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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2025

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  • You know, I wonder how many places are captured like Wyoming is.

    Fun lesson on the sparsest state in the nation, their constitution allows for a single public university. One. It’s in Laramie. That college basically owns Laramie, the college campus takes up the majority of the town. Cost of living there is similar to the Chicago suburbs as a result. The college is the only option for in-state tuition for residents to get a 4 year degree with federal aid.

    It’s the only public option and trying to open another one would be illegal.

    The president of UW is one of the most insanely compensated individuals I have ever met. He has a mansion in the mountains and owns the surrounding few miles. He is so filthy rich it’s disgusting.

    The teachers, on the high end mind you, make $55,000 a year. By high end I mean multiple doctorals and decades of experience teaching 40+ credits per semester.

    I bet the private colleges would stand to lose money, and honestly fuck those guys with a spiked tentpole. That scum is worse than UW and UW should make anyone with a degree bearing their name feel a deep sense of shame and regret at the least. That administration is outright racist, ableist, and corrupt garbage and a good chunk of the teachers are complicit in funnelling kids that have no business being in college at all into crippling debt just to make a buck.

    I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the private colleges had a similarly corrupted state of affairs when it comes to federal loans and aid.


  • The system update needs to be on a FAT32 drive without a label. The label shouldn’t matter. The update needs to look like a single folder on the root of the drive called $SystemUpdate. Plug it in, reboot the console.

    If your console is modded it will specifically stop that process unless you rename that folder, but if you don’t know what you are doing then don’t mess with anything that touches the nand. Updating a modded box is its own process.

    Also, just a fair warning, the Xbox compatibility files don’t come from a system update anyway, you need to use a program like Xploder to add the compatibility partition to your drive and manually copy it over. You should take some time and read up on SevenSins how to proceed.


  • Picking up any hobby from scratch is going to have a learning curve. If you can deal with the teething issues then gaming is one of the easier hobbies to get into. If you can follow guides then it’s pretty easy to get set up, and as a bonus if you aren’t an asshole about things and follow instructions reasonably well then finding someone to help you with getting specific issues resolved is pretty easy.

    Like with any hobby you can really get into the weeds as far as what’s “easiest” because everyone is just going to recommend the setup that works for them and that may not work for you out of the box. You are going to need to put some legwork into figuring out the hardware no matter what you buy. PC gaming is by far the cheapest and most flexible, full stop. You don’t need a new PC to play games either, there is this odd misconception that you need high end hardware for anything and… No… Just no. You can play anything up to the Xbox One/PS4 generation of games (including PC) on computers that were midrange in 2018.

    Grab an old PC collecting dust in the corner somewhere, install Fedora or Mint on it, and just use steam to launch anything you want to play. Explore the built in software repositories, those games are completely free, run on anything, and are surprisingly good in a lot of cases. If you end up wanting to play more and feel held back by the computer then look into something better. If you feel like you aren’t enjoying it and want to upgrade the hardware just to see if that’s what will make it click then it probably won’t.

    If you are really sold on the idea of consoles then don’t discount modding an older system like an Xbox 360 or PS3, once they are set up you can just pick a game and go.

    At the end of the day just find a system that you already have or that you can get for an amount you wouldn’t care about losing. You don’t want to drop a grand on a computer or a console with a bunch of games and never use it. Try playing some of the good free stuff and see if it’s worth investing into first.



  • You need to set an override in your environment variables to force it to use the gfx1030 kernel modules, but otherwise you shouldn’t have too many issues.

    It’s unofficial, but the 6700xt uses the exact same core as one of the supported enterprise cards, so just using the drivers for it generally works just fine. I use a 6800M personally.

    If you are struggling to get rocm installed at all then stop using the amd guides and just install the pre built binaries directly. Fedora packages them in their repository and in my experience rocm just works once you run dnf install rocm*.




  • Welds need a super clean surface to start with, if there is any oil or rust it will form a layer within the weld where the metal won’t melt together properly. Brake cleaner doesn’t really leave much of a residue, and it is an excellent degreaser. Problem is when you empty a can onto a prepped weld surface surrounded by tons of rust and gunk, it’s the solvent that gets trapped in there and blasted with heat and intense UV from the weld arc that can form phosgene. It can also happen when people try to torch rusted hubs after trying to use a can to break rotors and the like loose, that’s one of the reasons they moved to non-chlorinated stuff most places.




  • A lot of the same issues VR has that relegates it to a very niche hobby, as well as VR itself becoming more of a thing.

    Basically, it’s twice the cost at a minimum. Want 3D movies? Well, that’s 2 cameras, double the storage, and all of the added workload in alignment, effects needing to be done for each eye… Basically double everything and add some to stitch them together.

    3D games? Same thing, but with calculations. You have to render each eye, plus the calculations to keep them aligned and in the right place.

    3D screens? You have to render each eye, so you have to either do glasses or funky screen tech like the 3DS to get that image to each eye at the right time, so the usual minimum is a screen that refreshes twice as fast plus a bit extra with the glasses to tie it all together.

    See the pattern? It’s twice as hard, twice as expensive, plus a little extra.

    Which begs the question:

    Is it twice as good, plus a little extra?


  • Penicillin isn’t just growing some mold, it was selected for out of literally tens of thousands of strains of mold that were sent in from around the globe to find one that wouldn’t kill the patient. You would, at a minimum, need: microscope optics, glassblowing equipment to perform extractions and purifications, a source of solvents (ether will only go so far), assaying equipment (even old school stuff needs indicators), and enough industrial progress to make and machine steel to be able to scale any of it up.

    Just finding the correct strain of mold to begin to produce any form of antibiotics would need a pretty insane amount of hardware to make what we would consider a rudimentary lab in modern times, let alone isolating it in a way that’s safe for human consumption.




  • despoticruin@lemmy.ziptoRetroGaming@lemmy.worldVectrex Mini
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    4 months ago

    That’s kind of it though, the lines being drawn one at a time, in real time, you just can’t emulate that. You would need refresh rates in the thousands of hz to make it look even close to right, and that completely ignores the persistence of vision effect.

    Believe me, I tried. I explored damn near every possibility on 6 months of salary, it boiled down to an FPGA clone hooked up to a custom CRT driver and that still had issues with how it would look because the Vectrex uses an unhinged aspect ratio. If your tube isn’t the right shape all of the graphics get messed up because the system draws on a polar plane. It’s a fucking mess, I really wish people would stop trying to emulate it and just put the cash into making a proper tube. Would save actual engineers a lot of headache.


  • despoticruin@lemmy.ziptoRetroGaming@lemmy.worldVectrex Mini
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    4 months ago

    It’s always Vectrex too. I had a customer that was obsessed with getting one emulated, he just refused to understand that, fundamentally, vector graphics are incompatible with raster. No matter how I tried to break it down that a CRT was a necessity, that raster would always look wrong, that nobody develops a good vectrex emulator because you can’t emulate the graphics…

    Grifters gonna grift I guess.


  • Again, the issue is the scar tissue. Even if it didn’t develop into a cancer it will give you nasty COPD, gas exchange doesn’t happen with scarred lung tissue. Look at silicosis, potters lung, popcorn lung, and the plethora of other occupational diseases that are caused by particulate matter damaging lung tissue for examples of what asbestos would do without the cancer



  • Reddragon, and just pull parts from goodwill mice, they send you extra Teflon pads with the mouse so you can open it and keep the pads nice. Switches are just switches, they are standard sizes, and the cords usually use standard plugs, worst case you swap some pins around to match. Insanely easy to take apart, and cheap enough to not worry about breaking.

    They are cheap as hell, but they have good tracking sensors and are really comfortable to use.


  • Second best. The best is actually the reddragon one that’s $20 on Amazon.

    I have used every mmo mouse on the market (currently on a scimitar elite, it’s the one op has but silver not yellow) and they are all decent mice, but each has a fatal flaw except the reddragon.

    G600 click switches are awful and double click after weeks of use, I had to replace them twice, the final time with the switches out of the red dragon. That was fine for close to 10 years, but the side key caps fall off, they are barely glued on.

    The scimitar has an awful encoder on the scroll wheel, I had to open the mouse to pack it with Vaseline to get it working properly, and disassembling the scimitar is a nightmare.

    The reddragon has bad software, but it’s also supported by open source options for remapping and RGB, so it’s one flaw was by far the easiest to fix.

    The g600 was the most comfortable to palm, but the side keys are in an awkward spot to palm the mouse, the scimitar is nice for the adjustable keypad, but it moves with time and tightening it too much will break the mouse. The red dragon has an odd texture on the far side, very rough, but otherwise the best for a claw grip.