More often than I should. I try to balance that my work will buy one every few years with preserving the materials and labor.

We can call it USSR 2 Electric Boogaloo. United States Soviet Republic

This is cute and I got a big kick out of it.

Step 0. It just goes without saying.

When I was in about 8th grade, I had a history teacher bet me a case of pop that he could prove 1+1 did not equal 2. I said okay, and he told me to come in tomorrow and he’d have the proof on the board.

He was also our football coach and taught several grades. I went to a small k12 in the country. He was generally liked by the students but didn’t much like smart kids so he was a real smug prick about it.

That evening I mentioned it to my dad. He smirked and told me he knew exactly what was about to happen. Bear in mind this was pre broadband and I wasn’t going to crawl gopher at 9600 to find it, so it was good my dad is a nerdy engineer.

Next day; knowing he’d have a divide by zero issue somewhere in a sea of math salad, I walked into his class. It wasn’t my class but the first of the day. Kids a few years older, looking at me askance and laughing as he smugly said nothing but pointed me to the board, where there was predictably a math salad, tons of variables and algebra.

I think he expected me to crunch for a while… really chew on it, so he went right back to lecture. About 10 seconds later, I saw it, and just turned and looked at him, waiting patiently. He didn’t see me, but the class changed. A small din rose and the older kids started smirking and whispering.

He had such a shitty look when he turned to me, “I’ll take Diet,” he said.

“Really?” … “You can’t divide by zero.”

“I didn’t.”

“Right here, coach. x-y here is zero in the denominator. Better luck next time. I’ll take Cherry Coke.“ And I walked out, like a movie arsonist walking away from the fire. In my head, I was screaming. My heart beat like I’d run up a mountain.

Only silence was left in my wake that day. I was, for one day, the coolest bloke in town. I didn’t get the girl or anything, but there was Cherry Coke for the class the next day when I arrived.

Yeah that checks out.

I saw it mentioned a few times lately. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say because people are both talking about it more and governments are way overstepping there bounds on censorship and tracking.

• “What stands in the way”: noun clause
• ”becomes”: verb
• ”the way”: object, actually predicate nominative

No comma needed. Adding one would be a mistake.

But even if you’re unconvinced, you can just imagine it as scriptio continua lite as the original koine Greek text would have been.

Where do I need a comma here?

I don’t think it is disingenuous. First, it does have fluid, air. It doesn’t have liquid but he mentions that liquid is a great solution but with other drawbacks, like problems with temperature change.

But yeah, he is intentionally showing a dramatic example of the improvement of eddy damping, but it isn’t to mislead, rather to highlight. He released it to public domain, so clearly not trying to mislead to sell.

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

I want to be explicit. I’m not at all saying people “shouldn’t be able to profit from their work”. No way; all labor should be rewarded. I’m just saying I can see why works of art are somewhat different than tools. You use fiction versus non-fiction books as an example, but I’m actually putting those in the same box as games and movies.

I generally prefer FOSS for practical and ethical reasons, but I have no problem with paid software or people being paid to write free software. I think most software can be done better by an interested community. Free software is just better in many cases. Sometimes that is true with games too though. Enemy Territory, for example.

Anything that you like can be worth a cost. I prefer FOSS wherever possible, but really don’t mind paying for good stuff. One example is wooshy. This piece of software lets you use the keyboard in macOS for nearly everything, and it is the best use of the accessibility api’s I’ve ever seen. There are similar things but this software is unparalleled in my view.

Because games are works of art. They generally don’t work like other software. Most software is designed to meet some requirements and either does so or works toward doing so over its lifetime. A game seeks to tell a story or provide an experience that may improve over time, but in many cases is a static end product.

Of course that isn’t all cases these days because there are a lot of subscription based models and game seasons, etc. But you still expect a game to be a thing for a limited time, or at least its development.

There is clearly a ton of exception to this, but I tend to think of game producers as workshops filled with artists and such. More like making a movie than maintaining a building.

I can keep eating cheese for free then? Great!

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Okay fair enough, but that is at least slightly different than saying Proton isn’t FOSS, but I understand.

They have a pretty good FOSS standing and audits for software they distribute. While that doesn’t make it easy to host privately, it does make it trivial to see how data is shipped to their servers.

WDYM? Isn’t it?

It is a decent description for sure. But one without practical value. And yes brains can grasp concepts and reason, but by using a similar mechanism. One uses chemistry for electronic potential difference for neuron weights, but they are nevertheless more similar than one might think. Brains don’t have some supernatural special sauce; they are weighted neural networks.

But again, I’m not saying the description is wrong. It just has no value. Glorified autocomplete can mean pretty amazing outputs. “Just glorified autocomplete” is diminutive without purpose.

glorified autocomplete

People repeat that like it has some value, but it’s really just words. If autocomplete is glorified to the point of outputting something amazing, what is the value of saying it. I’m not saying it is, but if autocomplete spits out Shakespeare, “glorified autocomplete” is amazing.

I mean, in a sense, brains are just glorified autocomplete. So…?