It is a mistake to lead off with “here’s the thing about Elon Musk,” because there’s LOADS of things with Musk, but in particular. Let’s set aside how ludicrous it is to claim that the protesters are being funded by some outside source, because sure that’s worked in the past, and of course it’s the Democrats, those notably cash-positive people, who are doing it.

Elon Musk is THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD. If anyone could beat a theoretical money-backed protest against him, it would be him. Just offer to beat the offer of anyone funding the protesters. That’s it! If they’re only in it for the money then the protest would fold immediately.

More than that, Musk has literally paid people to vote in his favor in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race! The levels of hypocrisy are so staggeringly great that it risks materializing actual hippopotamuses on his properties.

Slant’s one of my favorites too, I also play a lot of Loopy, Dominosa and Bridges.

They can’t even manipulate their own fool heads.

I’ve heard of them, I might consider trying one someday, but the research and effort to set it up is an obstacle. Plus I don’t run Windows any more, and I don’t even know what Linux support for it is like.

I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?

And I’ll add that calling someone “beta” will lower it an additional notch. Please don’t adopt blitheringly stupid memes.

Something that will immediately lower my regard for a piece of writing is the use of “cuck,” for any purpose.

I haven’t checked to see if someone’s mentioned it yet (it’s a long thread!) but I want to put in a word for a piece of software I’m always touting: Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection!

It’s a wonder! 40 different kinds of randomly-generated puzzles, all free, all open source, and available for practically every platform. You can play it on Windows, Mac (if you compile it), Linux, iOS, Android, Java and Javascript in a web browser. It should rightfully be high up on the iOS and Android stores, but it’s completely free, has no ads, doesn’t track you and has no one paying to promote it. No one has a financial incentive to show it to you, so they don’t. But you should know about it.

I think you’re overstating things a bit, but it’s true that I keep getting caught up by weird behaviors.

I paste image data into a layer. I drag the layer a bit to get it where I want it. I try drawing on that layer: nothing happens. Turns out, when I pasted the image, it created a layer the size of the current image with all the extra space filled with transparent pixels. When I dragged it, the transparent part of the layer that had been off the image’s borders was actually dead space, and it won’t accept drawing into it until I go under layers and choose to expand the layer to the dimensions of the image. Once you realize what’s happening it’s not so bad, but until that point it’s the software working how you don’t expect it, and some people are going to drive themselves batty trying to figure it out.

And just now in 3.0 I’ve discovered, if I copy a rectangular part of an image using the Rectangle Select tool, then paste that data into another program, what gets pasted is a transparent box the size of the original image full of transparent pixels, with the copied part opaque in the middle of it in its former position inside the image.

It seems like it’s purposely trying to come up with an unintuitive way to implement my actions. I don’t remember it being like this in the past. What happened?

City of Heroes, everything by Atari Games, the Wizardry series, the Ultima series, many others. I’m old, and I remember some of the games, and developers, we’ve lost.

What will probably happen is a one or two term slump. What’s different between then and now is the internet and social media, which fills most people’s brains with a deluge of noise. In addition to the effects of misinformation daily telling people that the moon is the sun, most algorithms prioritize novelty, and nothing’s more novel than the most stupidly wrong-headed take. We constantly hear the opinions of people who should be laughed out of the room! We sit and chuckle, but there’s tens of millions of people who have poor media skills who it can actually influence.

Something I’ve seen far less reaction to than I expected? While the Switch 2 looks like it takes standard MicroSD cards, it DOESN’T. It takes the fairly obscure MicroSD Express standard! I can’t even BUY an SD Express card locally right now! It seems likely, at launch, that Nintendo’s branded cards will be the only ones people can get that will work with it!

The Switch 2 has 256GB of onboard storage, much more than the Switch, it is true. But it’s also backwards compatible with the Switch, and lets users bring their old digital library over with them. I have a 256GB card in my Switch, it’s nearly full, and it doesn’t have my whole library on it! If I got a Switch 2, I’d have it filled up on day 1!

And the MicroSD card issue won’t be obvious to most buyers. Parents will get their kids Switch 2s, and wonder why their old card won’t work with it. It’ll look to them like the Switch 2 or the card is broken, unless they implement a physical lock against incompatible cards, and I don’t know if SD cards even support those. Also, SD Express cards are more expensive than standard ones.

This could end up being a debacle almost on the scale of the price (which, as others have noted, isn’t even Nintendo’s fault entirely).

I blame the rise of internet stocks. There were a few companies, like Google, Amazon and Facebook/Meta, that if you got in on the ground floor of them you became insanely rich, you got so much money that economically it became a good idea to speculate on lots of little companies. It’s distorted a lot of economic realities.

Tesla has been in that mode for a long while, and it’s largely still there despite everything. And if Musk hadn’t blown his own company up, it might even have paid out in the end. Tesla was the only company seriously making electric cars for a good while, they had a strong lead on everyone else, and they had their charger network. That’s a lead that Musk’s recent actions has foolishly squandered—really, foolishly doesn’t seem like it’s a strong enough word. It’s an unforced error, it’s an own goal, it’s Musk just handing his company’s lead to his competitors.

Tesla’s implosion may be the beginning of a new age of sober realism in corporate governance. Imagine stockholder meetings where executives are asked, “You aren’t going to Musk this up, are you?”

It has so much further to fall. Tesla is still wildly overvalued.

Alex Hirsch is awesome. I could see Grunkle Stan trying to work AI into one of his scams, Ford would have to talk him out of it.

There are so many weird things about GIMP, and it feels like they add more over time. I’ve moved a layer and then tried to draw on it and had nothing happen. Why? Because the layer was created as an array of pixels the size of the image, and when I move it there’s now a dead zone where there’s no pixels in the visible image. It turns out there’s a special command to expand moved layers to fill the image: https://docs.gimp.org/3.0/en/gimp-layer-resize-to-image.html

There are times using it that it feels like a maze to navigate to just get my changes reflected in the document.

Back in the day there was Hardware Wars.

I know FlyingSquid from another community, and sent them a private message just a few days ago saying hello. (I didn’t know they had been missing at the time.) FS is awesome, and I really hope they’re okay.

I’ve seen this personally here in Georgia, and I mean more than once.

I handle this, as do most poor people, by not asking ourselves this question, not even fantasizing about it, for why torture yourself with something you never can do?