I’m on former Centurylink fiber which was similarly sold off to private equity. Other than the name changes and wonkiness with accessing my account in their system, its been…fine actually? The connection is more stable than it ever was under Centurylink for one thing, and my bill hasn’t changed at all in the years since

I was talking to a doctor recently about eczema and they explained to me that most lotions instead of hydrating, they pull the moisture from your skin and replace it with the lotion’s moisture, thereby making your skin dryer in the long run. Basically you want an oil based lotion that doesn’t rub in nicely if you want to actually moisturize

Plot twist: you now get to go to one of RFK Jr’s farms

The rx560 is pretty long in the tooth at this point and was a budget card when it released about a decade ago. That build isn’t far off from my wife’s PC before I rebuilt it last year (4th Gen i5, 12GB of DDR3 and an RX560) and it was pretty well rounded in everything being a bottleneck. Like she played plenty of games at 720p on it, but it wasn’t fantastic. Took a lot of settings tuning in every game to get things looking decent and performing well enough

It sounds like you’re building a PC for a friend or relative, I would steer them towards either a used console or encourage building a system without a discrete GPU and encourage them to circle back in a few months to a year and see if they can scrape together the budget for an RX4/580 or a used 20/30 series Nvidia card. The fact is, at that price range a bit more money can net you a lot more performance, so waiting and saving a little more is going to be the better option if possible

Why did that just make my brain start playing Diamonds and Guns

There’s a lot of assumptions going on here. First of all, historically 26 wasn’t the maximum for the draft but 40, but secondly there’s really no rules for a draft. A draft is already so much of an encroachment on one’s human rights and legal rights that all bets are off should one be declared. Sure there’ll be court orders and legal battles over it but we’ve seen how that goes already with the current administration, they’ll simply delay and ignore while shuffling as many humans out of reach as possible until they can’t anymore.

Best thing any of us can do is simply hope for the best. My personal hopes are, in order of declining positivity:

• There is no draft
• I’m either too old or too autistic to be drafted
• I can go back to college to be ineligible to be drafted
• I can find myself a non-combat role given my technical expertise
• Whatever happens happens and I’ll figure out how to survive and thrive like I have every other challenge that’s come my way in life

There’s really no other planning for such an eventuality. There’s too many unknowns you can plan for, and while I’m seeing plenty of folks talking about fragging, taking drugs or establishing a false history of drug abuse, transitioning, etc. the fact is there’s no telling what will happen nor what the legal landscape will look like

Do you think they’d actually bring back the draft?

On one hand a draft would be extremely daft on many fronts. It would make an unpopular president far more unpopular, it would put guns into the hands of a ton of disgruntled people, and there’s generally plenty of willing recruits based purely off of the economic benefits of volunteering

On the other hand, the way his administration is talking to the media it really sounds like they’re trying to lay the groundwork for a draft, including most notably saying why Trump’s youngest son “isn’t eligible to be drafted” (any normal politician would explain why their kid was “choosing not to enlist”)

So is eating a moderate amount of higher quality and more expensive chocolate. Its okay to enjoy a treat every once in a while

That was kinda the point I was making, needing a ton of land for solar panels to enable a transition away from oil wouldn’t be such a bad thing since so much land is used to grow corn for ethanol which…wouldn’t really have much demand following such an energy transition

It would be absolutely hilarious if in the very long term Proton or other Win32 compatibility layers just become a generic set of libraries that most games rely on for historical reasons despite every reason for their existence no longer applying

Latest jobs report showed a reduction in total jobs in the economy of 80k. The recession that’s been trying to happen for years is finally about to happen.

It’s really hilarious because economic indicators were all looking super good going into the 2024 election, and even jobs were starting to show some growth after being a bit slow following the insanity of 2021-22. Trump could simply walked in and went to sleep and the economy would be in brilliant shape right now but instead we have this

Yeah gas prices (about the only commodity that normies interact with) have only gone up by like 30-40 cents per gallon, about the same price they were 6-12 months ago. Normies only wake up once it gets to around $4/gallon or about a full dollar per gallon more than usual.

The last time gas prices went over $4 a gallon I heard many drivers of excessively large gas guzzling SUVs and Trucks complaining that they couldn’t fully fill their tanks due to the $100 limit on most gas pumps.

The $4 mark was also when people started actually making choices to drive less (and voicing these choices) and if it was sustained they seemed likely to choose to replace their vehicles with something more efficient

Farm Simulator has a bunch of tree farming content in the base game

Yeah I haven’t been able to make it since their 4th year. Super inconvenient time of year for me. But the times I have been able to make it it’s been a blast. I think Madison now has a new hacker conference too? And there’s Thotcon in Chicago too

404media is a super high quality new independent news source and they specifically broke this story as they’ve been breaking a ton of big stories (it seems like at least one per week) since they started up. It’s run by a bunch of former Motherboard (Vice News) reporters who broke tons of big stories for Motherboard back in the day.

It sucks that it’s paywalled but journalists have to eat too and as an independent media company they don’t have the option of operating at a loss that, say, Arstechnica can as a subsidiary of the behemoth Conde Nast which itself is (was?) a subsidiary of AT&T

Oh I thought he just removed it from future ones not past ones too

No it was Cyphercon in Milwaukee. Lots of people there also have defcon badges and swag so there’s a ton of influence from Defcon at least

The way he worded it, it sounds like you just revert back to before the first “Claude co-authored” committ

Plus it’s pretty easy to simply shift the time of use to when there’s the most clean capacity online (and this is easily encouraged with variable electricity rates)

Well then it’s a good thing that there’s a lot more than 2000 acres currently being used to grow varieties of corn that aren’t even intended for human consumption but will just be turned into ethanol