Main monitor is for Minecraft. Second is for Northernlion. This simple principle has brought me much success.

Failing checks is fine, and you might get to see some very interesting things from failing checks, so don’t feel bad if you do.

First as tragedy, and then as farce. Bush did 1/31.

It already did with Perestroika and the subsequent collapse of the USSR.

Usually if I’m reading something heavy I make sure to get up to play a little basketball or walk my dog. Some sun and fresh air always helps. Since it’s the winter in the northern hemisphere I guess that option is less available but I think that just generally trying to go outside for a bit is helpful.

I really, really hate when you try to compare a bad thing to racism and someone says “oh so you’re comparing [bad thing] to racism?” Yes! Yes I am! Because two bad things don’t need to be exactly equal in magnitude to still be comparable.

4k hours in PoE1 here, and while I really think PoE1 is still a better game than 2, I think I’m fine with missing 2 or 3 leagues of PoE1 in exchange for PoE2. I’m sure they’ll get back to releasing PoE1 leagues that are maybe a smaller scale than what we’ve had for a while because it would simply be stupid not to. They’re already creating huge numbers of assets that are backwards compatible, and will have plenty of developers who won’t necessarily always have their hands full with PoE2. It does seem like they have a big fire WRT PoE1 and having moved all the devs out to 2 to fix problems (problems that probably will never fully be solved, given the rate at which the game is growing), so I think this won’t be the last disappointment before PoE2 full release drops, but I’ve yet to see a good argument for why PoE1 is gonna be completely dead after PoE2 releases. It’ll cost them next to nothing to do a low effort league every 3 months.

Also as fair as your criticisms of 2 are, the game feels much better to play than 1, just in terms of controls and the feel of combat. You’re describing it as being so much slower than 1, but on my monk I generally feel like I’m moving around maps about as fast as I do in 1 before I have endgame gear; the main difference is that in PoE1 gear progression is smooth enough that anyone can slowly grind to make their character faster and faster, while 2 is currently in a horrible state for gear progression where making your character perform well is a balancing act of item rarity and fitting in Temporalis. I don’t see that as a fundamental design flaw, though, it’s clearly a consequence of how barebones the crafting system is at the moment, together with a lack of league mechanics and content to fill up the endgame. I don’t think this is a problem that wouldn’t be fixed via the usual GGG approach of powercreep via league mechanics and balancing every patch. It’ll get closer to where PoE1 is in terms of player power and content and PoE1 will get closer to where PoE2 is in terms of polish (and I know you’ll say PoE2 isn’t polished but I think most people who’ve tried to play both will agree PoE2 is more polished).

TL;DR the franchise is far from dead, PoE1 is in hibernation mode but it’s probably more accurate to say its golden age is over and it will see much smaller expansions moving forward, than to say it’s completely dead. But it’s speculation either way.

put that dang lathe down please

Very sad news. I hope the first PoE2 economy reset comes soon enough. I loved 3.25 though, the game couldn’t have had a better “final” league.

Climate Stalin doesn’t go far enough, we need Climate Mecha Stalin.

Obviously not top brass (although people with knowledge of military history and tactics are always useful). But knowing how to organize a division, understand military logistics, that type of concern has historically been very useful in any armed struggle.

Probably a case of people at the lower levels not having the resources, education, and surroundings to realize they’re trans and come out.

This has been and will continue to be my line on this issue. Are trans people who served in the US military criminals and morally reprehensible? Absolutely. Do they exist at a unique intersection of having important skills for the revolutionary struggle, and having a marginalized identity that orients their energy in the right direction? Also yes, at least if the left can capitalize on them instead of liberal opportunists. The tricky thing is drawing the connection between their oppression and the historical process of imperialism which they have contributed to but could help destroy.

The system is designed to punish. You can’t force the Democrats to change their policy

Definitely true but it also appears to be the case that the whole system is collapsing so it may have been the right call to give the Democrats the middle finger in the interest of destroying American empire.

Disagreed. The average american has no clue what they’re talking about and just vaguely believes that the Federal government is this big, vague entity that shreds away their “tax dollars.” This is evidenced by the fact they get always get upset when “downsizing the federal government” inevitably means cuts to the social programs they were benefitting from. They believe this at the time of answering the question, at least, and it would take them way more time thinking it through before they realize how things fit together.

Raising tariffs to incentivize domestic production helps create jobs at the expense of corporate profit. From a Nationalist perspective, it’s a good thing.

Not when companies that have immense amounts of capital can just freely move that capital around and keep producing at a small fraction of the cost of production in the US. They’ll never go back to the US, so the question is where the demand will come from to fill the hole the US is leaving; China has been angling to massively increase domestic consumption so I think that’s probably another gift to China in that end.

So a lot of people replied talking about commercial AI development, but I think the interesting thing is that even Western university AI research hadn’t really caught up to this. I have a prof who’s been researching ways to get deep learning models to run locally on minimal hardware and was familiar with quantization (although I think he was doing 16 bit), compression, all the tactics I’ve heard DeepSeek was using. I wonder if maybe the thing that makes R1 so much better is the whole COT thing? Maybe no one was trying COT with a much smaller model?

GOOD post

Stop naming your kids Gunner, start naming them Gooner.