I’ve hated him since before Trump’s first election, correctly realizing he is a fradulent try hard con man megalomaniac, and have had to endure a decade of people mocking me ‘oh yeah like you are smarter than the richest man on earth yeah right fuck off’.
Yep. I am smarter than him. So were half the people hurling those insults at me, actually.
Elon is actually quite stupid at everything other than conning people.
Much like Trump.
A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers … yeah I can often literally hear when you’ve plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.
Also, if you’re near high tension power lines?
You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.
But… that hum? The buzz?
Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.
Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.
Well I’m glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.
I’ve been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis… yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.
Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).
… Anyway, there’s much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.
There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations… if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.
Hehe sounds about right.
Yeah… a whole lot of gamers… seem to… think they know how game design works, think they know how to solve technical problems…
And well now in the last decade we see the buckets of slop games on steam made by such idiots, confirming that indeed, 95% of them have no clue about anything.
I was an early beta tester for Project Reality, which has now become its own studio, Squad is literally Project Reality just rebuilt in UE 4 to higher quality, because EA wouldn’t liscense out Frostbite to them.
But thats all a tangent to hopefully lend some creedence to when I say: solving network lag and having good netcode is actually extremely complicated and difficult, even still today.
We still see AAA studios fucking up the basics of a lot of netcode stuff in mmo/rpg typr games, where they just make way, way too much shit clientside authoritative, and then have to spend a year or two redesigning the entire game.
This, in turn, is why third party kernel anti cheats have taken off so much, because game devs just fucking give up at making a reasonably secure networked game.
Meanwhile Valve figured this shit out literal decades ago, with highly efficient netcode, and a mostly server side AC solution.
It isn’t possible to stop 100% of cheaters.
It is possible to stop 99.9% of them by designing your game and netcode well.
But that is apparently too hard, so basically the entite industry has outsourced it and/or solved it with massively inefficient and privacy/security compromising AC.
Trump Steaks in -> Trump Bullshit out
Thanks lol.
Unfortunately, I was crippled by an assault and now live off of SSDI, so if the shit eating splatters enough shit my way, I get to die homeless and starving in a wheelchair.
God Bless America.
So, its now around a day or two later.
I was right, Varoufakis is wrong.
Again, Varoufakis idea is:
Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)?
and
Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.
Summarized, he thinks that:
US Bond prices will go up
and/or
US Bond yields will go down
and
The USD will appreciate compared to the Yen, Euro, Renminbi, that is to say, a dollar will be worth more yen, euro, ren.
What is actually happening is:
US Bond prices are going down.
US Bond yields are going up.
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-JPY?window=1M
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-EUR?window=1M
USD is depreciating, not appreciating, compared to yen and euro.
The USD/CNY is exchange rate is set at a fixed rate by China, and they haven’t moved it yet.
So uh, no Mr. Varoufakis, Trump cannot have his cake and eat it too, infact he shit in the cake and then threw the mixture all around the room, now he gets nothing that he wanted.
Trump has destroyed the Bretton Woods USD hegemony, but in a way that is utterly catastrophic for the US, not some extremely clever 12D chess move.
Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.
Exactly.
In that sense, ‘pay to win’ has always been a thing lol.
You sound probably a bit older than me, but I can’t tell you how many times in the 90s and early 00s that I legitimately lost games due to having a garbage tier ping to basically everywhere, and a shitty eMachine, and everyone else just acted like none of that mattered and I was just whining.
Then, surprise, me and the online boys all jump into a server where they all have pings of 80, I have a ping of 200, and then they’re all mad that I cant hit anybody because enemies are rubber banding around like fucking DBZ characters for me.
… Then I do a LAN party with local friends and utterly dominate, routinely.
-.-
I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.
Got gaslit about it by my family as well.
You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.
You’d think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.
Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.
One third of Americans, about 100 million people, are in fact this stupid.
This is (one of) the real horror(s) of fascism:
It forms a cult of personality.
As in, a literal cult, a ‘Dear Leader can do no wrong’, honest to god, utterly delusional cult.
Just go check all the polls of people who still specifically support Trump’s tariff policy.
Combine that with the fact that 20% of the US is functionally illiterate (reading/writing skills of a 2nd grader or worse), and the average literacy level is between a 5th and 6th grader, meaning that next 30% of people are… just barely out of elementary school when it comes to literacy.
Those numbers are for US adults 18 or older btw.
As other commenters have mentioned, I too have multiple family members I have had to go no contact with in the last few years because they are in the MAGA cult, are incredibly aggressive, delusional, manipulativr, etc.
In my case specifically, my Dad fell all the way down the QAnon rabbit hole, and the last time I was with him in person, he was showing me how he manufactures ghost guns (no serial numbers) in his garage with some vintage machining tools.
In a sane world he would be on a red flag list as a potential domestic terrorist.
In the actual world he is just a retiree with a hobby.
I can’t say I’ve seen or heard of him doing that, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
I know Aiden showed up with Trump and gave him a CyberTruck with an American Flag style wrap.
Curiously, this was not long after Aiden literally shot the shit out of his own CyberTruck with an AR15 at close range, and was dismayed to find that it was in fact not bullet proof.
I can’t prove it, but it would not surprise me at all if this was the same actual CyberTruck after some repairs and a wrap applied.
All these fucking idiots spent at least 4 years scouring the globe to find the world’s best shit sandwich chefs, to source premium, wagyu quality bullshit from the finest international suppliers…
And now they don’t enjoy eating the sandwich.
Gulp it down fuckos, yum yum yum, you wanted this.
I’ll also throw Aiden Ross into this group. Actual sub room temp IQ idiot zoomer streamer, MAGA cultist/propigandist, who rose to fame by quite literally sniffing Andrew Tate’s farts …
(I am not joking, he did a video with Tate where at one point Tate gets up from his chair and leaves the shot, Aiden sneakily gets up and huffs the seat of the chair)
… yeah this dumb fuck had a stream in the last 24 hrs where he said he has taken an 8 figure loss on presumably his stocks and crypto from this Trump crash.
That is at least 10 million dollars, bare minimum.
No, you’re misreading this.
Trump is comparing Hamas guards holding hostages to Nazi guards holding prisoners, and he is suggesting that Nazis prison guards acted with love and kindness when a prisoner was in a very dire state.
The he switches to ‘no, the Hamas guards slapped their hostages’… implying they were worse than Nazi death/slave camp guards.
In the last minutes of the stream, Musk made a hardcore difficulty character he named Kekius Maximus, a 4chan-esque meme name he’s used as his display name on X. But Kekius Maximus was not long for the world. Musk died to one of the game’s tutorial bosses due to a bad connection, which subsequently concluded the stream, ending another sad, weird data point in the Elon Musk fake gamer saga.
The guy who claimed he was a top tier Quake player… who in actuality, was only scoring well in online matches, because he played on the T1 high speed, stupid expensive business line at his Zip2 business in the 90s… and performed terribly at LANs…
Well here he is 30 years later, now dying to a tutorial boss, partially due to the shitty connection of his own ISP.
Amazing.
For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?
Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.
Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.
Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.
Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.
You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.
Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.
Anyway woo random trivia.
Ok so… FOSS Dev submits a software (music creation tool) to Steam, to be ‘sold’ for $0, ie, available freely.
On the splash welcome screen to the software, there is a link to his patreon for donations.
Steam’s automated vetting/verification process identifies the keyword ‘patreon’, but misreads a u as a v, or that reversed, in the url, and sends out an automated response saying ‘direct links to request donations are not allowed, please remove’.
FOSS Dev somehow thinks this is a real person talking to him, writes up a response (with valid objections, that Godot and Krita and others feature donation links)…
… He does not recieve a response, but changes the link in his software to point to another webpage with a different url, where that webpage then points to his patreon, and uploads this new build to the automated first pass vetting system…
… and is surprised when this immediately passes vetting and is accepted.
Ok. Mhm. Yep.
…
Does FOSS Dev… did it occur to him that a platform like Steam that recieves, what, thousands of these kinds of applications a month, tens of thousands?, and is extremely well known for having a shockingly small employee headcount… might be using automated systems?
Might have a detailed flow chart for producing what are basically detailed error messages?
Has this person never heard of how call centers for large firms just give their phone support staff a script generated by such systems?
Has this person never used an automated support chat bot that only actually kicks you over to a real person if you specifically request it and/or exhaust its pre built in help options?
I am sorry but this dude is having an emotional breakdown from an automated bot response he doesn’t realize is an automated bot response.
He at no point ever shows the response from Steam to his pointing out that other FOSS software has donation links. There apparently… wasn’t one? … Because actual lengthy responses get assigned to a ticket cue for an actual human to read and reply to at some point, later?
I am absolutely baffled as to how anyone with any familiarity with ‘Steam Support’ could possibly think they are talking to an actual human being in this scenario.
This is like feeling personally betrayed by a nonexistant YouTube video reviewer support person when you upload a video with copyrighted music and are told it won’t be elligible publishing.
…
Now as to the actual Steam policies, the actual issues here… yes, in general, Steam is not geared toward FOSS releases with optional donations, yes it is bullshit that there are older software/games that got grandfathered in, no argument with any of that.
But he already solved the problem, on his end.
He already changed the url to not include a direct donation link by bouncing it to patreon via some other link.
The entire tech support adventure he had with trying to get donation DLCs was completely unneccessary… he already had an accepted build with a donation method accepted.
The entire tax adventure he had is also… he just says he has a very weird and uncommon legal setup with his sole proprietorship, and is frustrated that that makes the process complicated as well.
I get that this is frustrating, but again… if Steam said no to a donation only DLC… and he already has a build, accepted, with a working donation link that entirely circumvents the process, meaning he would not even be getting any payouts from Steam at all, and Steam will not be generating any revenue, whatsoever, because that software is listed as available in Steam for free, so there is no Steam cut…
Then this person is complaining about having to deal will some bs paperwork to be able to have his free software published on Steam, for no cost to him, at a cost to Valve, and he benefits massively by increasing the number of potential eyeballs on his software.
This is analagous to complaining that you have to fill out paperwork to recieve like free food benefits or reduced cost housing or a low cost bus fare.
…
In conclusion, yes, Steam is not the best option for FOSS releases.
Yep. Its a commercial storefront, primarily.
Alternatives exist, that are specifically supportive of FOSS projects with flexible donation/payment models.
I don’t know why you’d go to the hardware store and be angry that they don’t sell fresh fruit.
Should there maybe be some kind of push to try to convince Valve to offer some kind of option like that?
Well… maybe?
If Steam actually did basically what itch.io does, then uh, itch.io stops existing in … what, 2 years?
Yes hello, who is this?
Oh ok, yes.
Ah well you see, our salesman lied to you, Mr. Customer, he just says insane nonsense that bears no relation to reality in order to get you to give us money. That’s his job. Anyway, when Mr. Salesman gave you a delivery date, he didn’t tell us over here in product assembly about that until about 2 weeks ago, and it’ll take us about 8 weeks to actually make your order quantity.
What’s that? No, no problems here on the assembly line, we actually churned out 15% more widgets last quarter than the quarter before that, and we’re on track for current quarter production numbers to also grow by 15%.
Yep, yep, sorry about that, and that’s a good point, Mr. Salesman may have just added a 0 to those growth figures we reported to him when he was talking with you.
Of course! Thanks for doing business with us! I’ll hand you back over to Mr. Salesman now.
…
Ahem.
Fuck sales.
This is what I would actually say, and this is why I apparently have ‘poor interpersonal skills’.
Yes.
Literally Hitler.
‘My New Order’, a collection of Hitler’s speeches up through 1939.
Trump kept it in his bedside table in the 80s and 90s, according to his then wife.
Did people not know about this or forget this?
Trump literally routinely read Hitler’s speeches before he went to bed for years, then got very defensive when asked about it.
Lefties who were politically active during Trump’s 2015 campaign were… fairly concerned about this, and basically everyone to the right of them just screamed ‘You’re just calling him a fascist because everything you don’t like is fascist’ at us.
Did this whole thing seriously get memory holed this hard that you genuinely didn’t know this?
Or are you just younger and/or weren’t so politically involved a decade ago?
Ah.
I am American.
I live in hell.
We have a much broader problem of corrupt grifters in… basically everything, at every level of society.
=[
Sorry for doing the American thing and assuming you are also American.
Do the humane thing and just abort them in the womb with an adblocker.
If you are using some app where that isn’t possible, stop using it.