NXTR

The American dream is essentially trying to tell people that the United States is a meritocratic society. The more work you put in the more you get out. However, I’m sure most of us know this isn’t true. Where you were born and what family you were born into is the primary factor in determining someone’s success. So you grow up hearing stories of “hard working” billionaires and think “I can make it there if I work hard” while ignoring your family who worked their asses off and got nowhere. You see more of the lie of meritocracy as you age. People around you work hard and fail, you might succeed with less effort or fail with more. The idiotic decisions of today’s billionaires solidifies the notion that the American dream never existed and was fabricated to get people to work more for less in the hopes that one day they will make it. In reality, it all comes down to the zip code you were born in.

There used to be a product called Redline: White Heat from VPX (same people that make bang with the unhinged CEO). It had to be taken off the market because it had an amphetamine analogue in it called AMP Citrate or DMBA.

One scoop of that stuff made me feel like I was going to die. My friend who took Ritalin at the time told me it was more powerful than any other stimulant he had before.

It’s crazy to think this was openly available at health supplement stores for years before the FDA caught wind.

On the flip side I’m worried about manufacturers realizing that the continuous revenue stream from autonomous vehicles is more profitable than selling vehicles outright thereby increasing the cost of buying a vehicle to the point where ownership becomes functionally obsolete except to the ultra-wealthy. This also makes it much easier to restrict the movement of people. Self driving car companies could easily disable the ability to travel to entire areas either because they say they’re too dangerous or not profitable enough to operate in. I can imagine entire cities and rural areas becoming ghost towns. While personally I think autonomous vehicles, in a vacuum, have the potential to save countless lives, the reality is that in time we will be giving the companies making these vehicles the ability to dictate where we can and cannot go.

Something something Celsius 232.8

Kbin is probably the closest thing to this. There’s a magazine section for lemmy/kbin communities and there’s another section for microblogging which brings in mastodon posts.

Hopefully Microsoft releases a handheld mode instead of just experimenting with it. Besides the interface, they also really need to optimize for performance. Even though, with the steam deck, proton is converting draw calls it still outperforms the same deck running windows with native driver support. This really shows how the mountains of extra crap running on windows hurts gaming performance on these low power devices.

I used to work for a wealth management firm who got pre-IPO shares of DWAC. Even with the lockup period, anyone who bought those shares made an incredible amount of money. To anyone who invested at or after the IPO…they’ve lost quite a bit. Just goes to show that being good at investing boils down to having lots of money and knowing the right people. Basically the rich get richer with absolutely no risk while the average person gets fucked to line their pockets.

Republicans voters to fantasize about restricting the rights of their fellow citizens but when republican politicians actually implement these into law their voter base tends to be less than enthusiastic. The lack of a “red wave” during the midterms is an example of this. The reality is that most republican voters don’t actually know what republicans stand for. In fact, [many republican voters](https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/5-charts-about-public-opinion-on-medicaid/#:\~:text=A%20majority%20of%20Democrats%20(89,it%20was%20asked%20in%202019) view Medicaid expansion in a favorable light which is in contrast to their legislators who wish to shrink the size of Medicaid.

As republicans pass more laws to restrict the rights and erode away the already rotting social safety nets in this country, the less support they will receive. Unfortunately, this doesn’t hold true when marginalized groups are targeted. Instead, their base tends to solidify their support. If they aren’t directly or indirectly affected then they don’t care.

To answer your question, I think republicans thought they could get away with restricting abortion rights since their rhetoric didn’t scare away voters in the past. However, when they actually implemented it and it directly affected republican voters the mask came off and their support waned.

The intro was painful to read. It’s so blatantly obvious which parts were written by him and which parts were plagiarized (because they were actually well written).

The performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 GPU is already about 10-20% faster than the A16 chip, depending on the benchmark.

Even if Qualcomm only gives the Gen 3 a 10% performance increase, that is enough to beat or even surpass the A17 in gpu performance (rumors suggest something closer to a 30% increase). The Gen 2 already outcompetes the A16 in GPU power consumption and efficiency as well. This may change with the A17 since it’s on TSMC’s 3N node, however this node has been having issues which is why TSMC introduced the 3NE and 3NP so we will have to wait for power usage numbers from the A17 to see.

Overall I’m disappointed with the improvements between the A16 and A17. 10% on the CPU and 20% on the GPU (due to have 20% more cores) doesn’t seem like the type of upgrade I would expect from switching nodes. Hopefully next year they can do more with the improved N3 nodes. I’m also getting the feeling that Apple is trying to deploy more complex transformer models on their devices which is why we are seeing such a focus on the NPU.

I think you hit on the main point which is that nobody will pour money into developing for android. Apple also has the ability to make deals with companies with Capcom and Ubisoft to ensure games come to their platforms. I can’t see Google doing this since they already “tried” and failed to have a AAA mobile gaming platform with stadia. The only other company with enough motivation and money to bring big games to android is Samsung, but their mobile chips aren’t doing too well (despite their RDNA 2 architecture making it easier to port games).

The only way Apple Maps is good is if you put in a million requests to fix all of the issues with mislabeled business, incorrect routing, nonexistent places, etc. Only then would I consider Apple Maps to be on par with Google Maps. Since I have an iPhone and like the interface I tend to use Apple Maps more often, but the terrible search (which routinely doesn’t list easy to find locations), awful routing (it loves to take the express lane which has different exits without providing a toggle not to use these lanes), and out of date mapping data (I’ve gone to multiple nonexistent locations) makes me go back to Google Maps every time. I will admit I do love their 3D maps and street view which I find to be higher quality than Google Maps. Besides this and the interface, Apple Maps is inferior to Google Maps.

Here is the original FDA letter to VPX regarding White Heat. The chemical they are focusing on is 4-Amino-2-Methylpentane Citrate also known as 1,3-Dimethylbutylamine, DMBA, 2-amino-4-methylpentane, AMP citrate, and 4-methyl-2-pentanamine (according to the FDA letter). Upon further research, it seems like, although the structure of the compound is similar to an amphetamine, the actual mechanism of action of these and similar compounds, such as DMAA, still isn’t fully known. So it was a bit inaccurate of me to call it an “amphetamine analogue” since they might not work in a similar manner.

I’m guessing it’s to train AI models for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Unfortunately, Valve would also have to build a CPU translation layer (Like Rosetta 2) since games run on x86 architectures and snapdragon uses an ARM architecture. The steam deck uses a Zen 2 CPU architecture which is already x86 so there would be little motivation on their part to do this. Currently proton uses wine to convert windows api calls into linux calls. The big thing Proton does is allowing games that use DirectX to run on Vulkan which is natively supported in Linux. So unless Valve makes the Steam Deck 2 with ARM or another company decides to make an x86 to ARM translation layer, then I don't see something like Proton coming to android any time soon.

The quote you’re using is from the 2010-2011 peace talks. The reason those broke down is as follows:

Direct talks broke down in late September 2010 when an Israeli partial moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank expired and Netanyahu refused to extend the freeze unless the Palestinian Authority recognized Israel as a Jewish State, while the Palestinian leadership refused to continue negotiating unless Israel extended the moratorium.[3] The proposal was rejected by the Palestinian leadership, that stressed that the topic on the Jewishness of the state has nothing to do with the building freeze. The decision of Netanyahu on the freeze was criticized by European countries and the United States.

In regards to Oslo and the 2014 peace talks:

2014:

A deadline was set for establishing a broad outline for an agreement by 29 April 2014. On the expiry of the deadline, negotiations collapsed, with the US Special Envoy Indyk reportedly assigning blame mainly to Israel, while the US State Department insisting no one side was to blame but that "both sides did things that were incredibly unhelpful."

Oslo: Both Oslo accords were signed, however,

the interim process put in place under Oslo had fulfilled neither Israeli nor Palestinian expectations.

This led to the Camp David Accords where the main issues and points seemed to be the following:

the refusal of the Palestinians and Arafat to give up the right of return

Judged from the perspective of Palestinians' and Israelis' respective rights under international law, all the concessions at Camp David came from the Palestinian side, none from the Israeli side.

the Palestinians starting position was at the 1967 borders, but they were ready to give up Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and parts of the West Bank with Israeli settlements. Further, the Palestinians were willing to implement Right of Return in a way that guaranteed Israel's demographic interests.

The proposals were, for the most part, verbal. As no agreement was reached and there is no official written record of the proposals, some ambiguity remains over details of the positions of the parties on specific issues.

The talks ultimately failed to reach agreement on the final status issues: Territory, Territorial contiguity, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, Refugees and Palestinian right of return, Security arrangements, Settlements

To summarize the 2010-11 peace talks broke down due to Israel not abiding by the terms of the negotiation. The 2014 talks are debated with more blame seeming to be placed on Israel. The Oslo accords were signed but left unresolved and unfollowed by Israel leading to the camp David accords where the main issue seems to be the right of return for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were displaced. However, who actually ended the talks is still debated.

I’m fine with toll roads, however, I would like to avoid express lanes (usually two lanes of a toll road with extra tolls so it’s less congested) and there doesn’t seem to be a toggle for that. I will admit that for some cities Apple Maps is on par or better than Google maps and for others it’s the opposite. For my city Apple Maps just doesn’t get the job done.

A lot of consumer’s buying habits for products with inelastic demand is driven by cost. If companies weren’t driven by ever increasing profits then there might be more of an incentive to offer a wider variety of crops to consumers. Certain crops are already subsidized by the government to make it profitable for farmers. If other crops were subsidized then perhaps farmers would be more encouraged to grow them and if people see these at normal prices they might also be more interested in buying them. Of course, this would rely on multiple parts of farming being overhauled. For example, there’s a lot of cost sinks, one I can think of is the locked down maintenance of farming equipment (once again driven by the need for increasing profits via fiduciary duty). Eliminating these and other overheads would not only lead to more cost efficient farming, but also cheaper crops and increased variety offered to consumers.

Although I would love to see it, as long as DirectX is the de facto graphics API, I don’t see Microsoft fading into irrelevance when it comes to the PC gaming market.

It seems like the gaming division of Microsoft was doing just fine over that same period of time.

If the Xbox One was a complete failure then why would Microsoft make the series X/S?