tools to constantly monitor the patients and make sure they don’t wander away, while they feel like they have the dignity of independent living instead of an obvious rest home.

Do the same, but also make sure they’re on a captive network where they can pull up fibbed bank and brokerage statistics that tell them everything went up 15% per year, and staged broadcasts that says everyone is properly turning to face Wall Street and pray to the Line eight times a day. They’d never need to realize their assets had been nationalized years ago, they just think it’s permanent springtime in Jackson Hole or whatever.

After things take over, and they no longer hold influence or aspirational leverage, you release them back into general population. “Sorry, Elon, those numbers were faked, here’s 200 roubles and your assignment in the cobalt mines.”

Can’t go wrong with “Money can be exchanged for goods and services.” But I’d still rather have the peanut.