https://www.pewpewtactical.com/glock-18-sale-cant-have-one/
The Glock 18 is a full-sized automatic pistol chambered in 9mm capable of 1,200 rounds a minute.
https://www.firequest.com/AJ299.html
Glock 9MM 100rd Drum - Fits Glock 17/18/19/26
It’s all about the DPS.
It takes more work to avoid salt buildup, but you can evaporate saltwater as a place to dump heat, and we aren’t gonna run out of saltwater any time soon. 'Course, only so many places have saltwater access.
EDIT: You evaporate enough water for cooling, you can increase rainfall somewhat in the local area, which boosts crop growth measurably. I remember reading an article about nuclear power plants that use evaporative cooling producing that effect.
kagis
The growing prevalence of clean energy raises the question of possible associated externalities. This article studies the effects of nuclear power plant development (and, as a result, the increased amount of water in the atmosphere from evaporative cooling systems) on nearby crop yields and finds that an average nuclear power plant increases local soybean yields by 2 and corn yields by 1 percent.
Long Glock is loooong.
I think the scale on that model might be off a bit or something.
As @papertowels@mander.xyz said.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control
Historically, if you were in a noisy environment, you could get closed-back, circumaural headphones — headphones that fit around your ears and had a lot of sound-absorption padding — to help soak up the sound. I still use decent non-ANC circumaural headphones at home.
There are also some people who are more-willing to tolerate discomfort than I am who get in-ear buds, which block noise in their ear canal, and on top of that, fit ear protectors intended for industrial use, like 3M X5 Peltor ear protectors, which have even more passive sound absorption stuff than current circumaural headphones do, and are even larger.
That sort of thing works well on higher frequency sound, but not as well on low-frequency stuff, like engine noise, large fans, stuff like that.
ANC basically has microphones in your headphones, picks up on what sounds are showing up at your ear, and then tries to compute and play back a sound that produces destructive interference at your ear. That is, if you look at the sound waves, where the environmental sound is low pressure, it plays back high pressure signal, and when the environmental sound is high pressure, it plays back low pressure signal. It’s not perfect, or it could make environmental sound totally inaudible. But high-end ANC headphones are pretty impressive these days. I have a pair of Sennheiser Momentum 4 headphones — good, though not the best ANC out there in 2025, and I don’t personally recommend these for other reasons — and when they kick on, the headphones are designed to have the ANC fade in; same thing happens in reverse, fades out when you flip the ANC off. It sounds almost as if fans and the like around you are powering up and down when that happens, very eerie if you’ve never experienced it before. Even the sounds that it doesn’t do so well on, like people talking, it significantly reduces in volume.
And ANC does best with the other side of the spectrum, the side that passive sound absorption doesn’t — the low-frequency stuff, especially regular sounds like fans. So having both a lot of passive sound absorption and ANC on a given pair of headphones let the two work well together.
People often use cell phones in noisy environments, with a lot of people around, and ANC makes it a lot easier to hear music or whatever without background sound interfering. I think that it’s very likely that people will, long term, mostly wind up using headphones with ANC (short of moving to something more elaborate like a direct brain interface or something). It’s not really all that important if you’re in a quiet environment, and I don’t bother using ANC headphones on my desktop at home. But if you’re in random environments — waiting a grocery store line, in a restaurant with music playing over the restaurant’s speakers, on an airplane with the drone of the airplane engines, whatever — it really helps to reduce that background sound. ANC isn’t that new. I think that I remember it mostly being billed as useful for airplane engine noise back when, which they’re a good fit for. But it’s gotten considerably better over the years. For me, in 2025, good ANC is something that I really want to have for smartphone use.
The problem is that in order to do ANC, you need at least a microphone, preferably an array, and somewhere you need to have a model of the sound transmission through the headphones and be running signal processing on the input sound to generate that output sound. In theory, you could do it on an attached computer if you had a fast data interface, but in practice, ANC-capable headphones are sold as self-contained units that handle all that themselves. So you gotta power the little computer in the headphones. That means that you probably have batteries and at least for full size headphones (rather than earbuds) you might as well stick a USB interface on them to charge them, even if the user is using Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. And if you’ve done that, it isn’t much more circuitry to just let the headphones act as USB headphones, so in general, ANC headphones tend to also be USB-capable. My Momentum 4 headphones have all of Bluetooth, USB-C, and a traditional headphones interface, but…I just haven’t really wound up using the headphones interface if I have the other options available on a given device. Might be convenient if I were using some device that only had headphones output. shrugs
If it honestly doesn’t permit the User password to be reset, is there a “factory reset the whole BIOS” option?
I mean, there were legitimate technical issues with the standard, especially on smartphones, which is where they really got pushed out. Most other devices do have headphones jacks. If I get a laptop, it’s probably got a headphones jack. Radios will have headphones jacks. Get a mixer, it’s got a headphones jack. I don’t think that the standard is going to vanish anytime soon in general.
I like headphones jacks. I have a ton of 1/8" and 1/4" devices and headphones that I happily use. But they weren’t doing it for no reason.
From what I’ve read, the big, driving one that drove them out on smartphones was that the jack just takes up a lot more physical space in the phone than USB-C or Bluetooth. I’d rather just have a thicker phone, but a lot of people wouldn’t, and if you’re going all over the phone trying to figure out what to eject to buy more space, that’s gonna be a big target. For people who do want a jack on smartphones, which invariably have USB-C, you can get a similar effect to having a headphones jack by just leaving a small USB-C audio interface with a headphones jack on the end of your headphones (one with a passthrough USB-C port if you also want to use the USB-C port for charging).
A second issue was that the standard didn’t have a way to provide power (there was a now-dead extension from many years back, IIRC for MD players, that let a small amount of power be provided with an extra ring). That didn’t matter for a long time, as long as your device could put out a strong enough signal to drive headphones of whatever impedance you had. But ANC has started to become popular now, and you need power for ANC. This is really the first time I think that there’s a solid reason to want to power headphones.
The connection got shorted when plugging things in and out, which could result in loud sound on the membrane.
USB-C is designed so that the springy tensioning stuff that’s there to keep the connection solid is on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord rather than the (expensive, hard to replace) device; I understand from past reading that this was a major reason that micro-USB replaced mini-USB. Instead of your device wearing out, the cord wears out. Not as much of an issue for headphones as mini-USB, but I think that it’s probably fair to say that it’s desirable to have the tensioning on the cord side.
On USB-C, the right part breaks. One irritation I have with USB-C is that it is…kind of flimsy. Like, it doesn’t require that much force pushing on a plug sideways to damage a plug. However — and I don’t know if this was a design goal for USB-C, though I suspect it was — my experience has been that if that happens, it’s the plug on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord that gets damaged, not the device. I have a television with a headphones jack that I destroyed by tripping over a headphones cord once, because the headphones jack was nice and durable and let me tear components inside the television off. I’ve damaged several USB-C cables, but I’ve never damaged the device they’re connected to while doing so.
On an interesting note, the standard is extremely old, probably one of the oldest data standards in general use today; the 1/4" mono standard was from phone switchboards in the 1800s.
EDIT: Also, one other perk of using USB-C instead of a built-in headphones jack on a smartphone is that if the DAC on your phone sucks, going the USB-C-audio-interface route means that you can use a different DAC. Can’t really change the internal DAC. I don’t know about other people, but last phone I had that did have an audio jack would let through a “wub wub wub” sound when I was charging it on USB off my car’s 12V cigarette lighter adapter — dirty power, but USB power is often really dirty. Was really obnoxious when feeding my car’s stereo via its AUX port. That’s very much avoidable for the manufacturer by putting some filtering on the DAC’s power supply, maybe needs a capacitor on the thing, but the phone manufacturer didn’t do it, maybe to save space or money. That’s not something that I can go fix. I eventually worked around it by getting a battery-powered Bluetooth receiver that had a 1/8" headphones jack, cutting the phone’s DAC out of the equation. The phone’s internal DAC worked fine when the phone wasn’t charging, but I wanted to have the phone plugged in for (battery hungry) navigation stuff when I was driving.
Sony WH-1000XM4/5/6
I don’t have one of those, but they’re pretty popular as headphones with good ANC.
Jlab Epic Air Sport ANC
I do have those, though.
Sure, but I think that the type of game is a pretty big input. Existing generative AI isn’t great at portraying a consistent figure in multiple poses and from multiple angles, which is something that many games are going to want to do.
On the other hand, I’ve also played text-oriented interactive fiction where there’s a single illustration for each character. For that, it’d be a good match.
AI-based speech synth isn’t as good as human voice acting, but it’s gotten pretty decent if you don’t need to be able to put lots of emotion into things. It’s not capable of, say, doing Transistor, which relied a lot on the voice acting. But it could be a very good choice to add new material for a character in an old game where the actor may not be around or who may have had their voice change.
I’ve been very impressed with AI upscaling. I think that upscaling textures and other assets probably has a lot of potential to take advantage of higher resolution screens. Maybe one might need a bit of human intervention, but a factor of 2 increase is something that I’ve found that the software can do pretty well without much involvement.
Gotcha, thanks!
I’m assuming that it’s some sort of component from the air conditioner, but damned if I know what it is. Looks like power plugs on it, and someone else mentioned “caps”, so maybe a capacitor, though I wasn’t aware that there was some kind of plug standard for large removable capacitors.
kagis
Yeah, this capacitor looks similar.
EDIT: Apparently air conditioners can use large capacitors:
https://www.amazon.com/Capacitor-Conditioner-Multi-Purpose-Capacitor-5-Warranty/dp/B092ZQ3Y3N
Capacitor for Air Conditioner 5 uf MFD 370 or 440 Volt VAC, Multi-Purpose Round Capacitor for AC Motor Run or Fan Motor Start or Condenser Straight
EDIT2: Oh, I bet I know what it’s for, given the “Fan Motor Start” and what I assume is a misspelled “Condenser Start” text on the Amazon listing. Some hardware will draw a lot of juice when starting up. Laser printers are prone to this, for example. The references above are to mechanical things, moving components, and maybe one need extra power to overcome static friction, to get the parts in motion initially; once moving, they face (lesser) kinetic friction. One option is to just draw a ton of power from the line, but then that increases the peak power demands of a device. Another option, gentler on whatever circuit or external power source is providing the power, is to charge a capacitor for a bit and that’ll let you create a big surge of available power for a moment without having to have higher peak demands on the external power source. Adds to device cost, but limits its peak draw.
In fairness, rural America probably didn’t entirely understand the implications of said vote.
As I’ve pointed out on here before, I feel like a lot of people in mostly-Republican-voting rural American are going to be even more disappointed when they discover agricultural subsidies ending, healthcare subsidies ending that disproportionately benefit poorer, rural areas, illegal immigrant agricultural workers that farms rely on becoming unavailable, counter-tariffs that tend to target agricultural output from rural areas, etc.
“Having high-rise, low-income housing in the middle of other buildings downtown would look terrible,” said resident Karen Glaser during a June 3 Menlo Park City Council meeting. “With no one coming to town, it would become a ghost town.”
I am very confident that there will be more people, not less, if higher density housing goes up.
If you want to live in an area that doesn’t have high density housing anywhere nearby, there are lots of places that don’t have the kind of housing demand that exist in the Bay.
kagis
https://www.mylife.com/karen-glaser/e318975051066
Sale Price: $2,525,000
You can sell your $2.5m house and have plenty of cash on hand to move to a ton of places in the US that are low density and going to stay that way because there aren’t a ton of people who want to live and work there. If you want a Small Town, USA vibe, there are no shortage of towns across the US that would no doubt like to have you move in and patronize their downtown eateries and whatnot.
Also, if you don’t have adequate parking space in an area, it results in cars spilling out into the nearest street parking.
That being said, if you want to increase housing density and you want available parking, you either gotta convert some low-rise buildings into parking and some into higher-density housing, or you gotta build parking garages, which cost substantially more than ground parking.
kagis
https://dcplm.com/blog/cost-of-building-a-parking-garage/
The cost per space varies based on the location and design of the parking garage.
- A surface lot is $1,500-$10,000 per space (economical).
- An above ground garage is $25,000-$35,000 per space (balanced).
- An underground garage is $35,000-$50,000 per space (expensive from excavation).
- Automated parking garages can vary greatly, but typically fall within the range of above-ground garages.
Any parking mandate adds to the cost of the housing. That being said, I generally think that that’s worthwhile (and frankly, my experience has been that parking mandates generally aren’t high enough for existing apartments). If you have a one-parking-slot-per-apartment mandate, you also have a number of people in those apartments who have multiple cars.
considers
I do kind of wonder how much it would cost to do low-rise parking garages. Usually when I see them, they’re in high-value areas, downtowns and stuff, and very tall.
https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/9476621/2021 Parking Structure Cost Outlook.pdf
This has multistory parking garage construction costs for different locations. It looks like parking garage construction cost in San Francisco is about 50% higher than a lot of the country. I wouldn’t expect materials cost to vary much from state to state. Some of that is maybe earthquake code compliance. Some probably labor cost.
EDIT: One other point I’d add is that if you have one parking spot, it’s also possible to fit multiple motorcycles/mopeds in it. I know one person who was in an apartment who kept her motorcycle and another one in her parking space. Some places in (arid parts of) California are pretty amenable to motorcycle use.
EDIT2: If you figure, back of the napkin, that housing has an expected 10% ROI and the price difference between a surface parking slot and a multistory parking garage parking slot is maybe $25k, then it’s gonna increase annual rent for an apartment by maybe $2,500 or $208/mo, which I kinda suspect is gonna be rather outweighed by potential decrease in rent from more supply of housing being available; the price difference between “high demand area” housing and “low demand area” housing is a lot more than that.
https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-with-the-most-expensive-rents
The top four most-expensive US cities median rental price for a 1-bedroom apartment rental here are all in California: San Jose ($3,223), San Francisco ($2,705), San Diego ($2,534), and Los Angeles ($2,358).
The four least expensive cities are St. Louis, MO ($1,059), Cleveland, OH ($1,046), Oklahoma City, OK ($1,010), and Tulsa, OK ($994).
That’s a lot of difference there to work with.
Why should the Pacific Ocean be named “the Pacific Ocean” when it could be “the American Ocean”?
What did you think of the new aiming system? I’ve heard mixed things, but it sounded good to me (or at least way better than a flat percentage).
I don’t know what the internal mechanics are like, haven’t read material about it. From a user standpoint, I have just a list of positive and negative factors impacting my hit chance, so less information about my hit chance. I guess I’d vaguely prefer the percentage — I generally am not a huge fan of games that have the player rely on mechanics trying to hide the details of those mechanics — but it’s nice to know what inputs are present. It hasn’t been a huge factor to me one way or the other, honestly; I mean, I feel like I’ve got a solid-enough idea of roughly what the chances are.
even if it doesn’t hit the same highs as JA2, there hasn’t really been much else that comes close and a more modern coat of polish would be welcome.
Yeah, I don’t know of other things that have the strategic aspect. For the squad-based tactical turn-based combat, there are some options that I’ve liked playing in the past.
While Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 aren’t quite the same thing — they’re closer to Fallout 1 and 2, as Wasteland 1 was a major inspiration for them — the squad-based, turn-based tactical combat system is somewhat similar, and if you’re hunting for games that have that, you might also enjoy that.
I also played Silent Storm and enjoyed it, though it’s now pretty long in the tooth (well, so is Jagged Alliance 2…). Even more of a combat focus. Feels lower budget, slightly unfinished.
And there’s X-Com. I didn’t like the new ones, which are glitzy, lots of time spent doing dramatic animations and stuff, but maybe I should go back and give them another chance.
I’m sorry, you are correct. The syntax and interface mirrors docker, and one can run ollama in Docker, so I’d thought that it was a thin wrapper around Docker, but I just went to check, and you are right — it’s not running in Docker by default. Sorry, folks! Guess now I’ve got one more thing to look into getting inside a container myself.
While I don’t think that llama.cpp is specifically a special risk, I think that running generative AI software in a container is probably a good idea. It’s a rapidly-moving field with a lot of people contributing a lot of code that very quickly gets run on a lot of systems by a lot of people. There’s been malware that’s shown up in extensions for (for example) ComfyUI. And the software really doesn’t need to poke around at outside data.
Also, because the software has to touch the GPU, it needs a certain amount of outside access. Containerizing that takes some extra effort.
https://old.reddit.com/r/comfyui/comments/1hjnf8s/psa_please_secure_your_comfyui_instance/
ComfyUI users has been hit time and time again with malware from custom nodes or their dependencies. If you’re just using the vanilla nodes, or nodes you’ve personally developed yourself or vet yourself every update, then you’re fine. But you’re probably using custom nodes. They’re the great thing about ComfyUI, but also its great security weakness.
Half a year ago the LLMVISION node was found to contain an info stealer. Just this month the ultralytics library, used in custom nodes like the Impact nodes, was compromised, and a cryptominer was shipped to thousands of users.
Granted, the developers have been doing their best to try to help all involved by spreading awareness of the malware and by setting up an automated scanner to inform users if they’ve been affected, but what’s better than knowing how to get rid of the malware is not getting the malware at all. ’
Why Containerization is a solution
So what can you do to secure ComfyUI, which has a main selling point of being able to use nodes with arbitrary code in them? I propose a band-aid solution that, I think, isn’t horribly difficult to implement that significantly reduces your attack surface for malicious nodes or their dependencies: containerization.
Ollama means sticking llama.cpp in a Docker container, and that is, I think, a positive thing.
If there were a close analog to ollama, like some software package that could take a given LLM model and run in podman or Docker or something, I think that that’d be great. But I think that putting the software in a container is probably a good move relative to running it uncontainerized.
They have mechanical components that will wear out over time (though I suppose some people probably use them lightly enough that it’s less of an issue).
Just tried it, and it was some other game I was thinking of; I hadn’t played JA3 yet.
While I haven’t finished the game, thoughts:
It’s the strongest of the post-2 Jagged Alliance games that I’ve played.
Still not on par with JA2, at least relative to release year, I’d say also in absolute terms.
My biggest problem — I’m running this under Proton — is some bugginess that I’m a little suspicious is a thread deadlock. When it happens, I never see the targeting options show up when I target an enemy, and trying to go to the map or inventory screen doesn’t update the visible area onscreen, though I can blindly click and hear interactions. The game also doesn’t ever exit if I hit Alt-F4 in that state, just hangs. AFAICT, this can always be resolved by quicksaving (which you can do almost anywhere), stopping the game (I use kill in a terminal on Linux) and reloading the save, but it’s definitely obnoxious. Fortunately, the game starts up pretty quickly. Nobody on ProtonDB talking about it, so maybe it’s just me. I have not noticed bugs other than this one.
So far, not much by way of missions where one has to figure out elaborate ways of getting into areas or the like: more of a combat focus. I have wirecutters, crowbars, lockpicks, and explosives, like in JA2, but thus far, it’s mostly just a matter of clicking on a locked container with someone who has lockpicking skill. Probably more realistic — in real life, an unattended door isn’t going to stop anyone for long — but I kinda miss that.
The maps feel a lot smaller to me, though the higher resolution might be part of that. A lot of 3d modeling to make them look pretty. There’s a lot more verticality, like watchtowers.
The game also feels considerably shorter than JA2, based on the percentage of the strategic map that I’ve taken. That being said, JA2 could get a bit repetitive when one is fighting the umpteenth enemy reinforcement party.
Unique perks for mercs that make them a lot more meaningful than in JA2 (though also limit your builds). For example, Fox can get what is basically a free turn if she initiates combat on a surprised enemy. Barry auto-constructs explosives each day.
Thematic feel of the mercs from JA2 is retained well.
Interesting perk tree.
A bunch of map modifiers like fog that have a major impact.
Bunch of QoL stuff for scheduling concurrent tasks for different mercs.
Pay demands don’t seem to rise with level, though other factors can drive it up (e.g. Fox will demand more pay if you hire Steroid).
Feels easier than JA2, though I haven’t finished it.
I’m pretty sure the keybindings are different.
Tiny thing, but I always liked the start of JA2, where your initial team does a fast-rope helicopter insertion into a hostile sector. Felt like a badass way to set the tone. No real analog in JA3.
I started running into guys with RPGs early on in JA3, much earlier than in JA2.
JA2 has ground vehicles and a helicopter and they require you to obtain fuel. Transport logistics don’t exist in JA3, other than paying to embark on boat trips at a port (and just checked online to confirm that they aren’t just in the late game).
More weapon mods in JA3. Looks like some interesting tradeoffs that one has to make here, rather than just “later-game stuff is better”.
For me, it was a worthwhile purchase — even with the irritating bug I keep hitting — and I would definitely recommend it over the other post-JA2 stuff if you’ve played JA2 and want more. It hasn’t left me giggling at the insane amount of complex interactions that were coded into the game like JA2 did, though, which were kind of a hallmark of the original.
You don’t pipe salt water through the data center. You have a heat exchanger that touches the salt water.