I’m on former Centurylink fiber which was similarly sold off to private equity. Other than the name changes and wonkiness with accessing my account in their system, its been…fine actually? The connection is more stable than it ever was under Centurylink for one thing, and my bill hasn’t changed at all in the years since

It would be absolutely hilarious if in the very long term Proton or other Win32 compatibility layers just become a generic set of libraries that most games rely on for historical reasons despite every reason for their existence no longer applying

Yeah gas prices (about the only commodity that normies interact with) have only gone up by like 30-40 cents per gallon, about the same price they were 6-12 months ago. Normies only wake up once it gets to around $4/gallon or about a full dollar per gallon more than usual.

The last time gas prices went over $4 a gallon I heard many drivers of excessively large gas guzzling SUVs and Trucks complaining that they couldn’t fully fill their tanks due to the $100 limit on most gas pumps.

The $4 mark was also when people started actually making choices to drive less (and voicing these choices) and if it was sustained they seemed likely to choose to replace their vehicles with something more efficient

Streamer mode is typically for one of two usecases:

1. The streamer plays their own music, so being able to silence all game music simplifies things
2. The game might contain copyrighted music by known artists, which can trigger automated enforcement. In most jurisdictions music used in a game is fine to stream/record because it’s covered by the developer’s/distributor’s license, but that doesn’t stop overzealous rights holders from placing bogus claims that can muck up your revenue, so it’s easier to just not play music that you don’t yourself have license to play

Yeah at work I had a realization recently that power automate and similar systems with AI steps are going to be really powerful. Since you have a bunch of deterministic steps you can just have the AI do the one text manipulation bit where you don’t need deterministic output (handy for non-deterministic inputs for example)

I mean, as the law is written there’s zero requirement for the entered age to be verified, only to associate an age bracket with the OS user account and to provide that info to programs as they require it. Now, I do wonder if a California-compliant OS would require service accounts to have an entered date of birth and what kind of fun that could potentially lead to of you enter the date of account creation as the birthdate but the full ramifications remain to be seen

Hey man, I’m sorry that I did put you in that position with my comments! I thought you were exaggerating about the social anxiety (I’ve known several people who do) and that it was like myself where the best thing to do is to push past it, be awkward and do whatever it is anyways to build the skills to be less awkward later

I hope my comments are worth saving and coming back to later! I’ve had my own thoughts and ideas for running events in my community but I have my own challenges I should work on before undertaking such a project. But I did dump a basic framework for creating an event based on my experience volunteering at a few nonprofits and helping them run events so maybe there’s something there?

Any of the ideas I’d said above wouldn’t be solo operations. Sure they could be but finding a friend to be your business partner or creating a small organization to manage and run things both helps manage risk but also helps fill in the gaps in your own skillset.

The easy option is just to talk to the local library about running a film festival, get it scheduled in the community room and put on the library events calendar and just bring a laptop and a projector if the library doesn’t have one and watch some public domain films. This can grow into a larger indie film festival in time and in the short term you can get your feet wet and have some fun doing something meaningful in your community

Now if you wanted to go all out and do it for real with an actual budget (still only talking single digit thousands at the most though! I know folks who spend that much annually on their private hobbies, and if you play your cards right you can probably break even pretty easily) and really try to make something of the whole thing, this would be my gameplan if I were to try to set one up in my town:

1. Enlist some friends/trusted family members to help run it, create some loose organization amongst your enlisted folks to help delegate tasks and share the responsibilities and costs, create a regular meeting/working session schedule and break out into task forces as needed
2. Look around your local community and identify potentially suitable event spaces. Is there a local art gallery or community center you can rent out? Maybe an indoor/outdoor space at a park you can rent out from the city? What’s the cost to rent it out for an evening? How many people would be allowed in the space at once and what would it take to setup a projector, some speakers and a laptop?
3. If you find a suitable enough space and have reached this stage, strongly consider officially registering your organization (a non-profit would probably be lowest-risk since businesses and governments love donating to non-profits and it makes it much easier to rely on volunteer labor and donated hardware and licenses further reducing risk) this is also the stage where you should have ideally identified your budget and general gameplan for running this thing
4. Consult your local government and any local colleges for assistance. See if you can get any film, culture, English or even just liberal arts instructors on board with helping boost your event. Your city government may have resources they can offer as well, since boasting an indie film festival is usually a good thing for any city. This is one instance where living in/basing your operation in a smaller town is a big benefit because the local government will likely be excited to help however they can to build more local culture and draw to the town.
5. Schedule it! Book your reservation of the event space
6. Advertising! Post fliers, ensure its mentioned in the local paper and local news (if they exist) make sure its listed on the events schedules that would be relevant. Get any local/regional colleges aware of the event so that students might come attend. Contact the senior centers and make sure you’re on their event calendars so you get some bored retirees to attend too
7. Get your equipment in order. If you went the non-profit route contact local AV/IT companies for donations of equipment/time. Many of these companies will donate both in exchange for plastering their company name on event as a sponsor. Also get your food vendor(s) in order. See if there’s a good spot for a food truck to setup shop and contact some local food trucks to gauge interest. This is also the stage to line up your tuxedo rental so you can look the part when you give your opening/closing speech about how proud you are to have seen this event come together
8. Run the event! This is probably the hardest part because everything you thought would be fine will go wrong, while the parts you thought would catastrophically fail go perfectly, but ultimately its fine because its a brand new indie film festival and nobody expects it to have the polish of Sundance or the Grammys.
9. Do it again the next year! Or even in 6 months! Once you’ve held a couple of festivals you’ll start collecting some regular attendees, made some extremely important contacts, and you’ll have started to establish a reputation. Maybe this is just a cool thing you do now, or maybe it grows into an actual big thing! (if it does and my comment inspired you, please let me know though! I’d love to know if my random brain dumps on weird corners of the internet actually impact people in meaningful ways!)

Well, either that or crimes, but some crimes can be seen as illegal work

Human existence requires work. Someone has to grow the food, someone has to fix the things, someone has to build the structures and plumb them and someone has to help fix us when we get broken. The only way to never work is to freeload off of everyone who is working.

What really sucks is that society expects us to be “specialists” in one thing for the rest of our live

Specialization is literally how humanity shifted from being hunter-gatherers who lived to be about 30-40 before getting mauled by a bear or killed by another tribe or dying of an infection because you slipped on a rock.

In the modern economy specialization doesn’t have to mean doing the same thing every day. Any kind of career where you fix things, you can easily find a job that varies wildly from day to day. A mechanic might be replacing an engine cylinder one day and rebalancing wheels the next and rebuilding the exhaust the next. An IT person can be troubleshooting a software error one day then tweaking network performance the next then imaging laptops the next. A project manager will have different work depending on what phase of the project it’s in, and the type of challenges and work will vary wildly by what kinds of projects they’re managing

The trick is, find something you don’t mind doing and that can turn into finding something you kinda enjoy. As long as you don’t wake up dreading work every day (which if you do it’s probably time to shake things up, both for yourself and for your loved ones!) you can have a pretty decent life

The other way to look at it is what are hobbies and volunteering but work in of themselves? Human existence involves work, but every human should be able to find work that they can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)

So here’s the thing, many people hate their jobs and just work them because they don’t really see any other option than to keep working the job they hate, but also plenty of people really enjoy their jobs. Depending on your interests you might have to get a little creative or try something you’d never thought about or something you’ve never heard of

If you enjoy problem solving (a very common human trait), there’s some lucrative corporate careers out there in things like project management, asset management or even just straight management. If you just want to zone out and listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day there’s tons of machine operator jobs that will absolutely fill that role (and often in small towns with very low costs of living as an added bonus) if you want to just get paid go hike there’s jobs to be had in surveying and land management. If you like working with animals the ag sector has you covered, and if you like working with your hands there’s always tons of jobs in trades. If you like helping people there’s the healthcare sector and if that’s too much blood there’s always medical coding or outside of the healthcare sector there’s tons of banks out there looking for loan officers who will talk to people and fill in the blanks on the forms. Sales is also very lucrative and very cushy if you can get into B2B sales. There’s tons of jobs that exist and every job is different, so there’s bound to be one out there that scratches an itch for you and you can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)

And this is all assuming you want to work for someone else, you can always start something on the side while keeping another job that pays the bills, or if you have a supportive partner who’s willing to cover the bills while you take you shot at a business. Go start a hardwood furniture business, or find an obscure thing that nobody makes anymore and start making those. Go create an event that people can buy tickets to attend. Open a bar or a store or a pilates studio! Buy an old building on some unfarmable land and create a winery or fish farm or wedding venue! Sell pancakes out of your garage! Paint murals for people! Grow mushrooms to sell at the farmers market! Start a commune or a bus tour company or a bike taxi! Is it hard? Absolutely. Will there be roadblocks and challenges to overcome? Indubitably! But overcoming these challenges is fulfilling in itself and plenty of people start businesses successful enough for them to retire off of (or at least successful enough to sell to someone else who can make it successful enough to retire off of)

I could work in a movie theater or something similar, but then I’m back to making state minimum wage instead the almost double that I’m currently making.

You could own a theatre. You could also create a local film festival, even if that means just booking the community room at the library and screening public domain silent films to start with. Or if you want to make a job out of it, maybe you can snag the screening rights to some indie/deep backlog films and do a traveling film festival, maybe setting up in small towns where there isn’t already a ton going on where you could also get the venue for cheap.

There’s also companies popping up that have bought the rights to reprint deep back catalogue films. Like I recently heard about one that buys the rights to reprint B movies from the 70s and 80s on VHS, so apparently there is a market for that kind of thing too!

I’ve heard advice to initially release a demo on Itch, encourage those who enjoy the demo to join your org’s discord, then blast discord to go buy the game on steam on launch day to help boost your day 1 numbers on Steam.

I’d also check various gaming communities on as many social media platforms as possible to see if they allow indie devs to announce releases

Have you tried reaching out to YouTubers who review/play through similar games to yours? Can you buy an ad read from some youtubers as a less intrusive style of ad? Do you have a demo at all that you can point people to right now?

Almost drove off with the gas cap and door open on my car

I made it a habit to always glance in my side mirrors to confirm there’s nothing unexpected around me (including open doors or connected gas nozzles) before shifting out of park every time. Granted best practice is to walk around the car once as an inspection before even starting it every time, but that’s more than I often can be bothered to do

The thing with adding lanes is induced demand. By nature of there being more space for cars on that road more drivers will choose take that road over other roads. Cars don’t magically come into existence, people drive them, and people drive them for a reason, most commonly to go to/from somewhere

Trains (and bikes and buses) take cars off the road. Every person riding on a transit solution that isn’t a car is a individual vehicle trip saved. When every vehicle contains an average of 1.2 people in it, you’ve got very close to 1:1 vehicle reduction for every trip that’s not taken by car

So to your point, are some number of non-drivers choosing not to drive because of traffic? Probably a small number of them. But a complete transit system that has the real world effect of fewer cars on the road will mean few people owning cars. Why would a family own 2 cars when one is parked most of the time? Why spend $20k on a new (to you) car if you’re barely using the one you have/had? Fewer cars means less cars on the road which means less traffic. This is the dream.

Goddamn we need so much high speed rail, and yesterday

And so much more standard speed rail too! There’s tons of railroad lines all over the country, and even many old stations still standing. Let’s start building RDCs again (or better, a modern equivalent) and start running passenger services on all of those lines

The challenges are several fold. For one, there’s basically no manufacturers of passenger railcars left in the country. Occasionally a network upgrade will lead to one being spun up for a few years then it’ll shut down once the order is fulfilled because there’s no consistent market for passenger railcars in North America.

I’d propose using a mix of historic British Rail procurement practices and current military contract practices where you put up a pot of money for up for say 3 companies to develop a prototype railcar meeting a specific spec. Make the spec for a fairly basic car and be ready to update station platforms for ADA compliance rather than forcing the cars to be compatible with 20 different platform heights and designs. Then test those 3 prototypes and the winner receives a bonus as the design is purchased by the federal government, and next you license that design out for all manufacturers in the country to produce, followed by an ongoing order of say 48 railcars per year from 5 different manufacturers and you have 248 railcars per year (enough to replace Amtrak’s entire current fleet within 10 years) from 5 different companies (reducing risk of one company mucking it all up) all manufactured with local labor and you have a standard design that is already in active production for other operators to order as well. Repeat this process for more equipment and designs as needed, and suddenly you have a bunch of known standard designs that your network can be built to and you have health competition between manufacturers which will be big enough (because each will have around 50-100 million dollars a year in revenue from that one ongoing federal contract alone) to start performing their own independent R&D to make their own unique stock to try to attract more orders from rail operators

This is what the federal government exists for, making ambitious infrastructure projects like this possible. Policians just aren’t interested in thinking big enough

It’s funny how you can tell when a concept is extremely modern because in languages other than English they tend to just use the English term or a localized variation of the English term

Usually they “save you money” by giving you a shittier policy and relying on the buyer not understanding what coverage they need and why

Seriously going through an insurance broker is awesome. Best dang way to deal with insurance because I can just call up the broker and have them do it all for me, plus they get paid on commission by the insurance companies (which are mostly smaller B2B companies that don’t spend millions on advertising) so it’s not even like you pay more for your insurnace