everdrive

Are there _any_ good video game movies whatsoever? The 2005 Doom film was the easiest miss I'd ever seen. All they needed to do was remake Aliens, but with Doom. Instead of ending up in the Alien nest, you end up in hell. No idea how they managed to drop the ball on that one.

>Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker

Nah, I don't think I will.

People have what you might call a comparison disease. Once something can be compared with something that is "better" in some metric, most people are unable to think about whether or not the "lesser" version is sufficient. All they can think about is that the "better" one exists.

There are people who would be unable to sit through a movie at DVD quality, or at 1080p, but what do they think people in the past did? Was everyone who watched movies on VHS or DVD just enduring pure suffering? No movie has ever been enjoyed at resolutions lower than [current standard]?

Whether or not it came to legal notices, these sorts of "use technology to make the other technology less-bad" tactics are always temporary games of cat-and-mouse. Fine in the short term, but not something that offers a full, stable replacement.

I'm not sure how to discuss bidet problems without sounding gross.

I tried a bidet previously because people rave about them. But when trying them, there seems to be two problems. The water that hits you sprays around on impact. So that immediately-sullied water now has a bit of blast radius to it. I also can't see down there, so having done what certainly felt like a pretty thorough job bidet-ing, I would wipe and discover the job was not so thorough. So although you could potentially use a bidet to reduce your toilet paper usage, toilet paper itself allows you to actually check whether or not you got everything, which just seems impossible with a bidet alone. And if I only used the bidet, then what am I supposed to do to dry myself? It feels like TP needs to be in the mix at least a little bit.

Am I just using it wrong? Does a lifetime of using it give your brain a clearer sense of where the water has hit and what "clean" feels like.

>-- the various heroin epidemics saw to that.

But hey, it's walkable!

No bombs, no fishers.

I would get rid of every single golf course in the world if I could. One of the worst uses of land out there. Imagine the horrible, gross volume of herbicides each course uses to ensure that only the "correct" grass is growing over all those acres.

And you own clothing that was made with child labor. You monster. Why do you love child labor so much?

There would need to be some articulable upside to data centers, though. Even if we agree there should be less livestock, I don't see how that has any bearing on the data centers topic.

I don't hate data centers any less. That's 17B gallons wasted on something I don't care about and actively want less of.

The problem is further away when the next quarter, which for some companies, might as well be in the year 3000.

People are fundamentally short-term thinkers. Just imagine spraying neurotoxins on your lawn. You're "saved" from the "terror" of noticing more than one kind of grass, but of course you're incrementally increased the cancer risk for yourself, your children, and who knows who else. This is just one example; people do this constantly. Plastic fleece puts an untold amount of poison into the environment, but "I need to be warm RIGHT NOW." etc. Or lead paint. "It's only toxic when it breaks down, and that won't be for decades!"

Why would programming be any different?

No, and it's not strictly impossible to correctly build out a SOC / SIEM and ingest all the logs you want and pay for the right engineers to make sure it all works correctly. But damned if anyone manages to do a great job in this area. It's too complex and too expensive, so almost everyone settles for "best effort."

A lot of problems are easy conceptually, but we can't manage to tackle them.

I hear what you're saying -- I think there are a few points here:

- Obesity is not isolated to food deserts. The people in food deserts may be in a pitiable situation, but most of us are obese; not just the people in food deserts. If obesity were isolated to food deserts, or even concentrated in food deserts, I might feel differently.

- Even the people in food deserts have access to nutrition labels. One thing that makes a lot of sense is ensuring you get your vitamins, and then keeping the rest of your food cheap. In other words, the most cost-effective food regarding calorie-per-dollar might be zebra cakes, but obviously you don't actually to just buy Zebra cakes. Living on black beans and rice might not sound appealing, but it is not the path to obesity. When you live on black beans and rice, other foods are your garnish. Sparing, small servings, but present from time to time. Most breakfast cereal is also effectively just grass seed + vitamin powder, as well.

[edit]

There was a time in my life where I had very little money, and I lived on black beans and rice for quite a while. I biked and walked around the city and I was thinner than I've ever been since.

Right -- in the details this is heavily task dependent. If we're talking about word processing, then computing has mostly gotten worse in the past 20 years.

If we're talking about video game graphics it's a bit of a mixed bag.

If we're talking about local LLM models then you need all the power you can get.

Etc, etc.

>What would you do if all your food sources were appallingly lacking in essential nutrients and the sorts of things your body craved in order to get fed?

When I hit 300 lbs I might suspect there was a flaw in my reasoning.

>They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock

I really distrust flock in and of itself.

I'm not convinced. Propaganda only works when it relies on something that people are dispositionally inclined towards. eg: hating foreigners, calls towards group unity, etc.

You can't use propaganda to trick people into becoming experts at calculus, for instance.

I kind of hoped my point would come across more clearly. Obviously my current computer is faster than one from 20 years ago. But, it doesn't really react more quickly. It just does more: higher resolution video, advanced graphics, etc. The moment we add capability we rush to use it all up. This is not _always_ bad when it comes to computing, but I wouldn't mind if people in general had more restraint.

Destroy human knowledge, skyrocket RAM prices, push up residential electricity prices, potentially infantilize a generation of young people. It's all worth it, of course. Every time you _can_ invent a technology, you _must_ invent it. No externality is worth considering.

>You're right that obesity is not necessarily linked to overeating

This can be true, but I think some people are confused. The vast majority of the time, it is linked to overeating. There are some edge cases where there is something else going on metabolically, but most people do over eat.

I don't mean to be glib, but for the most part, yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-rep...

Obesity is nearly everywhere. In the old days, "prosperous" might have been a euphemism for "fat," as only the rich could afford to be fat. Now even people who are "food insecure" are often quite fat. Some of this of course is due to food quality, but ultimately there are no starving fat people.

> But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays.

People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health.

Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. They're merely more capable -- developers quickly and aggressively fill up (and overflow) all that added capability until you're back in the same place you used to be.

>This is like complaining that Fox News offices use water in their restrooms because you don't like their reporting. It's transparently not about that.

If Fox news were trying to put a huge bathroom next to my property I certainly would care, though.

> Do you need to eat alfalfa grown in California rather than the midwest?

The only alfalfa I have right now is made of little pellets that I give to my chickens.

> Large loads that can be curtailed during supply shortfalls via region shifting or operation of backup generators allow the grid to use a higher percentage of renewable generation without having intermittency issues.

I don't see how this is a benefit to building more data centers. This sounds like an explanation of how you might mitigate their impact.

> NIMBY

I'm not interested in this term until you'll happily accept a carpet factory next to you that poisons your water for years. There is TONS of stuff that no sane person would want in their back yards.

But that sort of analysis would prevent you from dropping a wikipedia link about something only somewhat related, and then implying that EVERYTHING is backdoor'd by the government.

>Do the math on what percentage of any given region's available water is consumed by data centers. Compare this to e.g. agriculture. This one isn't even a plausible concern, it's manufactured outrage.

Is it more than zero? I need to eat (although I do wish we all paid more for cleaner and more ethical food) but I explicitly don't want data centers.

I think this compares to pesticide to control malaria vs. herbicide to to prevent me from noticing two kinds of grass. Both put poison in the environment, but spraying for malaria has a clear benefit to outweigh its costs. But spraying herbicides so my lawn "looks nice" is really only a downside. What are the benefits to more data centers?

>Unless NIMBYs or captured regulators

If we're just doing ad-hominen we need a name for your group. Do you have any suggestions?

Books and romsets are the future. Get ready for it early.

China probably does lie about its pm 2.5 numbers, but it also seems objectively true that they (and really nearly everyone) are doing much, much better than New Dehli.

This outcome was always obvious. The internet is too big. You can degrade the sites that are legitimate enough to follow the law, but that's just a drop in the bucket in the sea of porn.