https://sbmueller.github.io/nohello/

Yeah, but against people with portable ATGMs, like Javelins or NLAWs. Anything else is not going to make a dent in an Abrams tank.

Also, they’d be much more likely to send in IFVs, like Bradleys. They’re much “better” equipped to deal with “people”.

Not when the output is a pipe.

Quoting myself:

It’s a great movie

So: ???

Interstellar is a very plot driven movie, it’s leads you by the hand saying “these things are happening, in this order, and it’s interesting and engaging”, and when the movie is done you get it: the journey is at an end, and the good guys conquered the big problems, emotions were felt along the way, and you’re not really left with any lingering questions afterwards. It’s a great movie, but it’s also a rather easy movie to enjoy if you’re into space stuff.

Whereas 2001, aside from being an absolute visual feast, is more abstract and theme driven, about humanity’s place in the cosmos, and it makes you ask deeper questions, but you must actually pay attention and discover those questions and explore them in your own mind to actually engage with the movie. It’s not a passive experience, and your engagement with the movie can stay with you for days. It’s certainly a much more difficult movie to enjoy.

When I was in my 20s, I hated movies like 2001 and Bladerunner, I found them so tedious, because I wanted scifi like Aliens goddammit. Later, I learned to really enjoy these more cerebral movies that took effort to engage with, because they were so rewarding when that effort paid off.

I don’t think Sandy did much game design on Doom though. He was mainly a level designer who came in late in the project to finish the levels started by Tom Hall, who had left id software, and to grind out levels for the third episode. By the time Sandy joined id software, Doom (the engine and game mechanics) was already pretty much the game it was going to be.

I should also say that the maps he made for Doom and Doom 2 are by far my least favorite in the game.

People who are “actor rich” aren’t the problem. AFAIK Clooney hasn’t done anything particularly immoral, he just played in some movies and got paid well.

You should be mad about the amoral corporations that are ruining the world, and the sociopaths that control them.

what are you paying monthly?

I have proton unlimited subscription that comes to about €10 per month (though you can often get temporary better deals for the first year or so), and that includes proton mail as well, which was my main reason for getting it. Just the VPN should be a bit cheaper.

Any negatives you can think of?

Not many. Speeds are good, and the IPs seem to have a better reputation than on Private Internet Access, for example: no captchas on google.com.

One recent change I was rather annoyed by is that they restricted the number of servers that are available with a manual wireguard configuration file to 10 per country, when hundreds are available through the app or browser extension.

I’ve had a few connectivity issues with the firefox browser extension as well, but nothing as of late.

For me it’s about separating online identities.

I don’t want adult sites to know anything about my real identity or location. I don’t want social network sites to know about my kinks or to be able to correlate my IP data with that of other people who may be on the same network. I don’t want online stores to know my ID on social network sites, or vice versa.

I do have separate browser profiles for each of my online identities, but they could still be tied together if I would use them from the same IP, so they each get a different VPN connection.

Using ProtonVPN here, because it gives me de-googled, private e-mail too.

There is a much more obvious country that has a vested interest in dividing western democracies, and weakening organizations that unite them, such as NATO and the EU, a country that’s currently in a proxy and hybrid war with Europe, and a country that has long understood the importance of information warfare: Russia.

Of course with the Trump administration, you never know, but then you could also ask yourself: if Trump was a Russian agent, how different would his actions be? Not very different I think.

I have no idea, and I don’t particularly care either, it’s not like it was some wildly expensive cable (though I don’t remember the price) … I just know that I saved myself a whole lot of inconvenience.

Gold doesn’t tarnish so much and is also often used on computer edge connectors.

Yes, Gold is a noble metal, so it doesn’t like to oxidize.

So regardless of the fact that it’s about an optical connector here, and hence completely nonsensical, gold is actually a worse conductor of electricity than copper or silver. The point of gold plated connectors is not so much to improve the immediate audio quality, but to prevent oxidation of the connector over time, which can degrade quality and lead to bad contact. Gold is a noble metal, so doesn’t oxidize. I would think most audiophiles know this?

I used to have to replace the cable of my electric guitar every few years because the sound would get crackly or drop out intermittently, I eventually got one with gold plated 6.35mm plug and I’m still using that same cable 15 years later.

Would be nice to see the gaming industry pivot back to making innovative games within the constraints of hardware, instead of just expecting customers to throw ever more powerful (and power consuming) hardware at it.

Winget is such a half-assed effort

And most of the time it just downloads the msi package or the installer exe and runs that, and you have to click through that. It doesn’t actually keep track of what gets installed.

To be fair half the world seems to forget Belgium is not all french sometimes

It’s annoying as fuck.

Microsoft/Xbox store used to be almost entirely French when visiting from a Belgian IP, even if you set your profile language to Dutch or English. Not sure how it is nowadays, I don’t come there anymore, but it was like that for at least a decade.

Amazon Prime and Netflix still have many movies and series in dubbed French only for Belgian customers, and not the original version with Dutch or even just English subtitles.

Many sites serve you a French language page by default if you visit from a Belgian IP, and then you have to hunt in the header or footer of the page for the language toggle. You usually can’t even read the cookie permission popup in a language you understand.

Christopher Nolan’s ideas are all: imagine this story, BUT get this: the timeline is fucked.

That’s every single Nolan movie.

Yes, but that’s supposed to be your inner monologue.

Why would I throw it away, when I can give it to someone who needs it more, or sell it?

Because selling is always a hassle, dealing with choosing beggars and scammers, and it may not be worth much anymore for general use.

For example, my old PC is a i7 4770k… it can’t run Windows 11 or play remotely recent games. I don’t know anyone who could use this thing, so to save a few watts I took out the GPU, put it in eco mode and have been using it as my Linux server.

My NUC uses 6-7W idle.

I have played around with some mini PC’s (minisforum and beelink brand), they’re neat but they turned out to be not very reliable, two have already died prematurely, and unfortunately they are not end-user serviceable. Lack of storage expansion options is an issue as well, if you don’t just want to stack a bunch of external USB drives on top of each other.