Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?

We have like eight food trucks in the region and they’re all Taco trucks.

I know this might be a difficult concept for you to grasp, but when you post something… in the comments… in public, it prompts people to respond to your comment. Especially if what you said was nonsense.

.world has been doing server maintenace today. There was a sticky about it and everything. So there are probably federation delays and timeouts to contend with but your inmediate go-to is to start spouting nonsense about “rogue admins.”

Yeah, okay. Sure.

I am literally on lemmy.world right now, it is my only instance, and I’m commenting on this thread because it appeared on my front page. I don’t know what to tell you other than you don’t seem to understand how this works.

I am really much more interested in why all the food trucks seem to be taco trucks. It’s like it’s some kind of national conspiracy.

Where is the pasta truck, the stir fry wok truck, the BLT truck, the foie gras truck, etc.?

Sycophants were probably just salty because they knew you were right.

For the benefit of anyone else reading this, nVidia’s DLSS3 and DLSS4 absolutely do incorporate motion interpolation (i.e. fake frames) via various methods. Fake frame generation can be disabled, at least for now, but that’s really not the point. What’s more to the point is that the only headline capability added to this with the 50 series nVidia cards, for instance, is an even greater depth of fake frame generation. nVidia clearly thinks that their future is in fake frames.

DLSS Super Resolution is the image upscaling scheme, and is now a component of DLSS3/4, but claiming that the current incarnation of DLSS is not intended to generate frames from the whole cloth is inaccurate. nVidia labeling both of these things “DLSS” probably did not do any favors to anyone’s ability to keep track of this ongoing clusterfuck. If you have a 30 series card or below you are limited to upscaling, but upscaling is not the main thing I’m griping about.

(This is also now the case with both AMD’s FSR 3.1 and 2.0, also, which explicitly mention “temporal upscaling,” i.e. once again fake frames, in their blurbs.)

If upscaling in whatever form looks better for you, mind you that I’m not trashing your opinion. To some degree, options exist for a reason. Some motherfuckers play their emulators with Supereagle scaling enabled, or whatever. I dunno, it takes all kinds. But silicon space that your card’s maker dedicated to AI and upscaling fuckery is also silicon that could have just been allocated to bigger or more rendering pipelines as well, and that’s exactly what they didn’t do.

But towards your last point, absolutely yes. This is also how raytracting and RTX are being pitched now that the cat is out of the bag that RTX performance is generally trash and it also achieves very little in terms of adding usable gameplay-conveying visual information. “Oh, but now instead of calculating light maps in advance developers can just have it performed in not-quite-real-time on the GPU [wasting a shitload of silicon and electricity calculating this over and over again when it could have been done just once at the studio]! It’s so much easier!!!”

This is deeply stupid. Miss me with all that shit.

It seems we’ve reached the plateau, finally, where the hardware vendors (or at least nVidia) can’t or won’t bring any new meaningful performance enhancements to the table for whatever reason, so in order to keep the perpetual upgrade treadmill going they’re resorting to bolting gimcrack crap to the hardware to help them cheat instead. Maybe some day actual per-pixel real time raytracing will be viable and for certain applications that could indeed be rad, but trying to force it halfassed now is pretty counterproductive. Ditto with frame generation. I’m sure it has applications in noninteractive media or video rendering, but trying to shoehorn it into gaming doesn’t make any sense.

The frames they generate are not “free,” nor are they necessarily accurate. If your GPU can’t fill your screen at native resolution at a rate matching or exceeding the refresh rate of your display, you either need to turn down your graphics settings or invest in a beefier GPU, not make up fake image data to go in between (introducing input lag) or around (by deliberately rendering at suboptimal resolution and attempting to AI upscale the result). And attempting to exceed your display’s refresh rate by making up additional fake frames is literally pointless, just setting electricity on fire for no benefit.

But then, it will probably also shock and horrify people to learn that I also always run with full screen antialiasing turned off. My display is 3840x2160. Trust me, jaggies are of no concern.

I have no interest in either of these stupid technologies.

Nah. If it’s here it’s here. You’re literally looking at it right here right now, so obviously this thread has not been deleted or blocked in any way.

If you’re signed in your visible feed is influenced by your community subscriptions and default sorting preferences. Lemmy does not hide content based on any “algorithm” other than communities you have outright blocked under your account. Signing in might have prompted your client/UI to sort this off of your front page, but it’s not being nefariously hidden from you.

Yeah, I saw the Gamers Nexus benchmarks on it and for the money I’m really not impressed. With what these cost, a couple of percentage points don’t excite me. I already have a plenty fast graphics card.

The only thing I’m “missing out” on is nVidia’s attempted near-monopoly on raytracing, which is not a technology in which I’m the slightest bit interested because, gee-whiz factor aside, even on their very fastest flagship new card it still tanks your framerate to an unacceptable level (in my opinion) for no tangible benefit whatsoever.

The only issue I foresee is upcoming games that “need” RTX, i.e. the current incarnation of the id Tech engine for some batshit reason, but the only things that run that so far are Doom: Dark Ages and that Indiana Jones game which I likewise have no interest in. So fuck it.

(And I similarly do not care about DLSS or FSR or motion interpolation or any other kinds of fake frames, which are another absolute dumb-shit dead end.)

I went with AMD for my most recent build out of pure knee-jerk spite and that’s looking like a better and better decision with each passing day.

I’m not going to say I called it, but I called it. I watched the 50xx series launch with only vague interest since I have no intention of buying an nVidia card again, ever. I saw that tiny little power connector kicked off at a weird angle like that on the 5080 in particular and thought, “Boy, that looks stupid as fuck. I wonder how many minutes it’ll be before those start catching on fire.” The 40xx’s getup was already a well known issue as we can see by the gymnastics apparently required as illustrated in the article. It seems that they learned nothing other than that consumers will buy the damn things anyway. And neither did we, since people are still clamoring to buy them.

Mankind has known for a hundred years how to make an electrical connector big enough to handle the amount of current it’s supposed to pass. And it’s not like they didn’t have any goddamned room on the vast acreage of the 40xx and 50xx series cards to work with, either.

You know what? I haven’t had a single problem with my RX7900XTX except that I wound up with an Asus one, and I need to use Asus’ stupid Armory Crate doohickey to mess with its single RGB light as it does not appear to be compatible with iCue or OpenRGB. But you know what, if the thing is stuck in its default Unicorn Barf mode until an update or two comes down the pipeline and it hasn’t, like, set my computer on fire I think I can deal with that.

The difference is all the gun totin’ Trump voters genuinely believed, either via self delusion or with the assistance of right wing media, that Trump wouldn’t take their guns. They made up any number of excuses to rationalize what was said in order to maintain support for their man. “He didn’t actually mean it.” “He was just speaking figuratively.” “It was taken out of context.” Etc., etc.

That will last only right up until he actually does this. Never mind that it’s already too late in that they voted for him. I am predicting that exact moment is when the realization will finally set in. I’m sure many will probably also try to cope by trying to find someone else to blame. That won’t change the fact that in the moment, regardless of the rationale, showing up in a uniform and trying to kick in a paranoid nut’s door and tell him you’re here for his guns is a monumentally stupid idea. The element of surprise will surely work in the feds’ favor only until it comes out that the first gun owner has been killed as a result of a mass confiscation incident.

Both sides will ultimately and inevitably decide that “shoot first, ask questions second” will be the only viable strategy. Except it isn’t, when both sides are doing it. The only winning move is not to play.

There are basically only two lines that this administration can cross after which it will be, to employ the vernacular, on.

• Cancelling retirees’ social security and/or retirement benefits
• Trying to take everyone’s guns

The major difference is that one those groups is preeminently equipped to make that process very difficult. I’ll bet you can guess which one it is.

The one thing that every paranoid loon agrees on – left or right – is that the US government actually attempting to blanket confiscate guns is the 100% unquestionable and unambiguous indicator of everything going absolutely sideways. This is why gun bans have always been incremental; those in politics absolutely know that the end result of trying to do it all at once is only a guarantee that a lot of people get shot.

Watching all the rednecks try to reconcile that it is in fact Trump’s gubmint that is comin’ to a’take their gunz is going to be quite the spectacle, I’m sure.

Especially since in the height of my pirating years during teenagerdom, no amount of cajoling or coercion could get me to pay for whatever it was because I didn’t have any money. Which not at all coincidentally was why I was pirating it in the first place.

These dweebs always operate from the frankly invalid preconception that if the pirate had not pirated the media they would have paid for it and therefore they’re “owed” a sale, but that’s not how it works. I imagine that if the vast majority of people were unable to pirate their thing, they simply would not watch/listen/read/play/consume the thing at all.

That’s because the UK has stronger wage protections than the US. Here the Federal minimum wage for “tipped positions,” which are their own special category, is only $2.13 per hour. The management literally expects you, the customer, to make up for their payroll shortfall.

Related fun fact: The reason the US (still) has such a tipping culture at all is, as usual, the result of post-slavery racism when business owners flat out refused to actually pay any of their newly freed black employees, and instead demanded their customers to do it for them. For those positions, tips were the only way those people got paid.

So yes, US business owners would absolutely force their employees to work for no pay if they could get away with it.

I sure am. (Also, that is a fuckton of fake Swiss Army Knives. I kind of approve, especially including the loose busted off scale on the platter, there.)

Story time. In fact, I have told this story before. It’s got two acts.

Act 1: Our local farmer’s market/flea market had a stall that sold, among other sundry low grade imported Chinese crap, a wide variety of low grade Chinese knives. I bought a few from them over the years for the sheer novelty value – you know how it is – but one day I noticed their stall was completely barren of knives. I asked the owner what was up.

He told me he (or rather, his son) got busted via some kind of sting operation by the local cops selling a knife to a minor, so they’d been banned from selling knives and weapons altogether. What was he to do, he told me, with all of the crap he had left over he couldn’t sell.

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it,” I said. And I did.

I wound up with a Samsonite suitcase half filled with bargain basement knives. It took me years to get rid of them via giving them all away, and then breaking the rest. Me and my friends would go camping with bandoliers of 20 identical knives each. We’d use cheap folders for throwing knives, baton firewood with fake Swiss Armies, and lashed brass-and-plastic bejeweled Arabian daggers to the ends of sticks to use as fishing spears. The whole lot. It was a riot.

Act 2: At that time I was working in IT at this engineering firm. This is relevant because one day we had a prolonged power outage, and I can tell you there’s very little in this world that’s as useless as a bunch of engineers who can’t use their computers. While we were waiting around in the semi-darkness waiting for the lights to come back on, I was hanging out in our accountant’s office chatting (because we got along, and also not least of which because her office had a big window in it whereas my IT dungeon had none), and idly flipping my balisong/butterfly knife around. As you do.

Well, as I do, anyway. It’s not like I’m not a known quantity in that regard. Both here and there.

Some background on this, we had a new accountant in training who nobody liked because she was a little proto-Karen and also not very competent at anything. We suspect her CV was rather embellished. Even the boss didn’t like her and he was the one who made the decision to hire her in the first place. She came in to ask our head accountant some question or other, damned if I was paying attention to what it was, and left. No incident, didn’t speak to me, didn’t even look at me.

Well, here comes the next day and I get a calling on the carpet from the boss because this nutty woman complained that I was “brandishing a knife in a threatening manner and she felt unsafe,” or some shit.

I told my boss two things in no uncertain terms, the first of which was I was standing behind our head accountant’s desk while this chick came no nearer than the doorframe, so I’m like 20 feet away with a significant quantity of office furniture between us. And more to the point, we’re all adults here. All you gotta do is say, “Hey. Why don’t you put that fuckin’ blade away, man?” No problem. But she didn’t say anything about it to me.

Nothing really came of this and she got fired a couple of weeks later for gross incompetence and, I suspect, getting on the boss’ nerves.

The punch line: This announcement came at our weekly meeting where every single individual in our little office was crammed in the conference room. “Awesome,” says I, “To celebrate I have some party favors for everyone.”

Among my suitcase of shitty knives I had a ridiculous bevy of crappy balisongs, which I’d dutifully sorted out and completely filled an empty box from an Allen Bradley contactor assembly with them. I must have had fifty of the damn things. I plonked it on the conference room table and told everyone in the company to take one. Hell, our outgoing employee can have two, for good luck.

Now we had a level playing field – everyone has a butterfly knife. (Glassdoor did not exist at the time, and in retrospect it’s probably a good thing that it didn’t.)

Anyway, I can now tell you there are in fact two contenders for the most useless thing in the world. The second one is a building full of engineers, all armed with balisong knives, none of whom really know how to use them.

I had to explain the concept of Vaporwave to my father, a musician who was active throughout the '80’s. I told him it’s zeitgeist for an era that never actually happened. So I think this hits the nail on the head.

There are similar, albeit less ᴀ ᴇ s ᴛ ʜ ᴇ ᴛ ɪ ᴄ, notions for other decades as well.

Everyone thinks the 1950’s were a nonstop sock hop and an episode of Leave it to Beaver.

Everything thinks the entirety of the 1960’s was Woodstock.

Everything in the 1970’s was brown and orange, or wood grain, and had a ridiculous mustache on it.

…But then, everything that everyone knows happened didn’t actually happen in the decade everyone thinks it did anyway.

You can be subpoenaed to testify in court. You cannot be compelled to talk to the police.

Maybe you want to go as far as “Were you shoplifting?” “What? No. That wasn’t me, man.” … do your best imitation of someone who just fell from the sky. “So you’ve NEVER MET your neighbor. Your neighbor across the hall.” “Nope.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, I don’t know.”

Wrong.

Don’t tell the cops “I don’t know” or “I didn’t see anything,” or anything of that ilk. Don’t try to plead innocence. Don’t try to use logic. It will only ever work against you, and it will never work in your favor. Always always always always.

Just tell them you exercise your right to be silent. Over and over again, if necessary. That is all you say. Be a broken record. There is no situation where you are actually obligated (in the US) to answer any type of questions for any type of law enforcement, at any time, for any reason, ever. That’s all you need to tell them. You don’t answer questions. You don’t answer why you don’t answer questions.

This is because you can also be prosecuted for lying to them, and their grounds for accusing you of lying can be pretty shaky but you still might get convicted. You can’t be prosecuted for saying nothing.

Note that this will not prevent them from lying to you, which is legal, and making spurious threats of arrest or similar to attempt to intimidate you into complying. Be aware that this is automatically bullshit. At worst the can hold you for up to 48 hours (-ish, state laws vary on that point somewhat) without charging you with anything and even if they do, you still don’t have to say anything to them.

If this happens, lawyer up immediately. You can sue them afterwards if it comes about that they violated any of your civil rights in the process.

In light of all of the above, I don’t deal with the police at all.

Name and if necessary, driver’s license. That’s it. That’s all I’m legally obligated to provide in my state, and even then only in specific circumstances. If they’re on my actual property they can pack sand; No warrant, interaction. I won’t talk to them, I won’t even answer the door. If they want to try to bust in illegally, what happens after that is on them.

I will further never, ever call the police for any reason. They simply can’t be trusted. If I have a problem with someone or something, I will solve it myself. The cops in my area have near as makes no difference to a 0% clearance rate for nuisance crimes, assault/battery, thefts, and burglaries anyway. Unless you need a report for insurance purposes it’s useless, and at that rate I’ll have my attorney call them on my behalf. They are not in the business of helping you. So don’t even expect that they will.

TL;DR: Don’t talk to the police.