#definitelynotplanetfall

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

The time of meowing is upon us.

*prepares for the looming onset of meowing*

[loving-n0t-heyting]

the real reason anprim is ableist is it's anti-autistic to get rid of trains

The lack of imagination with which you take industrial civilisations threat to the biosphere is damning. Why do you assume the existence of trains necessarily requires extractive oppressive automation? You could also have, for example, ppl ride on the back of chains of roughly train-shaped dinosaurs saying something like “Hey, it’s a living”

[andmaybegayer]

Hello sorry. It looks like my PC has finally bit the dust, or if it’s a fixable problem it’s just over a decade old and the non-problem parts are likely on their last legs anyway. Do you still recommend ABS from Newegg as a good source of general use prebuilt computers or have they trashed their reputation in the roughly two years since I asked you about computer parts. I specifically want to run linux but probably an easier distro than arch, which I had been using for historical reasons.

What I know about ABS is mostly second-hand, but I haven't heard anything egregious beyond complaints about NewEgg support being slow and frustrating, but they seem to build decent systems with only moderate mark-up.

Nvidia GPU's run better on Linux these days than they used to, especially if you're going to grab a distribution that bundles the nonfree drivers, but it's a thing to watch out for if, say, you want to drive more than three monitors or want to use something less nonfree friendly. It looks like all the ABS systems with AMD are sold out. Not a deal breaker, they're usually trivially resolvable! But I saw bug reports for "Nvidia Driver Mysteriously Crashes This Week" coming in every few months at my Linux Support Job.

I haven't watched the most recent Linus Tech Tips System Integrator Secret Shopper program, I don't think they did ABS, but it might be worth watching if you're in the market.

[toy-sitting-anon]

hey when i was looking through a bunch of old drawing shit i found the first ever toy sitting thing you ever drew. from back when we were like 10. the mysterious benedict society one. remember that? do you want it back?

stop trying to get, like, fake tumblr clout from knowing me. i still don't want to talk to you.

also, jesus fucking christ you're such a hoarder.

of course i would like it back.

[sigmaleph]

there's something kind of amazing about this. that you can take an obviously terrible design approach on purpose as a challenge and then on some level it turns out there's still a one-size-fits-all solution that is... maybe not 'optimal', who knows, but, highly optimised? the whole factory is in large part the same basic building block stamped one time after another. the design constraint prevents the already-existing standard solutions from working but then you find there's a new kind of standard solution, even more uniform.

and on some level you'd think that was an artefact of this run, but no. i've seen this guy's other challenge runs, like the beltless one and the all-burner one. they all end up with 'yeah turns out there's a standard solution i am just going to keep implementing over and over'.

i am reminded of what @definitelynotplanetfall was saying about how the main bus architecture and more broadly the factorio 'meta' of standard arrays for doing things means it's very easy to just take The One Tool That Solves The Problem and implement it and it feels... a bit like drudgery? idk i don't want to put words in their mouth that's the impression i got from what they were saying. and like at the time i pushed back a little because, like, i am having fun playing.

which i am, but. idk. there's something there. it seems easy sometimes to take the tools that simplify your life in this game a little too far and simplify the fun away. but at the same time it's also the case that i hate it when i grow used to a tool and it goes away, like when i started a vanilla playthrough for reasons a while back and noticed how much lacking simple things like module inserter and autodeconstruct was annoying me.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

as a kid i was grossed out when classmates were talking about sex and adults reinforced that this was correct, good people do not talk about sex and especially not children. then instead of the talk they gave me a book which i assumed was a test and i failed if i read it so i loudly refused to read it. then when they did sex ed in school i wanted to not be involved because everything up till now pointed to this being Actually Deleterious And To Be Avoided.

this is the "i cant believe this wife who has been shamed into perpetual abstinence of body/spirit until age 30 did not become a horndog the moment the wedding band went on??" evangelical purity culture thing but for sex ed innit

[andmaybegayer]

Let's say, hypothetically, for the sake of argument, that someone wanted the benefits of upgrading their computer but Fucking Hates Hardware, and is also frustrated that lots of major guides hedge everything by saying to Check For Yourself (reasonably! there is a lot of variability), but not how to sift through and synthesize the technical stats gained by Checking For Yourself to get an answer, and also has an eye-glaze-over reaction to the gobbledygook names of different computer parts and cannot trust themselves to remember such a name for even a few seconds. Let's also say this hypothetical person is an idiot partly in denial about their usage patterns but mostly completely ignorant of how to assess what they need, what counts as heavy usage and what counts as dicking about, whether what will count as dicking about in several years will be commensurate with what is considered heavy now, or what the bottlenecks in their current system are. What would you recommend to this person I made up?

You mentioned a few things that get to the heart of the Upgrade Question which is: what do I actually need?

Ultimately, the first thing you must ask is "Does my current system do everything I want to do." In my experience, future proofing is mostly a fool's errand, and I could write a lot about why that is, but let's just say don't worry too much about what you might be doing in five years, don't really look more than a year forward for performance estimates. Whatever you're doing now plus whatever you want to do but can't because of your current system.

(The other question is "where am I putting this", if you live in a tiny Tokyo apartment or you don't want to dedicate permanent desk space to a desktop, or this is going to be your only computer, a good laptop may be a better choice even though you're sacrificing some performance. If you live in a bigger apartment or suburban house, you can probably find space for a desktop. Hell, laptops come with a screen and keyboard built in, that's a cost a lot of people don't price into buying a new desktop for the first time.)

If your current system is doing everything you want it to do at an acceptable speed and noise level, you're done, no upgrade required. If, say, you edit video and you notice that since you moved from HD to 4k it's starting to take forever to render out, or you picked up Elden Ring and it's not running as smoothly as you would like, then it's time to upgrade.

Knowing what to upgrade, especially in-place on an existing system, is unfortunately pretty much impossible without getting into the weeds of performance and hardware, so your best bet if you are dissatisfied with your current setup is probably getting some kind of mid-range prebuilt system from a reputable company within your budget and performance constraints.

In general, most people will be moving from an old mid-range system to a new mid-range system every 3-6 years. You dont want to be upgrading with every new release, and really not even for every second release, unless if the actual tasks you need to do have changed since you got your system. In that case, you'll have to step up a budget increment since you need something faster than you use to have by a significant amount.

Budget-wise in USD, you kind of have these steps and the tasks the correlate with.

$2000: professional, "this is for my dayjob" workstations, performance machines for doing heavy compute

$1500: amateur workstations, high end gaming machines.

$1000: sensibly balanced gaming-optimized machines that'll handle most light workstation tasks, an hobbyist machine.

$500: utility laptops, for handling basic desktop and document handling tasks, programming, image editing, very light workstation tasks.

ABS out of NewEgg and Skytech from I forget who owns them make reasonably priced performance machines with all-new hardware, and while I know people who have had machines arrive with issues, the majority of the stories I hear are positive. The quality of various prebuilt manufacturers varies wildly in terms of cost to performance and level of customer service, but absolutely sight-unseen if I had to recommend some desktops and a laptop for a stranger I've never talked to I would say get one of these and it'll handle almost anything you can throw at it well enough not to annoy you.

These are not the best options per se, even in their own budget ranges, but what they are is solid all-rounders that I would not be mad about if someone told me to use them as the only computer I had for the next five years.

This is the summary of my advice on buying a new computer for people who don't like shopping for computers. The biggest weakness is the price:performance list up there, whcih assumes that you're getting fair pricing on the hardware. Lots of prebuilt companies charge super high markups on old hardware, which is an easy way to get screwed, so I'd advise checking what the latest generation of hardware available is and only using that if you're upgrading.

Annoyingly there's a new CPU release cycle happening right now, so the two things I recommended above will be one generation out of date by the end of October.

[halogenwarrior]

I think this comes down to how there are two types of "stereotypical characters". One is incredibly unrealistic to how real people are, doesn't have the humanity and interiority of other characters, etc. and this should just be avoided at an all cost. The other is when the character has a trait that is perfectly realistic and not uncommon among that group or people in general, and might not even be a negative trait, but it has become so stereotypically associated with that group that it appears disproportionately often and people want to see more of something different. So in the second type the character is completely fine and inoffensive on an individual level but it would be better if there was a global shift towards different character traits. Or course there is in a reality a gradient between these two types and not a black and white division, where it gets progressively more likely that a person like this can actually exist even if the commonality in fiction is a stereotype, and less offensive on an individual rather than societal trend level.

Like @self-loving-vampire and @definitelynotplanetfall gave the example of bisexual people with multiple partners, and this would largely fall in the second category, where there are plenty of people like that in real life and it's not offensive in isolation, but people are still frustrated with it being disproportionately common in media compared to real life.

Always weird to see a very confident post declaring that [x] is a homophobic/transphobic/ablest caricature with no basis in reality when you just...actually know multiple people like that.

[st-just]

"Average revolutionary steals three priests' clothes per day" statistic is misleading. Robes Pierre,

Look am I saying that taking the biggest and most impressive churches in the country at gunpoint to then use for the Cult of Reason (complete with absurdly over the top rituals and productions) was morally correct or good politics? Of course not.

Was it however hilarious and cool as fuck? Obviously! And isn't that the important thing?

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Tell me what it's like there, won't you? Visit me in a dream and tell me what it's like on the other side.

Gladly. As a matter of fact . . . I may have already.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

harriet du girls

do you suppose with her alcoholism harry-short-for-harriet is able to plug in her phone without missing and scratching up the bottom around the charger port

[grabhanem]

definitelynotplanetfall I'm begging you you have to stop what you're doing before it's too late for all of us

DH has me blocked but the thing that is so unsavory about fight club and the responses to it is that it posits that it is natural and liberating for men to be mindless thugs with no value other than the violence that they can inflict. When it comes to the ways it claims men are "domesticated," it pays relatively little heed to being under the thumb of an employer as the direct cause of misery, and instead takes aim at things like "living in an apartment with nice furnishings instead of a filthy slave-soldier barracks" and "not being allowed to kill or permanently cripple people that slightly inconvenience you." According to Fight Club, any man who does not want to be a mindless graceless punch-beast is a Fake Man with false consciousness who needs to be either beaten to a pulp or conscripted into Thug Club and abused and indoctrinated into the ideologies of Turbo Forever Violence Trust Me It's Deep And Meaningful Because If You Don't Like It I'll Beat You Which Is What Meaning Is.

If you are going to assert that masculinity is inextricable from violence and that to be a man is only to be an instrument of violence and every other thing that might occupy a man's focus is a distraction from this purpose, and you wish to form a militant organization about this, the only even quasi-sane conclusion is to make your organization about shooting people with estradiol darts.

If masculinity is about violence, that makes masculinity bad! It does not make violence good! The idiot 2010s response amounts to "masculinity is good, but violence isn't masculine, submitting to your boss is masculine" and aside from being eye-rollingly contentless and missing the fragment of a kernel of a point that Fight Club might have if you strip out the "therefore be a huge asshole to everybody" at the end of each sentence, that does not constitute sensible critique! To truly interrogate gender you have to at least put "maybe Being Masculine is not something we should invoke as straightforwardly and unquestionably admirable" on the table and nobody is willing to even consider this! It's so fucking obvious that I feel like I'm going crazy trying to explain it, it's like saying "this apple is red" and being asked to prove it with formal mathematical logic!

[triviallytrue]

oh oh do me now

Honestly there's a lot of people I could put here, but the top three have to be definitelynotplanetfall, twocubes, and Ellie (may she rest in peace).

[max1461]

oh also do you associate me with anyone

I think I associate you most with triviallytrue, but maybe also with people like wuggen (on the ground of vibes) and definitelynotplanetfall (on the ground of username shape. just look at it! it's similarly shaped!)

[st-just]

We haven't really interacted much but I'm going to miss your commentary and all the art you find

Aww, thank you! You usually have a really interesting perspective on things too!

[definitelynotplanetfall]

elden ring implies the existence of elden queue, elden stack, etc.