Canadian here. I spent most of July 1 in bed! Was not feeling patriotic! Did not watch any fireworks.

You don’t need money or a state to have capitalism, you just need private property.

Capitalism wasn’t invented, it was discovered, just like fire. Capitalism is what you get when the state relinquishes its control over capital.

Lots of people drink bottled water, soda, beer, or other drinks not immediately connected to the water supply. Furthermore, poisons are unlikely to remain undetected long enough to kill the entire population. While a strong dose of a deadly poison like cyanide can kill in minutes it’s likely to be detected quickly due to how rapidly its effects begin to show up.

A slower-acting, accumulating poison like dimethylmercury could potentially kill more people because its effects don’t show up immediately. On the other hand, the delayed effects of the poison would provide the victims a chance to retaliate against the poisoners.

Either way, it’s a very crude and unfocused attack against a population which is unlikely to achieve any political aim besides wanton destruction and outrage.

Medieval technology is vastly more complex, broader in scope, etc. compared to the Stone Age stuff on Primitive Technology. It’s actually extremely challenging to go from scratch like he does and then achieve medieval-level ironworking. He can barely make a few little iron pellets which are excessively-hard (too much carbon) and need further processing to become workable. He is a very long way from building a proper medieval smelter capable of producing pig iron or other cast iron products.

Same with any pair activity. Paddling a canoe is no fun if one person doesn’t like water and wants outta there ASAP!

It’s a cognitive dissonance thing for collectors. They want the preserved, playable copy but they don’t ever want to break the seal because that lowers the value.

I bet there are a bunch of collectors out there in possession of empty game boxes (with placebo weights) that have been expertly resealed and then submitted to grading companies for a seal of approval.

The guy seems like a shill. A hired goon who successfully destroyed Ross’s movement, just like they planned!

Yes, it is a choice. However one of the biggest problems is that so many of the good choices are gone. I’m talking about the positive social institutions and community organizations people used to belong to. The third spaces.

Communities have fragmented. Neighbours hate each other. Both of my neighbours hate our family. One is a childless, alcoholic husband and wife who also hate each other (they used to be nice years ago) who also hate us and give us creepy looks all the time. The other is green lawn-obsessed neighbour who hates us for the pine trees we have growing on our property and refuse to cut down (at our own expense) to suit their tastes.

We’re a society of severely mentally ill, isolated, confused, and angry people. Our villages and communities are all gone. We’re all a bunch of islands unto ourselves.

The manosphere is one symptom of a much larger problem. Look at it in isolation and you’ll miss the big picture. Authoritarianism is on the rise globally. Loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. Society’s traditional institutions are a distant memory. All we have remaining are loose groups of people shouting at each other as the spectre of war lurks in the background.

Yeah. When you start to realize that video games are just success surrogates to help you compensate for a lack of success in real life, it gets depressing fast!

I did so much gaming in my 20s. Now in my 40s it’s hard to motivate myself to play more than a few minutes!

Yes, of course. Look at Amish communities. Largely self-sufficient and thriving.

People who haven’t tried it greatly underestimate the amount of work though. I’d recommend dipping your toe in with some gardening at home first. Jumping in the deep end will usually lead to failure and disillusionment.

Make sure you have a doctor monitor you with regular blood tests. Supplementing vitamin D can lead to dangerous levels of calcium in the blood.

8 hours? What a luxury!

No, though there’s been plenty of marketing where they claim “we know how to build AGI.”

They have marketed ChatGPT as a general purpose AI from the very beginning, though the question of how to leverage that has remained open.

I was very careful not to use the term AGI for this reason. General intelligence tool isn’t the same thing. It’s a much weaker claim, yet it’s also a far stronger claim than any purpose-built software. The ambiguity is part of their marketing strategy.

If ChatGPT were marketed as a toaster nobody would bat an eye. The reason so many are laughing is because ChatGPT is marketed as a general intelligence tool.

Nothing like Prince of Persia. Has that overwrought modern platformer control scheme (with a zillion different things you can do in the air) that every single other modern platformer has. No thanks!

Anyone know of any modern platformer games without all that nonsense? The idea is to feel more like a human who actually needs to think before jumping. I want to feel the weight of my character, feel a strong sense of momentum, and be fully committed to jumps. Air jumps and mid-air momentum control are not my style.

That’s a strange list. OpenAI doesn’t only offer SaaS for end users, it also offers API access which puts it into the infrastructure game with the likes of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure (which actually offers OpenAI services and pushes them out to Windows users en masse).

6 million units at $700 a pop is $4.2 billion in revenue. Much closer to 1/2 of $10 billion than 1/10.

Apple has never made more money from the App Store than from iPhone hardware sales. When the iPhone launched the App Store didn’t exist yet. Over time, Apple’s revenue from services (including the App Store) has grown dramatically to around $26 billion per quarter today, though that is still less than what they earn in iPhone sales (a bit over $50 billion per quarter in 2024).