Wishful thinking?

Yep. And I’m sure you know this, but we toppled Iran’s democracy at the behest of British Petroleum (BP) through clandestine action of the CIA.

They used another tactic that I didn’t notice until one of the commenters on the Ars article/forum pointed it out:

Promising good stuff that’s not too close (~5 years) so you’ll remember it and say, “Hey, where’s my <good thing>?!” but not so far away (~25+ years) that you’ll say “That’s way too far you need to fix this shit now.” Apparently it was used in Soviet Bloc countries a lot to keep the population from revolting, and now I’m seeing it everywhere in our society. In this case, the O&G companies said things like, “Sure! We’ll be generating all your fuel with algae in ~15 years and then we’ll never need to drill again!” and “We’re developing amazing carbon capture technology that’s a mere ~15 years away and will repair all the damage we’re not doing!”

Ars Technica might be owned by Conde Nast, but it has a really smart userbase on average, so I tolerate that fact.

Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s just interesting to see yet more evidence they were lying as dishonestly as the tobacco industry. I think this article presents a pretty cohesive timeline of those lies: what they knew and when they knew it.

I think it’s a little of both, but one of my friends left my company producing weird semiconductors to go work at Micron making RAM. They’re definitely ramping up a little, but the equipment and techniques to fab those chips is very specialized. Imagine trying to drill zillions of really tiny, deep pits, and then making sure the very bottom of those pits get coated while the sidewalls are completely unaffected… and you have to do it everywhere uniformly on a hundred 350mm wafers per minute.

There’s a pretty big benefit to the solar panels: more efficient and also can be placed in a solar-synchronous orbit that is always illuminated. I can’t imagine that power advantage outweighs the disadvantages of cooling power-hungry hardware with no way to reject that heat to air or water. I’m with you: WTF are they thinking?

I heard Google just launched a test bed. Basically one mini server the size of a refrigerator that can only operate for 15 minutes before it needs to shut off to prevent heat damage. I’m guessing that thing will prove the case against celestial data centers, but we’ll see. The only good thing to come of this is that it might help advance cooling tech for satellites and suchlike.

That’s if they don’t decide the best course of action is to launch them into LEO lol. If they do (they will–they’re that stupid), the infrastructure will burn up in less than five years.

I believe Be Quiet! also sells such fans. I’ve been a fan of their stuff for a while, mostly because it’s black (matching my color scheme) and secondly because it’s cheaper.

Quiet fan.

They could have made it even faster with a coat of red paint, but engineers thought that would have pushed the materials past their limit, so they chose to leave it black.

It feels like we’re losing ground. Why does 8GB of RAM feel totally insufficient to browse the same websites I used 12 years ago with 4? I’m so happy I maxed out my motherboard’s RAM (32) when I built a PC in 2021.

PROTIP:

Ebooks are trivially easy to find online, or you can check them out from your local library.

There’s a free and open source program called Calibre that can manage your ebook library, change file formats, edit visual formatting, and even remove proprietary DRM.

Don’t let Amazon being a bad company prevent you from using your old Kindle.

Check out some Doom Eternal speedruns. (I guess 100% speedruns so you aren’t seeing people glitching through the game.) That game is actually extremely fast-paced. Good players are swapping through all fifty of their weapons every 4 seconds. Come to think of it, I wonder if the need for gore kills is a consequence of me sucking. (I think the chainsaw for ammo is unavoidable, though.)

I didn’t like the mandatory finishing moves either, and to be honest, I didn’t finish the game, but I got a lot further than DOOM 2016 and I thought the gunplay felt really snappy and satisfying in the way the OG games did. The levels were diverse and I actually liked the platforming puzzles, but I’m also the kind of guy who played surf maps in CounterStrike and strafejump races in Quake, so I’m predisposed to that sort of thing.

Oh well. They made a thing and it’s not for everyone. I wonder if you’d like The Dark Age. I haven’t played it yet.

I just don’t see why they had to make X Men woke? Why does everything have to be about a persecuted minority group finding its standing in a society that fears it?

(tee hee)

And also Instagram and whatever other Zuck products are in your life. I’m happy they wasted so many billions of dollars setting of virtual Mii meetings lmao…

What didn’t you like about Doom Eternal? That one was widely praised.

Japan is honorary Western.

(So is Korea.)

It really depends. There are great examples like DOTA2 and Path of Exile, and miserable examples, like every crappy gacha game.

Riot is kinda in the middle for me. Shame they nuked 2XKO after not telling anyone about it or catering to the people they neglected to tell about it.

I want the latter, and tariffs are not the only way go about protectionism. There is also subsidization, which is how the US has maintained its defense and agriculture industries. If we want stuff made domestically, we’re going to have to pay for it. Subsidies are generally preferable to tariffs because they can be paid through progressive taxation instead of regressive taxes on consumers.