dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

That’s remotely possible, and I would be inclined to agree if the circumstances around this weren’t so fishy to begin with.

E.g. why is the police report heavily redacted? Why has the suspect not been named? This is highly unusual, and suggests there’s something more going on. I’d doubt very highly the grand jury were given the full picture.

It’s pretty much a done deal that we’ll never know more. Someone is making an effort to bury this.

Highly unlikely. Even in bumpus old corners of Texas, the state is absolutely obsessed with doing anything to take away any citizen’s gun rights and will do so by nailing them with some kind of felony, and a negligent discharge scenario that results in somebody getting killed in normal circumstances would definitely qualify.

People in Texas may love their guns, but the cops in Texas are the same as cops everywhere and if they had their way nobody would have the guns except them.

This points to me that someone involved in law enforcement, someone involved with the government, or someone with very high level connections and/or a lot of money was the one responsible for this and that’s why it was swept under the carpet. If it were just a regular Joe there’s no way.

Well, the one in the headline is so hilariously far out of scale that it could probably fire actual life-sized F-35’s like missiles from its wing hardpoints.

I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.

Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.

Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router’s inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP – it has been on all of the examples I’ve touched so far – and thus should not be treated as secure.

You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It’s kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.

Those white power redneck types are all protestants (baptists, or some other evangelical wingnut strain) and most of them have a vehement anti-Catholic streak. A black pope would just confirm to them whatever-the-hell conspiracy shit they already believe about the Catholic church, so it’d more or less just be spitting on a forest fire anyways.

Not that the Vatican shouldn’t do it anyway, though.

We can only hope.

In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, to alleviate the effects of the…Anyone? Anyone? The Great Depression passed the, anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? Raised tariffs to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.

It’s been slightly over a year since they did, IIRC.

They also sent out a ton of spam messages to their members begging them to buy stock at the time.

And they need to escape unscathed every time. We just need to ensure that our ratio is 2:1 or greater. There are more of everyone else than there are of them.

When they no longer have to follow the rules, the rules no longer matter. Violation of the social contract to that degree renders it null and void.

Some of them can be. HPV is the typical cause of cervical cancer, which is the one I can think of off the top of my head.

The final verse really drives the nail home just in case anyone in the audience somehow didn’t get it:

Blame Canada
Shame on Canada
For the smut we must stop, the trash we must smash
The laughter and fun must all be undone
We must blame them and cause a fuss
Before somebody thinks of blaming us!

That, or maybe they’ll hire Carmen Sandiego.

I’m not saying nobody has that requirement, I’m just predicting that most people actually don’t if they sit down and think about it for a minute.

Also, what jaroni just said about cover art and position saving is still patently false and has been since, like, 1994.

Artwork

Yes they can, via images embedded in their ID3 tags. This is supported by a huge array of players in terms of both physical hardware and software.

Keep your place

Yes they can, via many players (including both VLC which is what I use, and also my car stereo).

Sync across devices

This much is true, at least in the players I use. There’s probably a solution with some specific player somewhere.

But specifically for audiobooks, I don’t… need… to play across multiple devices. I listen via only two methods: My headphones (which are driven by my phone) and in my car (which works with my phone). I only actually use one player. It goes with me everywhere. Ours go with most of us everywhere; we’re naked without 'em.

If your use case requires a networked solution, you do you. I’m just saying, don’t automatically get blinded by how the Streaming Era has kind of fucked up everyone’s brain.

Edit: Downvoting me doesn’t change the fact that what you said was false.

Yes, I am aware of where this is posted and am prepared for my inevitable crucifixion as a result of this observation. But, like… is this really a problem that requires a self hosting solution? That seems like quite the overcomplication to me unless you absolutely require access to your entire selection on multiple devices that will have 24/7 network connections for some reason. I imagine most people actually don’t. And if you do, a simple file share is probably a less convoluted solution, and surely already exists on the server you already have.

MP3’s take up negligible amounts of storage space on modern devices and can be played on anything, and can be easily taken with you anywhere including out of network range.

I guess teaching people how to drag-and-drop audio files onto their phone and open them with VLC would be a much shorter article.

(Ed: Punctuation.)

Gamer’s Nexus is gonna need a bigger shirt this time.

For the benefit of anyone else reading this, nVidia’s DLSS3 and DLSS4 absolutely do incorporate motion interpolation (i.e. fake frames) via various methods. Fake frame generation can be disabled, at least for now, but that’s really not the point. What’s more to the point is that the only headline capability added to this with the 50 series nVidia cards, for instance, is an even greater depth of fake frame generation. nVidia clearly thinks that their future is in fake frames.

DLSS Super Resolution is the image upscaling scheme, and is now a component of DLSS3/4, but claiming that the current incarnation of DLSS is not intended to generate frames from the whole cloth is inaccurate. nVidia labeling both of these things “DLSS” probably did not do any favors to anyone’s ability to keep track of this ongoing clusterfuck. If you have a 30 series card or below you are limited to upscaling, but upscaling is not the main thing I’m griping about.

(This is also now the case with both AMD’s FSR 3.1 and 2.0, also, which explicitly mention “temporal upscaling,” i.e. once again fake frames, in their blurbs.)

If upscaling in whatever form looks better for you, mind you that I’m not trashing your opinion. To some degree, options exist for a reason. Some motherfuckers play their emulators with Supereagle scaling enabled, or whatever. I dunno, it takes all kinds. But silicon space that your card’s maker dedicated to AI and upscaling fuckery is also silicon that could have just been allocated to bigger or more rendering pipelines as well, and that’s exactly what they didn’t do.

But towards your last point, absolutely yes. This is also how raytracting and RTX are being pitched now that the cat is out of the bag that RTX performance is generally trash and it also achieves very little in terms of adding usable gameplay-conveying visual information. “Oh, but now instead of calculating light maps in advance developers can just have it performed in not-quite-real-time on the GPU [wasting a shitload of silicon and electricity calculating this over and over again when it could have been done just once at the studio]! It’s so much easier!!!”

This is deeply stupid. Miss me with all that shit.

It seems we’ve reached the plateau, finally, where the hardware vendors (or at least nVidia) can’t or won’t bring any new meaningful performance enhancements to the table for whatever reason, so in order to keep the perpetual upgrade treadmill going they’re resorting to bolting gimcrack crap to the hardware to help them cheat instead. Maybe some day actual per-pixel real time raytracing will be viable and for certain applications that could indeed be rad, but trying to force it halfassed now is pretty counterproductive. Ditto with frame generation. I’m sure it has applications in noninteractive media or video rendering, but trying to shoehorn it into gaming doesn’t make any sense.

The frames they generate are not “free,” nor are they necessarily accurate. If your GPU can’t fill your screen at native resolution at a rate matching or exceeding the refresh rate of your display, you either need to turn down your graphics settings or invest in a beefier GPU, not make up fake image data to go in between (introducing input lag) or around (by deliberately rendering at suboptimal resolution and attempting to AI upscale the result). And attempting to exceed your display’s refresh rate by making up additional fake frames is literally pointless, just setting electricity on fire for no benefit.

But then, it will probably also shock and horrify people to learn that I also always run with full screen antialiasing turned off. My display is 3840x2160. Trust me, jaggies are of no concern.

I have no interest in either of these stupid technologies.

Yeah, I saw the Gamers Nexus benchmarks on it and for the money I’m really not impressed. With what these cost, a couple of percentage points don’t excite me. I already have a plenty fast graphics card.

The only thing I’m “missing out” on is nVidia’s attempted near-monopoly on raytracing, which is not a technology in which I’m the slightest bit interested because, gee-whiz factor aside, even on their very fastest flagship new card it still tanks your framerate to an unacceptable level (in my opinion) for no tangible benefit whatsoever.

The only issue I foresee is upcoming games that “need” RTX, i.e. the current incarnation of the id Tech engine for some batshit reason, but the only things that run that so far are Doom: Dark Ages and that Indiana Jones game which I likewise have no interest in. So fuck it.

(And I similarly do not care about DLSS or FSR or motion interpolation or any other kinds of fake frames, which are another absolute dumb-shit dead end.)