Glad it at least made someone twitch. I got a good chuckle as I was typing it out.

If you’re going the iGPU route, you may want to look into out-of-date (from a year or two ago) enterprise/corporate fleet laptops. There are always a ton on the market because the C-level execs always demand the newest and best laptops, even if they’re just going to use them for emails; the CEO would be embarrassed if they found out they had a worse laptop than the programmers or 3D modelers, after all. So the company IT is always milling through enterprise laptops.

And when they go to list 20 identical laptops on eBay at the same time, (because they just upgraded an entire department,) they’re not concerned with how much money they’re actually getting for each resale. The person making the listing is just some lowly IT schmuck who will never see a dime from the sale, but is forced to list them because the bean counters in accounting want to recoup expenditures. If you try to buy used from a personal sale, that person is going to be focused on getting the most money possible; No gamer is selling their year-old GPU unless they really need the money. By sticking to laptops that are popular in corporate settings, you’re able to ensure that:

1. There are a lot of identical models on the market, driving prices for each one into the ground.
2. The seller doesn’t actually care about things like minimum sale amounts, because they’re just trying to get this stack of old laptops off of their desk.
3. It has probably only ever been used for email and PowerPoint.

You can often find two year old like-new $2000 laptops for like $250. Hell, just a quick google search of “Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2024 i7 1TB used” turned up multiple eBay listings for like $200. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon (current model is Gen 13) is a $2600 laptop, but the Gen 12 is only going for a few hundred.

Payment processing is one of those things that really should have been treated as a public utility from the start. The same way we treat water, electricity, and phone lines. But even getting the internet treated as a utility has been a losing battle thus far.

I have one in a very well hidden pocket in my backpack. Because it’s my gig bag, and goes with me when I’m working in the field. If I were just leaving it under my desk all day, I wouldn’t bother. But since it often ends up sitting in the corner of a random room while I run around a building, it has an AirTag buried in it.

I can’t even log in, because their 2FA system is overwhelmed. I’ve been waiting almost four hours for an email code to hit my inbox.

Factorio. At my worst, I was seeing conveyor belt patterns in my sleep.

Yeah, I was going to take a guess. As someone who has dealt with random farmers in the middle of nowhere, at least one of the two are going to be true:

1. That will be the best produce you have ever laid eyes on.
2. The person misspelled things on purpose, to grab peoples’ attention.
3. You’ll be able to fill an entire grocery bag with produce, for like $3.

There are a lot of places like this, where you’ll get some really high quality stuff for basically no money. As long as you’re friendly, they’ll usually give you some crazy good deals.

The best tamales you’ll ever taste? They come out of the back of a beat-up minivan in a hardware store parking lot, at the crack of dawn. Just cruise through a Home Depot lot as the sun is rising, and look for the car surrounded by people. Bring cash in small bills.

I’d argue it is protecting programmers. Previously, people would waste programmers’ time with poorly concepted/uncreative app ideas. But now people are going “oh I can do that on my own”, and wasting their own time with AI vibe coding.

Exactly. One of the biggest takeaways from holocaust education is that people worked tirelessly to cause it, and even more people stood by and did nothing while it happened. Monstrous people worked to cause it, but they were people nonetheless. And that means it could happen again, if people get complacent.

And the same could be said here too. They may be monstrous for raping kids, but calling them monsters works to dehumanize them. It dismisses the actions as part of their nature, which dismisses the intent they have. They’re people. People did this. People will continue to do this. And that means the public should do everything they can to hold these people accountable.

I mean, the courts ruled that he raped E. Jean Carroll, even without penile insertion. The legal definition of rape largely depends on where the crime is committed; In some jurisdictions, it requires PiV sex. In others, it can be as simple as unwanted intimate contact.

The judge in that case clarified that even though he was “only” found liable for sexual battery, what he did (groping her breasts and inserting his fingers into her vagina without her consent) would colloquially be known as rape. Even though it didn’t fit the strict legal definition for the jurisdiction (which required penile insertion) the average layperson would still consider his act to be rape. This clarification was after he tried to sue her for defamation, when she publicly said she won the rape case against him.

Ah yes, by the end of the week we will have achieved full apotheosis: master-final-v3-deployed-2025_08_01-usethisone

For the curious, sideloading apps requires you to run a server on your computer, and refresh the signature on the app at least once a month. Because iOS automatically kills any apps with out-of-date signatures, only automatically refreshes signatures on official App Store apps, and doesn’t allow any signatures longer than 30 days.

Lmao this chode is really over here trying to ignore all of the cultural context and redefine the n-word, to be able to use it without getting punched in the mouth.

It’s a joke that the rise in left handedness correlated to the time period of the war. It’s just pointing out a spurious correlation, and falsely equating the two.

Either you just whooshed really hard, or I am by posting this. I genuinely can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

Neurotypicals are just the majority minority. They’re ~40% of the population, which isn’t the majority, but it is the largest single group of people. It’s also a lone circle on an otherwise overlapping Venn diagram, because all of the other circles preclude being neurotypical. So if you’re meeting someone for the first time and are going to make assumptions about them, the default is to assume that they’re probably in the largest, most monolithic group. Assuming any other group has a large probability to be wrong, because even though 60% is the majority, it is split amongst a bunch of much smaller circles.

All of the other circles on the diagram are messy. They overlap, they have their own special quirks, the lines around the circles are blurry, and that 40% monolith also says that the 60% (broken apart into much smaller circles, so nowhere near as united) is weird and should just fit in. So yeah, neurotypical became the default.

I’m sure their privacy policy gave the standard promises about storing their private data in a secure way, which they did not do.

Their ToS can be found here. Section G of their Limitation of Liability tries to shield them from liability against data breaches. But if they were criminally negligent, the ToS won’t protect them. The Data Protection section basically just says “check our Privacy Policy for info on what we collect”, which is pretty standard fare for a ToS.

The Security section of their Privacy Policy is also extremely boilerplate. Here’s the entire thing:

Security of Your Personal Information
The security of your Personal Information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number) on our Services, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL).Tea Dating Advice takes reasonable security measures to protect your Personal Information to prevent loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. Please be aware, however, that despite our efforts, no security measures are impenetrable.If you use a password on the Services, you are responsible for keeping it confidential. Do not share it with any other person. If you believe your password has been misused, please notify us immediately.

This one particular sentence may end up burning them though:

Tea Dating Advice takes reasonable security measures to protect your Personal Information to prevent loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction.

I think most people (and the courts) would agree that putting a password on your database is a reasonable security measure that would be expected per this Privacy Policy. Especially since their next sentence goes on to elucidate that users should keep their passwords confidential.

This is a pretty solid list, but I’d try to bridge the gaps between older games and more modern ones, to show how things progressed. Essentially, you want each section of the museum to tell a story about how some critical building block of gaming was taken from concept to implementation.

I would actually include both the original Castlevania and Metroid then follow it up with Symphony of the Night. Show the original Castlevania game to establish the series, then show Metroid which has the exploration and backtracking with new abilities. Then show SOTN, which shows the combination of the two (effectively cementing the entire Metroidvania genre). Then show a game like Hollow Knight or Ori and the Blind Forest, which goes on to embody the genre several decades after it has been established.

Zelda is a good one, and I’d follow it up with something like Okami, which follows the same dungeon formula in a radically different setting and art style. Again, showing the genre’s establishment, then showing how it can be adapted.

For Final Fantasy, I’d also include FFX, which follows a very similar turn-based playstyle. Maybe include a Dragon Quest game somewhere in there too, as that series tends to stick to the same basic gameplay formula. Then I’d take it in a different direction and show something like Bravely Default, which is still technically turn-based, but also has additional elements layered on top.

I’d chase Super Mario 64 with something like A Hat In Time. Again, showing the establishment of the 3D platformer, then showing the elements in use elsewhere.

You have Ultima on here, which I agree with. But I’d probably break the display for it into two different halves: For the RPG half, I would include some more tabletop-inspired games here too, as the early game devs were largely tabletop game fans who were simply adapting their favorite games into digital settings. Games like Fallout 1/2, or Baldurs Gate. Maybe even show a modern game like Baldur’s Gate 3, to show how tabletop RPG mechanics can gracefully transition to digital games. Morrowind would also fit nicely here, but Skyrim is a little too far removed from old TTRPGs to be relevant to this section. Still important to have on the list, but I’d probably have it in a section dedicated to player-made mods.

For Ultima’s one-point-perspective dungeon-crawling, following it up with something like Persona Q or SMT: Strange Journey could be impactful to show how it was adapted to more modern games.

“Ah good, finally have some alone time. Just gotta go put on a full face of caked-on concealer before I can jork it.”

Because it’s meant to be a block of code, not something that formats using MarkDown rules. The point of code blocks is that you can use special characters and have them rendered as plaintext, instead of actually working as special characters. For instance, here’s the classic Reddit shrug:
¯_(ツ)_/¯

Notice that the left arm is missing? That’s because the backslash and underscores are both special characters. The backslash cancels out the underscore, making the backslash disappear. Now here’s the same shrug formatted as code:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Notice that the left arm is visible, (or at least, it should be), because none of the characters were treated as special characters. If the left arm is invisible on your client, that is actually an error in parsing the MarkDown formatting.

Tangentially, if I wanted to format that shrug without the missing arms, it would actually take three backslashes, like this:

¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ 

The first backslash cancels out the second, making the second visible. Then the third cancels out the underscore, making the underscores visible, if I only used two, the backslash would be visible, but the underscores would disappear and make the head italicized. But by using three, we get this:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Notice how I was able to actually show how I used all three backslashes, using the code block?

Mine used to be fantastic for recipes. It was nice having a small screen in the kitchen dedicated to recipes and background music. You could ask it for a recipe, it would automatically search for one, trim the mandatory “story of my family eating this meal so I can copyright it as a creative work” intro, and compile the recipe in easy-to-follow steps. But now I ask it for a recipe, and it just goes “I didn’t understand, but here are the search results.” Which just opens a web browser, meaning all the biggest reasons to use it (not digging through search results, skipping the intro, compiling everything into a step-by-step list that you can follow along with, etc) are all gone.

I only had it because it was a gift, but it was honestly extremely handy when my hands are busy and I didn’t want to be digging around on my phone constantly. But not anymore, because at least I have an adblocker on my phone.