I find it surprising that more people aren't dismayed at how many advertisements we are being exposed to daily. I think that once you're used to it, you don't feel much concern about it, but when you manage to cut a lot of them out (e.g. I have a pi-hole filtering a large portion of ads in my whole home) it becomes extremely upsetting to be dropped back into a place where they are everywhere.
Few things upset me as much as driving around a beautiful place and having billboards plastered up and down the highway. A few states have come to their senses and banned them.
The issue as a whole is that it genuinely is eroding the human experience. Being alive in a world where your eyesight is real estate to be filled with images that are meant to leave you with negative emotions with the intent of taking your money from you is bleak.
I don't often watch live/terrestrial TV. On the odd occasion I do, I'm taken aback. I forget how frequent, jarring, and obtrusive they are. And in recent years, it seems that gambling ads are more and more common. It's really quite astonishing.
Many people have TV on in the background all the time. I wonder if there's correlation between a "ads aren't so bad" and TV watching.
I worry that such a tax would create a self-reinforcing monopolistic effect by making it harder for smaller companies to do it, thus enriching those that can afford to do it. Even if there's a threshold under which it's not taxed, it still benefits big corporations.
That's the benefit of just such a "Microsoft model": one throat to choke, as a manager once told me. A tightly regulated and taxed ad monopoly system would be a lot tamer, at least until it captures the regulators.
It's my totally uneducated perception that you need to start out as explicitly unaffiliated in order to execute on a shift like that (e.g. South Park). If you start fighting in one direction, I imagine it's near impossible to start punching backwards (once your audience is established) without alienating a substantial portion of your base.
Surprised the French get the "lives" in this, given that the soviet union lost about 40 people for every french person while having a population only about 4.5x larger.
The quote is a little messed up because many of those 'soviet tanks' were Lend-Lease tanks produced by allies. Iirc it goes "WW2 was won with British intelligence, American steel, and Russian blood"
Indeed, USSR casualties (including civilians) were off the charts. USSR, then China, then Germany and then Indonesia. [0] 'Russian blood' part is something of an understatement.
The lend lease part is not correct. Lend lease went mostly to UK (Google AI says about 60% of lend lease went to UK & the rest of lend lease was split between USSR & China. Take that with a grain of salt)
Not to be taken with a grant of salt, according to wikipedia: "Most tank units were Soviet-built models but about 7,000 Lend-Lease tanks (plus more than 5,000 British tanks) were used by the Red Army, eight percent of war-time production. " [1]
Also per wikipedia, USSR produced about 30k light tanks, 65k medium tanks (eg: t-34), and 13k heavy tanks. [2]
>The lend lease part is not correct. Lend lease went mostly to UK (Google AI says about 60% of lend lease went to UK
UK sent stuff to USSR, too, including probably some of the stuff they got from the US, and they delivered it to Murmansk (rather than requiring the Soviets to come get it) during which their convoys and sailors took losses from the German navy.
I heard that the USSR received $1 trillion worth of stuff in 2025 dollars from it WWII allies. The US sent advisors, too, e.g., in how to build factories.
Of course, a few years later the US was sending stuff to Germany as part of the Marshall Plan, one of the purposes of which was to build up Germany so it could resist future Soviet aggression.
Yes, but that wasn't part of the "lend lease" program.
The quantity of materials sent from the UK to the USSR was significant. Just it was not part of the lend lease program. (Arguably this is something better, just direct aid without strings attached).
The quantities of what the UK gave to the USSR was a sacrifice of blood and treasure: "food and raw materials, roughly £30 billion in today’s money. This included 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft, while public charitable donations provided approximately £5.3 million (roughly £490 million in today’s money) in medical stores...."
"Some of these supplies were purchased in the United States (US) by the UK for delivery directly to the USSR. Most British supplies were carried by sea to Northern Russia, docking at Archangel or Murmansk, by a series of Arctic convoys, which were subject to sustained German attacks from three dimensions from powerful German forces based in Northern Norway" [1]
> I heard that the USSR received $1 trillion worth of stuff in 2025 dollars from it WWII allies
Sounds plausible (I would hesitate to repeat it without seeing the data behind the numbers). I'm curious how the number breaks down as a relative amount.
And there's the reason Nintendo isn't doing it. The top priority for them by a massive margin is consistency. The QA they perform for their own products would require an absolutely enormous amount of staff, all for a minuscule payout because there just is not the kind of demand for those games that would justify such a return.
Nintendo's own Switch release of Super Mario Sunshine used an outdated version of Dolphin, one of those imperfect emulators. (People were remarking on the emulator bugs as soon as it was released.) They saw a demand and didn't let QA get in their way.
That's not true, the Switch version of Sunshine runs on an in-house Gamecube/Wii emulator called Hagi. Nintendo have always rolled their own emulators, although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.
Even if Nintendo wanted to use existing emulators, they wouldn't touch a GPL project like Dolphin anyway. They do use open source libraries in their games but never, ever GPL ones for fairly obvious reasons.
> although curiously their NES emulator uses a ROM header format which originated in the unofficial emulation scene, so they must have used unofficial docs for reference.
Tomohiro Kawase, the guy who did the Animal Crossing NES emulator, was a part of the emulation community in the 90s and contributed to iNES. It makes sense that he kept using that header format when he started working at Nintendo.
I wouldn't even say that use of a header format itself is indicative of wrongdoing, even if Tomohiro hadn't went on to work for Nintendo.
However, if Nintendo had released any NES ROMs with a "DiskDude!" header? Then maybe. AFAIK this never happened though, and the big leak proved that they had a full final (and sometimes post-final or unreleased final) archive with split PRG/CHR, so they didn't need to use DiskDude! ROMs.
Yeah I think it was just the developer working with what he was familiar with. For example, the emulator used for the 3DS NES Virtual Console titles was developed by a different team at iQue. It uses its own bespoke header format called TNES rather than the standard iNES header.
Ah, sorry. I remembered people at the time of its release saying it was Dolphin because some of the bugs were identical. I guess I misremembered that speculation as fact. I didn't even know Dolphin was GPL. Thanks for correcting me.
There might also have been some confusion because the Gamecubes official codename was Dolphin, so Nintendo's emulator may well have the string "Dolphin" in it despite having nothing to do with that Dolphin.
I was like this in the "I love to spend a lot of time mucking about with my server and want to squeeze everything out of it that I can" phase.
In the last few years I've transitioned to "My family just wants plex to work and I could give a shit about the details". I think I'm more of the target audience. When I had my non-truenas zfs set up I just didn't pay a lot of attention, and when something broke it was like re-learning the whole system over again.
My way of dealing with this is to ensure everything is provisioned and managed via gitops. I have a homelab repo with a combination of Ansible, Terraform (Tofu), and FluxCD. I don't have to remember how to do anything manually, except for provisioning a new bare metal machine (I have a readme file and a couple of scripts for that).
I accidentally gave myself the opportunity to test out my automations when I decided I wanted to rename my k8s nodes (FQDN rather than just hostname). When I did that, everything broke, and I decided it would be easier to simply re-provision than to troubleshoot. I was up and running with completely rebuilt nodes in around an hour.
I agree; I tried Free/TrueNAS and some other flavors of various things and always ran into annoying limitations and handholding I didn’t want; now I just use Gentoo with ZFS and do my own thing.
Yet again, Google announces another lineup of phones where a vast majority of the announcement is about software features that could be implemented on existing devices, highlighting the wastefulness of the yearly release cycle.
Few things upset me as much as driving around a beautiful place and having billboards plastered up and down the highway. A few states have come to their senses and banned them.
The issue as a whole is that it genuinely is eroding the human experience. Being alive in a world where your eyesight is real estate to be filled with images that are meant to leave you with negative emotions with the intent of taking your money from you is bleak.
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