There’s an axiom that every single news headline on the internet that ends in a question to the reader can be accurately answered with “no”.

I guess they are including the screen, the keyboard and the trackpad with the Windows license in those $200 estimates.

Gaming away from mtx and daily reward grinds, and also single player experiences without the competitive pressure can be beneficial. It is also a low effort activity that distracts from work only mindsets and it’s been proven to be a net positive for rest in contrast with social media doom scrolling.

They don’t have to manufacture them all. That little SteamOS Compatible sticker is gonna kick Windows out of the gaming throne and push steam machines as the default livingroom gaming solution. One of the big things about this announcement is that it isn’t addressed only to customers, it is aimed at developers. The store page even has sections to announce that development kits are available. They want the software and hardware developers onboard, that’s how they are going to push out competition.

“Powerful PC gaming in an open ecosystem”

Valve just kicked the teeth of all console makers with this announcement. If only they manage to ship and distribute globally they would single-handedly threat taking over the entire gaming industry (hardware side) in a single generation. Of course, it’s well to wait for reviews, hands on demonstrations and the reality that comes out of this. But I bet there’s more than one MS an Sony executive who were apprehensive of seeing this day arrive.

Also: the fact they doubled down on the Steam Machine name. It’s like a huge FU to all OEM manufacturers who laughed at them in 2017.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Most localization in software is trash because technocrats refuse to pay actual translators. Part of the reason I have involved myself in FOSS localization efforts is because it is extremely obvious it is either being done by amateurs who don’t speak the language, or using machine translation (AI or otherwise) that never gets the context right. Most people doing quality localization are scattered thin and the only ones paying good money for quality localization (FAAMG or whatever they call themselves now) are now laying off massive amounts of workers to replace them with poorly implemented AI.

The concept of good and evil is actually very limiting and tends to raise people with twisted worldviews. Most intelligent people learn that morality is complex, reality is not black and white, and to wish harm upon others to ensure personal bliss is rather sociopathic and fucked up.

Christianity faces a major foundational dissonance. Early tribalist (in group, out group thinking) values that have to coexist with radical empathic universalism. They usually ignore the development of Jewish traditions, and it took priests centuries of dissertation to mesh both views together. But they are incompatible. To believe in clearcut good and evil, and also things like a reward heaven (an idea also eradicated in most Jewish tradition). One must learn to suspend empathy for the fellow human being. To be happy while knowing others are harshly suffering (aka “they deserve it”). To think that one’s own cruelty will be forgiven just by saying a magical incantation is also fucked up.

Now, the solution given to it is not widely accepted, and is the source of schisms in different Christian cults. Jesus’s message is that of universal forgiveness with radical empathy. The abolition of heaven and hell. But many intermediate concepts had to be inserted to make it make sense with organized religion. Like sin forgivenes through repentance, second coming prophecies to delay the forgivines, apocalyptic prophecies to delay the abolition of hell and other exceptionalist interpretations.

Anyways, I started rambling, but Christianity is incapable to be internally consistent as it is. And some dogmatic views require people to be actively assholes by definition.

None of that comes activated by default. Sure, there are some dark patterns that trick people into activating bullshit. But anyone with half a brain and a minimum attention span not rotten yet by social media will click no on those prompts. Once disabled at the first startup, Samsung doesn’t bother you ever again. You can uninstall every single Samsung app and substitute with your favorite, no issue. This includes all Google apps, except play services because of Google.

As for ads and uninstallable bloat, it’s probably a carrier version. Those do get bloated and get ads. But otherwise, the international unlocked versions don’t show any ads at all. I’ve never seen an ad in my S25 phone and use nearly all Foss apps. The phone has never refused to uninstall anything. The effort to do that is pretty minimum, no tech knowledge required. Just learn to say no to software, it’s not rocket science. People got conditioned to saying yes to every prompt just to make it go away. This is how they get you. But it is not mandatory or out of your power to disable that stuff.

And for the UI, it’s a subjective matter of taste. I’ve never liked any of the alternative launchers either, they all suck in some minor way that breaks their gimmick. OneUI is fine and perfectly functional, it even has more customization and QoL features than stock launcher and other truly bullshit launchers like Xiaomi’s.

Not all Samsung phones are the same. Carrier versions are usually the one’s that come neutered and bloated. While international versions are unlocked and allow to uninstall anything. Including Google’s applications. I wished they wouldn’t be working on permanently locking the boot loader, that is their real sin.

I always took it more as a sermon on defeatism and belief in one’s own prowess. The quote can be misleading out of context. But if you remember the entire scene, Luke is in a very negative mood. Saying over and over that he can’t lift the X-wing, that it is impossible, what is the point, it is different from lifting small rocks, etc. Yoda is trying to shift Luke’s point of view. There’s no difference between the small feat and the large feat, only that he doesn’t believe himself capable enough to do it. Yoda instead appeals to determination. Do it, failure is not even believing in doing it in the first place—remember the quote is not “success or fail”, it is “do or do not”. Lack of confidence and faith in the force is what is holding Luke back. The quote comes as a response for Luke going “ok, I’ll try” in a completely defeated way. Suggesting he already decided he will fail. Thus Yoda’s scolding, no, don’t try, do it, full send, believe. The unspoken corollary being, if you do it and fail, then just do it again, harder and using what you learned.

After Yoda demonstrates that it was possible, after all, Luke says “I don’t believe it”, and Yoda responds “that is why you fail”. The whole point is that believing himself incapable is what is holding Luke back, you have to believe and do the thing. Else you’ll always fail. You suck at playing the violin? well, do it anyway, that’s the only way you’ll get good at playing the violin. Saying I can’t play the violin will only set you up for eternal failure and you will never do it.

It is poignant because the film actually ends in a sort of defeat. The empire seems all powerful and impossible to oppose, but they do it anyway. Afterwards Han Solo is in carbonite, Luke was severely wounded, losing an hand. Hoth is lost, cloud city betrayed them. But instead of being downtrodden and defeated, they end up hopeful and ready to do it again, to face the empire and save their friends. Because they believe in themselves and the force. It is like, the point of the movie.

Agree, but it was just how normalized internment camps were (Hitler claimed he got inspired by US ideas of population control). Which facilitated the German use of propaganda. If you said, “they are killing everyone there, my family died in there”, no one would believe you even if you were an eyewitness. Although there weren’t executions in the US camps, the conditions were so bad that at least 1800 out of 120 thousand people died. Even today, some people don’t believe the testimony of the families of Japanese victims of the camps and trivialize and downplay their suffering.

That’s nation-state apologia. They just ignored all the evidence because genocide wasn’t even defined yet in International Humanitarian Law, they just didn’t care. Remember that even the US had concentration camps inside the US for foreigners, almost all of them Japanese people. They just felt this was a normal thing armies did to control populations deemed risky (see the ghettoisation of black communities, history of segregation and the systematic wipe out of indigenous tribes). They knew, armies even went directly to the locations of the concentration camps, they already knew where almost all of them were. Like, inside Germany it was not entirely a secret either. German officials boasted about the whole thing in international forums and in propaganda.

The term Genocide, even, was coined by a polish-Jewish lawyer in 1942, Raphael Lemkin precisely because of what was known at the time of what the Nazis were doing against Jewish people and his own experiences surviving the Holocaust.

You’ll be surprise how often paradox is just a proxy term for we don’t fully understand it yet. The point remains, scientists, as subjective human beings we all are, can only approximate natural truth through our own perspectives. Socially constructing knowledge that we deem our truth. Is it a game? Yes. Can it be politized by bad faith actors? Absolutely. Best we understand it to fight it than try to pledge absolutism as a banner, because that will pe politized too. And there we will lose. Absolutism feeds fascism, nuance and empathy are the enemies of fascists.

You had shitty teachers. That doesn’t mean social-constructivism is wrong. Quite the contrary, it kind of bizarrely proves how social relations alter your perception of reality.

Oh, please. Let’s not go there. Epistemologists have never suggested or promoted any such thing, your wariness is misplaced, it seems. If anything, fascism will use any and all rhetorical resource to promote their rise and stay in power. Remember, before post-modernism—which is the source of the “every person has their own truth” thing you dislike, not epistemology which predates post-modernism by a couple of centuries—fascism used objective truth as justification for the superiority of the in-group in power. Eugenics was touted by fascists in the 1800s as the epitome of scientific enlightenment. It was obvious and proven scientific knowledge that black people were an inferior race, etc. All the classical Nazi pseudo-arguments. A harsh and closed view of objective truth is precisely the kind of mindset where fascism thrive. Fascists like absolute truths quite a lot, even when they contradict each other.

The point of epistemology is to analyze the ways in which humans come up with and use knowledge. It has absolutely no prescriptive tenets at all. It is entirely descriptive.

Like, you can’t look at me in the eye and seriously suggest that Bertrand Russel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Locke, Hume or Immanuel Kant were fascists.

Exactly, remember the point was not to be right. But to have the discussions. It wasn’t the physics we were interested in, but in the ways to construct knowledge. Definitions and models are human constructs. The universe doesn’t care that we do or do not have neat words and models of its workings. However, language and knowledge, as human endeavors, require human interaction.

An interesting one way to illustrate this point was: An hermit, all alone in the wilderness, by sole virtue of reasoning acquires absolute objective truth of the fundamental laws of the universe. Way beyond any current scientific knowledge. However, he doesn’t tell anyone. Has any knowledge been gained? If he dies, not telling anyone what he discovered, has any knowledge been lost?

One of them arguments was that in a vacuum, absent of any container or gravity, a liquid’s shape is that of a sphere.

Another one was that depending on the definition of liquid, liquids might or might not have a shape. This ranged from definitions of liquid based on atomic structure of molecules up to phenomenological definitions (asphalt and glass are liquids, according to some definitions e.g.). It also varies depending on the definition of the attribute shape itself.

The point of the exercise was to challenge the notion of objective truth in science.

Every other industry does have a version of crediting. From services providing name tags to the reception staff and waiters, to engineering companies with “about us” sections on their webpages showcasing projects and the engineers who designed them.

Musicians often have sections in their live shows introducing the instrument players of the band even if it was a solo event. Music albums used to come with a booklet that, along with the lyrics and nice art, included the credits of all musicians. Theaters will hand out a pamphlet with a review of what the play is about and a list of credits for the production team.

Hospitals and clinics are required to display the names of medical staff somewhere in a billboard. Private practices have to show the name of doctors on the doors. In some countries restaurants have to showcase the kitchen staff names and the number of their sanitary permits to handle food.

Every industry has their ways, this is just the way this industry decided to do it.

I had a very cool class in research epistemology and the exercise was basically to answer the question, do liquids have a shape and if yes, which is it? How would you prove it?

It was the source of the most deranged but valuable discussion I’ve ever had.

Children are the epitome of innocence in the meaning of the word for: moral discernment between good and bad. In moral philosophy the reason why someone is culpable is because they understood the negative consequences of their actions but decided to do it nevertheless. This is why, for example, in the law, there is a difference between murder and manslaughter. Children must be taught morals. Another example is in Christian morality. The original sin is the ability to discern between good and evil. Thus the loss of innocence of humankind.