Wow, my prediction was pretty close. 7 months ago, I predicted that the Steam Machine prices would be $800-$900 for the 512GB model, and $1,000-$1,200 for the 2TB model.

That was in the middle of memory prices going vertical, and I still got down voted to hell by people claiming that they were expecting $600-$800 tops...

Honestly, with how bad memory has become even over the last 6 months, and the increased brutality to the market done by tariffs and the oil supply shock, I'm actually surprised they were able to hit $1,049 for the base model.

The hard truth: It's an acceptable price within a piss-poor market. The harder truth: It will sell out extremely fast and won't restock likely for months.

When Framework announced their new Framework 13 Pro line laptops last month, a lot of people balked at the price. $1,500 was the cheapest pre-built model, and DIY was basically the same price, unless you already had some components. The pricing for higher tier specs easily climbed to $2,000+

Still, they sold out of every model for the first 6-8 batches in a few days, and barely 2 months later, they are sold out to batch 15, with an expected delivery in October.

The K-shaped market is further becoming a reality. The people that have the money to drop on stuff like this, are happily dropping it. And the people who can't afford it are getting left in the dust.

The scumbag oligarchs have created the cyberpunk dystopia, and most of us aren't going to be living up in the shiny skyscrapers...

The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widely accessible.

I'll have to try again, it's been rough the last few times I've tried.

You're right, sorry haha. I flipped that 180 degrees in my head.

Most people don't use critical reasoning to make their decisions, hence why most people live their lives in a state of constant contradictions.

My old philosophy professor once told us that the most effective way to expose somebody's lack of critical reasoning about an issue is to just respond with, "who says?"

Basically the Socratic method, ask them to justify the statements they make, and see how they respond. The vast majority of the time, you'll quickly find out that they don't have any good reasons to support their statements. They haven't given them much thought at all, nor much thought to differing views/positions. They live their lives in ways that feel generally "correct" or pleasurable to them, and that's it.

Why do they think it's alright to eat factory farmed meat? Because they like the taste, the thought of billions of animals living short, miserable lives, then being slaughtered and processed for us to consume doesn't horrify or disgust them, so they keep doing it.

Most people when challenged on it will put up some vague attempt to support their actions, "Other animals do it to each other, so why not us?" "Animals don't have sophisticated minds, so it doesn't actually cause them real suffering." "Humans need animal protein to be healthy." etc. All terribly weak arguments that are easily refuted. But most people don't care, because most societies normalize meat consumption and factory farming. They grew up eating meat with other people eating meat all around them, and they never gave it any thought.

Hence why most pet owners who eat meat would be absolutely horrified and disgusted if their dog or cat had a litter and somebody bought all of the puppies/kittens, only to torture, slaughter, and eat them. A completely inconsistent reaction given the fact that the pet owner happily eats other animals that are treated in the same way. But again, they didn't reason themselves into their viewpoint, so they don't worry about being consistent.

This is further confirmed by anecdotes from vegetarians/vegans, who will tell you about all the awkward, unprompted reactions from meat-eaters when they find out they don't eat meat. Many people get very defensive, often making snide or accusatory remarks about vegetarianism/veganism. They don't like the idea that eating factory meat is morally wrong, because they like the taste and don't want to make to effort to change their lifestyle to confirm with that moral principle. So they mock, tease, or try to "expose" inconsistencies in the vegetarian/vegan's own worldview as a defense mechanism.

If they can make the vegetarian/vegan look foolish, then that feels like a win psychologically to them, which provides mental and emotional comfort and allows them to slip back into their lifestyle without needing to confront their own moral failings.

(I'm leaving this up for transparency, but I totally misread the comment I responded to. Sorry! I have attacked a strawman, and fought valiantly against ghosts lol.)

You're several decades out of date with that opinion.

Chinese manufacturing has exploded in quality, safety, and efficiency over the last 20 years. The old stereotype that China is an assembly line economy pumping out cheap knockoffs and plastic junk, is false.

China now has some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the world. Even Tim Cook stated publicly a year or two ago, that they don't manufacture Apple devices in China because it's cheaper. They do it because China is the only country currently that has both the precision engineering plus the scale to build those devices at the volumes and quality Apple demands.

China has invested massively into STEM, their students, engineers, and scientists attended the best Western universities across the world for decades. Learned everything they could, brought that knowledge back home, and have been expanding on and turbocharging it with massive state and private investments.

Basically they did what the US used to do before we became a grift/vibe/hussle economy, and they are eating our lunch. Now I am absolutely no fan of China, but damn it, I am starting to get pretty jealous...

1. The first argument is just another version of the "it's natural/unnatural, therefore it's right/wrong." Many animals also eat their own young, rape each other, etc. Does that make it acceptable for humans to do it also? Of course not. Some homophobes will point out that homosexual relationships are evolutionarily disadvantageous, ("unnatural") and therefore that means it's wrong for humans to form homosexual relationships. Obviously a ridiculous argument, but it's just the inverse form of the one above.
2. Is it alright to torture a human infant or a severely developmentally disabled person? What about a person with very advanced Alzheimer's? All three examples have little to no mental self-awareness, certainly less than a dog, pig, dolphin, etc. At what point is self awareness sufficiently low enough to make it morally acceptable to cause deliberate pain to that person for your own enjoyment? Second, there is a growing body of evidence that a large portion of animals, including many that are currently farmed/fished for consumption, demonstrate sentience beyond simple reflexes. Beyond the scientific studies, everyday experience indicates this in many animals. Dogs, pigs, birds, octopus, can all solve simple puzzles, demonstrate various apparent emotions like curiosity, fear, joy, confusion, anger, etc. Clearly some level of sentience is present, even if it's quite simple.
3. All essential nutrients humans need can be found in plants. You need to adjust your diet obviously, some nutrients like B12 and Iron are harder to get from a plant-based diet. While others, like Vitamin C and Fiber are easier. The old stereotype that vegetarians/vegans are all malnourished weaklings, is a myth. There are many vegetarian/vegan elite athletes, including Olympic medalists and world record holders, (Alex Morgan, Scott Jurek, Dotsie Bausch, Fiona Oakes, Meagan Duhamel). So at least in the developed world, (where factory farming is the most pervasive,) there is no nutritional need for the general population to eat animals.

Reading on this a bit more, it looks like I was off on B12 specifically. Vegetarians can get this from eggs and milk, but full vegans need to either eat plant-based foods that are fortified with B12, or directly take a B12 supplement.

So my first sentence should actually be, "All essential nutrients humans need can be provided by a plant-based diet." That is accurate because it includes fortified plant-based foods, plant-based direct suppliments, and vegetarians.

Slow and steady, with occasional spikes when a government or mega-corp does something particularly terrible.

Now try it again but give yourself amnesia so you don't have any prior knowledge of skills or lessons learned from before.

Give yourself a severe drug and/or alcohol addiction for several years so you develop chronic health problems and hardcore substance dependence.

Experience enough traumatic events that you develop some severe form of mental illness, preferably multiple at the same time.

Destroy all your contacts from your former life, don't record anything or log anything because you can't have any permanent support group. Surround yourself only with people as or more desperate than you.

Make sure your social problems have caused you to rack up a significant number of criminal charges, bonus points for felonies that stay on your record for all to see if anybody even considers hiring you.

Now you're close to experiencing what many homeless folks' lives are actually like. This guy's "experiment" is asinine. Just another sigma grindset bootstrap husk social influencer who has no idea what it is actually like to have nothing.

His conclusion is that people are homeless because why? They aren't grinding hard enough? Because they aren't putting in the hours? Because they just don't really want it bad enough? Miss me with that bullshit.

Bitwarden password manager. I've used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.

The company doesn't care about you. The company doesn't care about you. The company doesn't care about you.

It's the timeless debate between accessibility and exclusivity. Do you want more people in your community by compromising some values? Or would you rather be a hardliner but never reach those people?

Most of the time you have to pick somewhere on that spectrum. It's a question of pragmatism and utilitarianism.

Does it do more good for lots of people to be slightly more privacy-aware, or is it better to have a very small portion of the population that are super privacy-aware?

You have to decide, and the debate rages on all the time.

All companies should be required to release their entire codebase under the GPL if the product is no longer going to be maintained by them.

That way a community of people who actually care can maintain and improve it.

I play several games that run on 20+ year old engines, long since abandoned by their original creators. The community reverse engineered the games and server infrastructure so they can still be run and enjoyed today. Same for all the folks who develop emulators and the entire ecosystem of ROM dumpers, readers, and handhelds that surround them.

Capitalism is a cancer. So amazing that, at least in certain parts of the software world, we have something better.

This is also a friendly reminder to donate to and support your favorite FOSS projects! they need all the help they can get. ❤️

I hate these companies, they are the end game of hyper-consumerist Capitalism. Cheap junk, made largely with slave labor, with extremely toxic chemicals that destroy our environment, most of which gets dumped after a few uses in landfills to slowly rot and leak micro plastics into everything.

DO NOT BUY FROM THEM!!!

Influencers on TikTok doing $200 haul videos with huge boxes of this swill for their addicted viewers, it's horrific.

Gee, if only there was some way to have seen this coming before hand...

The CEO apparently is a big private equity guy, and those bloodsucking ticks only know how to do one thing: Suck every last drop of money and goodwill from the company and its customers as quickly as possible.

Breaks my heart, I've been a massive Bitwarden advocate for years. Been happily paying for the individual paid plan. I'm now working on setting up KeyPassXC with syncthing.