MudMan

MudMan , 19 hours ago

Fun fact, in many places, soft-serve ice cream is known as "Italian ice cream".

What we are seeing here is a slightly botched traditional Italian lunch.

MudMan , 19 hours ago

Italians will cook your pasta inside a whole wheel of cheese. Spaniards deep fry pork belly and serve it as a snack. Last time I was in Eastern Europe I thought something was a sweet only to discover it was a lump of straight-up pork fat. Just raw. To munch on.

Americans may be more consistent at eating gross murderfood regularly and in large quantities, but they sure aren't the only ones to have it.

MudMan , 2 days ago

I don't do that with anybody, normally. People of all genders will sometimes give you a hug here if it's been a while or if they're happy to see you. Cheek kissing is mostly a women thing, though.

MudMan , 4 days ago

Well, and also one to make it less like Latin. And the same with French.

People have been beating this thing with a stick for many centuries. It's part of the charm. And now it's doing the same to every other language. That's maybe less charming.

MudMan , 4 days ago

I love both. And handhelds. And consoles.

I just like videogames and things that can run videogames. Videogame tech is cool.

I genuinely don't get why people have such a grudge against gaming laptops. It's like they got stuck regurgitating talking points from the mid 2000s. There have been so many super cool gaming laptops in the past couple of decades. Big, chonky powerhouses, sleek stealth workhorses, quirky nonsense builds... It's awesome.

MudMan , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Alright, alright, just because I got myself excited. Top three gaming laptops, rating for sheer cool factor with no regard for practicality or value for money, but in no particular order:

1- MSI GS65. It could be the Razer Blade, which is the OG, but the GS65 was legitimately the best of that first batch of thin and light gaming laptops that looked classy without looking tacky. It had a 1070 in it, it could run every contemporary game just fine and it made you look downright stylish working on a Starbucks. So cool.

2- ASUS ROG Flow Z series. Asus put a dedicated GPU. In a tablet. Like, up to a 4070, you can get in one of these. It's fat, it's clunky, it's underpowered for the hardware, it's heavy, it sounds like the speaker in your first smartphone... but guys, 4070 in a tablet, are you kidding me? How cool is that?

3- Framework Laptop 16. It's a modular laptop with a dedicated GPU module and a bunch of random configuration options. Gaming laptop lego. Again, how cool is that?

MudMan , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

I was telling someone else in a different thread that I would pay good money for a Framework device in tablet form with a detachable keyboard. Just mush entires 2 and 3 on that list. I'll pay way more than it's worth. Like, Surface Pro money for Kindle hardware. Just give it to me.

MudMan , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

OK, but why?

Well, for fun and as a cool hobby project, I get that. That is enough to justify it, like any other crazy hobbyist project. Don't let me stop you.

But in the spirit of practicality and speaking hypothetically: Why set it up that way?

For self-hosting why not build a few standalone machines and run off that instead? The reason to do this large scale is optimizing resources so you can assign a smaller pool of hardware to users as they need it, right? For a home set of two or three users you'd probably notice the fluctuations in performance caused by sharing the resources on the gaming VMs and it would cost you the same or more than building a couple reasonable gaming systems and a home server/NAS for the rest. Way less, I bet, if you're smart about upgrades and hand-me-downs.

MudMan , 4 days ago

Yeah, but if you're this deep into the self hosting rabbit hole what circumstances lead to having an extra GPU laying around without an extra everything else, even if it's relartively underpowered? You'll probably be able to upgrade it later by recycling whatever is in your nice PC next time you upgrade something.

At this point most of my household is running some frankenstein of phased out parts just to justify my main build. It's a bit of a problem, actually.

MudMan , 4 days ago

OK, yeah, that makes sense. And it IS pretty unique, to have a multi-GPU system available at home but just idling when not at work. I think I'd still try to build a standalone second machine for that second user, though. You can then focus on making the big boy accessible from wherever you want to use it for gaming, which seems like a much more manageable, much less finicky challenge. That second computer would probably end up being relatively inexpensive to match the average use case for half of the big server thing. Definitely much less of a hassle. I've even had a gaming laptop serve that kind of purpose just because I needed a portable workstation with a GPU anyway, so it could double as a desktop replacement for gaming with someone else at home, but of course that depends on your needs.

And in that scenario you could also just run all that LLM/SD stuff in the background and make it accessible across your network, I think that's pretty trivial whether it's inside a VM or running directly on the same environment as everything else as a background process. Trivial compared to a fully virtualized gaming computer sharing a pool of GPUs, anyway.

Feel free to tell us where you land, it certainly seems like a fun, quirky setup etiher way.

MudMan , 4 days ago

I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it's two instances at most, so... I don't know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It'd pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you're only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you're playing.

But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that's the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I've done that before for that reason.

I suppose it's why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.

MudMan , 6 days ago

Man, I say this a lot and I know it comes across standoffish, but... US ethnic categorizations seem bonkers to me.

What does "half Jewish half Irish" even mean? Isn't that a Jewish person from Ireland? That would count as fully both things. What are the other two halves?

This is why I have to think about the immigration form for ten minutes each time I get through customs in the US, it's all "was any of your grandparents a smurf?" and "are you latino and/or lactose intolerant?" and stuff like that. It makes no sense.

MudMan , 6 days ago

Aw, you guys are gonna make me answer this seriously, aren't you?

No, it's not the Jewish part that I don't get. I have been around enough to understand that Wilson is implying that she has some (presumably) Ashkenazi and some Irish ancestry, and I am self-aware enough to understand that she would sound insane if she put it that way.

The fact that she's calling it out as a shorthand for common cultural ground is the part that is strange, let alone the persistent hangup with ancestry and the weird assumption that culture is somehow genetic. I was just trying to break it down gently by being facetious about it.

It's weird, it's highly specific to American culture, and yes, I do get the very deep roots in colonialism that lead to this outcome. It's just weird to me that's where it landed and how often Americans seem to think it's universal when it's actually pretty unusual.

I was not kidding about the census categorizations that get repurposed on immigration forms, though. They are full of apples and oranges in all sorts of arrangements and I have never once felt I fit on any of the categories or that the categories themselves make any sense.

MudMan , 6 days ago

Wait, who what now? I'm not aware of any extra immigration requirements based on your health situation. I certainly didn't get asked when I was a migrant.

MudMan , 6 days ago

Okay, so that's two for Canada, one for "you have to prove you have a job or resources to support yourself, but no specific health care requirement".

Gonna guess this is a Canadian thing, then? Or at least a thing in some places but definitely not "all the countries with good health care".

MudMan , 6 days ago

I am VERY glad that's not how we frame it here.

I mean, hey, yeah, being a place where people like to retire the issue does come up in conversation, but health care is a constitutional right, it is provided universally and even undocumented migrants are allowed to access most of the system. Makes sense to me. You get taxed a proportional amount of what you make, everybody gets the support they need. I have several family members that would likely not be alive right now without that principle and that's how I wanted to be treated when I lived abroad, so I have no problem extending the same privilege to others.

Yay for socialdemocracy, I guess.

MudMan , 6 days ago

Well, hey, all I can say is that's not how it works either in my home country or in the other place where I lived as a long term resident, and I am glad that's the case. Over here even undocumented migrants have a right to health care, which was not uncontroversial but is definitely the right call.

MudMan , 6 days ago

No it's not. First of all, there is no requirement to be healthy to be able to be a migrant here. That's not a thing in either my home country or the country I personally moved to. Both of those place have "social nets".

I get being annoyed at the places where that is true, but why assume it's universal? It clearly isn't.

MudMan , 6 days ago

I literally moved to a different country and lived there for a decade. I think I would have noticed while I was filling all the forms. I talked to no doctors, I answered no questions and nobody ever brought it up. The first time I got a physical after moving it was the yearly checkup at work.

And I've worked with migrants here as well. Hell, I've hired migrants. In one case we messed up the paperwork and had to start over. Not once did we check for any disability exemption of any kind.

And no, I'm not telling you my life history just because you're too conservative to assume that countries don't just issue blanket bans for sick people to be immigrants, go google it or something, do some research before telling other people on the Internet how the world works.

MudMan , 6 days ago

Because you are acting like a baseline of inhumanity is the norm and refusing to accept the economics of not being a complete dick could be sustainable, which is a pretty fundamentally conservative stance.

I'm still not telling you where I live because I am not an idiot, but what I can do is google it for you:

In most cases, disabled people can move wherever abled people can. Kristine Thorndyke of TEFLHero confirms that there’s no visa barrier there for disabilities. Panama is the same. Countries with universal healthcare will still extend coverage, though waiting periods and supplemental insurance may apply. In countries like Germany, where health insurance is mandatory, you’ll find private insurers to fill in gaps on preexisting conditions. Others, like Costa Rica, extend healthcare coverage for all at one nominal rate. Brazil covers medical costs for all residents for free.

https://expatsi.com/healthcare/disabled-expat-guide/

There, go be weird somewhere else.

MudMan , 6 days ago

Same amount whether you're disabled or not, so no, not a "restriction on disability" at all.

Keep going down that list, though, you'll figure it out. Just don't feel the need to post updates.

MudMan , 6 days ago

No, if you don't have a job or means to support yourself, you are cut off from migrating to most places, regardless of your disability status. Being disabled also doesn't mean you can't work or have an income.

If you can legally move to a place as an person without disabilities, being disabled in itself will not be a blocker (apparently only in some places), as long as you meet all other requirements, which is what the meme above is about. There is a very, very wide gap between offering to take care of foreign dependents sight unseen and actively excluding disabled people because they are a "burden". As in, only one of those is an extremely dickish, borderline eugenic stance, the other is entirely run of the mill red tape.

As in, I migrated to another country and nobody checked my disability status, but they sure as hell checked that I had a job. Like I said in the first place.

And even then, there are countries that will provide health care universally as a recognized human right, including undocumented migrants, even if they still require a job or income to allow visa access or permanent residency. Like I said in the first place.

I'm running out of ways to ask you to be weird about this somewhere I can't see you.

MudMan , 7 days ago

I want a convertible Framework device with a detachable keyboard so bad.

I don't need another laptop, but a modular standalone tablet-ish screen with an optional typing surface and shipping Linux as an option? I'd be so there, especially if paired with upcoming ARM SoCs.

MudMan , 8 days ago

Gotta say, for a guy they keep presenting as a senile, barely-functional bumbling idiot, orchestrating a trial to throw your own son in jail just to generate a distraction is kinda badass.

Some real "getting captured was my plan all along" energy right there.

MudMan , 8 days ago

So... which education system would that be?

I acknowledge that online the assumption is whenever you see memes like these it's always about the US, but maybe having that assumption is me internalizing that weirdness?

MudMan , 8 days ago

Oh, ok. So no problem, then.

I mean, if all of them are like that then it's a fundamental, intrinsic problem of growing up and learning things and there's nothing to be done. No point complaining.

But I don't think you mean that, to be perfectly honest.

MudMan , 7 days ago

This is just repeating what I originally said, but hear me out. Who is "we"?

I mean, this very nice lady even says at around the 35 minute mark that "there are plenty of schools that don't grade their students and have great college acceptance rates", which makes me think she thinks her "we" may not be your "we". She definitely doesn't seem to think that "we" is "all of them".

So who is "we"?

MudMan , 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Alright, sorry to shock you guys, but... what this video is describing is pretty run of the mill game design.

This is literally how game design works. All games "play you". The cliché of "how Mario 1-1 silently teaches you the game" is the same process this is describing. Dynamic difficulty or handicap systems like some of what he's describing have been in play since the 16 bit days, at least. I genuinely laughed out loud at "games are no longer a meritocracy".

Which is a shame, because there is a very interesting debate here, which a lot of very smart game designers, including Mark Rubin, are constantly having about how to desgin multiplayer games. Not whether to design matchmaking or multiplayer interactions, but how, and that's a very important distinction.

Personally, I think Rubin has a point in that if you overmanage matchmaking and you design that poorly you end up with every match being the same, particularly in team games. If you know what to look for you can tell what your team composition is. "Oh, this is the carry guy, here's the middle of the pack, and I guess in this one I'm the loser". That's not super fun and it does make for flat, uneventful matches. But also it's not super fun to consistently be crushed by sweaty high end players every time just because you got to a game too late and all the casuals had already dropped off. Matchmaking based on ladders or rankings is as old as... well, matchmaking, which is mostly a Xbox 360-era concept. Looking at ELO and other skill measurements is a bit more nuanced, but it can work well in ranked modes, particularly for 1v1 games, as long as there is some unranked mode where you can go to get less serious, more varied encounters. Things get weird when you start implementing over the top mercy rules, or throwing players into bot matches for a cheap win. Game design is ultimately player manipulation, but the point of a magic trick, to go with the video's metaphor, is that the audience needs to be fooled, or at least suspend disbelief. A win players know was forced feels condescending and patronizing, so it's a risky tool that probably shouldn't be abused.

But we're getting in the weeds. The point I do want to share is that while some of these specific examples may be counterproductive or misguided, the concept of manipulating players into having a good time is absolutely not. It is, in fact, the entire core of designing videogames. Game designers constantly anticipate what their players' experience is going to be, even when that prediction is "this is where the players will get creative".

MudMan , 12 days ago

That's how this works, isn't it? Nobody reads past the headline. Everybody feels about it super strongly, just not strongly enough to actually read about it.

MudMan , 12 days ago

Yeah, right? The biggest bummer of this entire stupid thing that should never have existed is that it's overshadowing perhaps the most exciting hardware launch on Windowsland since the original Surface. I am VERY interested in seeing if Windows on ARM is viable this time, and as a longtime Windows 2-in-1 user I am incredibly excited about the prospect of a similarly performant version that doesn't need to be plugged in basically at all times.

But because MS can't come up with a feature without shooting itself in the foot with a bazooka we're all here talking about the stopgap they had to implement to save face while they wait to be able to quietly kill this dumb thing for good. I swear, they are incredibly bad at this.

MudMan , 12 days ago

I'm torn about the marketing, because a) MS clearly wants to own "AI", and they do have the cheapest, best version of multimodal chat at the moment, and b) I do think to normies it's more marketable than "we did the Macbook Air, finally".

On the other hand, I 100% agree with you that I give zero craps about their stupid certification for 40 TOPS on laptops. I already own things with GPUs in them and I use very little in the way of LLMs or image generators, and certainly not offline, so the battery life and the matching improvements in weight are THE feature for me.

I mean, it doesn't really matter either way, the market is what it is, and I get to use the devices the same way regardless of how they're marketed, so sell whatever you have to sell. It's still fascinating and kinda sad to witness the self-sabotage, though.

MudMan , 13 days ago

Nah, I don't mind small talk. Small talk is fine. It's easy, you just smile a bit, and say hi and make a joke about whatever the other guy said.

It's the mid-size talk I can't deal with. The kind of talk where the other person is just giving you clichés of normie chatter about politics you disagree with or car culture or reality shows and you're supposed to just... keep providing valid responses and appear interested. I don't see what's small about that and it's excruciating.

MudMan , 13 days ago

Aw, came here to say that and got beaten to the punch. Damn you, fast Portuguese speakers.

MudMan , 14 days ago

I... is this an ironic The Onion thing, or...? Like, is it trying to shine a light on how the Internet has changed us as a society or is it being legitimately super weird and patronizing?

MudMan , 15 days ago

Hm. So are we all the way there to Win 11 not being installable in fully offline machines, or...? Because niche as that application is, it does sound like the start of a use case for a natively compatible Windows alternative from a third party (say, a FreeWin to go with FreeDOS). I know there are or have been some attempts, but... yeah, long term that seems like it would prompt more focus on something like that.

I suppose it's more likely that compatibility layers in other OSs would get there first and more practically, but still. Maybe it's time to move Windows applications from an ecosystem to a standard.

MudMan , 17 days ago

I think plug-in hybrids are probably the way, particularly outside the US where Tesla hasn't made a bid for controlling the charging network by overinvesting in proprietary charging spots.

At that point it's probably the price that is the issue, but otherwise that seems to be the proposal that people are most comfortable with. The scalability of "EVs as tech toys" upstart approach has always been a bit weird, and without that leading the way as much I don't know that there are incentives to fully transition without an in-between step.

MudMan , 16 days ago

I didn't say it's a bad thing at all. I said there are territories where they didn't do it, so the charging infrastructure hasn't been built up by a private company effectively losing money in pursuit of cornering a specific market, start-up style. Even in the US the coverage is uneven, and outside the US it's basically nonexistent, so the headstart Tesla created to solve that issue is not the norm.

But... yeah, no, they made a bid for controlling the charging network and standard by losing money on a charging network the market didn't support yet so they could kickstart a segment they were trying to lead. I don't think even Tesla people would deny that.

MudMan , 16 days ago

I didn't say it was a good thing either. It's just... a thing. That happened.

I get that people get super wrapped into morality on this issue and rooting for the things they "support" or whatever they view it as, but that's genuinely not how I look at it or how I'm framing it.

EVs are EVs. They're a consumer product and also a part of a larger process of overhauling our energy generation, infrastructure and consumption. I do not have a horse in that race, beyond the obvious large-scale global impact, and even there I'm a lot more broad and neutral than the average online commenter, from what I can tell.

So no, it's not a good or a bad thing. A company made a very strong bet on electrifying vehicles, and as part of that bet they invested very heavily in a charger network, which was very costly but also placed them in a position to control key parts of the infrastructure. It was a bold move, and it worked, kinda. But even that big investment couldn't possibly be global, so all I'm saying is charger coverage is very uneven and there are regions where plug-in hybrids make sense as a transitional option where the charger network is moving slower in the absence of Tesla investment.

You keep trying to make this into part of an ongoing argument you're clearly having with someone else as part of some online side-taking. I'm not sure which side you're on, or the other guys are on or what the dividng lines are supposed to be. As a casual observer with an interest only in the big picture ramifications, I legitimately could not are any less about that.

MudMan , 18 days ago

I mean, he was in Singapore talking about Asia-Pacific tensions, which adds some context. As a standalone headline, yeah, an umprompted reassurance like that is terrifying.

MudMan , 19 days ago

I mean, duh.

He should have dropped out when he was found to have raped someone.

Hell, he should have dropped out when the "grab them by the pussy" tape came out. How did that work out?

Go vote for Biden if you can, is my point here.

MudMan , 19 days ago

Hah. No.

There is zero way that a different Dem candidate would win this if Biden dropped out. Zero. The MAGA goons alone would be hammering how much of a disaster they are and bragging about it all the way to the White House. And that's before you have to deal with the right wing media.

MudMan , 19 days ago

Anyone not named Joe Biden doesn't have that baggage by way of not being President at this very moment. Trump would have that baggage, for sure. So would any other Dem.

And yes, whatever arguments right wing media are using against the Dem candidate do matter. Outside the tiny, itty-bitty bubble of leftist social media, where people who actually decide elections live, that is a thing that happens.

MudMan , 23 days ago

I'd like you to read what you just wrote very slowly and imagine it's somebody else saying it, just to visualize if it's an absolutey bonkers thing to say.

MudMan , 28 days ago (edited 28 days ago)

Also if you support surrogate pregnancy, don't support surrogate pregnancy, support public ownership media, don't support public ownership media, support sex work, don't support sex work, support UBI, don't support UBI or pretty much any other bit of policy.

Every leftist is Schrödinger's leftist, constantly in a superposition of true leftism and false leftism until they interact with another leftist, at which point they collapse into a false leftist every time.

And then a conservative wins the next election so they can dismantle any leftist policy that has been accidentally introduced and the cycle can start all over again. Nature is a beautiful mystery, really.

MudMan , 28 days ago

Nobody is a leftist, see above.

MudMan , 28 days ago

If politics isn't confusing you you don't understand politics, I'll say that.

MudMan , 28 days ago

This post really rounds out this metaphor, because it's just as infuriating to people who understand the self-defeating nature of leftist purity checks and to quantum physicists pretty much for the same reasons.

MudMan , 28 days ago

Speaking of superpositions, this exists in the same space as flat earthers in that there's almost certainly some blend of genuine arguments and trolling but it's impossible to probe which is which.

But all joking aside, the overall point about leftists being susceptible to fratricidal, self-defeating infighting is absolutely genuine, and whatever amount of trolling and hostile propaganda is involved is certainly built on that assumption. If there is something to be learned from this nonsense is that this is a vulnerability and we should be consistently unified about acquiring, supporting and maintaining any remotely left-leaning and/or least right-leaning candidate available in every elected position at every level of democratic governance worldwide as a unified front to make that narrative go away.