I’ve been thinking about doing this too! I have a RPi 4 that’s not doing anything, and I don’t really have a great offsite solution for backups and I have family in another country. Maybe next time I go over there I’ll see if they’ll let me set one up lol.

There are also charities that take donations of old laptops and use them for things like education in places that don’t have access to a lot of technology, so I guess you could recycle them in that sense.

As a European living in Canada, it seems like outside of the States there’s a lot of talk about figuring out how to just carry on without America. And this is going to sound harsh, but TBH even when the US being more chill it’s still kind of a pain in the ass to other countries around the world. There’s always some war that they start and expect everyone else to get involved in or something like that, and for the last decade or so they’ve been flipping between sensible people and Trump every 4 years which makes the whole country wildly unpredictable to deal with. It’s hard to get any sort of international agreement going when it takes a year or two to negotiate, and you know it’s just going to get tossed out a couple of years later anyway.

Also, as a non-American if you complain about the president or say something like “You guys should vote for Harris” during an election, there’s always a swarm of Americans who show up and tell you to butt out and mind your own business, but they don’t seem to get that it is our business because when you elect someone like Trump it fucks up the world. I’m sitting here in Canada, wondering when the tariffs are going to kick in or if America is going to try an annex us, whether the US is going to start a war with the EU over Greenland, or if they’re going to seize the fucking Panama Canal in the next couple of years, which are all things that the president of the USA has openly talked about doing. Not to mention there’s an unelected ketamine-addicted billionaire Nazi running around installing servers in all the government offices with nobody stopping him, who’s also talking about overthrowing the UK government and trying to get the AfD elected in Germany, so who knows what that’s going to do around the world.

I mean realistically what are you gonna do, appeal to their better nature? We’ve been trying to do that since when… Reagan? Nixon? The right has only dug in deeper and deeper, and now the Nazis are back.

We’re long overdue for some fuck about and find out time IMO.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out they’re making a ban list for all these communities, but the ‘glitch’ was that someone turned it on before whatever PR move/manufactured scandal they were going to use to justify it was ready to go.

Or this was just a test fire to see how people would react.

Just as a heads up, the Hitman trilogy is absurdly complicated to purchase for some unknown reason. I own the first two and I literally cannot work out how to buy the third one.

So tread carefully I guess lol.

Art jobs are like this! Especially if management are also art people, then every day is utter chaos lol.

Two things an art job is great for:

• Developing a thick skin. Make art every day, send it off, receive a detailed list of everything that sucks about it, re-do it, repeat this about 30 times until it finally goes out, then receive death threats from the audience.

• Learning to function under chaos. A regular Tuesday at Art Job is roughly equivalent to the worst day in company history and a normal office job.

Two things an art job is not good for:

• Keeping the desire to make art for fun in your spare time.

• Being a regular functioning human.

Yeah I have a Steam Deck with a dock and bluetooth mouse & keyboard, it’s basically just a desktop PC lol.

Although the Deck does struggle a bit with super high-end games, so a similar thing with beefier hardware could fill a niche there I guess?

When the first Steam Machines were announced years ago, I assumed they’d all be running the same hardware like consoles do, and I thought that was actually quite a good idea because it could give game devs a sort of “baseline” set of hardware to aim for, as opposed to the sort of “vaguely make it run on Windows” system we seem to have currently. So if the new ones are all more-or-less the same kit like the Steam Decks are, and they take off well enough, it could be handy in that way I guess.

Plus it’ll presumably run SteamOS so more Linux exposure which I always appreciate.

Yeah as a non-American, it certainly does look from the outside as if a ketamine-fuelled Nazi is going around just taking over government offices largely unopposed.

I did poke around a bit more and found that I didn’t have the direct mode on, so it was hopping around. Switching that on and doing a direct connection made it much better, like 50Mbps. But that’s still only 25%-ish of the regular speed, whereas I thought it’d be about 50%. But way better than like 2% of the original speed which is what I had before lol.

As a side note, I don’t know if I maybe have something configured wrong but is DAITA supposed to absolutely massacre your connection speed? I assumed it would be slower but my connection goes from ~190Mpbs to 3Mbps when I enable it.

Yeah I agree with copyright just being about 20 years or so, but more just for the sake of art and having a robust public domain that can preserve cultural things. If that also benefits AI in some way, sure, whatever.

I think ultimately there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t give a fuck about copyright anyway, be it China or just some random person on the internet who’ll eventually train an open-source LLM on everything they can get their hands on. The current copyright system hampers innovation (not just in AI, but in all sorts of areas) and holds back culture for the sake of making a handful of corporations rich, and is largely irrelevant nowadays anyway because of the internet IMO.

I think it’ll quickly move beyond the ‘overseas’ bogeyman anyway, especially with LLMs becoming open-source. Once that gets properly rolling, anybody could theoretically train an LLM on whatever material they want regardless of how illegal it is, and people won’t really give a shit, they’ll just use whichever one works best.

Le Guin describing the novel, to give OP a sense of it:

My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action — except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

To embody it in a novel, which had not been done before, was a long and hard job for me, and absorbed me totally for many months. When it was done I felt lost, exiled — a displaced person. I was very grateful, therefore, when Odo came out of the shadows and across the gulf of Probability, and wanted a story written, not about the world she made, but about herself.

Once you wrap your head around it, Rimworld is great for stuff like that. Once you start thinking outside the lines you can perform the most outrageous war crimes for literally no reason other than your own entertainment.

Like, if an enemy sends a raiding party you can nuke half the map with nerve gas to kill them, then skin them, eat them to keep the colony growing, then load all their skins into a pod and fire it back into the enemy base. The game doesn’t encourage you to do stuff like that, but it also doesn’t stop you lol.

Or you can use the skins to make hats and trench-coats.

I don’t know the name of it, but I really enjoy the sort of gameplay where you roll up to an enemy compound or something, and then you just sort of chip away at it and cause chaos until it all falls apart.

The sort of thing you’d do in Farcry, where you’d snipe some dudes, plant traps, shoot the tiger cage so the tiger would get out and eat people etc.

All the more reason this is going to get ugly, even when we wiped them off the planet it only took a century or so before they came back because people are mostly nasty idiots who don’t learn from history.

I suppose the revised plan is going to have to be to wipe them off the planet again and then make sure they stay scared forever.

I would make a very rare exception and pre-order only certain titles, like if there was a new Civ Game, cause I knew I was going to get it immediately anyway and sometimes they’d let you pre-load.

But with the new Civ being nearly $170 CAD for the full version, I’m not even doing that anymore. I look forward to the real Civ VII release date of sometime in the 2027 Steam Christmas sale lol.

English, where the word ‘jam’ can mean traffic, a stuck door, to play music, to cram things into a tight space or a fruity preserve lol