I’m so confused. Whose dishwashers are you talking about? I’m in the US, you’re describing every dishwasher I’ve ever had, except that we always hook it up to the hot water line. Our unit takes very little water, it takes hours to run a load due to efficiency features. It has a heating element inside to take whatever water it gets and keep it hot for the cycle.

I don’t really see why it’s any less efficient to use the hot water we are already heating with our water heater (which heats much more efficiently than a small electric heater would). The water originally arrives to my house cold, it has to be heated one way or another. My dishwasher is less than 10 feet away from my water heater, water is not losing appreciable heat on the way to the dishwasher.

Up to* $2k. Just for the sake of clarity.

The tax credit is 30% of the total project price, up to $2k. If the HPWH is over double the cost of NG, you’re still paying quite a bit more even with the tax credit.

Man I haven’t thought about kkrieger in a looooong time. Thanks for that!

I agree though. I think it’s been happening for years. Hardware has gotten so fast compared to where we were a few years ago. But it hasn’t caused rapid innovation like everyone thought it would. It’s just made devs lazy and we get massive unoptimized piles of shit released that take hundreds of gigs of space, require 8gb of vram and 16gb of RAM and still run like trash.

I’d love to see another era where we have game developers truly innovating and really trying to get the most out of hardware but I wonder if things have gotten so complicated that those days are gone.

That’s a good question. If I’m honest I haven’t seen UT in probably 15 years.

I think it was the cornfield chasing parts? I also recall just being super creeped out by E.T. himself. The way he made sounds, the way his fingers move, etc.

The biohazard stuff you’re talking about scared me, but I think just the sounds E.T. was making, not the guys in suits specifically.

E.T.

I saw it when I was probably 4 or 5? I had recurring nightmares for YEARS. Like, well into my mid teens. I’m pretty sure I even had one or two as an adult. I’m recovered now and I’ve watched the movie without incident, but I don’t like it and I don’t really want to willingly watch it again.

I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid and convinced my parents to let me see it in the theater when I was 6. I was so fucking terrified at the opening scene I pretended I needed to pee so I could step out for a minute.

I did come back and loved the movie though, so I guess it wasn’t that bad.

I’ve just started dipping my toes back into the waters again too, also after many years of downloading absolutely nothing. It’s a combo of things prompting me.

First, costs have gotten out of control and prices just keep creeping up. This is happening at the same time as content libraries per service dwindle. I make more money than I used to, yet it feels like it goes not nearly as far these days with prices of everything skyrocketing.

Second, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to find things. Part of the issue for me is interfaces (though I can get around that, generally). Part is content shuffling from one service to the next. But a big issue is all the trash content companies like Netflix are shitting out to pad their libraries. You have to wade through oceans of garbage to find a single thing worth your time. This experience is exactly why I dropped traditional cable years ago! I hate endless filler trash. I don’t want the illusion of a large library to make it seem like I’m getting value. I just want actual good content.

I totally get wanting to play the game when it’s fresh. You miss out on being part of the buzz of a new game if you wait to play it. Every gaming site is full of memes about a new game for the first few months after release and it’s definitely part of the experience to be on the “in” side of that.

With that said, I just pick and choose which games matter to me for that nowadays, and I commit myself to actually beating the games I buy (assuming I don’t hate them). Committing to beating them before buying a new game has really cut back on my buying of new games only to have it languish in my backlog and see price drops before I ever play it.

This way I do get to be part of that community for the games that really matter to me, but I also am not just buying everything out there at full price.

Don’t focus only on reddit users. That unnecessarily narrows the scope of the issue.

Lemmy has significant barriers to joining that other sites or services do not have. And then once people manage to join there are basic usability issues with simple things like finding communities.

Until these core issues are solved it feels pointless to try to target users from a specific site.

Fully agree with you on artists not getting their fair share, and I would argue that the issue is sadly endemic across the entire music industry and was that way long before streaming services even existed. Spotify is merely the most visible representation of a long festering issue that spans generations.

I can only speak for myself but I do actually still buy CDs for bands I really like. I will also occasionally buy merch or go to shows. Some of these bands I very certainly would never have discovered without Spotify (or a service like it).

Ultimately I agree that I’d like people to understand their options. I think the biggest likely barrier is convenience. I have a NAS server, and a virtual host set up that runs a Linux server with Plex on it, and I have that open so I can use Plexamp to play live albums or any other stuff I own that isn’t on Spotify. But like… That’s a massive barrier to entry to simply create something close to the experience Spotify offers out of the box. And it’s definitely not as polished. I do it because I’m a hobbyist, but most people aren’t like that. So then if you want to buy music individually, you’re stuck listening to actual physical CDs, or ripping them and loading them on your phone or mp3 player. Old school cool for sure, but new school convenience is sure hard to beat once you’ve had a taste.

This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.

We do not care that we don’t own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it’s almost a perk that I don’t because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify’s library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.

I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don’t want to go pirate it, I don’t want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.

And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I’m a member at our local zoo. I don’t expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I’m a member at our museum. I don’t feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don’t own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.

Spotify is the exact same for me.

Which of course is stupid, because USPS is actually great and provides a much better and more reliable service than any private competitor even in its current underfunded state.

I agree but I’ll take it a step further. I’ve been in IT for almost 20 years. I never took a math class after high school (age 18). I took math up through calc 2 in high school.

I’ve never used a single lick of anything beyond basic math for my work. None. And I don’t know anyone else who has either over the course of 4 different employers and working with hundreds of people.

In my opinion it’s the logical thinking and the process of problem solving that are the parts of math that translate to IT. Doing proofs, understanding all the reasons why something is the way that it is. So in that regard sure, math is important. But I feel like OP is implying that actually knowing how to do complex math problems is important for a career in IT, and it really isn’t.

If we are trying to dig into the root cause? Then yes, honestly. It is Google. And don’t call them the “search engine guys”, that’s not what they are about. They are the “mass aggregation and correlation of user data guys”. Search has been a means to an end for Google for a very long time.

All those other things didn’t exist when google was developing their model. Google paved the way for the internet no longer being free, but being “free” with payment rendered in the form of user data. That in turn directly led to all those other evils you referred to. It is not an exaggeration to imply that Google is ultimately at fault for the way the internet functions today.

There’s already been a new flavor of coke developed and allegedly chosen by AI. If that’s not some kind of singularity moment, I don’t know what is.

“The postal service is losing money!”

No, the postal service costs money. It’s a service. It doesn’t aim to make a profit. It costs money, and we are in turn rendered a service that is useful.

I swear people are delusional.

From a pure graphical fidelity point we’re there now.

From an animation standpoint we are light years away. The absolute best animations or facial expression renders I have seen are nowhere near good enough to actually pass for real. And honestly I am not sure I’ve even seen meaningful improvement in this area in a long time. Even in this demo videos the cars don’t look quite right as they move, and cars are much easier than people, or the way cloth moves when on someone who is moving.

I’d like to think this is the next big focus for graphics, but animations are a lot harder to get right than pure visual fidelity. I hope studios start focusing on it because it will take take us to that next step.

He’s saying we would never have an oil spill equivalent to the amount of oil that is used because we try very hard not to spill oil. It is expensive and damaging.

If you are asking a hypothetical question comparing the amount of oil in a spill and its damage to the environment vs simply using that oil normally, I think the oil spill wins in a landslide for being the most damaging.

The Typing of the Dead

I highly doubt Nintendo is attempting any kind of gap closure with the deck, because how could they and why?

The only thing they share is a form factor. Nintendo is well aware that the reason they sell consoles is as a dedicated platform for their own games. I truly believe that is their bread and butter and all they really care about. If the system gets popular enough, then it will get some third party support which means it will have some very limited library crossover with PC/PS/Xbox, but I think we are past the point where Nintendo intends to rely on that as a selling point for this or any future generation of consoles. Ports of games that come to switch are pretty uniformly the worst version of the game to play, and it’s pretty clear that doesn’t bother Nintendo at all.

Which is all to say, I don’t think Nintendo and Valve think of each other as direct competitors, because they serve entirely different markets. I have both a switch and a deck. I love them both. I use my switch to play Nintendo games, I use my deck to play pretty much anything else. I don’t think I’m unique at all in that regard, and frankly it never would occur to me that these devices have anything to do with one another.