Thrashy

Thrashy, 4 days ago

Different Vance. Cy Vance was the prosecutor who treated Epstein with kid gloves. J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, who was briefly the darling of liberal media types for showing how the folks of Appalachia and the Rust Belt have been abandoned by those in power, before realizing he could do better for himself by gargling spraytan-orange mushroom dick and riding Trump’s coattails into right-wing demagoguery. He’s a Senator from Ohio now.

Thrashy, 7 days ago

Gale is my least-favorite party member from a personality standpoint, so I asked my wife why she’s always romancing him in every playthrough. She said, “I dunno, why would I be attracted to an autistic-coded nerd who talks like he ate a thesaurus?” and I don’t know how to process that.

Thrashy, 7 days ago

Former child prodigy with a Special Interest he immediately shares with anybody who takes a passing interest in him, prone to over explaining, so uncomfortable with emotionally charged situations he sends an astral projection to fill in for him… I personally don’t think it’s intended to be read that way, but I can see how some might choose to do so.

Thrashy, 6 days ago

The play-by-email mode was broken to the point of uselessness in Civ5 and I don’t think they fixed in it in 6 (you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn’t run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn’t join even if you did get the damn thing running) so my friends and I tried once and gave up. I would love for 7 to have a robust PBEM system so that we can play together without needing to spend hours a week watching paint dry while everybody else plots their turns, but I’m not holding my breath.

Thrashy, 8 days ago

Absolutely nothing? Were you spinning “Israeli interests secretly control the entire world” conspiracy theories over here too, or was that just in c/technology?

Thrashy, 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Unfortunately I can’t bring reciepts on account of your screeds getting rightfully binned by the moderators, but there is a difference between:

“The Jewish people have a strong history of valuing education that’s put a lot of them into the middle and upper classes and have also historically been the victims of vicious oppression, and the Israeli state has never been shy about using either of those things as a cudgel to get away with their own human rights abuses”

and

“Israel is secretly in control of Intel and other vast swathes of the Western economy and are manipulating everything behind the scenes for their nefarious ends!”

The latter of which is what you were spewing in the Technology community a few weeks ago and earned the ban-hammer over there, and which makes up a not-inconsiderable part of the rest of your comment history. I find Israel’s history of oppression – which, to be clear, extends not just to Palestinians but to the non-Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora as well – and their current war crime spree in Gaza utterly abhorrent, but you’ve let yourself run all the way to “actually the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were kinda true” in opposition, and that’s some racist shit which you’ve been rightly banned over from multiple communities. You can oppose the Israeli state without engaging in rank antisemitism.

Thrashy, 9 days ago

There’s definitely going to be a shift back in his direction amongst the faithful as conservative media does its work, but the thing to look for is whether than holds for low-information “undecideds” who make up about a third of the electorate. Depending on how much his case stays in the media, how much it affects his own ability to reach voters (i.e., does he get sentenced to prison pending appeals? Does he end up under house arrest with a parole officer looking over his shoulder?), and if people like the Minutemen or Proud Boys engage in violence over it, people in the middle who might have otherwise voted for him on the basis of “economy feel bad, maybe different big man make economy feel better?” might continue to peel away from him, and that’s a greater risk to his chances than what the diehards will or won’t do.

Thrashy, 12 days ago

This is a reference to upscaling algorithms informed by machine learning a la Nvidia’s DLSS – seems like AMD is finally going to add the inference hardware to their GPUs that will let them close that technological gap with the competition. I’m guessing it won’t come until RDNA5, though.

Thrashy, 13 days ago

When I was a kid, Dad would bring home these little foam airplanes that the FedEx office in his building handed out as swag for people who used their services. I loved those things, and I’d be lying if that childhood positive association with FedEx didn’t have some small effect on my preferences as an adult – but it was free.. I think that’s a bit less insidious than paying for the privilege of giving my kid merch pushing a particular brand association on them.

Thrashy, 18 days ago

According to reporting on the jury selection process, one of the jurors reported that their primary news source was Truth Social… so it’s a distinct possibility. In the case of a lone holdout, though, the judge and the rest of the jury are both likely to lean hard on them to get with the program.

Thrashy, 17 days ago

I was going to say so, but the NY state code requires the defense to assent to the replacement of an unfit juror, and we all know damn well that they won’t do that.

Thrashy, 22 days ago

I mean, if nothing else they got Republicans to embrace gun control.

Thrashy, 23 days ago

As the parent of a toddler, there have been a lot of these lately between Ukraine, Gaza, the earthquake in Turkey and any of a dozen other natural disasters and brutal wars of ethnic cleansing, and I don’t expect the pace to slow down soon.

Thrashy, 24 days ago

Good for you. In 2008 I went from having standing offers for paid internships at a half-dozen architecture firms to not knowing of a single open entry-level position in a 500 mile radius, and it stayed that way for almost three years. I graduated in 2010 and spent the next year mostly-unemployed in my parents’ spare bedroom, applying to every listing for a fresh-out position nationwide and not getting so much an automated courtesy email to let me know my resume didn’t make it the top of the pile of hundreds of others doing the exact same thing. I spent a year working for less than minimum wage as an illegally-misclassified “contractor” sorting mail and running errands, just to get an architecture firm on my resume. My best friend from architecture school became a barista and joined the National Guard to cover his student loan payments, and didn’t land a job in the field he spent five years training to enter for another five years.

Inflation sucks right now, but this is a fucking cakewalk compared to the Great Recession. Lucky for you that you were in a position to capitalize on the misfortune of others, but don’t forget for a second that millions of us went through years of misery.

Thrashy, 27 days ago

My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn’t tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing – this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower’s use.

Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as “a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation” but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it – flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That’s a lot of bad choices to make at once.

Thrashy, 27 days ago (edited 27 days ago)

If it ain’t leaking that means it’s empty, etc…

Thrashy, 28 days ago

This is the thing. Netanyahu is a sociopath who needs a forever war or else he eventually has to face the music. Without outside military intervention, this only ends in one of two ways:

1. either Bibi drags it out long enough to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, claim he defeated Hamas, and memory-hole the intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 attacks to succeed in the first place, or
2. he loses control of his political coalition, elections are called, and he’s quickly removed from his PM position, put on trial for corruption and then thrown in prison for what will probably be the rest of his life.

Prolonging the war doesn’t guarantee he won’t end up in scenario 2 anyway, but from his perspective at the very least he’s running out the clock. Dead Gazans (and to a lesser extent dead Israelis) don’t matter to him.

Thrashy, 30 days ago

I can’t wait for Cold War 2: Thermonuclear Boogaloo.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

I mean, at this point an “ideal” solution (such as it is) would be for the US to stop stonewalling UN Security Council resolutions so that the other members can greenlight a peacekeeping operation a la Kosovo, that would stop the fighting, open up aid flows, and create an avenue for effective enforcement of the 1948 treaty boundaries on the way towards implementing a functional two-state solution. But that seems pretty unlikely right now.

Thrashy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

They’re flying these in very low and slow, which is hard for SAM radars to detect and lock on to unless you’re right up next to them – and once they’re past the front lines Russia doesn’t have many (if any) point defense installations.

In fact I imagine that the economic impacts of these attacks may be a secondary goal, and the main intent is actually to force Russia to pull SAM systems off the front line and redeploy them across the Russian interior to defend facilities they thought were safely out of Ukraine’s reach. The fewer defenses on the front line, the more capable Ukraine’s air force is to support efforts on the ground.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

This is the guy who couldn’t even be bothered to spell his own name correctly, after all. I don’t get the sense that he’s going over anything with a fine-toothed comb on the best of days.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

I don’t like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It’d probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it’s anticipated to create from radiation exposure.

Bottom line, when you’re talking about reactors that aren’t pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that’s reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.

Thrashy, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

In fairness, several others in the room died years-to-decades later of leukemias that were arguably attributable to their exposures. That said, the Slotin criticality accident is one of those cases where nuclear disasters end up being both completely horrifying and a lot less deadly than you think they ought to be.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

It’s the first clip in this compilation, but they’re all pretty good… www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wgwtc1U6c4

Thrashy, 1 month ago

The “I’m gonna give you $100 to fuck off” school of military strategy.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

I fully expect a dissenting opinion from Alito and Thomas that attempts to retcon nominative determinism (“Donald Trump can do whatever he wants, but Joe Biden is a stinky poo poo head and must go directly to jail”) into a core pillar of Constitutional originalism, but I don’t think there’s a majority on the court that would sign on to an opinion legitimizing drone strikes on the opposition party. I’m fairly certain the end result will be a significant narrowing of Trump’s criminal exposure regarding the January 6 insurrection, but the biggest impact that the court has made with this case is dragging out the process of trying it to the point that it likely will not be decided before the election. If they help Trump run out the clock and it winds him the election, then he can instruct the DoJ to kill the case, and his toadies on the court will have handed him a win while being able to maintain the thin veneer that they’re not nakedly partisan operators. If Biden wins anyways, they’re not in danger of catching flak from the MAGA crowd because they will have done their part.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

The heyday of the Eve Online subreddit was great for this shit, and it was always good for a laugh when something that made complete sense in-game hit r/all and started freaking people out. Some bangers were:

• How do I sell a hanger full of corpses?
• I just killed someone for the first time! I’m so excited!
• Does anyone know if drug production is a good source of income?
• I want to kill someone, I need help.
• Did you ever regret killing someone?
• Industry Question: Drug Labs
• Assasination Request

Thrashy, 1 month ago

This used to hold broad cultural applicability, back in the Before Times when the “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong” crowd was still excluded from the political mainstream. Norms excluding out-and-proud ethnofascists from official, public participation in the English-speaking political right started to seriously slip around the time of Obama’s election and certainly ceased to exist after Trump’s win in 2016, but prior to that time “Nazi” was very much more often an ad-hominem attack than an accurate description of somebody’s politics.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

For those of you who recognized the Transport Tycoon graphics, enjoy this magnificent recreation of the soundtrack with live instruments that the original composer put together several years ago.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

Studies have shown that in most cases that you’d care most about, extreme punishment does not serve as an effective deterrent to bad behavior. Creating the Torment Nexus as a way to enhance prison sentences serves only to increase the degree of cruelty involved in our already vengeance-oriented justice system.

Thrashy, 1 month ago

It’s been many years since I read them, so I don’t know them off the top of my head. That said, as I recall the explanation was that:

• most violent crimes are crimes of passion, and since they tend to occur in the heat of the moment people aren’t thinking about consequences
• a significant amount of property crimes are acts of economic desperation and/or crimes of opportunity, where the consequences of being caught are either unimportant compared to the more immediate survival needs of the perpetrator, or not fully considered when presented with a tempting opportunity for quick gain

and as such, most of what people think of when they think of criminal activity isn’t well controlled by draconian punishment, and is instead better addressed by improving the general welfare of the most at-risk populations, and focusing incarceration on rehabilitating offenders so as to be able to safely reintegrate into society.

If I recall correctly, white collar crime is one of the few exceptions, since it tends to require quite a lot of planning and forethought to carry out… and if I’m perfectly honest, I’m fine with a billionaire CEO being sentenced to one hour in the Torment Nexus for every hour of stolen wages his company profited from, but alas, that’s not the world we live in.

Thrashy, 2 months ago

The management agency that leased the house I lived in while I was in college tried to withhold our security deposit because we didn’t provide proof of carpet cleaning.

The house had all hardwood floors.

Thrashy, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

There are so many things that were horrifying about the US’s prosecution of the Global War on Terror, but at least when confronted with the same problem the US was like, “what if we invented a knife missile that can hit a guy in the driver’s seat of a car without hurting anybody standing next to the car?” whereas the IDF took the position that a 100:1 ratio of innocent bystander to presumed militant is totally acceptable (in an environment where fully half of those innocent bystanders are children to boot). Just absolutely ghoulish levels of inhumanity.

Thrashy, 2 months ago

Given what they’ve done elsewhere I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 100% remote-piloted via satellite internet (most of their sea drones are controlled via Starlink, for instance) but in the case of fixed infrastructure, a smart fusion of GPS, IMU, and potentially video image matching for terminal guidance (these aren’t big bombs in the grand scheme of things and it’s important to hit the right part of a sprawling refinery or factory complex in order to knock it out for an appreciable amount of time) could overcome GPS jamming, and be well within the technical capabilities of the Ukrainian arms industry. TERCOM as implemented in the Tomahawk runs on early-80’s computing power, and it’s only gotten easier. Machine vision frameworks are widely available and well-understood software these days, and can run on fairly modest hobby hardware to boot.

Thrashy, 3 months ago

To your last point, compare and contrast with Obama, whose speech patterns were chock-full of long pauses where you could just tell he was doing higher-order political math on the next phrase. To an extent that’s because that’s what Obama had to do or else the Hannities and Carlsons of the world would find some minute quibble they could build out into an elaborate conspiracy with which to fan the right-wing outrage machines for another week… but for all the other problems I have with the man I do appreciate the no-fucks-given mindset Biden’s brought to the job. The right wing media hate machine has become fully decoupled from reality at this point; there’s no reason to soft-shoe around things that might set them off anymore.

Thrashy, 3 months ago

I think they see Trump, and say well, he’s an asshole, but he’s not one of those weird plastic people who’ve been stealing from my pension fund and making sure my health insurance doesn’t work, and he seems to hate them too and not afraid to get violent with them. Hey, that sounds pretty fuckin’ good from where I’m standing. He’s got my vote.

Rural Americans by and large don’t have pensions anymore if in fact they ever did, and they’ve been thoroughly brainwashed to believe that their insurance worked better back when you could be kicked off your plan for costing too much and be blacklisted from getting any in the first place if you had a pre-existing condition. No, the thing that they liked about Trump was that he said he hated all the people they hated too, and he gave them license to speak their hate aloud after decades of being told that they were bad people if they hated somebody because of some indelible feature of their origin or identity.

Thrashy, 3 months ago

• No trigger discipline
• No hands on the wheel
• Open container of alcoholic beverage
• Speeding egregiously
• Driving a Nissan

All checks out.

Thrashy, 3 months ago

Good good, it is an Altima, isn’t it? I didn’t dare to assume but after a bit of Googling the interior is a dead ringer for an 07-12 Altima – objectively the hooptiest of all Altimas. This guy really is a walking stereotype.

Thrashy, 3 months ago

I used to know a poli-sci researcher who was trying to take a big-data look at the success and failure of revolutions, taking in variables like “how many demonstrators rallied against the government?” “How many dissidents were disappeared by internal security forces?” and even things like “how many bullet holes are there on the buildings around the main protest venue in the capital?”

I asked him once if he’d discovered the secret to a successful revolution, and he just grimaced at me.

Thrashy, 3 months ago

What’s a little Third Reich here or Reign of Terror there between friends, eh? Besides , it’s not like a little bit of anti-intellectual purging or nationwide famine isn’t worth enduring to get to a better world for the people left afterwards!

Thrashy, 3 months ago

Ukraine claims north of 400k, which is undoubtedly optimistic, but allied intelligence agencies have previously floated numbers around 1/2 to 2/3rds of Ukraine’s public claims, which is still an utterly appalling number of dead Russian men. Russia’s tactical approach from the start has been more or less to treat their mobilized conscripts as expendable. For politically-important objectives their commanders have been perfectly happy to dump fresh meat into the metaphorical meat grinder until the gears jam, and then claim victory.

Thrashy, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

It’s a damn shame, too, because the commercial software in the sector is abusively overpriced, and there’s just nothing to be done about it (unless somebody can get antitrust regulators to pay attention, which hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not holding my breath for it).

It’s not like the FOSS options out there aren’t fundamentally capable of doing the job, either – it’s just that they almost universally seem to have been designed by people who think of GUIs as a concession to the normies, and don’t understand typical or expected design workflows. I’d love to be able to use FreeCAD instead of Fusion for hobby projects, but just creating a sketch in the former is like fighting through molasses compared to the process in Fusion. A bit of focus on UI instead of under the hood features would go along way towards making these programs viable competitors – look at how Blender’s perception changed amongst professionals after it ditched its idiosyncratic pre-2.7 UI, for instance.

Don’t even get me started on BIM software… Ridiculous subscription pricing, barely a bug fix to be found, and feature requests ignored for a decade or more! The last release of Revit’s headline new feature was (drumroll, please…) A dark UI mode. Good to see Autodesk put my employer’s seven-figure subscription payments to good use. 😑

Thrashy, 3 months ago

I still participate in a few small subs that Lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass to replicate, and even in many of those there has been a marked decline in the quality of posts and discussion. It’s painfully clear that the mods who left during the API protest were putting in serious effort, and the scabs that replaced them aren’t up to the prior standard. Makes it a lot easier to leave most of Reddit behind, at least.

Thrashy, 3 months ago

I appreciate how quickly this has mutated from a jab about how frequently she flies on her private jet to “Taylor Swift is jet, like if true”

Thrashy, 4 months ago

I appreciate the “explain the movie plot badly” energy of this post.

Thrashy, 4 months ago

I was a longtime Debian/apt diehard but I’m coming down on the same side of late. My homelab runs Proxmox (Debian based) with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS containers for more up-to-date packages, but my attempt to use KDE Neon (Ubuntu-based) for my desktop PC was a disaster. I’ve switched to Nobara (Fedora-based), and other than having to switch from Wayland back X11 because Wayland on NVidia breaks a bunch of things I need for work it’s been relatively smooth sailing.

Thrashy, 4 months ago

I loved the in-the-moment gameplay and the narrative arc they had going there for a while. Despite myself I’m still invested in some of the characters… but it’s one of those games where I really recognized how all-consuming the engagement treadmill I had been on once I stepped away. It’s probably a good thing for me that it’s in the shitter at the moment, or I could easily get lured back in.

Oh, and the r/DtG mods deleted my highly-upvoted Lightfall “lore/prediction” shitpost that was a massive wall of text winding up to an Attack on Titan pun, so fuck 'em.

Thrashy, 4 months ago

The old Trackmans have very limited inputs relative to modern gaming mice. There are some trackballs with scroll wheels, but they have different ergonomics (you rotate the ball with your thumb rather than your index, middle, and ring fingers) that my buddies aren’t fond of.

Given that theirs is a very niche use case, I don’t think anybody’s gonna make a trackball to suit them that also has a scroll wheel, but I guess if somebody was motivated enough, there’s an opportunity for some sort of ESP-based open source hardware.