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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • China has been militarizing and between the gender gap, the soon decline in population, and recent global attitudes towards them shifting , theyre going to be in for a world of economic hurt. A large population of unattached young men with poor economic outcomes doesnt bode well for peace in that region.

    Likewise the US policy of “surely embracing capitalism will lead to a liberal democracy” gave way to mild hostility towards china when it didnt happen. Especially with a president for 4 years who kept saying those quiet things other presidents didnt outright say because they knew it would be poking the bear for no reason.

    God help us all if this actually happens because it would lead to a world war centered on Asia and china, and I hope that what will happen with the age gap and decline in china will mirror more japan, but we do live in uncertain times.




  • 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.






  • 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.






  • I dont really use windows often outside of my work devices these days, but even if I did I wouldnt use edge as a primary browser based on how things rolled with IE6 and active X.

    Yeah yeah youre a new friendlier Microsoft, webstandards and html5 are more locked in, and your browser is a chrome fork, and you “<3 Linux”. I remember what you are and how you locked down the web when you had a chance. Personally I dont use chrome for the same reason given the direction google has been heading.

    But to answer “why not Edge?”: because you spent the better part of the last few decades sucking and amoral companies dont deserve the benefit of good faith.