VRay

I used to think that one of the worst things in the USA was that 100 people per day die in preventable car accidents, but now we’re getting 10x that from a virus and people pretend that it isn’t happening

Doesn’t look too bad so far as the USA goes, although if legal gun owners or Mexican cartel members were out there killing 40 people a day, you’d be screaming bloody murder about it

Particularly if you’re just one guy applying to random groups, the last few slots get applications from tons of insanely-powerful characters. You can sit there trying to join a group as a new player for hours and not get anywhere unless you apply to mostly-empty groups or start your own with a friend or two

If you don’t know that, it’s easy to think you’ll need to pay for achievements and loot in order to have a shot at getting a group

Hey, so long as I’m mentioning WoW here: That game is still taking in 200 million dollars a year or more, but it’s only getting a small fraction of that reinvested. I think the market is ripe for an actual WoW-killer. Gather a team, make a polished AAA version of WoW, and rake in the dough

You may as well not bother.. people with self control and awareness will play non-toxic games, and people without it will avoid your patch since it’s not the real game to them

We have so much food available that it’s a problem that poor people suffer from eating too much

It’s easier and more convenient to throw electronics, clothing, and furniture away than to bother repairing them

I wouldn’t bend over to pick up a quarter, even though it could buy me a day’s rice or flour

Once we’ve moved industry into space, we could well be ten or a hundred times as wealthy as this. Maybe employment will only be something for overachievers in that distant future

Full disclosure though, if you do that while my wife and kid are home I will stab you

Basically no lockdown other than shutting down bars at 8 PM, plenty of exposure between proximity to China and super-crowded trains

The difference between Japan and the USA is their ubiquitous mask use

We went on a 20 year jihad over a single 9/11's worth of preventable deaths in the USA, and yet we can't be bothered to take any action when we're racking up a 9/11 every couple of days?

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view...

$2.6 billion is chump change to a medium-sized city with a few hundred thousand residents, much less the US at large

We just need to remove zoning restrictions so that market forces can bring houses back down to being an affordable, depreciating asset.

https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...

The problem is that everyone is a member of a different 1%. "Oh, only one percent of users have that monitor setup" "Oh, only one percent of users run that app" "Oh, only one percent of users change that setting in any given month" "Oh, that app only crashes once per hundred uses"

If you do 100 things with your computer every month, and every one of them has a 1/100 chance of crapping out, you're looking at a 64% chance of something crapping out on you over the course of the month

I ended up having to buy a new monitor to work around the issue, since I couldn't handle having apps explode on me any more

I'd say it's fair to call the process by which people justify doing bad things as "evil". I just wanted to correct the notion that Facebook employees think of themselves as villains.

Facebook is connecting people with each other.

Amazon/Microsoft/Google are collecting usage data to improve their products. Amazon and Microsoft think it's such a benign thing to do that there's no need at all to allow people to see or opt out of this collection. Google thinks that providing visibility into what they're doing is more than enough to make up for it. Apple thinks that making it explicitly opt-in is enough to justify it.

Defense contractors are keeping Americans safe and making the world a safer place.

High-frequency trading firms are providing liquidity.

Landlords are "housing providers"

Etc etc

Someone was going on and on about how Facebook is showing off a (likely) $50,000 prototype and I was just explaining that 2021's $50,000 prototype is 2031's $100 at Wal-Mart

No matter how hard I looked or negotiated, I couldn’t manage to get any remote offers or jobs in small towns in the USA that’d pay over about $140k. Meanwhile, with my experience it was EASY to get an offer for $300k in the Bay Area.

That means that even paying $3300/month to rent a run-down shithole and $6 per gallon for milk, I’m saving $120k a year vs the $40k I’d save in a small town.

The numbers get even more insane if you buy property in one of these hideously overpriced Bay Area cities. I haven’t done it yet, since a downturn could leave me holding the bag and trapped in this nightmarish place for 5 years, but the financial incentives are incredible

I’ve taken long stretches off work and done all sorts of amazing, productive stuff during that time. I have friends whom I really respect completely fall apart when nobody’s ordering them around every day though.. they stop going outside, the lack of exercise and sunlight sends their meat suits into “depression mode”, and it’s a quick downward spiral

I’m hoping that having a whole society oriented around it would result in a more positive outcome

Sure enough, it worked. I was just hurting my neck by using my PDA too much with my neck craned downward, and getting massages/exercise or just not using a mobile device fixed the problem completely

I really lucked out with that guy

5-10 years after VR starts to really take off, you’ll be able to get a decent standalone VR headset for $200 or less. They’ll probably be cheaper to make than laptops or TVs in the long run because of the smaller displays.

I ask because in-state tuition in California and Washington is so high that you could afford a full time PhD student tutor with it.

Even the deadly hijackings it was formed to prevent wouldn't ever happen again, since the passengers would fight back now

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/locat...