One… glances to the side hundred… more furtive glances billion… number two giving thumbs up and nodding dollars!

To take this in a different direction, legal or not (considering the “higher power” generally gets to define what is and isn’t legal and might do so for its own benefit rather than in the best interest of everyone, if there even is such a thing), how can it be determined if a subset of a power structure breaking away from that power structure is a good thing or bad thing? What arguments other than “we’ll use force” are there to support a region needing to remain under the thumb of a power they no longer wish to serve?

All cats are finely tuned stealth killing machines (though some are lazy). House cats are just optimized for rodent-sized prey, though they are still capable of putting up a decent fight against larger things. Though I’m curious if cats evolved to trigger “cute” recognition or if primates evolved to find things that include cats cute.

Feels kinda like a game of crusader kings iii where you’ve gained some territory but worry that your opponent’s allies might send a large army at any time, plus your vassals are rumbling about revolt, so you want to get that war finished asap but don’t have enough of an advantage to force them to accept your terms.

Except it’s OK when it’s crusader kings because that’s just a fucking video game and people aren’t really dying on both sides for your ego or power hungry imperial bullshit.

I like that on Linux I can install the updates and know that the ones that require a restart will just be ready the next time I restart at my leisure. And if I don’t feel like restarting right away, it won’t nag me about it and maybe just restart on its own if it decides I’ve put it off for too long.

And I can’t believe my previous “solution” to that was to give ms even more money for win 10 pro (to get access to the paywalled settings) only to still feel like ms thought it was their computer that they allowed me to use.

I don’t think custom songs are supported on the PS. I never really tried tbh but it didn’t look like there was a mechanism for enabling them. It was a reason why I wanted to get my psvr2 working on my PC, though now that I’m on Linux, I’m not holding my breath on that.

Grim Dawn has a similar approach. You just have a health and energy potion that goes on cooldown. No need to worry about potions for inventory management or remembering to buy them in town or checking if you need to pick some up, plus less loot clutter because of it. The potions return a % of hp/energy, so they scale with your character. And it helps with balance because now those players who do farm tons of potions so they can spam them don’t need to be considered.

Yeah just don’t go all in on any of those. Dip your toes in to see how long the interest lasts. In my experience, it usually lasts just about long enough to slow roll going all in on it and then it fades. So you don’t save any money, but you might get more time to enjoy it before it becomes another chore that must be avoided if possible. And even then, if you force yourself to do it, it can shift into a thing you enjoy but must stop doing as soon as a natural break occurs because there might be something else more enjoyable.

Is there a good resource that lists all games known to require a specific version rather than being fine with the latest? I don’t really have the patience to check each game these days, so a list to skim would be nice.

Yeah, when I made the switch, I checked a bunch of the games I played the most for steam deck compatibility and thought I had to give up on some of them, only to find that they were still fine because my desktop is much more powerful than the steam deck. Plus it has a keyboard; if a game requires a keyboard, it hurts the steam deck compatability score (how much depends on if it’s required for playing the game at all or just needed every now and then to enter some text).

So treat “steam deck supported” as “works on linux” and “steam deck unsupported” as “maybe works on linux”.

I think the better indicator of not supported at all on Linux is the “3rd party kernel anticheat” marker in the store, though I tend to avoid games with that anyways, so I can’t really say for sure.

Lots of good advice in here for the basics. Only one I’ll bother repeating is to get used to your clutch by slowly releasing it and getting the car moving without touching the throttle at all.

Also never downshift into first. This is a bit of a soft rule since it can be done, but the speed you need to lose before you do is a lot more than any of the other gears. If it’s a 6 speed, this might even apply to 2nd gear to a degree. To figure out when it’s safe to downshift to first, redline it in first and check your speed. Never do it at or above that speed as a hard rule.

For intermediate techniques:

When shifting while moving, let off the gas a bit before pressing the clutch. The idea is to smoothly stop accelerating to reduce the jerk you’d normally get from going from accelerating, clutch (decellerating), back to accelerating once in the next gear. Your passengers will appreciate it if you can get this timing down, though if you’re on your own, it doesn’t matter as much since you can anticipate the changes in acceleration.

On the opposite end of that spectrum, practice speed shifting once you’re comfortable with clutch timing and gear positions. It’s the same motions as a normal shift, just aiming to do it all as fast as possible. It’ll give you better acceleration when you need it (very noticeable if you compare one and the other when accelerating beside another car from a stop light).

For stop and go traffic and traffic jams, instead of maintaining the same distance from the car ahead of you, try to figure out a constant speed you can maintain and let the cars ahead of you do the pull up (away from you) and then brake to a stop (while you slowly catch up to them). If you can find the right speed, you can stay in first gear instead of needing to get in gear, move up, then clutch. The “getting the car moving without throttle” skill from earlier can help here and sometimes you can go a while in a jam without touching the gas pedal. It’ll reduce the wear on your clutch and brakes if you can drive in a way that uses them less.

And an advanced technique:

Clutchless shifting. If there isn’t a lot of force on the gear, you can pop it into neutral without the clutch quite easily. And by force I mean if you aren’t accelerating or engine breaking. Getting into another gear is harder but also possible. The hard part is that you need to match the engine speed with the transmission speed for the gear you want to shift into. If they match, it’ll just slip in. But matching is easier said than done, since the car is decelerating and the engine also changes speed very quickly with no load. If the speeds are far from a match, it will feel like the gear just isn’t there. If they are kinda close, you’ll be able to find the gear but it will grind when you try to put it in all the way. If they match closely, it’ll just slip in as easily as it slipped out to neutral.

Why would you want to know how to do this? Well, for one, it’s very satisfying to do properly. But I was very glad I could do it when my clutch died. I was able to drive for another week without a clutch because I was competent enough with clutchless shifting. Note that if you need to do this, you have to turn your motor off when you stop (unless you’re on a downward slope), put it in first and start it in first gear to get moving again (which feels awful and is awful for your starter and probably not great for the whole drivetrain, so get it serviced asap but this might at least save you from needing a tow).

I think standing near the red things in the middle of the reflection. Look at the size of the forklift in the reflection for reference.

As much as I love my independence, I can’t help but look at society and think that things have gone very wrong at some point.

They want something like the Star Trek computer or one of Tony Stark’s AIs that were basically deus ex machinas for solving some hard problem behind the scenes. Then it can say “model solved” or they can show a test simulation where the ship doesn’t explode (or sometimes a test where it only has an 85% chance of exploding when it used to be 100%, at which point human intuition comes in and saves the day by suddenly being better than the AI again and threads that 15% needle or maybe abducts the captain to go have lizard babies with).

AIs that are smarter than us but for some reason don’t replace or even really join us (Vision being an exception to the 2nd, and Ultron trying to be an exception to the 1st).

Only watched half of the video (because it’s something I’m well aware of), so it might have gone into it, but another angle is that there’s often villains that make good points and then suddenly take it in a batshit direction.

Like Thanos had a point but apparently never understood exponential growth and how reducing all life by any constant factor is just delaying the same result, even if his snap made 99% of people disappear (unless he snaps enough people that the population collapses entirely, which is what he wanted to avoid).

There’s many other examples where reasonable starting points end up in unquestionably evil conclusions. Pretty sure it’s just propaganda to make people who don’t think much about things link those reasonable beginnings with “evil” in their minds.

Also there’s characters like Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark who are billionaires but their stories always ignore the realities of what must be done in order to become a billionaire (ie underpay staff doing the actual work by billions). In Stark’s case, they sidestep that by giving him super advanced AIs and automation robots, though he’s still the owner of a large corporation, that he still benefits from despite offloading any of the responsibility of even running it to everyone else.

Check out the behind the bastards episodes on Gates. Even his charity foundation is just another way to exert control.

That one is particularly rage inducing if it’s the one I’m thinking of (I think ep 1 of the new season?).

Some of the others in the new season aren’t so depressing or rage inducing, though.

That reminds me of the way Gordon Ramsey said to cook scrambled eggs, at least for the result. Beat it in a bowl with some milk, then cook it with low heat using a spatula (the scrape luquid from the sides perfectly kind, not the pick up flat thing kind) to mix it constantly. Then, when you think it’s almost done, it’s done.

Eggs end up moist and undercooked looking. It’s OK, I wouldn’t call it better than the usual scrambled eggs but just different.

Not sure if briefly cooked on very hot pan would give the same result though.

My first seagate HD started clicking as I was moving data to it from my older drive just after I purchased it. This was way back in the 00s. In a panic, I started moving data back to my older hd (because I was moving jnstead of copying) and then THAT one started having issues also.

Turns out when I overclocked my CPU I had forgotten to lock the PCI bus, which resulted in an effective overclock of the HDD interfaces. It was ok until I tried moving mass amounts of data and the HDD tried to keep up instead of letting the buffer fill up and making the OS wait.

I reversed the OC and despite the HDDs getting so close to failure, both of them lasted for years after that without further issue.

With the 9/11 reference above, it had a similar effect on airport security. The TSA has been making traveling hell ever since and I’m not sure if they’ve actually stopped any real threats (cursory search says nope).