astronads

It’s a shame because the mediocre hardware specs lend itself to a cheaper companion device for people who already have a vast steam library and a powerful gaming PC.

I would have impulse bought this for $750 to play my backlog of indie games and older AA/AAA on the couch, with a nice small form factor, very quiet machine, and hdmi cec to control my tv like a console.

Instead, I’m going to be scraping together some old parts and putting steam os 3.8 on it. Kudos to valve for giving this option to us officially, and I plan to support them with a hypothetical steam machine 2 in the future when prices are more sane.

Yeah, the machine elves rabbit hole is interesting for sure. I hope a lot more rigorous science delves into both mushrooms and DMT

It is interesting how the hallucinations consistently represent tiny people/elves to the mushroom consumer, even across geography/culture.

I wonder what the brain is doing…

The solution is home assistant [0] it lets you manage and control all kinds of smart devices with a lot of customizable, hackable things. And it runs locally, so if you buy the right types of devices that don’t phone home to the cloud (or you shitcan their internet access) you can fully manage your own system.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/

This guy is a little annoying in the intro but this is a genuinely informative and in depth look at how different sound quality was in this earlier computing era based on your sound card hardware. You’ll likely learn something, I know I did.

No paywall: https://archive.is/xrhez

Anyone out there still playing MUDs? Any good ones to recommend?

Plenty of people would greatly appreciate charging times much quicker than 20 mins. People without large families taking long breaks, apartment dwellers, etc. would

You’re making some assumptions here and I suggest you broaden your mindset a bit. First of all, at least according to testimony under oath, they are not avoiding detection and there is a plethora of high resolution imagery and sensor data, they just keep it hidden and highly classified. I get that there isn’t a lot of quality stuff coming from civilians, but we don’t know the UAP intentions or quantity. They could be just trying to observe us without freaking us out or interfering with us en masse, much like we observe animals in nature ourselves. They may only be interested in subtly monitoring our military assets and nothing else. There could be any other unknowable reasons. They may not perceive existence the same way as us, they may not have the same 5 senses or see in the same spectrums, they may not have emotions or a completely different thought process.

They also may not be light years away, but rather ultra terrestrial or interdimensional or time travelers or they use wormholes to “teleport”. We just don’t know, but the possibilities are not constrained to just your “incompetent but competent” paradox.

Edit: you may find this article thought provoking: https://jdmadden.substack.com/p/naturalizing-without-demytho...

A ton of people live in flats, apartments, condos and other shared housing that do not provide home charging capabilities. Just because it’s not a big deal for you and your situation doesn’t mean it’s the same for everyone else.

Please share more about this!

The downside, other than the obvious maintenance/reliability concerns of an aging vehicle is safety. Modern cars are much safer in crashes than 20+ year old cars. [0]

What sucks though is that basically every modern vehicle egregiously violates our privacy [1]

[0]https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[1]https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/article...

This is good and realistic advice. Companies exist to make profit and returns for their investors/shareholders and ultimately they will do what this necessary to make that happen. Layoffs are just another (unfortunate) business transaction.

I was once in a meeting with an SVP who was going over what he was going to say in an upcoming all-hands meeting. He kept referring to employees as “resources” and I told him he should call them people or team members as resources was dehumanizing and made it sound like we’re just line items on a spreadsheet and pawns on a chessboard. He looked at me and said you’re right - that is how they look at things, but thanked me for reminding me of his audience. He was candid with me only because I was also high up in the org.

Companies are not your friend. The people above you in the org are not your friend. You are not special or different or immune or safe. Ultimately, you do have to look out for yourself. If a company is able and willing to terminate your job for financial reasons, you need to be willing and able to terminate your job for financial reasons too - on your own terms and with a better higher paying job lined up. It’s just another business transaction. Loyalty is dead. Act accordingly.

Of note, they have streamlined and consolidated their policies around this to make it easier for streamers to know what’s allowed and disallowed.

Streams marked with certain labels will not show up on the home page, but with the new policy a broader set of sexually suggestive content will be allowed on the platform.

This submission links to an article summarizing the changes. The full policy is here: https://safety.twitch.tv/s/article/Community-Guidelines?lang...

There’s evidence that constant unwanted noise can negatively impact our health: https://archive.ph/5mvYQ (nytimes)

I don’t mind visiting cities, but I certainly would never live in one.

They don’t have an inherent right to exist or be profitable. If the EU agrees this violates GDPR then they will have to adapt or die.

And it costs more than the amount of revenue my viewing of ads generate them.

I don’t believe anything one way or the other, but the whistleblower who testified under oath to congress and prompted this legislation (among other whistleblowers still anonymous) he mentions non human intelligence and bodies. His name is David Grusch, you can google for some interviews with him if you’re interested.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/senators-move-require-relea...

https://thedebrief.org/the-uap-disclosure-act-of-2023-what-w...

There will be a public congressional hearing on this aired within the next two weeks.

Apparently from inspecting the Reddit app APK, they are planning to allow rewarding contributors monetarily (probably with crypto)

https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-contributor-program-...

This will likely turn Reddit into a (even bigger) cesspool of karma farming spam/bots and bullshit AI posts now that they can make a quick buck off it.

I found it interesting to see how (mis)translation and biased researchers were able to put forth a false narrative, and for decades thereafter many took it at face value and continued to share the faulty information. It wasn’t a topic I was expecting to encounter today, and that’s why I’m sharing it!

Try https://teddit.adminforge.de/

As an early retired person who is most definitely capitalizing on “taking it easy”, this lifestyle sounds positively exhausting and hellish to me.

I find it mostly interesting how different successful people can be with wildly varied takes on what works for them lifestyle-wise as well as what they value in life. Not to mention how we prioritize (and focus) our limited time on earth.

Kudos to you for making your life work well. We’re wired differently, and that’s okay.

He admits in the article he was eating only ~500 calories per day. Of course he’s going to lose weight…

What makes medical profession immune? I see this area as ripe for AI disruption. Analyzing symptoms and providing suggested medicine, tailoring dosage based on your individual vitals, analyzing data/imagery to diagnose you with diseases, all kinds of automation and speed ups for processing patient data, etc.

This mindset just artificially downplays the fact that it will get incrementally better, multiple times, and strikingly quickly. It’s insanely shortsighted IMO. You don’t have to believe AI is the next coming of Jesus to recognize it’s reached a point (or soon will) to be genuinely disruptive. Corporate execs will absolutely and quickly pursue using AI to reduce costs and speed up development. At the expense of employees.

There was a large thread on HN with almost 1000 comments a month ago on this topic and a ton of comments are hugely dismissive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665738

It’s an interesting subject and if you broaden your view of what they could be, it gets even more interesting. I.e. instead of little green men flying on faster than light spacecraft gazillions of miles to visit earth, what if they are from a different dimension? Time travelers? What if they’ve always been here? What if they created us, and we are a planetary zoo? What if we are in a simulation and they are the “gods”/admins of our reality?

I’m not suggesting any of those are true, I personally have no idea. But it could be a lot of things and the sky isn’t even the limit.

All I know is that in the past few years there’s been a huge shift in what our leaders are saying and the stigma of “tin foil hat UFO nutjubs” is being lifted. The question is why? And why now?

A good primer on the topic: https://www.uap.guide/quotes/introduction

I just like to keep an open mind…