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When compared to other professional level laptops the macbooks do put up a good fight. They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad the prices get a lot closer(when they arent on sale like thinkpads frequently do).
That said even then the m1 macbook is over a thousand dollars after tax and that gets you just 256GB of storage and 8GB of ram. Theyre annoyingly not as easy to find as intel offerings but you can find modern ryzen laptops that can still give you into the teens of screen on time for less with way more ram and storage space. The m1 is still the better chip in terms of power per watt and battery life overall, but then getting the ram and storage up to spec can make it $700 more than a consumer grade ryzen.
A demanding game on a macbook air m2 will still draw close to 30 watts and while that is actually still good for a laptop relative to what the output is, and you can probably do things to improve that by tweaking in game settings, it’s still going to suck power out of a 50Whr battery.
Steamdecks also run an efficient ryzen apu that lets them play games for 2-8 hours depending on how things are tweaked. Likewise on my 39Whr ryzen thinkpad(intel got a 59whr battery dont get me started on that nonsense) I can get 8-12 hours depending on usage normal browsing as well.
This isnt to take down the m1 & m2. They are definitively more powerful, theyre definitively more efficient, I’m not disputing that. But the gap isnt as huge as it was when the m1 launched.
They’re of course exaggerating a little and speaking confidently because theyre in the business of selling a product and not in the business of trash talking what they sell or reducing confidence in their product.
That said the M1/M2 silicon battery life gains were a huge leap forward when they first launched but in terms of battery efficiency and power AMD has been nipping at their heels, and in due time intel will likely get it’s stuff together and join them. You can already get ryzen laptops efficient enough and cool running enough that the fan is off during most light usage, and they can get hours into the mid to high teens on some models.
Likewise even macs will start to drain quite a bit when say watching an hd video 1.75x speed, or playing a video game, or encoding something using max CPU power. So while the Macs do have a power per watt advantage, you’ll still need to be plugged in.
And thats BEST arm vs intel and amd as they catch up. Samsung, google, and qualcom dont really have anything like the m2 at play and while qualcom is rumored to be close the samsung fab’d chips definitely arent.
So as things are the death Intel and AMD has been greatly exaggerated and in part due a combination of the usual apple hype combined with that hype being VERY VERY justified this go around.
Land trusts are such an interesting concept and I do hope that they succeed. That said it sucks that it has to come to this and that the government doesnt do more in order to curb affordability crisis. The failure of pruit igo and other housing projects echoes all over north america and is used as proof that public housing is a failure while ignoring the many many other factors that went into making these projects a failure.(from poor maintenance, out of place high density, intentionally kneecapped funding structure, and of course just the bad timing of subsidized suburban sprawl hollowing out cities in general). But land trusts are at least something to help compete with developers and put downward pressures on real estate pricing.
Regarding airBnB though I feel like the impact on housing prices is over stated. The units that exist really only number in the thousands, and while it is awful there are some scumbag landlords who use it as a way to do short-term rentals without the rental protections, when it comes to housing in major cities like Toronto or NYC this is a drop in the bucket. The issue, especially in torronto is lack of public competing at more affordable prices, and the poor zoning options that mean that a stones throw from a street of high rises is a single family home neighborhood.
If there was more generous density zoning then toronto could become a lot more dense while also spreading things out a little. It wouldnt need a street of high rises because low rises and mid rises in more places would be cheaper to build, more humane in scale, and also be more dense.
Most importantly an issue that plagues north american cities that isnt addressed is the density of its suburbs. There is high demand for urban living within metro areas, but urban density falls off a cliff. So people who want that lifestyle only have one choice and it’s to go into the city. If suburbs were more urban, more able to house people, and not just decentralized single family homes around stroads then we’d have a lot of pressure relief from the city itself.
And the craziest thing is that density doesnt mean high rises. It doesnt mean tall buildings and heavy traffic, and low green space. Just across the border in the buffalo metro area there is the suburb of kenmore ny which has a pop density of 4,088.77/km2 compared to Toronto’s 4,427.8/km2 . Look at this place: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SeGrD7t5ytxcZQsa7
It’s a lot of single family homes, some commercial drags with the major village center being on delaware with low rise units, and split houses(two flats) distributed throughout the village. This is the thing that is most frustrating about nimby anti-density proponents. You can still have a nice sfh, with some land to bbq, parks neaby, a driveway to park your car in, and all that other expected nonsense and have density. The character of your neighborhood doesnt have to turn into midtown manhattan in order to become more dense.
Oh sorry, I meant the DVD mail era of netflix not dvds in general. But yeah its fascinating how fast it happened. We went from having no dvd players to having one, to our house being full of them. I remember I even wound up getting a dvd player that was divX compatible that let me watch my downloaded content on the big tube tv. That stupid dvd player caused me to learn the difference between container and codec. It’s also remarkable how much clearer those low quality downloads on a low res CRT.
A lot of the venture capitalist driven industry has been fueled by an ask for forgiveness not permission move fast and break thing philosophy tesla included. It’s about time the law start catching up with them instead of caving to their will because its a TOTALLY NEW idea because an app is involved.
Im reminded of this short diddy https://youtu.be/9ywnLQywz74
Honestly its hard to say for me. Generally I dont usually pay full price for games unless its a franchise I know I know I really enjoy and the general critical and user reviews confirm it isnt a dud. I usually dont find myself unhappy with my game purchases though. If Im usure about something I wait for a sale.
Did a quick calculation and found that a 60$ game needs to be 35hrs to break even with movie prices edit: *where I live
How much do tickets cost where you live? Even using older $10 per seat prices and an average run time of 2 hours I come down to $5/hr. Also probably not just going out to a theater alone so if you’re bringing a date or your family, or even going with friends for a collective experience that balloons quite a bit.
Hmmm. I dont exactly want to cheer on the music publishing copyright industry, but AI infringing on creative spaces is certainly an issue especially when its trained using someones data without their consent.
Im surprised they arent chomping at the bit to train these AIs so that they can use the end result to give us AI driven artists, but I guess their knee jerk reaction to do a dcma takedown is too strong.
Back when reddit was smaller and more community driven, and went down more often, it was pretty much known to not do much. You got access to a gold subreddit and it was more or less a way to donate to a website you used a lot.
This made more sense when reddit was a small community driven upstart with frequent meetups, and secret santas, and a smaller feel.
Then reddit became one of the biggest websites on the web and I dont quite get why people kept doing it.
Yeah there are a lot of little usability things that give mastodon a lot more friction to use compared to twitter. Sure a tech savvy person can figure it out and breeze through it but for an average user being forced to choose an instance, having to figure out how to find people on other servers that arent coming in, and using other websites to search and browser addons is a lot of work.
The site has gotten a lot more usable recently, but during the first few twitter exoduses Mastodon was very rough and it’s no wonder that average users bounced off of it.
Thats not even getting into the network effect. Sure some people are there for the microblogs from anyone and building out the network effect. But twitter became mainstream with professionals. So for a lot of people the appeal of twitter was getting direct contact from celebrities and famous people, getting news from reporters as it was happening,Insight from industry professionals like writers, artists, and directors, and more! You could even get better customer service from companies because their twitter reps were more empowered to help you since your issue was more public.
Then there were the niche subjects that being big leads to. Wrestling mastodon is like 70% one guy on my timeline who is just really enthusiastic about womens wrestling(and posts news and cards for men’s stuff too probably because he notices how little is out there). On twitter you have lots of people tweeting about it along with the actual wrestlers themselves!
Hopefully this will curb that weird conspiracy theory right wing pipeline that the algorithm pushes people into, but I fear given how mature youtube is that the damage may have already been done.
Also I always love seeing them push short form content, when youtube used to have LOTs of shortform content but they adjusted the algorithm like 10 years ago to punish it. It screwed over a lot of the animators and comedy troupes that used to make up a lot of the site back then and ushered in the era of the video essay(as well as youtubers slowing down their speech and repeating themselves in order to get to minute 10).
The shorts dont bother me as much but the media player does. Like theres no playback controls, its portrait only, an it doesnt even let you fullscreen if youre on browser.
To be fair depends on what you listen to on spotify. If you listen to major mainstream names, well yeah. Millionaires. If youre listening to smaller bands then the compensation model of spotify is shit and you can probably give them more direct compensation by going to a concert, buying some merch, and maybe directly buying music from them.
The issue is the way that news is consumed these days. You always used to have a catchy newspaper headline with a title to get you to buy it (extra extra read all about it insert catchy alliteration here) . People dont consume news. They dont read articles. They receive headlines and then immediately engage on some other website that profits off sharing this content.
Clickbate for all the woes exists because it works and people do click it. Or are more likely to click and share than if it was a dull informative headline. It’s the same as on youtube. As long as the actual meat of the article is fine and the headline isnt too much of a BS article it doesnt bother me too much but of course there are limits to that.
Ive seen plenty of people share news with me in the form of a tweet with an abbreviated link that goes to an actual source making me wonder why they didnt just send the source(probably because they didnt click the link or felt the abbreviation was helpful).
It’s one of the huge issues the modern web faces. People dont spend time surfing from site to site like they used to , they mostly spend time scrolling a major social media platform(whether that be reddit, facebook, lemmy, twitter, mastodon, google news, etc) and scroll past shared headlines. Often not even clicking the link just scrolling past the headline.
Its one of the reasons many news sites are having a lot of trouble advertising and making money. It’s why we have those controversial protectionist laws like in australia that are penalizing google news, and it’s why web design of website home pages has gone down the toilet. Lots of websites are getting a more generic design on the grounds that most of their traffic doesnt come from someone going to “website.com” and seeing what’s new they come from facebook mostly.
NPR is a little different because it isnt primarily a text based news source they are an audio one. Since theyre mostly radio programming they could keep focusing and producing their bread and butter and were able to transition gracefully into the podcast era. They rely on being in people’s podcast feeds, or on peoples phones on an app more than they do being on x or facebook.
I feel like it’s also a demo issue. I feel like there is a large overlap of people who listen to NPR and people who are like not going to follow Elon as he flushes twitter into the x toilet.
This is such a horrible situation for all involved. Understandably the birth parents and blood relatives want to have the right to raise their kids especially when they clean up their act and find themselves in a better place to raise their kids and make things right for their family.
On the other hand I imagine it has to be heartbreaking to foster a child who was unwanted or removed from an abusive situation and raise them for several years like your own only to have a court come in and tear that child that you were raising and caring for away because you’re not their real parents.
The whole thing from both sides is just awful.
Like I said I’m basing my assessment on both games by the response the community gave and reviews Ive read and seen. I tend to do the patient gamer thing and wait for big steam sales before buying a game(unless its something I really want and sometimes I know indy games are already cheap and grab it at a lesser sale). Cyberpunk had a similarly criticized launch with the multiple daily 1001 posts on reddit and much like starfield has people who defend it you had people defending cyberpunk as well.
But from the outside looking in it was literally the same. You had the people who let themselves get spunup by the hypemachine absolutely let down when the game didnt live up to the hype.
You had the people who were chastising the bugs and “dated mechanics” how the game “didnt feel alive” and the “driving physics suck”
You had the hardcore CRPG fans for whom the only true RPG is: Baldurs gate 2, Morowind, Fallout 2, and special mentions to fallout new vegas. They’d come in and criticize lack of options and choice and blablabla.
You had the youtubers clowning on the game like Dunky showcasing a bug-fest.
And among people who actually reviewed the game the community consensus I saw was polarizing. Some did love it but a lot of people expressed it not living up to potential.
Again I cant say for sure(maybe next winter sale will be my time to shine) but it’s feels like this outrage cycle was targeting cyberpunk for a while and then one day it just stopped. And now that its time for the community to throw their poo at something again cyberpunk is the hero of the story.
So sorry for the rambling but in short my post is less a personal judgment of cyberpunk and more a “the community hated this game and had little good to say about it, and now it’s their precious baby and starfield is the bad one”. I know its not happening here but I figure rather than spitting into the wind on reddit I’d complain about this weird online discourse here.
he smashed the statues because he considered them “to be idolatrous and contrary to the Torah.”
followed by
The man’s lawyer, Nick Kaufman, denied that he had acted out of religious fanaticism.
If you say so! Its horrible that someone who isnt even from an area thinks they have the right to destroy another place’s cultural heritage and history because they feel it goes against their religion.
Part of me almost wonders if it’s been elevated because it’s frequently featured on those benchmark videos that have gotten so popular lately. Heavy use of ray tracing, frequently updated to get new features, very tweakable, and thousands of videos using Cyberpunk as the standard for hardware to be measured by just puts a bug in your head.
Lol I like how you took a break from the sprawling modern CRPG by playing a different sprawling modern CRPG.
I do love the pillars of eternity series though. I think the first game got a little exposition text heavy and could have done with some more character animations during cutscenes, but I loved the story and the setting and I enjoyed the tropical island hopping of the 2nd(though I do wish the ship to ship combat was better they were so close to what could have been a paired down FTL).
It depends what you’re using it for. If you want to old school mid to late 00s twitter that was just random anonymous people microblogging random thoughts and sharing links and pics then you’ll be happy to be back home.
If you followed twitter because it was a way to get direct contact and access to industry professionals, celebrities, reporters, breaking news, specific niche communities that just dont exist or barely do on mastodon, then you will be unhappy with it. Mastodon will get you uh, George Takei, Zach Weiner, and the technologyconnections guy.
For example of the difference and why many people just dont care for jumping into mastodon I’ll use My wrestling feed as an example. On mastodon it is mostly one guy who’s enthusiastic about womens wrestling(seriously if he stopped my feed would die), one news reposting site(which honestly isnt a bad thing cause wrestling news is awful), and a handful of other people. Twitter has lots of memes and clips from the fans after episodes air, lots of links to primary sources and news sites, and the actual wrestlers interacting cutting kayfabe online promos, promoting themselves, and interacting with fans.
This applies to a number of niches, hobbies, and fan interests on twitter. Bigger isnt necessarily better but the size and adoption of twitter is a huge strength.