The upscaling technologies they’ve been building into modern graphics stacks also have benefits for much older games where the performance isn’t necessarily needed. There’s an old game I like to play, Railroad Tycoon 2, which doesn’t run at resolutions higher than 1024x768 and modern upscaling can make that game look absolutely gorgeous despite being 4+ pixels per original pixel. I’m sure it provides similar benefits to emulators and the like too!

To build off of this, if you collect $1000 in taxes from a million people and you’ve just pulled in a billion dollars. With 300 million people in the country that’s a lot of tax dollars.

Obviously if you can tax 1000 out of every million dollars in wealth and individual earns in a year you can easily collect far more in taxes given how many multimillionaires will see their wealth increase by tens or hundreds of millions in a year.

This is all super reductive for simplicity. It’s worth looking at how the super rich are able to avoid paying taxes. Are they not paying taxes because they’re doing things with their money that is directly incentivized and generally better for the country than if they simply hoarded the same money, such as running the money through charities, clean energy installtions, etc? I’m honestly asking because i really don’t know and I dont have the time right now to pull at that thread and research the question

The earth is traveling around the sun at about 67000mph (29,722 meters per second, the unit of measurement I’ll use from here on our for consistently) that means to fall into the sun (and this is once you’ve already expended a ton of Delta-V (delta-V being a count of meters per second in change to orbit your craft needs to make/can make) escaping the Earth’s gravitational influence) you’d have to slow down a significant portion (about 24,000 meters per second specifically) of that 29,722 meters per second that you’re hurtling through space at.

It takes so much energy to try to crash a craft into the sun it’s literally cheaper (only costing about 8,800 m/s of Delta-V, compared to about 24,000 m/s of Delta-V) to fly the craft very very far away, such as to the edge of the solar system, then zero out the angular velocity so it effectively falls into the sun, than it is to fly directly to the sun. This tactic also enables one to use another planets gravitational influence to “gravity turn” and save on fuel, but it’s still horrendously expensive to get even a small craft weighing a fraction of a ton from the surface of earth out to the edge of the solar system to begin with.

Rockets face a significant challenge in that in order to reach orbit they need a large amount of energy, sources from a large amount of fuel. To get 1 ton of payload to orbit it needs an amount of fuel which adds additional weight which then requires additional fuel to lift the mass of the fuel. Because of this it takes about 100kg of fuel to get 1kg to orbit

In short, I highly recommend spending a few days playing Kerbal Space Program to learn far more than will fit in a single comment about orbital dynamics. That game is amazing at teaching basic concepts of orbital dynamics and the incredible challenges space programs face in just getting payloads to orbit let alone incredible feats like interplanetary travel or interstellar travel

I have a better idea! Launch it into a stable orbit in the oort cloud and maybe we can create a new planet there to colonize in a few centuries! It’s perfect because then we have the perfect place to send the radioactive soil from WWIII and a perfect base to hide from WWV from!

Camelcamelcamel is also good for seeing pricing shenanigans like this too. A box set a relative asked for was marked as $100 but on sale for $30 and checking camelcamelcamel I could see it’s rarely listed at its list price and basically always marked down to $25-35 with spurts of time at $40-50

Honestly I’ve only gone made it to 7 days when sick and feeling like a shower would be waterboarding myself and waited until I felt just well enough to actually shower

Remote work really lends itself to some bad habits. My body’s sweet spot seems to be showering every other day, and with remote work I can end up not leaving the house at all for long enough that I’ll get to as much as 4 days without showering (usually the point where I shower at lunch because holy crap I just want to not feel my skin being greasy

Doesn’t help that I do evening showers which relies on my getting ready for bed on time, and staying up too late can be made up for by simply getting up 5 minutes before work and eating breakfast over the work computer an hour later

There’s growing research into positive tipping points for the climate. Biden’s historic investment into renewables put a finger on the scales tipping them for significantly more solar and wind investment, which will of course reduce the cost of building solar and wind and soon enough the federal government’s finger won’t even be needed on the scale to make solar and wind cost effective to build.

Other decarbonization efforts like pushing for more bike infrastructure leading to fewer car trips and more bike trips, and shifting cars to electricity rather than gasoline also have tipping points where it will make far more sense to do the cheaper thing that happens to be better for the climate than not

This is exactly what I’ve been saying. Shove a virtual tip jar in the browser and let it pay out to websites based on viewership. I could even imagine a model where sites simply say “you must have at least $x in your tip jar to view this site, or pay us directly $y per month” for sites like Wall Street Journal that now paywall everything away

I realized I was long overdue for a hardware refresh when I learned that nvme drives are /dev/nvme and not /dev/sd[x] and I realized every single computer I interacted with was pre-nvme

Having written some error messages in a godforsaken database frontend, an error message only means that something didn’t work correctly and may or may not correctly indicate what is actually wrong

The final line of the one about the VAX machine is so perfect

The biggest problem with the bubble that IT insulates themselves into is that if you don’t users will never submit tickets and will keep coming to you personally, then get mad when their high priority concern sits for a few days because you were out of office but the rest of the team got no tickets because the user decided they were better than a ticket.

If people only know how to summon you through the ancient ritual of ticket opening with sufficient information they’ll follow that ritual religiously to summon you when needed. If they know “oh just hit up Rob on teams, he’ll get you sorted” the mysticism is ruined and order is lost

Honestly I say this all partially jokingly. We do try to insulate ourselves because we know some users will try to bypass tickets if given any opportunity to do so, but there is very much value in balancing that need with accessability and visibility. So the safe option is to hide in your basement office and avoid mingling, but thats also the option that limits your ability to improve yourself and your organization

What irks me is the “technical impossibility” of raw TCP and “I must be wrong” when filling out their firewall change form.

Most commonly a port is opened to accept traffic of a specific protocol that runs overtop of TCP of UDP. I’m guessing the individual that responded might not be very good at technical communication and was just trying to question “are you sure it’s raw TCP and not just http traffic?” In order to keep the holes poked into the firewall as narrow and specific as possible

They’ve since given us a different port “close to others that we use”, for whatever reason that matters, and based their choice on some list of common protocols outside the reserved range. But not 4001.

Usually if infrastructure is assigning a port other than default it’s because that port is already in use. The actual port number you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s not a common default (which basically all ports below 1024 are)

Using ports that are close together for similar purposes can aid in memorability if that’s a need, but ultimately it doesn’t matter much if they’re not conflicting with common defaults

They opened a ticket because an arrow at the border of our UI vanished when they screen shared on Teams. Because of the red border. And they blamed our application for it.

Probably a user was complaining and needed action immediately and they didn’t have time to test a cosmetic issue in an edgecase. For minor issues I’ll open a ticket with the party I think might be responsible just to get it out of the way so I can get to higher priority stuff, and I’ll rely on that party to let me know if it’s not actually their problem. Heck it might even simply be the IT person assumed it was a misrouted ticket, since users open tickets in random queues all the time

They didn’t set up their PKI correctly and opening our webpage on specific hosts gave the typical “go back” warning. But it was our fault somehow, even though the certificate was the one they supplied us and it was valid.

If the certificate is correctly generated and valid an SSL error would indicate it was incorrectly applied to the application. I’m guessing by the inclusion in this rant that the conclusion was it was in fact a problem with the certificate, but we don’t have enough details to speculate if it was truly a mistake by the individual that generated it or just a miscommunication

Honestly it sounds like you’re too quick to bash IT and should instead be more open to dialogue. I don’t know the specifics of your workplace and communications, but if you approach challenges with other teams from an “us vs them” standpoint it’s just going to create conflict. Sometimes the easiest way to do it is to try to hop on a quick call with the person once you get to more than a couple of emails back and forth, plus then you have more social cues to avoid getting angry with eachother and can give more relevant details

WSL is interesting because it manages to simultaneously offer everything a Linux user would want while also actually capable of none of what a Linux user would need it to do. Weird compatibility issues, annoying filesystem mappings that make file manipulation a pain, etc

In a Windows environment I’ve found it honestly works better to either ssh into a Linux machine or learn the PowerShell way of doing it than to work through WSL’s quirks

no benefit over GUI alternatives

Lol nice bait

My current workplace organizes both development and infrastructure within IT which itself is a sub department of finance. I’m not saying this is the best approach because honestly it only took 1.5 layers of apathetic management to make long term planning a nonstarter

I wonder if I’m missing something about myself

Lol I feel that. I can’t tell how much I might be a little bi or just horny

I support their rights, they are people

the genitals only mader in bed

These things are very tied together. Supporting people being who they are means supporting them if they want to publicly show their identity

I just don’t want aliens in the far future watching our shows and thinking “god damn, it was femboy paradies!”

What does that matter at all? Who cares what people in the far future think? What matters is what people think today, and representation helps people find their own identity and know that they’re included in society

I thought I’d never meet a trans person and very few gay people in the agricultural college I attended when I went back to college. Turned out every damn one of the friends I made was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. So as the other person said “as far as you know”

Acceptance of gay and trans rights has allowed so many people to realize they’re not so straight or not so cisgender and that’s wonderful. People are finally finding the freedom to be who they are!