The mods of a certain pair of tankie instances a few months ago were talking about taking over all other instances of Lemmy while the userbases became increasingly hostile towards users who disagreed with the idea that Stalin/Lenin did nothing wrong and that China is a perfect country who can do no wrong and has never done anything bad.

People have the right to not be harassed and take action to prevent said harassment.

Lemmy moves in mysterious ways. It is not our place to question the actions of a higher being such at this. 😄

A wise person once said, “It’s not possible to make a billion dollars in a year. It is, however, possible to steal a billion dollars in a year.” You have to be stealing value from somebody along the production chain to be accumulating that kind of wealth.

For me, it’s more about how much I enjoyed the experience than a simple dollars per hour equation or something. It’s a very case by case basis for me.

I remember when Alien:Isolation came out, I told people I got my money’s worth in just the first hour from how scared shitless I was the first few times the xenomorph came out to hunt you.

On the other side, I got Starfield for $20 off in the release week, but despite how many hours you can sink into that game, I found the entire experience rather bland and dull and regret buying it.

And this right here is why the "Ghost Gun" thing is largely just a scare like the Halloween drug thing that happens every year. Because it's generally cheaper and easier to go one state over to the state with lax gun laws and buy a gun there for the price of an Ender 3 instead of going through all the effort of buying a printer and learning how to use it. Same reason why the Mexican cartels smuggle guns out of the US and into Mexico, and not the other way around. Guns are cheap and plentiful in the US, and they're not hard to get.

There's some "teh gubernment is cummin fer muh gunz!1!" chuds out there 3d printing guns, but there's plenty of those people with guns they bought legally as well. The biggest large scale ghost gun manufacturing I've heard about is the Burmese resistance fighters who have been printing en masse a design to fight back against a genocidal military coup in Myanmar because the international community has largely ignored what's going on there and they can't get guns any other way, which is exactly the sort of situation that design was created for.

Nah, if it were the US, that playground would be a parking lot.

I by no means have a raging hate-boner for Epic or anything, but they've definitely done enough to irritate me to the point where I haven't even bothered with the store for the free games.

It started off poorly with the store launching in such a bad state that it would've failed the HTML class I took in high school (it didn't even have a cart. How can you launch a shopping site without even having the ability for people to buy more than one item at a time? I learned how to program that in 2007!) and it went downhill from there with stuff like the exclusivity deals and that sale they did where they marked 30% off on games that hadn't even released yet, without even telling the developers or asking permission. Then they've rushed to embrace pretty muchthing I've praised Valve for refusing to deal with, from NFT games to AI that may or may not be violating copyright laws with the stuff making up the learning databases.

Plenty to criticise, but I'm getting tired of watching them try to shove their foot back into their mouth.

I think the real issue is with schooling before college, and this article seems to be looking at college as the same sort of environment as the previous 12 years of school, which it isn’t. So much of everything through high school has become about putting pressure on teachers to hit good grades and graduating student percentages that actually teaching kids how to learn and how to collaborate with others has become a tertiary goal to simply having them regurgitate information on the tests to hit those 2 metrics.

I have taught myself a number of things on a wide range of subjects (from art to 3d printing to car maintenance and more. City planning and architecture are my current subjects of interest) and I’ve always said when people ask about learning all this stuff that I love to learn new things, despite the school system trying to beat it out of me. I dropped out of college despite loving my teachers and the college itself both because I didn’t like my major (the school was more like a trade school, we chose our majors before we even got to the college) and because I had never learned how to learn in the previous 12 years of school. I learned how to hold information just long enough to spit it out on the test and then forget it for the next set for the next test. Actually learning how to find information and internalize it through experience came after I left school.

Very true, but it’s precisely that wealth disparity that concerns me. I’ve seen the current US wealth disparity described as being on par with the disparity in France just before the French Revolution happened, where the cost of a loaf of bread had soared to more than the average worker made in a day. I worry that the more than half a century of anti-union propaganda and “get what I need and screw everybody else” attitude has beaten down the general public enough that there simply won’t be enough of a unified effort to enact meaningful change. I worry about how bad things will have to get before it’s too much. How many families will never recover.

But these are also very different times compared to the 1920s in that we’ve been riding on the coattails of the post WW2 economic boom for almost 70 years, and as that continues to slow down we might see some actual pushback. We already have, with every generation being more progressive than the last.

But I still can’t help but worry.

The US economy literally depends on 3-4% of the workforce being so desperate for work that they’ll take any job, regardless of how awful the pay is. They said this during the recent labor shortage, citing how this is used to keep wages down and how it’s a “bad thing” that almost 100% of the workforce was employed because it meant people could pick and choose rather than just take the first offer they get, thus causing wages to increase.

Poverty and homelessness are a feature, not a bug.

What is this “passing lane” of which you speak? All I’ve ever seen in America is the fast lane and the slow lane(s).

And only end up being farther back than if they had just stayed put, as everybody else had the same thought, making the new lane the slower one.

It’s worth noting that though those are the “recommended” settings, my 2060 runs high settings without any issues, and runs high settings on every other game I’ve played, including other AAA releases from this year. It’s my fault for not making it clear that those are NVIDIA’s recommended settings and not what I actually have it running at. But Starfield is the first game I’ve ever seen that has simply not been able to run on a standard HDD at all. Even Baldur’s Gate 3, which requires an SSD as well, runs competently on an HDD, just with slower load times on models/textures.

I totally understand that tech becomes outdated, especially with the jump from one console generation to the next. And especially that the recent generations of NVIDIA cards have been nowhere near as long-lasting as the 900 and 1000 series were. But Starfield is an outlier even by those standards. It has never put any real pressure on my CPU or GPU, it’s all been entirely on the speed of the harddrive.

Running it on an HDD was such a bizarre experience. The game would freeze for about 5 seconds every minute or so, and on initiating any dialogue with NPCs it would stutter for just a moment. NPC dialogue would also be out of sync with their animations, which is to be expected with the stutter. The weirdest part was how the music would stop playing suddenly and the game would go completely silent for about 10 seconds while it was still running smoothly, before all the sounds that had happened in that timespan played out suddenly, like they had been queueing up while the game figured out whether or not it wanted to play them. For this one particular game to have these kinds of issues - especially considering how partitioned the game world is by loading screens - says that the issue lies in the optimization of Starfield and not the specs of my PC. Especially since they all stopped when I migrated the game to an SSD I have plugged into an external SATA dock hooked up over USB C.

The fact that it literally can’t run on a normal HDD is baffling to me. The game is so poorly optimized that not only does it require an SSD just to run both the graphics and audio smoothly and in sync, but the recommended settings for my 2060 are everything as low as it can possibly go. I got roughly a decade out of my 970 before it truly started to show its age, but my 2 generations old card is barely good enough to run this game?

And don’t even get me started on how I keep feeling like I’m playing Fallout 4 because so much of the music uses the same underlying score of the music from the reveal trailer. The number of times I’ve heard those rising notes from the leaving the Vault scene in Fallout 4 in my 3 hours in Starfield…

I mean, be the change you want to see in the world…

Sheer spite is a perfectly valid reason to continue to get out of bed in the morning.

Nobody on their deathbed has ever said, “I wish I spent more time in the office.”

A battle you don’t have to fight is a battle won. But if you do have to hurt somebody, hurt them bad enough that they won’t get back up. Otherwise, they’re very likely to come right back at you.

Well, art is political by its very nature. It is inherently filled with the views and beliefs of the artist, and it’s important to point out the dangerous ones so people are aware and to prevent a potential slippery slope to radicalization. Or to prevent moments like that time Smash Mouth unknowingly retweeted art from a famous lolicon artist.

As for the rest, I completely agree. One of the ways to deal with a shitty person is to take their propaganda and meme the shit out of it.

Yup, it’s the same old song of fascists and cultists.

“Are you lonely, sad, angry, or just generally dissatisfied with your life? Have you tried blaming your problems on a minority with less power in society than yourself? Act now, and I’ll throw in a second minority, free!*”

*Just pay shipping and handling.

I haven’t played it, but that seems to be the general consensus I’ve seen.

I was confused as well because the industry standard (Maya) natively supports Linux. Until I looked up Solidworks and realized we’re talking about 2 different 3d modeling/design fields.