I appreciate what he’s done for VR and retro gaming.

He took money from a lot of donors, used that money to get patents for his company, then sold that company, including the patents, to Facebook (now Meta).

I do not appreciate what he did there.

It’s not like Putin hasn’t tried that…

It’s hard to believe how insanely long it took, and still is taking to get a production-ready, solid ntfs driver in linux.

The emergence of a deadly new disease

Wishy-washy question. New diseases emerge all the time, and what do you mean by “deadly”? Almost all diseases can be deadly some of the time, almost none of them are always deadly. We’ve had several “new” diseases that are deadly often enough to be worrying, but no wide spread new ones that are as deadly as rabies. Also, what does it mean for a disease to be “new”? Because of a lack of sexual procreation, and therefore lateral gene transfer, neither viruses nor bacteria are species-forming. Every new individual ever is a new diverging point for a line of successors, and that line will never, can never merge back with the rest of the population. The point at which a strain has mutated enough to be called a new disease is basically a matter of opinion.

Gay marriages will be commonplace

Again, wishy-washy question. What is commonplace? I don’t know a lot of people who would still object to gay people’s right to marry, but I personally don’t know a single married gay couple. Is it commonplace? I can’t tell.

Country will have elected a black president

Clear yes. A big part of the country had a very dangerous and still going meltdown over it, but still, the answer is a clear yes.

Country will have elected a woman president

Clear no, if by a small margin on two occasions.

Illicit drug use, such as marijuana and cocaine, will be commonplace

Again with the “commonplace”. It’s hard to define. I’m going by “illicit drugs” meaning drugs that were illegal on a federal level in 1998 (not that this will make that much difference). By my gut feeling, I would say this was already “commonplace” in the eighties and nineties. Though it does seem to have increased since then.

AIDS will be cured

There have been a small number of cases where it actually worked, but to my knowledge nothing universally applicable. AIDS treatments, however, have become so good that the disease is no longer seen as a major problem of our times.

Cancer will be cured

That was always a non-starter, and even people in 1998 should have known that. Cancer is not one disease, at best you can cure a small specific subset of cancers.

Most stores will be replaced by shopping on the Internet

Brick and mortar stores have become fewer, but it’s hard to tell how much of that was Internet shopping and how much was market consolidation into powerful big-box stores.

Most people will do their jobs from home.

We didn’t even come close to “most” during Covid. Most jobs just cannot be done from home.

United States will be involved in a full scale war

What’s “full scale”? There were certainly a few that were “full-scale” for the other side. Shit, there only just was one shortly before this poll was conducted…

From the photo, there seems to have been a substantial-thickness concrete wall and then a brick wall. Obviously, they were still not enough, but it wasn’t just a brick wall.

And about the wooden shelves: So what? They are not security relevant or customer facing, they just need to work as shelves.

Error correction and compression are usually at odds.

Not really. If your data compresses well, you can compress it by easily 60, 70%, then add Reed-Solomon forward error correction blocks at like 20% redundancy, and you’d still be up overall.

If any person actually typed that they aren’t sane at all.

That doesn’t actually rule out anything.

Maybe he means that he took that photo on the sly, through a keyhole or something? In that case, “peeked” makes sense again.

I don’t know, they’re demanding quite a lot of expensive stuff there. Of course, it depends on what the contract the says, or of there even if a contract at that point. If the contract allows for that stuff, or if they’re willing to pay hefty additional fees for all that, than that’s okay. If not, they are acting unreasonably entitled here.

* Edit: Just saw the second pic. It’s still wild but they are offering to pay as much as it takes, so as far as I’m concerned, they’re in the clear.

There’s talk on reddit about another more close-up video that shows him getting hit in the carotid artery.

That’s pretty bad. I don’t like Charlie Kirk at all, but him getting shot is going to rile up the right into a fierce frenzy. This will get dangerous, and will make the situation even worse.

Posts in public forums are very often made for the sake of just about anybody reading the thread, not just the person they are directly responding to.

RIP David Graeber.

“They’re a private company” (with a state-sponsored monopoly on an essential good).

I don’t know how anybody is surprised by this. Who do you think would buy a privatized municipal water supplier, other than people trying to squeeze as much money as possible from a population with no recourse and no say in the matter?

There is no wise way to use that information.

But the foolish ones could be entertaining.

Money quote from the article:

For its part, Russia had largely shrugged off Mr. Trump’s previous 50-day deadline, noting that past deadlines set by Mr. Trump or his team had come and gone with little consequence.

The only context in which I’ve ever heard of that place is that big military cemetery.

Saying RAM can help because you can reencode the video to h.264 or h.265 to make use of hardware decoding is more than a bit of a stretch. You can just reencode it to the normal disk instead. Unless it’s the speed of the local block device that’s the bottleneck here (and there’s no indication that it is, and it would be extremely unlikely), using a ramdisk/tmpfs for any part of that is just pointless.

Modern CPUs (from like the last 20 years) will throttle down a lot before they actually shut down. Unless your cooling is completely inadequate or somehow broken, shutdowns because of high load just dont happen. I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong with your hardware.

A problem with cooling could also go some way to explaining your performance problems – but it could also just be that your system just doesn’t have the computing power to do what you want it to. The computing demands from video decoding go up dramatically when you go beyond 1080p. If I recall correctly, the Intel Core CPUs with the “U” at the end were the low-energy models (for longer battery life); of course that comes with compromises on the performance side.

The CPU model suggests that this is a laptop, and a fairly old one at that. I would look for things like blocked air ducts or broken fans if I were you. It’s also possible that the thermal compound between your CPU and the CPU cooler has dried out and needs replacing (although laptops of that power class should be using thermal contact solutions that do not dry out), or that contact has lessened for other reasons. Again, if your computer seriously powers down because of load, it’s borderline broken and in need of maintenance.

As for your other question, no RAM cannot help with that. It can hurt if you have too little of it, but once you have enough, the best it can do is not be a bottleneck.

* Edit: Also, make sure you are not setting down the laptop on anything soft, like a blanket, when using it. It will sink in and have its air intakes blocked if you do that.

Hm, agree in principle, but it should also really be noted that a donation that is required to get an account (or arguably even smaller perks) does not count as a donation anymore. At that point, it’s a weasel-wordiy way to say “payment”. Which should, IMHO, not be supported.