Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.
The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).
It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.
Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.
Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.
The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.
Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.
There are only two types of “Super High-IQ” people who will go for an unpaid job working in politics for the likes of Musk:
Also, even amongst the “very naive young things”, in my own personal experience, the high intelligent types with the personality to be real believers of far right stuff, are at most above average intelligence but below genius level IQ (which is 120) and hence not really “super high”-IQ (which would more 160+) - I once worked with a guy like that who thought himself very intelligent and in his new job ended up working in an office with two genious level colleagues and he was very entertaining because of his “buttons” were so obvious and he was so easy to give the run around.
Super-high IQ people are often the very opposite of street smart, but one thing they aren’t is stupid and at most fall into the first part of the saying “you can deceive most people some of the time, or some people all of the time, but you can’t deceive most people all of the time” - they can be swindled but they’ll figure it out faster than most.
Same moneys, fancier tools.
Well, Money de facto ruling over massive domains in a country, including access to life essentials, is the very opposite of Democracy.
Yeah, but that happens only once per person, whilst the other one happens every day.
Yeah, but today is always the first day of the rest of your life.
I think the problem is because CRT displays didn’t have pixels so the uniform noise which is static was not only uniformely spread in distribution and intensity (i.e. greyscale level) but also had “dots” of all sizes.
Also another possible thing that’s off is the speed at which the noise changes: was it the 25fps refresh rate of a CRT monitor, related to that rate but not necessarily at that rate or did the noise itself had more persistent and less persistent parts?
The noise is basically the product of radio waves at all frequencies with various intensities (though all low) with only the ones that could pass the bandpass filter of the TV tuner coming through (and being boosted up in intensitity by automatic gain control) and being painted along a phosphorous screen (hence no pixels) as the beam draw line by line the screen 25 times per second so to get that effect right you probably have to simulate it mathematically from a starting point of random radio noise and it can’t be going through things with pixels (such as 3D textures) to be shown and probably requires some kind of procedural shader.
If government is actually the top power on the land with oversight over and the power to rule over everything, then the power of voters which choses the people who lead said government controls the top power on the land, which is what’s known as Democracy (even when imperfect).
However if government ties its own hands so that it doesn’t really oversee or rule over the domains were Money has the most power, then it’s not the top power on the land anymore - Money is - and the votes of people do not control the highest power on the land anymore, they only control a secondary power, so what you have in not Democracy anymore, it’s Oligarchy - Money is not democratic since doesn’t have any “one person one vote” rule and instead some have billions of times more power than others.
“Small government” is really just a slogan for a government which has had its hands tied by reducing its funding so that it’s unable to oversee, much less rule over, the areas where Money dominates, especially when it comes to facing the wealthiest people and companies. Mind you this only works if the other elements of Democracy are kept, so Money still wants a Judiciary and Law Enforcement independent of Government to uphold their ownership of things and stop the plebes from taking their shit, just a government weakenned in all other areas and unable to fight Money in the Courts.
I think you’re confusing rich people with common people.
Those making money in the “homeland” from colonization weren’t the peasants.
I live in a country - Portugal - which when I was born was still a Fascist dictatorship and still had colonies in Africa and back then the vast majority of the population in the country was incredibly poor (to the point of the country getting food help from The Netherlands) but 7 families were incredibly rich (and the white landowners in the “colonies” exploiting the locals and the land they had stolen from them too were rich).
Somehow I don’t think my mother (who walked to school barefoot in Winter as a child) was getting any of that “stolen wealth”.
Blaming the entire nation and everybody in it for colonization done by the country during times of autocracy is just how the wealthy who inherited wealth their ancestors amassed by exploiting people in faraway lands ditch the blame into the sons and daughters of the people who back then were poor and powerless.
Compensate the actual people who suffered (or their close descendands if still alive), not the parasites in power in lands which happenned to have been occupied, and do it with the money of those who gained from their suffering (or the inherited money from close descendants), not the usual Identity Politics bullshit of diluting the blame of a few by blaming whole nations and ethnicities to de facto benefit people who were not victims or descendents of victims but instead just happen to share nationality or ethnicity with the victims, all the while avoiding like crazy talking about the wealthy who were the ones amassing most if not all of the upsides of the pillaging.
Why waste time and fuel going all the way to the location of a black hole (not to mention that all the radiation near it isn’t going to be good for the ship) plust the delta-V to reduce their speed until they actually are not in orbit anymore and fall down into it?
Best just jettison them out of the airlock without a suit in the middle of nowhere.
By the way, the picture illustrating the post isn’t actually displaying the real thing - the noise in it is too squarish and has no grey tones.
It’s definitelly an analog over the air TV thing.
The way digital works you would either get a “No signal” indicator (because the circuitry detects the signal to noise ratio is too low) or squarish artifacts (because of the way the compression algorithms for digital video are designed).
I’ve had fewer problems with GoG + Lutris in Linux than I’ve had with Steam in Linux, to the point that I had to pirate one of my Steam games in order to be able to run it in Linux (the pirate version runs just fine).
Mind you, I get the impression that older AAA games are the most problematic ones, thought that’s maybe because I don’t run anything with Kernel Anti-Cheat and nowadays don’t really do online gaming (in fact all my games in Lutris are run inside a firejail sandbox with network access disabled).
Recently I’ve been playing Airline Tycoon Deluxe, Sims 3, Battle Brothers, Kerbal Space Program and Prey.
I think the newest is Prey, from 2018.
Airline Tycoon Deluxe is from 1998 and still fun (at the beginning, eventually you just make tons of money, use it to do more of the same to make even more money and it stops being fun). It helps that it’s a 2D game and the fun is in the management mechanics rather than related to anything visual.
By the way, they all run on Linux, though I had to literally pirate the Sims 3 to get it to work even though I own the game.
The way I went about it was putting Linux on a separate disk and then getting the bios to boot from it, leaving Windows untouched (though I can access the files from the Windows drives inside Linux if I need to).
Unless your machine is really old, it should have EFI boot so the Linux installation just registers itself with the bios as a boot possibility but doesn’t actually force anything or change the Windows boot. Then on the bios you have a menu where you can chose were to boot from, and Linux will appear with the name of the distribution you used (because that’s how a distro normally registers itself with the EFI boot during installation) whilst probably your Windows 7 can be booted by choosing the drive were Windows is (because it’s still using the old style of boot process which is based on putting a boot partition at the start of the drive were it’s installed).
My Windows is still there, totally unaware of there being a Linux on the same machine.
The way I suggest you go about it is to check how to get into the bios (if you don’t know already) and the booting stuff in your bios to see if works as I said and you get it, and to see how Windows has its boot set-up there (as I said, for Windows 7 the bios should be booting a disk rather than an EFI entry). Download a Linux distro and put it on a USB flash disk or even an external HD and then try and boot from there (if you can get your bios to boot from the USB Flash disk or external HD then you understood the principle of the thing) - you can even just play around with that Linux distribution you booted from an external source and see if you’re ok with using it (i.e. if the UI is not confusing).
Then if you want to go ahead with it, get yourself a separate SSD (256GB is fine), install it and then you can install a Linux distribution from a USB Flash disk or external disk into it. Just install that Linux entirely in the new drive (since the drive is all for it you can let it just do the automated method of “install on drive”). Don’t tell it to do anything with the Windows drive (if the new drive is not empty - i.e. you got it second hand or were using it for something else - MAKE SURE YOU KNOW FOR SURE WHICH ONE HAS Windows so that you mistakenly install into that one, if the new drive is empty it will show as empty in the installation UI so you know it’s not the Windows one) and Windows will still be there and you can still boot from it if you need to (the point of checking out of how booting worked in the bios beforehand is exactly to make sure you know were is the boot menu on the bios, how to use it and which entry in the boot menu is the one that boots Windows).
In my case I actually had an old Linux in there which I overwrote with the new one that I now use and an old complicated boot mechanism were booting went via the Windows booting stuff which was the one showing me a boot menu, all of which going via a WIndows Boot partition in the same disk as the Linux installation so working around all so that Windows still booted was quite a headache and included some pretty nervous moments, but in your case if you just use a new empty drive for Linux and just chose in the Bios what to boot, it should be pretty straightforward.
Worst case you just have to go back to using that Windows 7.
I went with Pop! OS because it was recommended as being good for gaming and it has out of the box support for Nvidia Graphics cards, which is what I have.
It just worked, no fuss and a quick check on my personal Linux management and gaming on Linux notes folder shows no actual notes for my Pop! OS desktop system (for the games in it I do have a couple of notes, but no for the OS), which means I’ve had zero problems with the actual system so far (I write the notes down if I get a problem I need to figure out how to fix, just in case I get the same problem again and have to fix it again).
Mind you I haven’t mucked about with things like replacing my windows manager or using Wayland instead of X-windows since I don’t see the point in changing what’s not broken and works fine in a system which is supposed to be for relaxing, not experimentation.
I was doing the same thing (I too run my computers into the ground, though I also didn’t want to move to Windows 10 because of all the analytics at the OS level sending data to them MS added to that version, plus and frankly, it worked so I couldn’t be arsed).
I also switched some time ago, pushed by Steam’s impending end of support plus more and more stuff coming out without Windows 7 support.
However I took the dive and switched to Linux rather than Windows 11, to a great extent prompted by people here reporting good experiences gaming on it (since I already have quite a lot of expertise in it and I mainly just use my PC for gaming) plus it’s part of a broader set of changes to avoid enshittification (such as replacing my TV-Box with a Mini-PC with Linux) I’m doing at home and am very happy with the result.
It’s less heavy than Windows, even booting faster and seems to have extended how long I can keep going before that computer is totally run to the ground, though for that it also helps that once I started upgrading by changing the OS, I also went and did a few partial upgrades of the hardware, like replacing my old CPU with an equally old one but twice as powerfull - which used to cost 200 bucks but now was 17 bucks second hand - a more powerful graphics card and a more modern SSD disk for the games partition (it’s actually a modern M.2 SATA on a 2.5 inch housing adaptor, and that’s as fast as SATA ever got and to get better than that you need a PCIx M.2) - basically I did the upgrades I could do on the cheap without changing motherboard and everything else that depends on it (like memory and a newer generation CPU) and which would still be compatible with the Windows 7 boot partition I still have around (though I haven’t actually been booting it). Since I went from Windows 7 to Linux rather than Windows 11, none of the hardware upgrades was wasted in just making up for the extra bloat on Windows 11 and the machine definitelly feels a lot more performant.
As for games, most just work, about 1/3 need extra tweaking to work well or work at all and only 1 or 2 so far I couldn’t get to work at all.
Curiously at least one game - Borderlands 2 from Steam - that didn’t work on Windows 7, works on Linux. Also I can now run games whose minimum Windows version is 10 which I couldn’t before.
Also since all non-Linux games are running on the Wine compatibility layer, Linux is actually better backwards compatible with older Windows and DOS than Windows itself, which is nice for Patient Gamer types like me.
I think that with Linux in it my PC is actually compatible with more games than it was with Windows 7.
I seriously think it’s one of my best decisions in years.
Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:
So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.
The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.