wjrii

joined 1 year ago
[–] wjrii@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago

This is also age and culturally contextual. If kid and dad are on the same page about why junior is still living there, and if Dad is financially secure, he may want kid to pay down debt and be ready to jump straight to a nice place of their own. Now, if the family unit overall could use the help, and there is no specific plan for junior to move out, and and they're just sandbagging to have more money in their pocket after paying down student loans, it could be kinda shitty. Paying down the debt is not bad; minimizing overall cost of living for the family is not bad; what Boop2133 does with their money beyond loan payments might be bad.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago

"You don't face your fears, you ride them."

Sorry, y'all, but if you're already into tornado chasing, then something that scares you enough to stay home is probably simple prudence, not an emotional block. Either this guy is our protagonist and shouldn't be, or he's an antagonist and his Faustian temptation is unconvincing.

I dunno, maybe the CGI will look cool.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 5 points 9 months ago

The local cryptid in my home town was the "Humanzee" reported to have been created at the "secret lab" of a Yale psychologist/primatologist/eugenicist.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 9 points 9 months ago

I still keep reddit as a read-only resource, and yes, plenty of people still use it. There are niche communities that I sure do wish could hit a critical mass on the threadiverse, and the archive of advice and (mostly) human reviews of stuff are helpful.

That said, either it's reddit or it's me, but any community that's even slightly large seems to have a lost a little thoughtfulness and vibrancy. The takes are more boring, the jokes more repetitive, and I run across others' "goodbye overwrites" a lot more often than I thought I would, and generally in places where it seems like the original posts were genuine attempts to be helpful. Reddit is not gone, but it is reduced, and must eventually fade into the west.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 19 points 9 months ago

Influenced, yes, but it's also important to keep in mind that Lucas was working with a lot of influences, including some that make no sense if viewed as a cohesive allegory. For instance, the power relationship of the Rebels to the Empire has parallels of the Viet Cong to the US military. In a cut scene, though, Biggs specifically (and tediously, hence the cut) cites the Empire's nationalization of private industry as influencing his decision to join the Rebels.

Lucas has always been a well-meaning, left-leaning, white American boomer. He includes relevant ideas based off that worldview in his work, but he's not making grand political statements or really even engaging with political thought in a serious manner. Star Wars is probably more timeless and better for it.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago

Our house will get about 90 seconds or so of totality, so I am really stoked that I get to see it but don’t have to make it a whole thing. Only thing I haven’t decided is if I’m going to try to muscle in on my kid’s elementary school events or grab her after lunch.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago

...but that’s about it

That's not how people work. You think Americans are stubborn about our customary units? Try damn-near everyone (including many Americans) with SI.

Time in particular is unlikely to be significantly reworked because you can only push the inconsistencies out so far. So you divide the day into a thousand beats. Great. A year is still not an integer number of days, and weeks and months are only loosely based on physical (lunar) phenomena at all.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 7 points 9 months ago

Yup. This is corollary to the other post talking about diameter. If you make a perfect circle with your perfect meter of perfect string, suddenly you can no longer perfectly express the diameter in SI units, but rather it's estimated at 31.8309886... cm. Nothing is wrong with the string in either scenario.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm amazed that we could design something that flew at all, given Mars's atmosphere is something like 1/150th of Earth's, but the gravity is closer to 1/3. I'm sure many people know this, but one of the bigger bits of scientific fudging in Andy Weir's The Martian is that a windstorm would fuck up their base like that.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think it's a nice enough idea, and I hope it sets a reasonable baseline for what enthusiast and workstation laptops will be as the entabletification of the mainstream computing device continues, but right now it's sort of a solution waiting for its problem. Economically, it doesn't make much sense for one person to buy one. In an actuarial sense, it's almost certainly better to buy something you like that's less modular, and replace it if it breaks or stops being useful for your intended tasks. Of course if no one who wishes them well buys their computers, they won't last long enough to be relevant.

Strictly speaking, just standardizing and providing the physical specifications ends up making their dongles more like headers on a desktop motherboard, potentially a commodity piece that anyone could replicate. Their other modular components seem to have a similar idea. It all seems elegant enough, and ready to "backscale" into a distributed niche industry if the big companies stop making powerful proprietary machines at the scale that keeps them cheap. As it stands, they sort of ARE de facto proprietary, but I guess the idea is that there will be enough enthusiasts, hardware hackers, and evangelists paying a sizeable, but not crippling, premium to keep them afloat and gain the mindshare to become a new standard (and hopefully halo brand) when people need to build laptops like they build towers now.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 13 points 9 months ago

Just used it to do a clean install to move my ThinkPad from Ubuntu 22.04 to Kubuntu 23.10. Good tool, and much nicer than constantly "burning" ISOs to the flash drive.

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