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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • That is a silly take if I’ve ever seen one. How more targeted can you get than to make pagers that are exclusively used by a terrorist organization explode with such little force that even bystanders who are one meter away are unharmed, that even fruit at a vegetable stand right next to the targeted terrorist remains unspoiled? This is the very opposite of terrorism, literally the most precise strike on a terrorist organization or military as a whole in history, infinitely superior to a land invasion or air strikes. In the real world, it doesn’t get any more perfect than this. It would be preposterous for a strike on thousands of targets to result in zero collateral damage, but I would bet good money that once (or if) the actual numbers ever come out, it’ll be the most favorable combatant to civilian casualty rate for an operation of this size in recorded history.

    How naive does one have to be to trust official accounts on the number and age of the victims from a failed state that is effectively under full control of a terrorist organization? I can assure you that the estimated five grams of explosive have resulted in far more terrorist deaths than just 10, even during just the first strike - but Hezbollah won’t be willing to admit as much and instead present, through their intermediaries in the Lebanese government, a convenient fake figure and two maybe real, maybe invented civilian casualties that you’ll happily regurgitate just as much as you happily regurgitate figures from the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza.

    I get the feeling that what many of Israel’s critics are asking of the country is to just roll over and die, that no matter to how absolutely extreme lengths they go to minimize civilian casualties compared to literally everyone else on this planet, it’s all categorically wrong, because those dastardly Jews had the audacity to not present their other cheek, even as hundreds of thousands of them had to flee their bombs due to near constant Hezbollah bombardments of civilian areas in the North of Israel. Were you even aware of this? Do you really think that this situation could go on indefinitely?



  • The thing is, this pornography and cats will tell future historians a ton about what people were like in our times. Not all of it will be accurate, but that’s an issue with any primary source. Hell, watch some grainy smut from the '70s or '80s and pay attention to things other than the “action”, like the choice of music, the way the actors are talking, how they are dressed, what the sets look like, what kind of excuses for plots are being used, all of which are clearly products of their time. Amateur stuff is even more illuminating. Before anyone thinks I’m overthinking this: We learned a lot about Ancient Rome from the smut Romans carved into buildings in Pompeii.

    It’s the same with old cat pictures. You can reasonably date many of them by what the background looks like, e.g. what kind of electronics and furniture are present, how people who are also in the photos are dressed, image quality (provided it hasn’t been compressed to hell and back since), etc. These kinds of seemingly inconsequential artifacts of our time will be highly illuminating to future historians (provided they are being preserved), just like the complaint letters ol’ Ea Nasir received thousands of years ago.









  • Let’s be real: I doubt many people are playing the Uncharted games for the gameplay. These titles are doing the bare minimum to meet AAA action-adventure standards with some technical flourishes here and there, but that’s about it. You get by the numbers cover shooting, by the numbers occasional easy stealth, by the numbers climbing, by the numbers (and by that I mean really small numbers) puzzle solving, etc. The appeal lies in the spectacle, the artistry, the technical excellence by the standards of the platforms they are on, experiencing what are essentially slightly interactive Hollywood adventure movies that manage to keep the player hooked with expert pacing and characters that are straddling the line between psychopathy and charm just right.

    One might also argue that it’s more fun watching footage of these games than actually playing them. The best example of this is the car chase sequence in Uncharted 4, which looked amazing when I first watched it years before being able to play it, but once I got to actually experience it first hand, this was the moment when I dropped the difficulty down, because it was remarkably (and surprisingly) frustrating and irritating to play. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an astonishing technical achievement, but not one second of playing it was fun, at least in my opinion.





  • The 1060 is an eight year old mid-range card, lacking almost all of the features that are setting nvidia apart from AMD these days. It has CUDA, but on its own, that’s mostly useful only for non-gaming applications. AMD is lagging behind, but they are not lagging that far behind. AMD has trouble keeping up with 20xx cards and newer, especially when it comes to ray-tracing and upscaling. FSR, while supporting older cards and being manufacturer-agnostic (that’s why even your old Nvidia card is supported), is a crutch that comes with serious visual downgrades, whereas DLSS improves both performance and visuals. This matters in all market segments. Ray-tracing meanwhile is mostly a mid-range and up thing - and while newer AMD cards support it, their performance relative to otherwise equivalent Nvidia cards is lagging far behind.