Sure, people can use the presets, but on a lower end machine, those aren’t perfect for getting the most out of your specific hardware. What I meant there was that consoles, and by extension the steam deck/steam machine, have the exact setting loadout for that hardware dialed in.

Sure, he could pay someone to upgrade it for him, but at that point it loses a lot of the benefits that come with being able to upgrade in the first place.

The Fractal Terra is actually larger than all modern consoles. The Fractal Terra is 11.4 liters. The PS5 is 7.2 liters. The Xbox series X is 6.9 liters. The steam machine is 3.8 liters, 3x smaller than the Fractal Terra. When it comes to dimensions, the Xbox series X is smaller in all dimensions, and while the PS5 is longer and wider, it’s height is half that of the Fractal Terra. The steam machine is pretty similar in two of the three dimensions, but the depth is less than half that of the Terra. The Fractal Terra is a really nice, small case, but it’s only small for a PC, not a console.

As for normalizing incompetence, I doubt you have as extensive a knowledge as you do for computers for every single thing you interact with every day. Knowing “how to use one” is different from knowing how to build and upgrade one.

You come across as someone who is smart, and yet doesn’t fully understand that half the population is below the 50th percentile. The generalizations you make for yourself and those you regularly interact with cannot be made for everyone.

Eh, I haven’t seen any evidence that Trump is straight. Evidence that he’s definitely not gay, sure, but no real evidence of straightness. Sure, he’s in a heterosexual marriage, but so is my wife and she’s bi, so that’s not much to go off of. He seems to pass legislation that harms the wellbeing of lgbtq folks, but it’s not uncommon for people in power to show disdain for lgbtq people while being one themselves. It’s also not uncommon for folks to experiment with their sexuality in their early adult years, even if he isn’t bi, that doesn’t take blowing someone completely off the table.

The long and short of it is that I haven’t seen anything that would make me think Trump wouldn’t have blown some guy. It’s not hard to believe that he were willing to blow a guy, especially if it were a one-off thing he was trying in the spur of the moment at an Epstein sex party. It’s honestly a toss-up, and to act like it’s more or less likely to have gone one way or the other seems foolhardy here.

Also, do you have links to anywhere that Trump has professed to being straight? I couldn’t find any personally, but if you have them then that would make it more likely this email was just a joke. But if you don’t have them I can’t help but feel you are doing the exact thing you claim to be against: spreading misinformation.

You really do, and you not thinking so is telling of how skewed your view of what common knowledge really is. Where does someone start when building a computer if they don’t know what goes into a computer? How do they pick parts if they don’t know what changes will make their computer better or worse? I love PC part picker, but let’s be real, it’s for people who already know what they are looking for. PC part picker makes things so easy for you and I, but drop any tech-illiterate person into PC part picker, and they won’t actually get anywhere. Plus, I’ve had it get the dimensions of a GPU wrong before, and without verifying through a different website, I would have bought a card that didn’t fit in the case I was using. Even the gold standard sources of information make mistakes.

As for the pre-built argument, to someone like my brother who knows nothing about computers, but regularly games on his PS5, the steam machine and a prebuilt are essentially the same. He wouldn’t know how to fix the computer without sending it off to the company, which is how he’d fix the steam machine as well. He also wouldn’t see the PC as something that could be upgraded. If a game wasn’t running well, he certainly wouldn’t know what part would need upgrading in his machine to make his experience better. In that sense, the pre-built is effectly non-upgradable. He might know to adjust the in-game settings, but wouldn’t know what settings to change. On a prebuilt, this would be an issue. On a device that millions of people use, all with the exact same specs, this information is readily available. Think of the steam deck, you could look up “<game name> steam deck settings” and get the best loadout for your exact hardware. Hell, a bunch of modern games have a “Steam Deck” settings loadout built in. With a prebuilt, that’s not possible. And finally, the steam machine is considerably smaller than any mini itx prebuilt I’ve seen on the market. Hell, a mini it’s motherboard couldn’t even fit in the steam machine’s case. To a lot of people, not having a big box in their living room matters. I’ve had a hard time convincing my partner to let me have a PC in a Fractal Design Terra case in the living room, and that’s a case that is small and clean looking.

I mean, that and they taste completely different?

Not trying to attack you or anything because you did say that you don’t see the appeal for your own case, but that’s because this product isn’t for you. If you see building a PC and putting it in your living room as an alternative, it’s not meant for you. This is for everyone else who doesn’t see those things as easy. Being someone who has been building/upgrading my own gaming PCs since I was a preteen, I understand how simple it seems to you. But not everyone has that perspective. What seems like simple step-by-step instructions to you is actually really complicated. Part compatiblity alone is difficult, and even the best sources of info can get it wrong, and that’s really demoralizing for someone who doesn’t even know what RAM is. Step-by-step guides seem easy, but there are many predatory ones out there, which suggest using a free trial of paid software to do the things FOSS software can do. You and I know how to avoid it, but if someone doesn’t even understand the concept of an .iso file, how would they know that better alternatives exist? Also, an extremely common case when following tutorials online is that they are out of date, or an unexpected error happens when following them. You and I can quickly RCA these issues and get back on track, but when you don’t even understand what the steps you are taking are actually doing, these minor hiccups leave you dead in the water.

What you are actually suggesting here is people do like, a year of introductory computer classes. It doesn’t feel like that to you because you’ve been figuring all this crap out as you go along, but having walked people through the most basic of IT problems, you are overestimating what a normal person finds intimidating when dealing with a computer.

The original (presented) heart of the visas were to pull in some of the best and brightest of other countries to fast track them to become Americans, thus bolstering the output of America. This actually resembles the current American brain drain, where other countries are taking advantage of the mistreatment of scientists and other high-intelligence fields in the US to help their country have an even better output. In theory, the original plan makes a lot of sense. Improve the compensation of some of the smartest people around the world, and improve America. But in practice, it is being sorely misused.

I agree, I really don’t like people saying it was Bill Clinton, there is currently only evidence against that claim. But your second statement seems disingenuous, as there isn’t any sign that it was purely a joke, either. A better way to say your second line without showing a bias would be to say that “There is no evidence to show whether or not it was a joke, or to be taken seriously.”

To be clear, the quoted response from Mark Epstein about that email was, “For the avoidance of doubt, the reference to ‘Bubba’ in this correspondence is not, in any way, a reference to former President Bill Clinton. Any attempt to conflate that reference with President Clinton, or to read sweeping implications into them, misrepresents both the purpose and the tone of the original correspondence.”

There are a few ways to read this response, one being that it was all a joke, one being that it did happen and Bill Clinton wasn’t involved, and Putin doesn’t have the picture, and one being that it did happen, Bill Clinton wasn’t involved, and Putin does have the pictures. Without further clarification, we don’t know for certain which of these is the truth.

I do appreciate your desire to keep the facts straight.I know that it’s fun to jump to conclusions and speculate, but we are doing the credibility of anyone left of republicans a disservice when we spread lies. It makes it much easier for the Rupublicans at the top to spin a narritive that their followers can dismiss the things we say. I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but he does enough stuff to paint himself a hypocrite that there’s no need to embellish the truth.

This is a well-known comic artist who is drawing in his usual style, I can’t imagine he switched to using AI

I’ve priced it out for myself, and I couldn’t get a build that’s as good at that price, not on new hardware at least. Not sure how they worked out their numbers

My neighbors planted blackberries on their side of the property line. It takes a good few days each year for me to cut them back off my side. Please, if you want blackberries, plant them in their own little zone, and be mindful of how they can spread

Yeah, back in my early pirate years as a teen, I downloaded a virus. I was able to sniff it out, and I deleted it. But after every restart the files came back. I eventually found that it had created a separate file that would run a script to check for the existence of the others, and replace them if they were ever removed. I tried to delete this file, and couldn’t; their safety measure was to have that file always be referenced by something so it was impossible to delete. File locksmith was what made it possible to remove, and tattled on what program (yet another part of the virus) was keeping it open.

Hey now, artificial neural networks aren’t always the bad kind of AI, they’ve been around a long time and I really enjoyed playing with them back during my time at University

You are also missing the huge advances they’ve made in their contributions to FOSS, like proton, FEX, arch, etc. Steam has done an insane amount of legwork to get Linux gaming off the ground. They are the one company that made migrating off of Windows and onto Linux a valid option for me, and a bunch of other folks. Linux was ~0.89% of their userbase in 2020, and since their contributions to these FOSS projects, it has gone up to 3.05%. That’s crazy, considering it had been at or below that 0.89% since 2016.

Just the other day I was researching potential solutions to a programming issue I had at work. Basically, I asked AI “Is there an API call available to tweak this config” It responded “Yes, you can do that with the tweak-that-config command”

I went to check the documentation for the “tweak-that-config” command. It just plain didn’t exist, and never had. Turns out there was no API call to tweak the config I wanted, and attempting to use AI as a search engine is, in fact, a waste of time.

It’s common in big tech companies to have a small internal team that has the full-time job of contributing to the FOSS software they use. That is how this should have been handled. Google wants a new feature/bug squished? You’ve got your team that can make the change, that’s literally the whole point of FOSS.

I highly recommend shelling out the $12 a year for a domain to tie to your email through Proton, that way, if Proton starts to enshitify, you can change email providers without having to migrate all your accounts to a new email. I am actually going through the exact same process, and I never want to have to do it again lol.

You make it seem so black and white. I don’t think it’s as simple as the lesser evil choice is 100% wrong full stop. For instance, I support the lesser evil mindset over the not voting mindset. However, if one exists, I support voting for a politician that genuinely supports your views over the lesser evil mindset.

Not voting makes no sense to me, because a null vote has the same effect as a vote for whichever candidate you like the least.

I guess the fundamental difference between your perspective and mine is that I don’t see it as refusing to play their game, I see it as just another move in their game. I think there is no way to avoid playing the game, and so you should make a move that leads to the least bad outcome. It doesn’t take much effort, maybe a day of research at most to pick whoever you want to vote for. Not voting is technically a vote for whichever candidate you like the least, at least it has the same outcome.

That being said, I agree with you in that that won’t result in change on a larger, long-term scale, and that actions must be taken outside of the system to get what you want. But that stance and my stance on not voting are not mutually exclusive.

I don’t agree with this, but I understand the sentiment. While I think, at the core of it, the folks at the top of both sides have the same goals in mind, I don’t think the elections are rigged to that degree. Also, while voting 3rd party feels like a waste of a vote, I don’t see it as one, since third party votes are counted, and can have some semblance of social sway. Not voting and voting for a party that you disagree most with will have the same effect however, since both pull the vote towards the candidate you like the least.

As someone with a little insider baseball knowledge, it was just a few hours down of DynamoDB and DNS. However, that caused EC2 to go down for ~1 day, which causes pretty much 1/3 of the internet to go down. Once EC2 sorts themselves out, then teams/companies (almost all amazon services use EC2 in the back end) that use EC2 have to get their ducks back in a row, and that can take any span of time, depending on how well their code was written to handle failures + how many people they are willing to pay oncall/overtime.