I have written and rewritten my response here trying to find the right tone. I feel like we are closer to agreement here than might be immediately obvious. I think a lot of what we are seeing now is a result of 50+ years of people who find the idea of your republic distasteful seeking every method they can to erode it away. All the details are just components of this project, seems to me that MAGA is a result of years of stoking xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. Turns out if you spend decades laying the groundwork you can make the situation seem completely hopeless to a whole populace. I sincerely worry the long term goal is to perfect the formula for dismantling democracy and then start exporting it to the rest of the world.

Or I could be a fool, I don’t know and I don’t want to rewrite this again. Sorry that this was so rambling.

From my detached non American (but still a citizen of the planet so likely to get fucked hard by the way Americans vote) point of view, seems like Americans are continually letting perfect be the enemy of least bad. “Well since Democrats are kinda bad in these instances maybe we should just go fully fascist theological doom cult. That will force the Democrats to improve, or kill us all.”

I’m kinda looking forward to finding out which Chinese OEM is building this thing and how they will be contorting the definition of Made in USA to apply it here.

The signs of quality and attention to detail are already there for all to see!

deleted by creator

Actually I am misremembering, apparently capacitors are bad for audio, so to get the best you have to have chunky inductors and circuitry to do powerfctor correction to get a PF of 1. I was remembering big chunky power conditioners that look like batteries but are actually huge iron core inductors. They get your audio equipment “closer” to the power generation, which “improves your soundscape”. I’m sure he was using the stupid crazy priced audiophile powercords as well.

Oh, I was going to say you know a higher grade of audiophile than I do, but then I remembered that no I have met one. He had installed what was in effect a powerwall with supercaps and was generating his own waves through. His speakers cost more than my car, individually. I want to say Palladium Studio References. Wow yep. Thanks for that little blast from the musty vaults of deep memory… Well a 10 minute conversation 20ish years ago and a lot of “Ohs” and “Ahs” at his photo album.

Oh and the latencies, the really minimal processing that a CRT does compared to an LCD means that input lag could be insanely low. Subtlely different to refresh rate, I always felt it was the gamer equivalent of audiophile grade speaker cables personally, but some people swear they can detect it.

Oh that’s OK I just wanted to reminisce on the glory days, my backlog is so long already I could use all my spare time for the next year and still barely make a dent.

First time I attended a LAN party was with a group of 40 people who hired out the two conference rooms at the local library. First medal of homour game was a blast, especially 1 moment where I ended up last alive getting advice from the other 7 people on my team who were clustered around trying to coach me through taking on the last three Germans from the other team. Also helping to cart all the monitors in was some good cardio, kinda miss moving 24" Sony Trinitron CRTs around… Oh wait no I don’t at all.

You should give the Amiga version a go via an emulator. You might be interested in the differences. Loved that trilogy back in the day.

“Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited. Don’t get too excited.”

Its not working.

Having prepared sandwiches at industrial scales yo would be surprised how much you can scale down costs, bulk purchases can make a suprising difference. I really envy the system that most Japanese schools have in place. They seem to be focussed on the outcomes, not the cost or social engineering. I have talked with some Japanese friends about this and while a few are from wealthy families and attended schools without a formalised school lunch program the majority talk about how it opened their horizons as far as food options, gave them a sense of community, and was just a defining characteristic of their school life.

Not American, but here in Australia there is a growing trend towards supplying some level of food at school, quite a few schools are introducing Breakfast Club to offer food before school, and a lot of schools find they can get better nutrition for students by supplying balanced options to students directly via a variety of programs.

Food and Kids can be quite complicated and my own son can be quite resistant to the idea of even having food in his school bag as his medication supresses appetite and he feels pressured if we make him something as opposed to providing shelf stable packaged foods that won’t spoil if he can’t bring himself to eat.

From what I understand of the situation in the US this is an intersectional issue where it has been identified that:

• Preparing food in bulk is a lot cheaper
• Food can be fresh and thus encourage kids to eat it more readily
• Nutritional outcomes can be targeted

Which is intersecting with:

• America is a capitalist hellscape where no opportunity to profit of anyone, no matter how vulnerable, can be overlooked
• There are multiple levels in the school lunch program where private companies can invade to engage in some rent seeking
• Social pressure can be exerted to make sure families feel obligated to participate no matter how expensive or predatory the program
• Never ever should a poor person be allowed to feel a modicum of support or relief, if that can be achieved by leveraging their children so much the better.

When gay marriage was being debated here in Australia my sister (who is gay) was super upset the whole time. She talked about how much the fight affected her and wished that people who were against would just understand.

I told her I was a complete supporter of gay marriage for a whole bunch of reasons including:

• human decency
• equality
• people who don’t like gay marriage can just… Not get married to another person of the same gender.
• people should just mind their own fucking business

However I did also point out that a lot of the loudest voices against gay marriage literally did not give a flying fuck about the issue, it was a convenient wedge and distraction for them, the people who need a group to vilify for political reasons would have to find another target for persecution as soon as they lost this particular convenient red rag to a bull.

Today in Australia, I believe, the usual suspects who use fear and hatred as the bedrock of their politics have been able to tap into a deeper vein of ignorance to make Trans people that target.

Used to work in mobile phone sales at a 100% telco owned store, so when things went tits up for customers the licensed stores in our area would tell customers to come to our store as we had employee access that exceeded partner access. I had SO many variations of the apologetic conversation with an elderly person whose family assured them that the iPhone is the easiest thing ever to use. They were happy with a feature phone but had an iDevice shoved down their throat by family members because “they are so easy”. Oh and arranging a change of mind return on an iPhone is a fucking nightmare in Australian Telco land.

They are not the easiest most straightforward choice, unless you use your devices in the constrained manner Apple has decided you will use them. The multiple times I have been forced to use a Mac or an iPhone or IPad, I have found them slow, obtuse and they have an annoying habit of hiding information I want to see. Windows is not really any better, just different.

I kind of see it like any other preference, people assume that because they find something the best then everyone must agree with that take.

That’s fair. I never actually subscribed to Reddit, I was wary of social media after a brief time on Facebook where I realised it was harming my mental health. Plus I was friends with a bunch of strippers, a lingerie model who did a shoot with Playboy the year before I became friends with her, and a super exhibitionist gay guy I worked with… Result was I needed 2 Facebook profiles and swapping back and forth all the time was too stressful.

Which is a long way of saying that Lemmy is my first social media in more than 10 yearsnand I am not sure how I feel about downvotes as I don’t remember ever having recieved one.

I allowed NSFW posts because I used to get some truly random shit coming up back when I lurked Reddit that way, so when I got Boost for Lemmy I thought I would do the same. Reddit had a much better ratio of weird and wacky vs onlyfans ads. Lemmy unfortunately only seems to have OnlyFans ads.

I kinda miss some of the bizarre ARAD topics, or shower beers or borderline brain melting confessions.

Do any of these rhetorical questions ever get replies?

I find this amusing, had a conversation with an older relative who asked about AI because I am “the computer guy” he knows. Explained basically how I understand LLMs to operate, that they are pattern matching to guess what the next token should be based on a statistical probability. Explained that they sometimes hallucinate, or go of on wild tangents due to this and that they can be really good at aping and regurgitating things but there is no understanding simply respinning fragments to try to generate a response that pleases the asker.

He observed, “oh we are creating computer religions, just without the practical aspects of having to operate in the mundane world that have to exist before a real religion can get started. That’s good, religions that have become untethered from day to day practical life have never caused problems for anyone.”

Which I found scarily insightful.