This can’t be overstated enough. There are huge swathes of the USA where the only stores within half an hour are dollar general or gas station convenience stores. You literally can’t eat healthy on those sources, and the nearest actual grocery store could be an hour or even more away.

Kinda hard to eat well when just getting the ingredients would take half a days time.

Hell, I’m in a city and if I didn’t have a car my only options in walking distance are a convenience store and a couple fast food places. Nearest grocery store is a 12 minute drive or a 3 hour bus ride if the bus even shows up.

Correct assessment. Absolutism in political systems is unproductive and leads to poor outcomes.

I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.

Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.

Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”

But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.

Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.

Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.

Buttons and dials aren’t cheap. Even in economy cars it probably costs the manufacturer a few bucks for each one, accounting for the switch itself and all the trim that goes with it.

It only takes a handful to outweigh the cost of the typical LCDs used in car systems.

I’m talking about breaking into the industry. You just need to get an entry level job or two that will probably suck, then work your way into the niche you want with job experience. You probably won’t even really actually know where you want to ultimately go until you’ve been working for a few years and had time to gather new skills that you didn’t get in school.

Exception being academia, but if you wanna do that just go get your grad degree, and by the end of that you’ll have a way in or have learned that academia sucks your life force out for far less than the industry pays.

Yeah pretty much. I have a personal website that I set up with a pipeline to automatically build and deploy. Creating it taught me a lot of things and it was definitely a focus when I had interviews. Homelabs are great too, shows you have some self driven interest in the subject, especially if you don’t have a bunch of work experience to advertise.

I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.

Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.

If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.

For about 3-4 years. I switched after sway added support for per-display VRR which xorg cannot do still (and probably will never be able to do due to core design limitations)

On AMD it’s been better than Xorg for a couple years now in my use case. No more tearing and latency issues, any games that don’t play nice have worked fine with gamescope.

With HDR support finally on the horizon it’ll be able to completely replace windows for me which I already barely use.

The only issue I regularly encounter is programs handling windowing strangely. Some programs like to switch themselves into my active workspace under certain circumstances which is mildly annoying but just requires that I press the hotkey to put them back where they belong a couple times a day.

I wouldn’t call it defeatist, nuclear should never be more than a stopgap to 100% renewables. if anything, it’s awesome that we’ve gotten far enough with renewables that switching to them entirely is now a viable proposition. It sucks that we spent so much time dependent on fossil fuels when we could’ve been using nuclear, but the past is the past and the future is bright.

I will say, small modular reactors might have a place in the energy mix. They would be fantastic for more isolated grids where stability is difficult to achieve with 100% renewable energy. Think small island nations or remote areas. Also would be good for emergency and disaster recovery scenarios. We (as in the USA) also already have the supply chain to build them somewhat efficiently since we use them on our aircraft carriers. Just needs some tweaking to work well on land and for the regulations to loosen up to make it economically feasible.

Sure, if we could snap our fingers and have a bunch of nuclear plants it would make sense. But the tech is all ancient, and the regulatory structure is oppressive. It will take decades to build out the amount of nuclear capacity we need and cost inordinate amounts of money, and we’ve already passed the tipping point where renewables are the better choice.

Just as an example, it took us 14 years to build a single reactor in the Vogtle plant costing over $30 billion dollars. We’d need massive reforms to the regulations and supply chain for building reactors to bring those numbers down and that just won’t happen fast enough.

Even China, who is the world leader in nuclear power these days is slowing down building of new reactors in favor of renewables, and they do not have the regulations and supply issues we have in the USA.

A few years ago you would be right but we’re just about there, especially once sodium ion batteries become more mature which is definitely going to be a “next few years” thing, not a speculative maybe it’ll happen someday thing. There’s also ways to store power other than chemical batteries, like pumped storage hydro.

As someone who was vehemently pro nuclear, unfortunately we missed the boat. The time to invest heavy in nuclear was 50 years ago and instead we did the opposite. Renewables have caught up and nuclear is so far behind that it makes zero sense to build any new reactors when we can just build out more renewable power gen and battery storage for less money and without the whole nuclear waste handling problem.

I bought a valve index to play Half Life Alyx and Boneworks. I was so excited to see what new and exciting games would come next aaaaand… nothing remotely interesting has come out since.

Yeah seriously. As a dev, that 30% cut gets you a lot of stuff with absolutely no additional charges. Trying to roll your own distribution for your downloads could exceed that 30% by itself after you:

• Host the files somewhere that can be downloaded anywhere close to as fast as steam’s servers
• Handle payment processing fees
• Develop and maintain a site with high reliability

And that’s only downloads. With steam you also get:

• p2p networking tools
• game server hosting
• steam community integration
• analytics
• cloud saves
• voip

And like 50 other things. It’s ridiculously good value unless you’re developing some super low rent single player indie title. Even then, just having it available on steam will get you way more sales to make up for it.

Sure, epic charges 10% but you basically only get distribution and some super half baked community features.

You can take the quotes off too big to fail, they literally are. Their only competitor in the world is Airbus. Boeing going bust would be catastrophic to the global aviation industry and doubly so for the USA.

That said, I wanna see Lockheed step up and do a commercial plane. Gimme a jumbo jet that breaks the sound barrier and has a radar signature the size of a credit card pls.

I had family members who told me the vaccine was going to kill me and various other stuff they heard from Fox News and similar.

They all caught COVID at a party in 2021 and died. Seriously. It’s awful what all this conspiracy crap is doing to people. It costs lives and affects everyone around them.

How does this help though? It just makes people annoyed at protesters and, if anything, detracts from their cause. Protesting is great, blocking traffic is a criminal offence.

There’s no standalone fan controller in existence I’m aware of with Linux support unfortunately, blame manufacturers for that. I use an aquacomputer quadro and just fire up a windows VM with USB passthrough to change settings the once or twice a year I need to. What else isn’t working?

Regarding blender, what render options are missing? If it’s GPU rendering that’s missing, are you using Nvidia or AMD? I’m not familiar with how mint does things but you might need cuda or HIP packages for Nvidia or AMD respectively.