Leftists have a big problem with purity testing. It’s why they never seem to be able to accomplish anything. Instead of joining forces with other leftist groups that share 95% of the same views, they shit all over them for not being 100% aligned.

If they’d suck it up and work together they could actually be a political force and get some of what they want, instead of infighting constantly and accomplishing nothing.

It’s the biggest thing turning me off of leftist ideology. I agree with a decent amount of what they want, but as soon as I say something like “Maybe market economies solve real problems and are suitable for some situations like consumer products” I’m basically turbo hitler to them.

1.6% of gamers is still millions of people. Entire industries exist on the back of much smaller customer bases than that. Might as well say we should stop caring about desktop linux completely since the server market dwarfs it.

Mixed VRR is not an obscure feature for one. Most of my friends with gaming rigs have a primary monitor with VRR and use their old fixed rate monitors as secondary displays. Does it make a massive difference to run fixed refresh rate? No but it is noticeable and nice to have. Windows can do it and I paid for the hardware. Without parity on this kind of stuff, Linux is a hard sell to the people who do care about it.

Does it matter to Joe Schmoe? Probably not, but Joe Schmoe probably doesn’t care about Linux to begin with. You have to go for the tech enthusiasts first before you can get it to the masses.

With VRR? Xorg definitely did not support this as of a year or so ago without running a separate xorg screen for each monitor which prevents you from doing stuff like moving windows between your displays.

Mixed refresh rates worked okay-ish but VRR definitely did not work well in multi monitor setups.

There are some really major deficiencies in Xorg that aren’t present in Wayland. The main one that made me switch was proper support for variable refresh rate, and the ability to mix and match any fixed or variable refresh rate displays you want.

It’s a super common use case to have a primary monitor with high refresh rate and VRR, plus one or two cheaper monitors that don’t. Xorg doesn’t really support that at all without some really hokey tricks that severely impede usability.

Proper sync support is another one. Yes, you can set tearfree in X but the implementation is crap. You’ll still get tearing in a lot of programs and at least in my experience, it introduces a pretty significant and perceptible input lag, far more than needed to eliminate tearing.

To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work. Even if you get a bit lax and include MIT and BSD licenses as FOSS, a company still cannot take your work and stop other people from using it.

In the case of Duolingo, it’s pretty different because that volunteer labor output is gated in a proprietary walled garden.

Whereas contributing a patch to chromium for example will never gate that contribution, even if it makes it into chrome and produces millions of dollars of profit for google. You can always and forever freely access and use a version of chromium with your patch as long as there’s still a copy left to access.

It’s still worth using cards for the rewards points. I just set mine to auto pay and enjoy having everything I buy 3-5% cheaper, plus way better purchase protection and customer service. I’ve never paid a cent in interest or accrued any debt whatsoever.

And if for some reason you ever do need a loan, it’s a lot easier to get one with a credit history. It sucks that it is that way but it’s ridiculously easy to get a score well into the 700s if you just auto pay a credit card.

I’ve had good luck with nicotine giant, but pretty much everywhere has stock issues. They definitely carry both of those flavors but no stock at the moment.

I spend maybe $60 a year on vaping and I do it a lot. Key is though, mix your own juice and build your own coils.

A premade coil costs a few bucks. Replacing the cotton and wire in a diy coil is maybe a nickel. A bottle of premade juice is $20 these days where I am. Mixing my own costs at most, a dollar and that’s if I use more expensive flavor additives.

I won’t pretend it’s good for you, but if you’re gonna do it, no sense in half assing it and spending way more than you need. Plus it’s fun to experiment with new custom flavors.

The optics of paying disabled people shit wages is not good, but consider that those workers are otherwise unemployable. Goodwill is probably still losing money on a lot of them even with the super low wage.

If you force a higher wage, goodwill is simply going to replace them with abled people who can do the job much more efficiently and reliably.

The idea is that people under these circumstances should already be fully supported by disability pay (yes I know disability pay is broken right now, I’m talking about ideally here) or a guardian or caregiver, and their goodwill job is something for them to do to help with socialization, practice doing hands on tasks, and getting some pocket money.

If disabled people are struggling to make ends meet because they make $4/hr at goodwill, that’s a failure of our society at taking care of a less abled person, not goodwill. Nobody whose only option is to work at goodwill due to disability should need to be working at all. I’m not a Marxist but some level of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” isn’t a bad thing.

I do have other bones to pick with goodwill, but I’m pretty neutral on the disabled workers thing.

Most importantly, this stance doesn’t piss off AIPAC. If you ever want the overarching position of the us govt on Israel to change, you need to do something about AIPAC. They hold enormous lobbying power and will put it behind your opponents if you don’t support Israel.

Chicago is absolutely a desirable place to live, half of my friends moved there or are planning to move there. It’s the 3rd largest city in the USA, and while the winter weather sucks, it has head over heels the best urban design I’ve seen in an American city which more than makes up for it. I’m curious as to what industries you wouldn’t be able to make a career in in Chicago? They have a significant presence in just about every major industry sector except local natural resource extraction.

Regardless, it’s not desirability in and of itself that makes coastal cities expensive, it’s shit housing policy. Demand exacerbates the issue, yes, but the root cause is that there are more people trying to live there than housing units available. NYC for example is building less than 30% of the housing units required to meet demand. It’s not because there’s nowhere to put them, these units have already been designed, planned, and submitted for approval, but most of them will get buried in red tape, bureaucracy, and NIMBYism.

Outside the USA, it’s much easier to find desirable, affordable cities. There’s plenty across Europe and Asia that make American coastal cities look like hovels. Tokyo is the prime example, but outside the USA, cheap housing in major cities is more of the norm than the exception, with some outliers like London. I just randomly picked Berlin, a city I know nothing about other than it’s a fairly major one in Germany, and median rent for a 1br apartment in the city center is around $1400 equivalent. I wouldn’t say that’s cheap, but it’s nowhere near as outlandish as SF bay area or NYC.

Not necessarily. Rent is cheaper in places that have enough housing to meet demand. It’s easier to have enough housing in less desirable markets, but it’s certainly not impossible to meet demand in a desirable market too. Chicago has median rent under $2k as an example of a major city without this problem.

Typical rent in my city is like $1000-1500 for an entire 2 bedroom house. Even my brokest friends have their own place.

San Francisco or NYC? Enjoy your 150sqft shithole for $3k/mo.

10k TB would be enough to backup all my data hundreds of times over. If I made a cold copy every 3 months of everything, even accounting for increasing data over time, I’d probably die before making it through a single one.

OSMC makes some good Kodi boxes under the Vero name if you don’t need proprietary streaming services. I use the jellyfin plugin to read from my JF server, works great. Supports 4k, HDR, audio passthrough, many codecs, all the good stuff.

Between that and my PS5 it covers all the bases

Cruises are surprisingly cheap. Often considerably cheaper than a retirement home. Some people literally just take back to back cruises when they get old.

If it were a choice between some depressing elder care facility or cruisin and boozin til I go out for the same price, I know which one I’m picking.

The principles are really easy though. At its core, neural nets are just a bunch of big matrix multiplication operations. Training is still fundamentally gradient descent, which while it is a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of things, isn’t super hard to understand.

The progress in recent years is primarily due to better hardware and optimizations at the low levels that don’t directly have anything to do with machine learning.

We’ve also gotten a lot better at combining those fundamentals in creative ways to do stuff like GANs.

It stays hot, nothing’s gonna be growing.

With mine, the rice is still pretty good after about 48h on the keep warm setting. It’s still edible after 72 but starts to get too dried out at that point.

I know that phrase is the most beaten dead horse around at this point but the year of the Linux desktop is going to be different depending on what your requirements are.

If you just need to browse the web, it’s been there for over a decade. Same for most dev work.

For gaming, it’s already there for most titles. Pretty much everything I try works now unless it has anticheat. It’s been in a pretty good state for 2 or 3 years now at least.

For media creation and specialized software, it’s not there yet. The big stuff like adobe will probably never get ported and the free alternatives vary wildly in quality. Blender is awesome. GIMP is not. There’s also issues like lacking color management and iffy HDR support.