dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

[Insert XKCD “Standards” strip here.]

Nuclear has its place in the world, and it’s pretty much a given that in order to maintain high availability and energy stability we will not be able to rely solely on one single source. It can’t be all renewables, but it can’t be all nuclear, either. We are going to need a mix of both.

Nuclear can serve e.g. big time industrial, manufacturing, or other mission critical needs with large amounts of power that is reasonably clean and, importantly, very stable.

We just need to keep it from falling totally into the hands of morons who want to waste it all on “AI” datacenters, or whatever the fuck else.

Yeah, idiots can also spill a couple of million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Whoopsie doodle! I guess that’s just the cost of doing business, amirite? Good thing stuff like that always happens far away…

“But if you don’t pay into the grid, there will be no money for maintenance of the grid!!!”

1. What, like all these private power companies have been doing a good job of maintaining that grid infrastructure anyway? Don’t make me laugh any harder. They’ve taken all of their profits from the last century, give or take, and largely done the corporate equivalent of blowing it all on hookers and cocaine rather than reinvesting any but the bare minimum back into their own infrastructure.

2. If it isn’t profitable to run the grid, that’s great! To use an example, the sewer system in my county is run directly by… the county. It is not a for profit enterprise, because as soon as you pull your head out of your own ass you can realize that trying to make modern basic necessities like power, water, and sewer access private businesses is a moronic idea. One which leads to inevitable catastrophe, because capitalists are going to do what capitalists do. The fact that these idiots are straight-facedly behaving as if we “owe” them profits in perpetuity and expect us to swallow it is almost as bad as the fact that, by and large, the public still does. Nationalize that shit. It’s a matter of national security anyway, at this point.

To be fair, given its legacy now as one of the worst one-on-one fighting games in the history of the universe, Rise of the Robots probably wishes it was One Must Fall.

So what we’re saying is, this is it, folks. We’ve finally reached robot parity with exactly how humans would behave in the same situation.

The only part they won’t gut is the part that mandates that everyone must have insurance.

Uh, that’s the part that already got axed during Trump’s last term, in 2019.

I’m also going to add my stone to the pile here and point out that this hyperfixation on more and more “graphics” usually results in it ultimately being impossible to actually see what the fuck is happening on the screen.

You are a realistic barbarian dude who is brown, and wearing brown. standing in a realistic landscape which is brown, against a realistic highly textured and bump mapped bunch of trees which are brown, with leaves that are waving around in all directions realistically and are brown, trying to dodge arrows (which are brown) raining on you from the half dozen hairy orcs in the distance, who are also brown. And about nine pixels tall, and hidden in the bushes. Which are brown. And if this isn’t happening verbatim (or even if it is), 2/3 of the screen is also covered by a zillion glowy particle effects, motion blur, and bloom, which are the only colorful parts of the image but still add up to you not being able to actually see jack shit out of what’s important.

Bonus points if this also requires near frame-perfect inputs to handle, and you have half a second of input lag in between all the shit your console is trying to render plus the two or three frames eaten by postprocessing to make it “look pretty.”

Yeah, fuck all that.

A major part of game deign that everyone seems to forget a lot these days in the name of making everything realistic and/or extra graphicy is clearly communicating to the player just what the hell is going on. Older games, I find, often did a significantly better job of this.

You would think if anyone had any brains they wouldn’t want you to have to buy new consoles all the time. Aside from Nintendo, the hardware is usually a loss leader for the other major players and they make all their money on the licensing costs on the software, i.e. game sales, whereas they lose money every time a console ships out the door. Especially nowadays when the distribution is mostly digital and costs them practically nothing vs. the bad old days when they had to press discs and print labels and shit. Machine sales themselves have never been profitable at least for the first several years each system is out for the last several console generations.

It would be more profitable for Sony and Microsoft to keep you on the same console generation forever – with the inevitable falling cost of manufacturing the things, to boot – keeping it at the same MSRP and simply selling you more and more games for it.

Plus it would make their console sales numbers look really badass… eventually. “The Microsoft Xbox X One X S XS Series OneX S is the best selling video game console in history, selling 1.2 billion units over its 45 year life cycle, and counting!”

Extra crispy. I wonder if a replacement cable for one of those will work with my flashlight. It probably will.

Yep. These were a stopgap in the days when normal users could not be expected to have a functional home network of any sort. Those were indeed active devices, and had a lump in the middle of the cable that basically amounted to an integrated USB hub.

USB-A to A cables aren’t common

I believe USB A-to-A cables actually violate the USB spec and should not in fact ever exist. They definitely should not exist as a straight-through cable (although obviously they still do in reality) without any active electronics in the middle. Male A plugs are solely for connecting to a host device, and the entire purpose of the spectrum of B plugs in their various guises is specifically to make the other end of the cable that goes into the endpoint device different. The point is that you are not supposed to be able to directly connect two hosts together like that.

A straight through dumb A-to-A cable would connect the +5v pin from the host device directly to the +5v pin on the device on the other end of the cable. If you did this between two host devices (i.e. two computers) it is certainly possible that Bad Things would happen if the designers of both devices did not account for this type of stupidity. The only way one of these can be valid according to the spec is to omit the power pins entirely.

That said, I have a particular flashlight that came with exactly one of these naughty cables: A straight through male USB A-to-A cable with no smarts in it whatsoever. The flashlight charges via a USB-A port which is exceptionally bizarre, and I suspect the reason it does so is because it can also act as a power bank and the manufacturer was too cheap to include a type C or micro B or whatever port for input and a separate type A port for output. But now I’m stuck having to use the moronic cable it came with (which is also only like 14" long) without much hope of ever finding an alternative or replacement…

Well, okay. In that case, definitely fuck 'em.

I was just making a hot dog joke, man. We can grind up the shareholders first.

If they were going to bulldoze an inner city neighborhood, it’s likely that neighborhood was going to be predominantly black whether they like it or not. The white flight phenomenon predates Costco by a wide margin, and that fuckery already happened decades ago. While there were already inroads to corralling the country’s black population in cities around the turn of the century, the ball really got rolling on that in the post-war period following WW2 with redlining, block busting, widespread segregation prior to the civil rights movement, and the white middle class retreating to the then-new suburbs.

They could always grind them up to make into those $1.50 hot dogs.

Well, Delaware’s only real claim to fame other than grinding to a total standstill every time Joe Biden goes home is chicken farming. So I don’t find it at all implausible or susprising that some people there are exposed to a lot of birds. If it was going to happen anywhere, it was probably going to be there.

Technically extension cables were not part of the original USB spec, either, but that did not prevent oodles of them from appearing pretty much instantly. They solved a problem, there was a need, and thus they happened.

I.e. there never was supposed to be any such thing as a passive male USB-A to female USB-A cable, and yet pretty much every little MP3 player from 2001 to about 2005 came with one regardless.

These guys are out of business anyway. They don’t have to care; they can just dump whatever they have somewhere and scuttle off into the night, never to be seen again, nothing more than an echoing “woop woop woop woop” fading off into the distance.

They’ve been handed a rare and highly valuable treasure. They get all the good will from the community for doing the one thing that everyone always wants these companies to do but never happens, and this is now someone else’s problem.

If you’re going to have a problem, someone else’s problem is the best kind to have.