That’s probably a fair assessment, but still a rather damning indictment of the industry writ large.

There are definitely better versions of cryptocurrency that I think could be more useful, but the industry is definitely not headed in that direction. Instead, it’s all pump-and-dumps, rug-pulls, and other schemes that render them nothing more than highly speculative asset classes in which the underlying asset has no intrinsic value.

It’s just grift all the way down with crypto, isn’t it? Scams layered on scams layered on scams.

Also, it should have had Super Mario Galaxy 2, it was crappy that they went from 4 games down to 3 for that All Star collection.

Okay, I picked it up and blitzed through Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, and it was a deep disappointment. The personal and romantic stakes and themes of the earlier books with Cordelia Naismith were coupled with other adventures or plots, and the combination of the personal and the galactic stakes was part of what made them work. I felt like Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen utterly lost the broader plot, and it was just a book about two people getting together and retiring. (Which, to be fair, is a perfectly fine plot and there are multiple genres and sub-genres built around that plot, but in the context of the Vorkossigan Saga, it was a nothing-burger of a story.) There are some revelations about things long-past, which I think Bujold did to try to flesh out the story and maybe give Cornelia’s take on some of the events that happened around her in the intervening ~30 years since she had a book from her perspective, but in this book, hardly anything happens. Seriously, the stakes are so low. It’s pleasant, but scarcely needs to exist for the rest of the characters or novels. What a baffling addition to this series.

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I’ve seen where doctors are using it for surgery

The article I’ve seen is one instance in Brazil (article in Brazilian Portuguese) for laparoscopic surgery, which makes a lot of sense. I don’t know how it compare to other displays, however, or if using a VR set rather than a monitor offers advantages, or if the Vision Pro did anything new or better. The same article mentions that doctors had done the same thing with a HoloLens VR headset some years before.

Oh, I have not, thanks for the recommendation!

Roku Jellyfin app has been pretty good lately, few complaints now!

I liked the first two (about Cordelia) better than the Miles books in some ways. He’s just a kid, she’s more interesting in a lot of ways.

That said, I think the best bit of the whole series is the Miles-focused novella The Mountains of Mourning.

This seems fine, so long as the journos remember how to pull up stakes once a platform decays. I hope they learn a lesson about the importance of owning your own audience, follower lists, etc.

Non-Spotify link, for anyone not wanting to support that exploitative platform.

https://techwontsave.us/episode/252_nuclear_wont_meet_techs_energy_demands_w_mv_ramana

The episode has a point, all this nuclear talk is a fig leaf for really excessive and probably pointless energy consumption. So-called AI feels like a Ponzi scheme in more ways than one.

Just a reminder, the “major questions doctrine” is bullshit, used by the partisan conservatives to ignore the plain text of a statute whenever they want to engineer an outcome. Don’t pretend that this is anything less than make-believe judicial bullshit.

I just want to tip my hat to Elizabeth Lopatto’s writing in this piece. I miss following her on twitter and had forgotten how spicy and on-target she can be. Good stuff.

The current Indian government has prosecuted or detained employees of foreign companies in the past for actions taken by the company. There is a real risk here.

I do think the Indian government has a point if you read the lawsuit. This is a ongoing lawsuit and the page taken down had info on it and a discussion page where people were talking about the ongoing lawsuit. The lawsuit says that this “…Complicates and compounds the issue at hand.”

Hard disagree. Ongoing lawsuits often have complicated issues, but are nonetheless topics of public concern. It’s sometimes inconvenient for governments and large corporations to have the public aware of the lawsuit and the underlying facts and issues, but that’s no reason to impose a gag order.

Frankly, whenever I hear a court give vague rationales like “complicates the issues,” I assume they judge just doesn’t like the criticism. That’s what it sounds like here.

Mint

I see Mint as the more reasonable option that keeps 98% of the advantages of Ubuntu, with less of the crazy. I was a xubuntu user a decade ago, but have been very happy with Mint xfce since I switched.

Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that’s accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.

Beelink and Minisforum are legit

I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.

Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.

Kinda, there was a progression to travel to different planets, etc. I mostly played it with friends and messed around, so I didn’t pursue it very far.