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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Mario games were always kind of tech demos for Nintendo innovation and the innovation is kind of boring now

    In the 90s it was graphical fidelity and gameplay mechanics, smb1-3 on the nes, smw on snes, m64 were serious contenders for “oh my god this shit is crazy and plays like a dream”.

    Sunshine is around where the graphical fidelity started to lag but the physics were still nice.

    Then they started to innovate in other ways and galaxy brought in motion controls which were well done (arguably) and the (by then) distantly lagging graphics were almost a feature

    But odyssey showed that doesn’t work anymore. Everyone has motion controls now, even phones, and they’re often just annoying. The switches innovation isn’t something that really applies directly to gameplay itself, so ultimately odyssey stays just a standard game, with solid graphics thanks to great design but noticeable slowdown in several areas because it’s running on an outdated tegra tablet, and the same old platformer gameplay because there’s nothing new to do with it.

    They did have some cool level design that helped it feel fresh and interesting at times but it ultimately felt like it had similar problems to sunshine: not a bad game, but not an experience the way mario 64, mario world, or mario 3 was. Maybe I’m just too old



  • Yeah absolutely, and any bugs that are found are permanently gonna be there, stuff like that. It sucks. Thus the “I probably wouldn’t bother either”. But if you’re really passionate about it I say go for it, just cover your tracks really well, only work with people you trust implicitly, and don’t popularize the project until you’re ready to be done with it. The moment it gets hyped and picked up by ign/kotaku/etc you’re done.

    I think you can still get the word out to get other modders though. These things don’t seem to get squashed at the planning stage, otherwise publishers would be spending tons of resources going after people who have maybe done no actual work. It seems like what happened with this mod, when they make socials and release ongoing updates, screenshots, videos, etc, of their work, that’s what gets people hyped and all the attention (and eventual hammer) on them

    Of course this means you get no credit for your work, which sucks. If you’re undertaking such a massive effort and getting 0 credit I could understand why you wouldn’t bother (although it’s kind of badass to do it for no clout)






  • That’s the thing, he might live a bit longer but at what cost? I would much rather enjoy my life than by a slave to a miserable routine dedicated to promoting longevity that will potentially buy me an extra decade. Like I can just eat a somewhat reasonable diet, exercise, sleep okay and with decent genetics based on my parents and grandparents I will probably make it to at least mid to late 80s, maybe longer if medicine advances. If I had genetics that suggested a strong likelihood that I would die in my 60s I would maybe be more interested

    With this guys routine I could maybe push that to 100ish? I would certainly love to extend my life but not at the cost of it consuming my life. I assume he’s banking on getting to the theoretical max though, which is probably closer to 120ish, and that is substantial but then it’s like a few decades of extremely decreased mobility and mental acuity? Eh

    And of course this all disregards the potential that you get cancer, murdered, car accident, etc.



  • Most people won’t close their facebook account. if it ever does happen it will be because the accounts are purged (highly unlikely given facebooks raging hardon for data) or that the site undergoes a massive transformation after losing a ton of value and rebranding ala myspace.

    That likely wouldn’t happen for many many years until a solid competitor arose that grew enough to overtake them and that’s real challenging given their size. It was one thing when user counts were in the millions or even tens or hundreds of millions but facebook has several billion users. That’s like a sizable chunk of the entire population of earth.

    It would take a very novel approach to overcome those numbers and then you also have to consider momentum: at this point there are a great deal of people who consider facebook “the internet”. Like they open their browser/phone and that’s what they do. It is their habit. Then in second place you have instagram so even if you knocked facebook off meta would still ultimately be ok. And with the incubation period of social media they’d probably have another one up and coming long before your threat became viable that would have the benefit of starting in like 7th place simply because of their massive market share (see: threads). By the time your social network had the 10ish years it takes to get to hundreds of millions of users they’d potentially have that one at a billion, or have pulled the plug and moved on to another trial with a massive head start

    Doesn’t mean to give up on the fediverse stuff, just that the gross corporate social media likely wont go away for a very long time, if ever. Barring outside influence like regulatory change of course



  • The audio improvements are more impressive than the video improvements but they’re niche

    8k is a boring upgrade. We’ve officially reached the point where pixel density is like “well that looks better but only a little”. 1080p was dramatic, 4k was solid, 8k is eh

    The audio improvements are really for people who have external sound processing and want ultra low latency. This is cool but again only impacts really niche use scenarios. They use the example of AVR and headphones. I will use the example of gaming with an avr and games that rely on on low latency sound like bemani/rhythm games.

    I have an avr and playing rhythm games on it requires calibration every time, and often changing settings about muting player sounds so I don’t disorient myself with sounds that are triggered late by my own playing. The game I’m currently into shows an audio delay of just over .1ms with the calibration tool, mostly imperceptible for media watching and playing easy songs but a nightmare on hard difficulties.

    Certainly not worth upgrading my tv, avr, and cabling though


  • Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement

    For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.

    Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available

    I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet

    Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that

    Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file

    Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.

    And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall

    I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)


  • Cobra is just the right to pay the employer portion of your health insurance after you leave your job so you don’t lose health insurance. Most americans skip it because they’re shocked to see just how much their employer subsidizes their health insurance

    This is part of why there is such a push to decouple insurance from employment. Especially as corporations increasingly recognize they can both escape the tax demand of socialized health care and also escape the social contract of providing health insurance by moving more and more jobs to 1099/contractor positions

    So remember when you are eyeing up that contractor job at amazon/doordash/uber/zocdoc/etc that is probably never going to unionize (if they have their say anyway): the 30-40k you earn there is really like 6-12k less (more if you want good insurance or support a family) because you will have to supply your own health/vision/dental (or you can just let yourself ignore all preventive care and/or keep your fingers crossed that you never have an inevitable health issue that will bankrupt you with your meager salary). Also keep in mind you get no retirement benefits. Good luck relying on social security/the national pension with musk and co continuing their assault on it. I don’t blame you if you take the job, we all gotta make ends meet, but try to get out asap because they will literally work you to death for a pittance