Oh man, the Ouya. That’s a blast from the past. Play mobile games on your TV using a controller made out of cardboard and balsa wood and sized for a Roswell alien. Good times.

Me: “ugh YES we can all see your screen, stop asking”

Also me: “ugh YOU FORGOT TO SHARE YOUR SCREEN idiot”

This. It might be financially difficult, but you know what’s harder financially? Mental breakdowns, hospital stays, divorce cases, jail time. All of those are on the table when you work that much. Quit your job if you can, take as long a vacation as you can afford, remember why you enjoy your family’s company, and then ease your way back into working—at a reasonable schedule.

It’s not a cure-all. You probably still need therapy (there are places that offer grants and assistance with counseling). But a good work-life balance makes everything else feel like something you can handle.

No, they’re saying that some hardware manufacturers report 80% as 100% (as you noted) while others do not. Just like some manufacturers report 5% as 5% while others report 10% as 5% with the realization that most people misjudge when they’ll be able to charge.

You get it.

Ooh, I like this one! I think it’s for the same reason that liquids like egg whites, sea water, and even some broths can be clear when at rest but opaque when frothy. And the reason for that is the same as the reason why a straw in a glass of still water looks like it’s broken: refraction!

So, when light enters or leaves a medium at an angle, it is bent by the transition between the medium it’s entering and what it’s leaving. And it’s not a lossless process; some of the light that reaches the boundary is reflected instead by the medium, some is reflected internally, and some is absorbed by the medium.

With a single large bubble, you wouldn’t notice this; the boundary is tiny, there’s way more of one medium (air) than the other (soap), and the bubble’s shape means that the light actually tends to bend back to its original trajectory again coming out. But if there are many, many thousands of tiny bubbles, with pretty similar amounts of soap and air, some sharing boundary layers so that light can enter and leave at different angles, reflecting light all over the place and refracting it from everywhere, you’re just going to get that reflected mess.

And even if the soap is dyed, that wimpy little amount of dye isn’t filtering the color of the light enough for it to overwhelm the combined color of all the other light in the room; which, in most cases, basically average out to white.

Since 2000, the improbability constant of the universe has been rising at a geometric rate. It crossed the believability threshold in 2015, shortly before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Presidency.

At that point, scientists had predicted that the satire cycle would cease to circulate, leading to a breakdown of the humorsphere; but scientists at The Onion headed a task force that managed to find a loophole in the Costello Impossibility Limit, and allowed them to theoretically continue writing and publishing satire until the improbability constant reaches the Costello Limit and all of reality just becomes fiction (predicted to be some time in 2033).

Anyway, because of that loophole (which is named the “Twain Track,” after Mark Twain, who pioneered some of the early satire that eventually led to this discovery), satire is no longer required to be false.

Well, the market will definitely contract. I would say at least one of the big AI players will go out of business or be acquired by a competitor over the next few years, and at least one of the big tech corps will sunset their AI model over that timescale as well. Nvidia stock is going to take a steep nosedive. I think the future for consumer AI is mostly in small, quick models; except for in research and data analysis, where just a few big players will be able to provide the services that most uses require.

They currently have enough money to keep going for a while if they play their cards right, but once investors realize that the endgame doesn’t have much to offer them, the money will stop flowing.

I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

Looks like they originally animated him eating a sandwich but decided to put in a slice of deep dish pizza at the last minute.

True, though I think you might be able to use entertainers to overcome the rating drops long enough? I’m not sure.

Nice. I learned Qbasic to make a Pokedex.

Once the bubble pops, we can go back to letting AI do what it’s actually good at—pattern recognition, summarization, translation, natural language processing—and stop trying to shoehorn it into every single thing.

That’s probably a good read on it.

Interesting. Some of them are just dip switches, too. I hadn’t heard about needing a cable, that’s an interesting wrinkle.

I don’t have any specific recommendations for you, but I will say that

• pretty much every modern Chromebook will be able to have Linux installed over ChromeOS. You might have to open it up and remove a write-protect screw.

• Linux is a surprisingly good platform for games these days, actually. Steam has done a lot of work to get it there.

• If you’re wanting lightweight specs, you’re probably going to find the best bang for your buck in an old Chromebook; however, I don’t know if you’ll see as many of those coming on the market, and you’ll want to watch out for old school devices. Those things get worked over pretty hard.

Huh. I’m reminded of Roller Coaster Tycoon, which has scenarios where you have to have a certain number of guests in your park at a specific time; and a valid strategy is to get enough people to come into your park, and then delete the path behind them so that they literally can’t get out.

I think it’s the fact that he has a recognizable username that gives me pause on that, though. For a lot of people, his position is naturally going to afford him some level of deference and authority.

If the people making decisions spent time as normal editors anonymously, I agree definitely that that would be a good way to get to know the community more.

Fair point. Migleemo and Kovich definitely both seem like they’re trying for a Vibe, though.

Looks to me like that link is broken. Must be something going on.