Easily done:

1. Wait for AI bubble to burst
2. Buy render farm on the cheap
3. Avatar 4

Although I’m assuming that the raw rendering pipeline is what costs the most. I could be dead wrong about that - there’s a whole army of artists, technical people, and actors that go into such a production too.

Thank you for your service.

Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.

As far as I recall, that’s how it went.

I was gonna say this is at least Digg 3.0.

Oooh, rocking an HP? I too like to live dangerously.

But seriously, that’s good to know. Those are probably easier to come by out in the wild. It really looks like Thinkpads go from office deployments straight to refurb companies these days. I never see them at thrift stores, and I’m not brave enough to dumpster-dive at e-waste.

Sometimes, old machines are survivors. Beware of confirmation bias when trash/thrift-picking cheap systems though. IMO, Thinkpads can be tough as a coffin nail. Including work systems, I’m on number 8 at this point with no hardware failures in sight.

That said, I have a very lightweight Acer that’s about a decade old with the worst keyboard and trackpad ever manufactured. It also performs like a slug, even with Linux on it. Still, it refuses to break so I can get rid of it.

This essay is brought to you by Raid: Shadow Legends.

It’s worth adding that, if you are arrested, that phone is a treasure-trove of potential liability that will absolutely get used against you. Also, you’re probably not getting it back, so you’re better off without it. Carry cash, a map if you must, and coordinate rally points and fallback locations with your friends ahead of time.

A proper camera is a good tip, but make sure the camera memory and storage card are wiped ahead of time.

just living your life without a phone is getting harder

This is a bigger problem than most realize. Consider the barrier-to-entry for phones, internet access, and charging. Then add cashless payment on top of that. Combined, it creates a new red-line between economic classes, and a rather ugly one at that. At some point, this mode of commerce is going to get selected not for the convenience it provides, but for whom it excludes.

I’ll also add that getting access to a smartphone with total anonymity is impressively hard to do.

FWIW, Sony owns a lot of other companies, and so does Sony Corp. of America. It’s entirely possible that they’re dodging this one by using a company that’s not Sony Pictures.

I mean, that happens with CloudWatch all the time. It’s the most plausible part about this.

I blame the poor UI design and attention-grabbing tendencies of phone-compatible social media. Namely: Facebook and Instagram. It all goes on one endless vertical ribbon to compete for user eyeballs, and the winner consumes the maximum amount of screen real-estate possible when their turn is up. The software could provide decent margins for text-only posts to compete with images and video, or even clickable links and/or attribution for source material, but doesn’t. Because screw the open web, this is our walled garden. Anyway, that’s probably the reason for the massive margins: because it works better in content-hostile enviroment. </rant>

I haven’t always been a fan of Go. It launched with some iffy design decisions that have since been patched, either by the project maintainers or the community. It’s a much better experience now, which suggests that maybe there’s some long-range vision at work that I wasn’t privy to.

That said, Pike clearly has a lot of good ideas and I’m glad Google funded him to bring those to light.

I’ll also say that after finally wrapping my head around Python and JavaScript async/await, I actually much prefer the Goroutine and channel model for concurrency. I got to those languages after surviving C++, and believe me when I say that it’s a bad time when your software develops a bad case of warts. Better to not contract them in the first place.

You’re welcome.

I’m not sure if this is c/bmoviebonanza material, but it’s up there. Anyway, that’s a solid community if you enjoy shlocky “how did this happen?!” movies.

Also, just dig through the Cannon Group movie list for more “throw crazy shit at the wall” gems like this. Some are hits, most are misses, and a few are really incredible misses.

Best I can do is Lou Ferrigno as Hercules. Just watch the whole trailer. The monster designs and other set pieces are pretty far out there for the time.

With a helmet like that, may as well cast GWAR and call it a day.

Factories have safety lockouts for that sort of thing and I’m dismayed that they’re not a thing in the home. Especially for when your hand is down there.

The hilarity of your home wiring being sassed by the (admittedly amazing) guy whose video games boil down to “kill stuff, hit switches” with escalating difficulty and frustration.

On the one hand, I’d love our paths to cross. On the other, I’d relish the thought that he’d sweat just a little when trying to figure out anything inside my home.

Every time I’ve tried this, it’s ended in a labeling disaster. Maybe it’s my luck, but electricians seem to be more interested in wiring walls than rooms. As a result, the breakers seldom come anywhere close to any logical room layout. And then there’s legacy breaker-box GCFI stuff, and homeowner renovation hacks…