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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • The fun one that is at least a bit forgivable is “I found the solution! I just followed <long dead link to some other site>”. It’s especially fun when you keep finding multiple postings that look hopeful at first but then end up just linking back to the same dead link.

    The lesson here is that it can be helpful to future internet searchers (or even your future self) to copy the relevant information or briefly summarize it instead of just dropping a URL. Especially when linking to something like an company’s official support forum or posting as many companies will pull that stuff down eventually.



  • The “will of the people” was Joe Biden, who won the Democratic primary quite handily. However, the Joe Biden people thought they were voting for wasn’t the Joe Biden we actually had, as there was a very deliberate effort to hide his declining health by the party leadership. Hence the whole reason they had to change candidates, once it became too obvious that Biden wasn’t fit to serve another term as president.

    So while the Democratic party still followed their processes and guidelines by ultimately putting forth Kamala Harris as their candidate, it’s not like they had to do it because Biden withdrew due to some freak accident or something like that. You can’t really sanction what they did when the whole thing is rooted in the party leadership deliberately deceiving people.


  • I don’t know about still maintained, but it’s one of those pieces of software that did one task, did it well, and the one part you might want to update (the encoder) was a plugin. As such, even though it’s not seen any significant update since 2004, it’s really the only CD ripper I’ve ever used. All the way back to some old Pentium machine where ripping and encoding a CD to MP3 took longer than it would to play it. Though the times I’ve needed it in the past few years has dropped off considerably, and if I had to rip a CD today I’d actually have to boot up an old machine that still has an optical drive.



  • I suppose the space battles could sort of some sense given the technology in the Star Wars universe.

    Your spaceships have two engines/drives. You have the hyperspace engines which are fast but you can’t engage in fight in hyperspace (well…mostly), then you have the regular ion engines for use out of hyperspace which are slow as shit. Capital ships can barely get out of their own way, and even the Millennial Falcon isn’t terribly quick when not in hyperspace. Now combined with weapons like blasters which have the problem that blaster bolts are also slow as shit. As in considerably slower than bullet fired from a conventional firearm. So if you fire them from a distance from a target, they can see the blaster bolt coming and move out of the way (or jump into hyperspace) long before it gets there. Crappy, slow engines combined with crappy, slow space weapons means capital ship battles might involve the ships having to get close to each other and just slugging it out. That can also sort of explain the small fighters since they can get in really close and hit the ships at basically point-blank range. Though the lack of hit-and-run tactics involving jumping in and out of hyperspace is a bit curious.

    The rareness of the hyperspace-suicide maneuver might be rare as the rebels don’t have a lot of ships, and if they start plowing them into Empire ships, they’ll quickly run of ships and no matter how many Empire ships they take out in a battle, the Empire will always have another Star Destroyer. Though the big problem with introducing the possibility of this sort of maneuver in the later movies is the rebels would have absolutely plowed a ship into the Death Star with completely devastating results in the first movie. And anyone building a Death Star would have been well aware of an attack like that and would have known it would be almost impossible to defend against when you’re building a moon-sized target for it.


  • That’s more or less my take too. The world of the Star Wars universe feels huge and expansive, but in reality by the end of the original trilogy they had basically told all the interesting stories that were to be had about it. And even then, they were starting to run out of material for Return of the Jedi. They tried with the prequels, but as you say it mostly fell flat and ended up boring. The sequels started off more or less rehashing the original trilogy so they were at least entertaining, but that wasn’t enough for three movies and it turned into an absolute mess by the end.