Valdair

The IRS has been saying for years they in many cases don’t actually have the funding to dedicate to fighting multimillionaires who can afford protracted legal battles to avoid taxes. The IRS was granted a lot more funding as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a direct result of the current administration. The government is big and slow though, things take time.

Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.

Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.

I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.

Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they’re now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just… is not. Especially not in first person games.

In the USA licenses are not contingent upon manual vs. automatic. No one checks what car you drive. So you would have to learn somewhere - someone around you has to own a manual car in order for you to learn how to drive one, and here simply no one does. No one in my entire extended family, none of my friends, none of my coworkers I’m friendly with, none of the 50+ cars I have any tangential access to are manual. So even if I wanted to learn, what are my options? Buy an entire car just to learn? Services like Turo won’t let you rent one unless you can drive one already.

We have Driver’s Education in high school but it involves no actual driving - there are separate paid/private courses you can take that might involve defensive driving or learning stick. I did one on controlling skids on wet or snowy pavement and demonstrating e.g. turning under braking with and without ABS. But nothing about manual.

This thread is an amusing display of sample bias. Only people that want to respond yes and brag about it bothering to respond.

In reality only about 2/3rds of people in the US can drive stick and almost no one owns manual cars.

I’ve never driven a manual car. I’ve had people be like “You can’t drive manual?!” and then I would respond “So are you going to teach me?” The answer is always No, of course not, not in their car (assuming they even owned a manual, which none do anymore). My parents had manual cars but sold them 10+ years before having me.

I understand how a clutch works. It wouldn’t be difficult to learn. But what reason or motivation is there to learn when almost no cars are manual? They total something like 2% of new car sales. If you’re buying something like a 718 GT4 RS or a 911 GT3 RS for maximum driving engagement that’s great, but those cars are priced for the 1% of the 1%.

Even if you had a fun car, which I do, the drive to work is stop-and-go, roads are full, even the fun country backroads are filled with traffic on weekends, forests are burned down, gas is eye-watteringly expensive if you have a slightly performant vehicle. The time to have fun driving cars was 40 years ago.

I think Linus is convinced that if they slow down at all, the entire company will collapse because they’ve grown so huge. They also ran up huge debt to build the Labs which will not start generating revenue for a long time.

Linus has been sticking his foot in his mouth often enough that it’s starting to develop in to the persona he thinks he needs to/is supposed to have. The WAN Show is pretty much the only LTT content I care to watch anymore, but it has become increasingly common over the last ~year or more that he has a spicy take that gets embroiled in some mild controversy. But now he’s like “well this is the part of the show where I have spicy takes” and is almost actively looking to do it. I see Luke becoming increasingly frustrated with it too. Stepping down as CEO is probably the right call, but this move to “CVO” seems a little too lateral. I think Linus needs to pull back out of the spotlight, for the health of his company. But I really think he thinks his personality is the brand.

He likes and wants to be on camera, and he knows a ton from years in the industry, but I wonder if he wouldn’t be better as like… chief script advisor who also teaches other employees tips and tricks on how to compose videos, stage scenes, manage the flow of content, where to splice in B roll, how to read the weave of the youtube algorithm… They’ve grown remarkably, and I like what Linus states is the goal of the Labs project. But I worry he’s both becoming increasingly convinced his personality is an important part of the channel cachet, and also increasingly impulsive with regards to making decisions and spending money in an effort to go fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc

I haven’t enjoyed their main channel content for ever. Every once in a while if I’m interested in a product and have exhausted all other decently sized tech channels, I may watch their coverage but I’ve likely already made my mind up on the thing. I don’t and wouldn’t trust them for GPU, CPU or case reviews. I do generally like listening to the WAN Show, but Linus is sticking his foot in his mouth an awful lot these days. I like his vision for the lab, and I like what he ultimately wants to build with it, but I really worry they’re going too fast and going to bake in a lot of problems that will haunt the platform for ever, assuming it even gets off the ground. I was already worried but this video made me even less optimistic. I only knew about some of these oversights, the extent is pretty startling.

I’ll be significantly cleaner than average I expect… I don’t like cases, but a long time ago, circa when shiny black plastic was making its way in to touch screen phone design for the first time, a friend and I discovered if you keep your phone in a microfiber bag (like some sunglasses come with, particularly Oakleys we bought together at the time) it effectively cleans itself in your pocket. I still do, and I cycle those out and clean the bag once a year or so, or if it falls on the ground or gets something spilled on it. I have more now from different sets of sunglasses, laser goggles, etc.

I also happen to work in a clean room where you’re expected to wipe anything you bring in, including phone, laptop, etc., with isopropanol-soaked wipes before entering so that’s like disinfecting and taking off the oil every day or every other day.

No one else I know ever cleans their phone beyond wiping it with a shirt or something when the oil & smudges becomes too noticeable.

Indeed, at least that’s the idea. Viewing and posting from kbin.social.

I’d like for kbin/Lemmy to be a full substitute, but right now only meme subs on lemmy are taking off or getting significant traction. It’s actually sort of annoying and makes me not want to bother. Apps are rough, block tools are inconsistent, see tons of posts twice or more all day (would happen on Reddit too, but pretty rarely, when big news was relevant to several large subreddits). Until the smaller subs I frequented Reddit for in the first place start coming over, kbin/lemmy can’t realistically be a replacement. Just something I check for a few minutes to try to leave app feedback and contribute traffic where I can.

It will take a very good app and a couple more high profile niche subs (like /r/piracy) mostly shifting to the Fediverse to start a real migration.

Need this, especially the in-line image expansion, for kbin STAT

More news, more protests, porn on /r/all, but this seems pretty high. There have been a few oddly spiky days the last few days, seems like probably bots.