But physical games that doesn’t require online would work fine.

Do we know this for sure? On the original Switch, when new games came out, they often would refuse to play until you updated the firmware on the console. So depending on whether they allow banned consoles to update their firmware, offline games might not work either.

Really! I find that fascinating.

When I try to think of a tune (often because I haven’t recalled the lyrics yet and am still trying to identify the song), I am just listening to the song in my head, trying to think of the notes and instrumentation of the next bit. I hear it, like a recording.

When I try to throw something–I said basketball because I figured it would be more relatable, but the sport I actually played was Ultimate (Frisbee, but that’s a trademark, so the sport is just Ultimate)–I’m picturing the path of the disc, how it will arc on the wind, the precise angle, how to roll it off my fingers, how long it will be in the air and how far to lead the runner. It’s a struggle to even come up with words for it now. It all feels visceral, the same as thinking how to reach my hand out to touch a glass on a table.

It’s hard for me to imagine using words for those kinds of things because words are so vague and general. Words deal with categories we impose on the world, rather than the world as it is. Like, I learned to juggle as a teenager; I could never do that if I had to use words to think about every way to maneuver my arms and how the balls would land and so forth. I just have to reach where the ball is going to be, and throw where my hand is going to be. When I first learned Mills’ Mess, I got it mixed up a bit (because I was learning from a VHS tape), and I had an extra throw in there. It took me quite a while to figure out how I mixed it up, and how to do it without that extra throw. But it was a spatial puzzle. I wouldn’t even know how to convey the issue in detail without just doing it.

I dunno. I shouldn’t be surprised that people’s inner lives are very different, but this particular point confounds me a bit.

When you’re thinking about how to throw a basketball to get it through a hoop, do you use words for that?

When you are thinking of the tune to a particular song, is that in words?

I think a lot of people overestimate the role of words in thinking. There’s a lot of non-verbal thought.

The “Scunthorpe Problem” strikes again!

Yeah, I think we just disagree about this. You’re implying that letting this go forward would be giving in to the state acting capriciously, but that’s really not what this is. The states have literally already started spending the money–hiring contractors and so forth to physically build things–based on the funds that the government had already decided to send them, but is now arbitrarily yanking back. Note that this is different from “we are accustomed to receiving funds for this”; instead it’s “you made a specific commitment to provide X funds for Y purpose, and are now suddenly stiffing us on the bill.” In that light, withholding a portion of the funds that the state ostensibly owes the government in order to make up that unexpected shortfall really isn’t that unreasonable. You keep portraying this as them withholding money “because they disagree with federal policies,” and saying “what those policies are and why is completely irrelevant,” but the policy they disagree with is the sudden and arbitrary withholding of previously-committed funds to the state, and they are withholding state funds to the feds as a direct way of offsetting that deficit. That makes it feel extremely relevant.

I just don’t think it absolutely has to be the slippery slope you’re portraying it as. I’m getting into technicalities because we’re discussing the law and precedent, and technicalities matter a whole freaking lot when you’re dealing with the law. There’s a reason descending into technicalities is referred to in roleplaying games as “rules lawyering”.

And as for highly populous states having a larger influence on federal policy…isn’t that just democracy? Power derives from the consent of the governed, and at the moment that consent is at a particularly low ebb.

In any case, yeah, I think we just disagree on this, and it’s all moot in the face of the specific court in power. I’ll let you get the last word if you want to reply, but I’ll probably drop it at this point.

I feel like you’re missing a point here. It’s significant that this isn’t just

they disagree with federal policies that are affecting them.

It’s that the federal government has made a commitment to provide funds to the state (e.g. the broadband construction funds, funds to build EV charging stations, etc.) and the federal government is now refusing to disburse those funds because the current administration has decided it doesn’t like paying the bills the previous administration incurred, at least to states Trump feels aren’t adequately supportive of his policies. The proposal in this case is to withhold delivery of funds the state is supposed to give the government in order to offset the funds the government is also contractually obligated to deliver.

I agree with you that this specific supreme court would definitely rule in favor of the feds, but I definitely don’t think the case is as absurdly one-sided as you seem to find it. I think a different court could probably find precedent for this kind of dispute if they were so inclined.

It’s not just Fox News. Bezo’s Washington Post ran an editorial, written by “the editorial board,” about how Mamdani would be “bad for New York and bad for the Democratic Party,” claiming he would destroy public transit, reduce the number of grocery stores, drive away big businesses, depress low-skill employment, etc., etc., etc. Oh, and of course that this would discredit all the other young candidates across the country. The WaPo’s threat earlier this year to make their editorial page aggressively pro-capitalist and anti-public-good was apparently very much in earnest.

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I tried this with my Switch, but it turns out the switch version of moonlight is super janky. It can’t wake the computer, and the controls don’t seem to map right by default, which basically means I have to remap controls every time I start a game (since I go back and forth between the PC and the handheld, and I need to switch them back when I’m at the PC). Plus it sometimes just stops accepting input for a while and makes me run down to the computer. It just has a lot more friction than I thought it would.

I’m doing all that because there’s this part of my brain that is convinced that I should get a Deck, even though my problem isn’t actually that I don’t have a handheld, it’s that I can’t motivate myself to play the games I already have. So, not actually gonna get a Deck unless the prices come down a lot. The used prices are mostly still over $300, though.

💰 💰 💰

So, the EPA sets emissions rules for the country, on the grounds that it would be problematic for industry if there was a patchwork of 50 different sets of rules about this stuff. California got the feds to agree to let them set their own stricter limits, though, and allowed other states to sign on to also use California’s rules if they wanted to, which several did.

So I think what’s happening here is that the waivers are being rescinded. They’ve been in place for ages (at least 50 years, I think?) so it’s a huge departure from business as usual, but you know how Trump loves stomping on norms.

This article has some of the relevant points: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/22/nx-s1-5387729/senate-california-ev-air-pollution-waiver-revoked

Seriously. This is exactly what people object to about Windows Recall. In its re-released version at least it’s opt-in for now, but it’s still eerily close to this.

They’re not saying that slow growth is definitely evidence it’s exponential. They’re saying that slow growth doesn’t prove that it isn’t exponential, which seemed to be what you were saying.

It’s always hard to identify exponential growth in its early stages.

I think he’s literally talking about making a credit that’s contingent on a certain IQ test score, or something along those lines. He seems to be a straight-up, unabashed eugenicist.

Good news on the latter front, actually: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-expands-investments-in-the-u-s-to-usd165-billion-with-new-fabs-and-r-and-d-center-a-closer-look

Yeah, I had the same thing with the photos of diseased bodies and the disparaging of contraception. I remember in particular that the textbook chapter on abstinence was immediately followed by the chapter on parenthood, which felt like it left a pretty conspicuous gap.

Amusingly there were two very different Health Class experiences to be had at my school. You were assigned one at random, you couldn’t choose which teacher you got. One was a first-year math teacher and member of an unsuccessful local Christian rock band. He’s who I had. The other possibility was a lesbian gym teacher, whose class was apparently (and unsurprisingly) a LOT more useful.

But yeah, the 90’s kinda sucked, and I hate that the US is trundling back towards that kind of “education.”

I guess I sort of agree? It’s a bit tricky to get it set up, for sure. Even just installing windows is probably beyond the average user, and this has a few more quirks and gotchas than normal.

E.g., in IoT LTSC 11 (which is what I’m actually currently using), when you connect a controller, it’ll bring up an error message about not having a handler for ms-gamebar, and fixing that calls for regedit. (One it’s fixed, though, it stays fixed.) It also got itself into a bit of a weird state during the initial installation where it wanted me to log in with a kind of account I don’t have, and while I was able to bypass that, I don’t think I did it in quite the right way, and it broke something in the install and I had to do an in-place repair install to fix it before it would install certain updates successfully. It was also failing to download the in-place repair install, so I had to look up how to do it manually using the install DVD I’d burned previously. But that fixed it, and it’s been fine since.

So, yeah, it’s got pitfalls and quirks and glitches. That’s also been my experience with other Windows installs, though, so it didn’t seem all that different in general.

But once you get those initial hurdles sorted out, it’s really just like normal Windows. Better, even, since it doesn’t have all the cruft built into it, like Cortana, Teams, OneDrive, start menu ads, nag screens about upgrading to 11, the Microsoft Store, etc. (Though you can add most of those if you really want them.) My aging parents aren’t willing to upgrade to 11 because they’re afraid too many things will have changed, and I’m thinking I’ll probably switch them to 10 IoT LTSC instead. I’ll just have to be careful to make sure everything they want to do works before I leave them to it. It still gets monthly security updates and everything.

Unless you switch to IoT LTSC, which will continue to get security updates until 2032. It’s kinda bullshit that they’re still making the security patches and then just refusing to give them to consumer 10 users.

Perlmutter was laid off from the Copyright Office after publishing a report on the contentions between artificial intelligence and fair use.

Oh, of course it’s ultimately about trying to do an end-run around Congress in order to enable the AI grift. Everything is always in service of one of the grifters providing Trump with a slush fund.

I’m so tired of all this.

They may have meant to say “vulture capital,” which is a term sometimes used for that kind of private equity firm.