monotremata

One use is VR, where the field of view is huge. The industry size and distance recommendations have a TV take up about 30° of your field of view, which works out to 128 pixels per degree for a 4k screen. For a headset with a 100° field of view (most are a little higher than this at this point, or at least claim to be, but it's a good baseline) you'd be looking at a 12k resolution to get the same level of clarity. But, of course, you'd need to run it at a very high framerate to avoid simulator sickness, whereas 4k often gets away with just 30 fps. Delivering power over the same cable also means just one cable.

Currently there are no GPUs to drive that high a resolution and framerate. But the cable was one limiting factor there, made especially frustrating by nVidia sticking to displayport 1.4 for so long.

Yeah. I'm 100% who Nintendo is trying to lure with this launch, and honestly I'm a little ticked off about it--I've really wanted Metroid Prime 4 for a long time, but now it's coming out and I have to choose between playing an inferior version or shelling out over $500 to play the good version. ($450 for the system, $80 for the game, and compatible SD cards in sizes larger than the internal storage of the new system don't even exist yet.) So I'm inclined to wait, and see if there are enough good games to justify the Switch 2 purchase eventually, but they're going to count that as poor initial sales for Prime 4. It might kill the franchise. Replaying some of my switch titles with upgraded performance might have been enough to motivate me to make the move, but they're also going to charge extra for that. That's...not great. Nickle-and-diming on top of a much more expensive system with even more expensive games is just ugly.

It definitely has me thinking about getting a PC handheld instead. A lot of what I was picturing was second-screen gaming while watching TV or YouTube, and the Deck is definitely a competitor in that space. There are a bunch of people saying that "oh, the reason you buy a Nintendo system is to play Nintendo exclusives," which, yeah, that is a selling point, but for the original switch, just being a portable system that played modern games was also a selling point. That second factor is absolutely going up against the Deck, and frankly losing, because Steam has everything. Switch 2 has to go all in on the exclusives, and that's a much tougher sell, especially since they don't have the gold mine of good games nobody had played that they had from the Wii U to pad the release schedule.

Maybe they'll amaze me, but I see them being very unhappy with the revenue from this console in a couple of years, and casting about for stupid shit to blame. And I think they're gonna blame Metroid. It's not Metroid, guys. Metroid is great. It's the pricing.

The White House is more than 40 hours away from here driving non-stop.

The number of people from here who could have participated in a march at the White House (maybe taking a week off work in order to get there and back traveling 16 hours a day by bus) would have been very small. Instead, thousands of us marched in our local downtown yesterday in a solid throng.

Protests at a specific location convey a message, but mass protests everywhere convey a message too.

I'm glad you asked, I was trying to figure out what Peter Sellers had in common with Musk.

https://m.xkcd.com/2566/

I'm guessing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

It's not unheard of, though. Modern Warfare 2 had only a 70MB file on its disc, basically a license, and required you to download the actual game.

Note I'm not defending this. It's a nightmare for game preservation and pushes us ever further in the direction of never owning anything. I'm just saying Nintendo isn't breaking new ground with this particular outrage.

For "listened to a boombox outside," does it matter whether you did so voluntarily or just heard it because someone else was playing one too loudly for you to ignore? In other words, I'm either 0 or 1.

As kids my sister and I found a set of old 1950's World Book Encyclopedias that a family in our neighborhood was throwing out. We brought them home on a wagon. We used them for years. They were definitely kinda dated--like, in the article about guinea pigs, it claimed they were the perfect animal for scientific research because they don't feel pain, which is obviously bullshit and/or propaganda. But that was actually kind of eye-opening for me at the time, because I didn't have a lot of experience of seemingly authoritative things that were also in error. It still had a lot of useful info, too.

I think they move too smoothly. I think it's maybe a combination of the "ew, tiny things are parasites" and the "ew, smooth-moving things are snakes" responses, even though neither of those is appropriate for the silverfish itself. I think that's part of what happens with the house millipedes, too.

I dunno, silverfish are smaller than flies, but they still give me that revulsion response.

Hubris is a kind of boastful pride--like a sense of invulnerability. It also implies a kind of dramatic irony, that this sense of invulnerability will eventually prove false. (The term comes from ancient Greek theater, where it's often the Heroic Flaw that will eventually be the undoing of the tragic hero.)

Chutzpah is more...audacity, nerve, gall. A person with chutzpah doesn't believe they can't be harmed; they're just willing to bald-face it out in the hopes you won't actually call them on it. In English it can have a positive connotation, the way "cojones" tends to, but it can also have a negative connotation, like "cheek" or "gall." It comes from Yiddish, where apparently it's more uniformly negative. (Leave it to us Americans to interpret a condemnation of shameless effrontery as somehow laudatory.)

I guess I would say the key difference is that someone with hubris thinks they are invulnerable, whereas a person with chutzpah is aware they are vulnerable and absolutely refusing to act like it.

They're definitely kind of related, but they just have really different feels to them