I have my incredibly rare moments. yes.

the prices for that aren’t even especially low, though.

remember, it’s also massively inflated because all the cutting edge fab capacity is being used to build entropy-and-scam machines, and before that, scamming machines. I remember when you could build a damn solid gaming computer with current gen hardware for 500$ without much sacrifice.

if you want to know what most of this actually costs, look at something like the MSRP on the raspberry pi. a general purpose chip that’s wildly overpowered for what 99% of these devices do.

look at how much you’ll pay for an esp32 or, if that’s too beefy for your application, an esp8266. arduino if you want prehistoric oldschool italian luxury. it’s like 5$ plus 0.10-15 dollars per sensor, and the fifteen dollar sensors are for exotic stuff like air quality. You don’t even have to code as often as not-somebody already made and open sourced it; you just need to play legos.

no but if you can find them at MSRP a pi is like 40$+arbitrary audio in hardware. with the right software, that will do everything an echo can, plus so much fucking more, on device, without touching the networks, in a smaller form factor.

neither of us did, no.

no, sorry; I’m profoundly lazy.

see, that’s the last phase of the heroes journey. that’s cool. more of that.

yes but that sounds boring and doesn’t require having a functionally super-hot piece right near a reserve of acetylene.

there’s the STEM bell curve. XKCD shows the axes as ‘how well your computer works’ vs ‘how well you know computers’. that is accurate.

but if you’ve ever known serious engineers who didn’t just live boring white collar work-home-work-and-some-marvel-shit lives, you’ll have seen things that make this look mild.

I vote instead we get more impenetrable and arcane with it, until it becomes a code phrase we can use to trigger some physiological reaction in fediverse users not unlike a magic spell. ‘imagine beans’.

and those other places no longer do porn, so anything that starts out as porn and somebody decides to turn into ‘high’ art can only really thrive here, or pornhub.

that actually depends. it’s far less likely than a shitlib who thinks rules are magic spells might assume, but there is a case to be made:

there’s quite a lot of capital outside the country which is not happy about all this instability nonsense, and a lot of the finance industry is seriously upset by even the THOUGHT of reneging on US treasury bonds, for which they hold this administration responsible, among many many many lesser sins that they thought were just empty campaign promises. taking apart this bastards corpse so fast the water doesn’t even turn pink might be just the example the finance ghouls think they need to make to secure the bag.

it had more money than god, and decided to play high risk games. it will burn.

I might not be alive to see it, because, you know, the camps and the death squads, but it will.

well, no, he wouldn’t have to pay taxes, because he’s special, and any IRS agent who put their name on the ‘please pay us’ would be personally fired and then someone would have them disappeared.

but it is a nice idea.

counterpoint: they’re trained from birth to be pigs, and dog brains are bred to never be free of that, to be unfailingly loyal. it maybe a tragic kind of evil, but they are evil, and they should also be put down.

yeah, dude was so good at electrical shit I literally cannot comprehend how he got to some of his ideas from where he was.

yes but the americans deserve it.

as if these assholes have ever read a history book. they don’t fucking know that.

it should though. everyone should go hard on these parasites. fascists always get a free ride from all the authorities. that’s how they get into power. they never suffer consequences, because all the consequences are fake and designed to stop people from being too free or too communist, both of which fascists also work to stop, so the nation’s enforcement mechanisms see them as friends and go really ridiculously easy on them.

france needs to nail america’s dick to the wall, and declare that no more american goods will be coming into france until these scum pay their debts. maybe even give a ‘we brought you into this world, and we can damn sure take you out of it.’

some of us are neoposadists, and really hoping for it.

I think the number of people they kill and the fact that 99.99% of them are used as gender affirming vehicles for cis men or fear totems for suburban white women means we should not have them.

yes, there is a narrow use case. sure. but a sufficiently souped up small truck designed to modern spec without the limits of japanese law would probably do most of that fine, and the ability to do any, or even all of that, is not worth the cost in human lives and greenhouse gasses that these cause.