About 10 years ago I worked at a company that had broken ground on a solar factory in the UK. The government cancelled subsidies for solar and they pulled out.

disco elysium is mostly driven by character and theme rather than plot. you’re not expected to solve the mystery, the game is more interested in which sidequests you engage with, how you treat the other characters, and how you choose to interpret the story. the choices you make don’t influence the mystery but they do influence the events of the mercenary tribunal, phasmid encounter and the final scene quite a lot. the tribunal is mostly about how well you did at the detective work and your relationship with Kim, whereas the phasmid encounter is about Harry’s inner journey, then the results of both of these scenes filter through to the confrontation with the other cops.

I also think the game does a pretty good job of setting these expectations, because for most of the game you just think the hardy boys did it, instead the game works pretty hard to make you curious about other things and you end up just going through the motions of the actual investigation

the deserter is probably one of the weaker characters, he does feel like a plot device, but he’s there to let the story connect the events of the game and harry’s own personal journey directly and literally to the history and politics of revachol, i think that’s probably why they decided to make him the killer in the first place

my understanding is that Mozilla paid good money for pocket and never made much from it

I know this is a meme but historians like Livy never used to let facts get in the way of a compelling historical narrative. obviously these sources provide a lot of useful information but taking them at their word is the equivalent of historians in the year 4000 trying to recreate 21st century life out of nothing but Joe Rogan podcasts

it is 2019, the 2060ti has 8gb of vram. it is 2020, the 3060ti has 8gb of vram. it is 2023, the 4060ti has 8gb of vram. it is 2025, the 5060ti has 8gb of vram.

I built my own nas back in the day and it is not worth it. trying to remember an the mdadm commands, setting up Cron jobs for scrubbing and smart tests, setting up email notifications if the tests fail, flashing the firmware on my hba, setting up dynamic DNS, fail2ban (later a private key whitelist), borg etc etc. it’s not too bad if you’re an experienced Linux user but it’s still a lot of time out of your day, meanwhile if you’re a new Linux user then you’re basically just playing russian roulette with your data. building a jellyfin server is a good learning experience but for a nas I would pick an off the shelf appliance every time

pisses me off that they call it an image editor

insightful comment. just one small criticism: there are a lot of artists out there who happen to exist within this capitalist economic system, who need to sell their art for money so that they don’t starve or become homeless. and these people probably don’t want their art and their style to be reproducible by ai because that would threaten their ability to house and feed themselves.

I’m all in favour of abolishing intellectual property, but only as part of a broader change to our economic system that would allow artists to support themselves without having to worry about ownership. besides, these ai tools aren’t really ‘sharing’ art, they’re just allowing big tech companies to consolidate wealth and power

finally, your point about art rarity is not really relevant to the discussion, these tools are intended for people distributing digital art, not people speculating on physical art

this pretty much sums it up. I thought trump would be incoherent, but some of the stuff out of his mouth was borderline surreal. Harris had completely tuned herself to ‘beat’ trump, and while it worked, it’s painfully clear that she doesn’t have a single original thought - nothing but platitudes, the same canned phrases about working families and small businesses, same tired defence of Israel.

Hopefully I’m not too late to say this: I would strongly caution against buying a Fairphone. My mum got a new Fairphone 3 in early 2021. Earlier this year, just after the phone went out of warranty, the USB-C port stopped working. The replacement bottom module was out of stock, it’s been out of stock for months, and the forums are full of people complaining that it’s been mostly out of stock since 2021. Fairphone claimed that they would have stock back by the end of August, and as of today, that is not true. This phone was supposed to have spare parts available through to 2025.