immutable

No you see they have a plan.

1. Convince people likely to vote for Harris to throw away their votes by voting 3rd party or staying home
2. Suppress democratic turnout while leaving Republican turnout untouched.
3. Spoil the election while haughtily going “oh not voting is a vote for trump somehow” and snorting to themselves. Completely blind to context.
4. Have the things they claim to really super duper care about like genocide in Palestine continue under trump
5. Also have vulnerable groups in America, like legal Haitian migrants, be the target of Republican vitriol.
6. (step missing)
7. Glorious proletariat revolution against the most powerful military and militarized police force to ever exist

Its brilliance is in its simplicity!

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

Pico8 carts are just a special flavor of png. I would try running it directly or if it won’t run them with the png extension just rename the file from .png -> .p8 without converting and see if that works

Relevant section of the user manual

There are three ways to share carts made in PICO-8:

1. Share the .p8 or .p8.png file directly with other PICO-8 users

Type FOLDER to open the current folder in your host operating system.

Although if you are having trouble you might have more luck getting started with the built in SPLORE command

Relevant section of the user manual

This might be easier to get started with since it will all get wired up automatically for you

That’s a shitty way to treat someone, sorry that happened to you.

If you have storage space though and look for good deals, ironically a Costco membership could help with your finances, and you could have cheap hotdogs again.

The trick to Costco is that, while everything they sell is normally of very good quality, only some of it is a good deal. I’ve yet to encounter particularly bad deals at Costco, something where I feel like I’ve been ripped off. That said, some things are a better bargain than others.

If you happen to have storage space, which isn’t the case for everyone, you might find that by purchasing some items in bulk and storing them that you end up saving more than the membership costs.

Some items that I find Costco normally has stable good pricing on that you can easily calculate out if it would make the membership worthwhile

• eggs
• milk
• toilet paper
• paper towels
• soda
• beer (depending on brand, there’s normally something that’s a good deal but it might change month to month)
• fruit
• meat (depending on cut, ground beef is normally a pretty good deal if you have freezer space for a few pounds)

Although if your bad experience with the food court person put you off that’s reasonable too. Anyways, just thought I’d share what I’ve found having a Costco membership for like a decade, I didn’t really want to pay upfront to go to a store but when I sat down and ran the numbers I came out ahead. But I have enough budget flexibility and storage space to make that viable and so I’m in a privileged position in that way so your mileage may vary.

Anyways still sucks that the person decided to belittle you, no one deserves to be treated like that. Hope your days ahead are filled with nicer people.

It is interesting to consider that in the vastness of space that something like a single restaurant might be viewed similarly to a glass of water in the US.

Sure the government could come in and declare eminent domain on my glass of water, but it’s value is so low as to be effectively a nonissue.

In a future where there are tons of planets and tons of replicators, perhaps the idea of personal property has just been extended to include things like a restaurant or a vineyard.

If you use the definition that private property is the private ownership over the means of production, it could be reasoned that something like Sisko’s is not necessarily a means of production but more akin to personal property. If someone on earth wants some creole food they can use any number of replicators to produce and enjoy that. Sisko’s and Picard’s vineyard might be similar to how we would look upon historical preservation. Some people could choose to spend their lives making things the old fashioned way because they enjoy it and people enjoy experiencing it.

The economy of Star Trek is interesting, but I think there are plenty of times when the utility of storytelling ends up mucking with the clarity of the message. One example I was just thinking about the other day was the introduction of the borg queen.

I get why it’s nice for there to be a borg queen, she can embody a more nuanced thinking part of the borg collective and the audience can much more readily understand the idea of a queen ruling over her subjects (whether that be like the rulers of humanity or like the queen bee as they sometimes say). But it also kind of sucks. The borg are such a fascinating species, a collective hive mind acting to attain perfection, more a force of nature than any of the other species we encounter.

While the borg queen is a compelling character and is acted wonderfully, I can’t feel a bit sad that it’s so normal and pedestrian. It turns the borg from this almost incomprehensible force into something so regular, a bunch of drones carrying out the will of the queen. While expedient to the storytelling, I like the idea of what the borg are pre-borg-queen more than what they become post-borg-queen.

I think with the economy a similar thing happens in storylines. There are many scenes that make it clear that humanity doesn’t have money anymore, but when you are telling a story and you want to have some stakes and obstacles, money is soooooo useful. Money makes it trivial to have an obstacle, or shit we need some latinum. Money makes it trivial to introduce stakes.

Star Trek had to try to thread this needle of presenting a post scarcity society while also making a dramatic engaging show for people living in a capitalist society. Scarcity is at the heart of a lot of drama, if you can just replicate your way out of every problem it’s not a very interesting show. It also leads to a thing that once you spot it’s hard not to spot, so much of the tension is aided by the “oh no we can’t replicate that” McGuffin. It plays out in a lot of episodes because otherwise every episode would be 5 minutes of “there’s an outbreak of tallarian flu on Corso V, we emailed them the recipe for the medicine and told them to replicate it.” Then the credits roll.

Not really perfectionism just grammar

I think the fact that using a neuter pronoun is so charged that we can’t even speak or write our language correctly is insane.

I’ve written thousands of technical documents, if you are referring to a generic operator / user / whatever the correct term to use is “they.” That’s how you say “the person that I’m referring to that I don’t know anything about”

There was a brief madness in the 90s when fucking morons used “he/she” for absolutely no reason.

Don’t worry, he seems hard at work making sure all that Tesla stock he got will also be worth less everyday.

In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers

At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.

The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”

Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.

Thanks for attending my Ted talk

I realized the other day about how much I’ve internalized the violence of capitalism. I was driving down the road and there was a man with a sign that said he was hungry and needed help and my first reflexive feeling was annoyance.

That’s insane, that’s monstrous, that made me stop.

Here is a human being, standing there just holding a sign and I’m annoyed, even angry at them. The system is set up so that there will be people that can’t be exploited by capital and that’s their lot, to stand on the side of the road begging for scraps.

You see it so frequently in capitalism that your choices are to be sad for them, be angry at them, or ignore them entirely.

Maybe I wasn’t annoyed or angry at that man, but at myself for hardening my heart to his plight, and at the system we are stuck in that put him there.

I always tip my hair cutting person 100%. I wanted a hair cut, the hair cut cost $x, that person literally does the entire thing often with their own equipment that they paid for. The place will charge me $x because that’s what the haircut is worth to me but I know the person that actually physically cut my hair with their skills and labor won’t get $x and I think that’s bullshit.

In many other kinds of transactions someone can go “oh well the business deserves a cut of the profits because they provided the ingredients, or they stocked the inventory, or yadda yadda yadda”. But the hair cut is the one place where with my own eyes I witness the full body of labor occur and see who does it. That person deserves the value that their labor produced, not some owner sitting off in their beach house doing plenty I’m sure but one thing I’m damn sure they aren’t doing is cutting my fucking hair.

I remember back in 2015 people were saying that trump was saying that he would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it. I thought, “I wonder what he actually said that got chopped up and editorialized this way?”

Every day after that has been me realizing that if you dig any deeper on the stupid shit it just gets stupider. We will kill off the planet because one time trump bought a cheap led bulb that didn’t flatter his natural orange glow quite enough and now we can only have coal fired power plants. Every stupid thing he says has an even stupider story behind it which itself probably has an even stupider story behind that and on and on. It’s truly astounding