The technological barriers for a self-sustaining colony are high for sure. I hope humanity eventually does get there, but if it’s all controlled by oligarchs then it’s hardly progress for humanity, despite any major technological breakthroughs.
American obsession with money is weird when you think about it. Money is only useful when the human creativity, ingenuity, effort, etc. you want is for sale. Billionaires think their bunkers will save them after they make the world go to shit, but nobody is going to take care of these helpless bastards when there is nothing for their money to buy. Then there is the fact that money often ruins intrinsic motivation, which is why, for example, looking at the work of great artists and composers from the past, it’s clearly evident which works were commissioned vs. which ones were truly inspired work. A lot of open source software is inspired work that can be used without the limitations of paid software. Anyone running the arr stack with Jellyfin on a shitty old laptop knows all the enshittified streaming services combined can’t offer a superior experience. People with a loving and supportive family are wealthier than Elon Musk, who despite his net worth reeks of desperation for any superficial attention he can get. America is supposedly a “wealthy” country, but any country with a government that actually cares about its people and ensures they have a social safety net, clean food to eat without 1000 toxic additives, etc. is infinitely more wealthy than the USA.
I’m also quite happy with the LCD model myself. Most games are running on medium settings on a low-res screen without RTX, so the eye candy is at a minimum anyway and I never imagined a better screen would make much difference.
The beauty of the Deck is how easy it is to pick it up and play an hour here and there wherever you are, so I’ve played a lot of games I’ve been meaning to play for years that I frankly would’ve not have gotten to play otherwise. Better with less eye candy than not at all.
I got the LED 64GB model last year for like $280 and added a $80 1TB SSD myself, which is an easy 20 minute job. For such a low powered machine, mid 300s is about what it’s worth to me, or otherwise might as well get a gaming laptop. I have a MSI laptop with a RTX 4060, 32GB of RAM that was around $800 on sale, which I mainly use for Blender, so I can’t see paying anything close to that for a handheld.
I think paid open source like GPL Blender addons from BlenderMarket, Gumroad, etc. is a good option. You pay for it to support the devs while also owning what you bought.
I haven’t really compared the specs of between them recently, but I have the Pro, and the main decider for me at the time was that it was $50 more and has Ethernet. That being said, I added a USB Ethernet adapter to an Onn device and it works, though the first one I tried didn’t work. It was worth the $50 at the time not to deal with that for the Shield.
Anyone successfully installed LineageOS on Nvidia Shield or Onn devices? I ran the Konstakang AndroidTV build of Lineage on a Raspberry Pi 4 a couple years ago, and it was nice in how uncluttered and non-spywarey it was, but I ended up buying a Shield because hardware decoding never worked well and the frame rate drops were unbearable.
I don’t want any device for my TV that makes it hard to install free apps like Jellyfin without logging into an account. I tried fake accounts with Apple devices in the past and ended up with a couple devices that were basically bricked when the fake email account I used got disabled due to lack of activity.
Same. I think it’s also possible to flash them with LineageOS, but swapping out the launcher and using adb to remove anything superfluous is all I’ve done so far.
I currently use rclone with encryption to iDrive e2. I’m considering switching to Backrest, though.
I originally tried Backblaze b2, but exceeded their API quotas in their free tier and iDrive has “free” API calls, so I recently bought a year’s worth. I still have a 2 year Proton subscription and tried rclone with Proton drive, but it was too slow.
I don’t see a problem with thumbnails that accurately portray the contents of the video, since only a small number of characters can fit in the title and a screenshot of one frame from the video doesn’t say much, so it can be difficult to get a sense for the video at a glance otherwise. I do get really annoyed with thumbnails that are deceptive in any way. If the thumbnail seems like it might be deceptive, I’ll usually read the comments before watching the video, or quickly scroll through it to see if it’s BS or not. Sometimes, the thumbnail advertises something that happens at the end of a 20 minute video that could’ve been 30s, in which case, I’ll scroll usually through to the end instead of watching the whole thing. If it weren’t for the thumbnail, though, I might not have watched it all.
Although I think Steve Jobs was a real piece of shit, his product instincts were often on point, and his message in this video really stuck with me. I think companies shoehorning AI in everything would do well to start with something useful they want to enable and work backwards to the technology as he described here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48j493tfO-o
I love me some self-hosted ML models, such as Fooocus.
Convincing your employer to reduce AWS costs, or better yet, go with a different cloud provider would likely have more financial impact than boycotting the portion of the company that represents a smaller percentage of their operating profit.
Wait until the 15th to order everything you were going to order this week. That will show them!
FTFY.
I found this publication in the British Medical Journal interesting about how evidence-based medicine is undermined by financial incentives. Science is the best institution we have for understanding the truth, but it’s far from incorruptible. It’s especially disappointing that the companies profiting from a product are in many instances the ones doing the studies to prove their safety and effectiveness. The corporate capture of the governmental agencies tasked with regulating them is also quite concerning, as is the state of academia.
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o702