From the industry journal I linked in another comment – it’s literally just an off-the-shelf Mireo Plus B. That’s it. The only thing Tesla about it is that it’s serving a spur line connecting Tesla’s factory to the existing Berlin light rail network, and was presumably financed by them for the PR benefit of not having the workers at an electric car factory arrive by diesel train.

I did a little digging and it seems like there’s a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn’t need frequent all-day service, even if it’s a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they’ve got doing “editing” at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into “world-first electric wonder train amazes!”

For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to “disrupt” it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.

That’s at least more cultured than my brain shouting “MULATTO BUTTS! (Mulatto butts!)” at me

I was a longtime Debian/apt diehard but I’m coming down on the same side of late. My homelab runs Proxmox (Debian based) with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS containers for more up-to-date packages, but my attempt to use KDE Neon (Ubuntu-based) for my desktop PC was a disaster. I’ve switched to Nobara (Fedora-based), and other than having to switch from Wayland back X11 because Wayland on NVidia breaks a bunch of things I need for work it’s been relatively smooth sailing.

For some the optionality of it is less important than the notion that if it’s performative, you can be bad at it and therefore make yourself an acceptable target for abuse, and besides that the idea that some roles can be restricted to only those with a certain set of physical characteristics is deeply ingrained in many, be that in terms gender, career, or what have you.

Can’t forget the spineties!

Greed isn’t the problem, per se – it’s that outside of the biggest sites, which could hoover up ad targeting data of hundreds of millions to billions and sell that data through their own internal ad platform – the model was never viable to begin with. Notice that the enshittification really took off all soon as interest rates jumped? Tech startups have all been floating along on easy money, but now that loans aren’t basically free, VC dollars are drying up. Companies that could previously offset their capital burn with yet another round of investment now suddenly need to make money on their own merit, and are finding that they have to cut service to the bone and monetize the bejeezus out of what’s left if they have any chance of survival.

“massively successful” in the context of Larian’s entries in the Divinity series or even Pillars of Eternity, which moved almost three quarters of a million units in its first year on sale, don’t count as successes in the eyes of AAA publishers like EA or Ubisoft. Dragon Age: Inquisition moved more than a million copies in its first week on sale, was Bioware’s biggest launch (probably ever, given the current state of the studio), and still barely made an impression in EA’s bottom line. In the same year FIFA 12 sold 3 million copies in its first week, and with its Ultimate Team gacha system represented a much longer stream of ongoing revenue than anything a self-contained single player RPG could provide.

Not to mention, deep single-player RPGs are massive undertakings, that appeal to a somewhat fickle playerbase. EA and Activision have demonstrated with FIFA, Madden, and CoD that they can cheaply reskin the same game over and over on an annual basis and move multiple millions of copies each time, without making an effort. Why take a risk on a relatively niche genre where your game could flop because of an off story beat or wonky mechanic, when you can just stick your last megahit in the photocopier and have it poop out another nine-figure megahit?

BG3 is of course a massive success and should be celebrated, but big publishers want to maximize their return on investment, and right now that means wedging live service offerings, loot box mechanics, and micro transactions into whatever genre maintains the most engagement over time. Right now that means multiplayer shooters and sports games.

On the other hand, Fraunhofer is obnoxious enough about licensing and enforcement that companies like Google invested similar money and effort into developing open-source codecs just to avoid dealing with them.

I understand the resistance to paid mods in more mainstream games, but in the simulation community paid mods are an accepted thing, and good paid mods are almost universally thought to be worth the price of admittance. The effort involved in making a high-fidelity recreation of a specific racecar or aircraft takes a lot of time and resources, and the people who go through the effort of doing so deserve to have their time and costs offset. Hell, I have only made a few free mods, and I’ve made a few hundred in tips off them all the same.

Public universities in the United States haven’t been able to subsist primarily on public funds since at least the Great Recession, and in many cases long before that. To the extent that they are able to, they’ve tried to bridge the gap between state funds and budgetary needs by attracting more and higher paying students, but that has lead in turn to a startlingly-expensive arms race between institutions trying to build the cushiest student amenities and hiring vast administrative bureaucracies professing their expertise at wooing and retaining high value (read: out-of-state and international) students… all of which comes at a cost to the student body, in the form of crushing student debt, which paradoxically depresses enrollment – for many institutions, tuition has soared past the pain point for new high school graduates and their families.

Enter the wealthy donor. Likely they’re a successful alumnus or local businessperson, who has more money than they can reasonably spend on their own. They want a legacy now – to have their name live on for decades or centuries after they’re gone. One easy way to do that is to get their name plastered onto the side of a landmark building at their favorite university, so they approach the administration with an offer of some millions of dollars, on the condition that it be used to build a new facility for their college or program of choice, and that it be named after them. This gets the school out of a bind, since they have massive backlogs of deferred maintenance they can’t afford to tackle, and a fresh new building for one program means they can play musical chairs with the others until they’ve vacated their most decrepit building and can just tear it down rather than deal with its problems.

However, as you’ve guessed, this gives donors incredible power over the universities. I know of one donor who enabled his pet dean to act like a spoiled child and run roughshod over the procurement process, kitting his new building out with useless bells and whistles that took budget away from things that could have actually helped students. In another case, a department chair’s actual job became to dote upon an elderly widow of a real estate baron, in order to keep the donations flowing to the department’s endowment. Not to mention the distorting effects that what donors choose to give money to have on both the programs that get attention, and the priorities of universities. There was a real glut of new business schools for a while, as an example, and all of them were really excited about the novel ways their MBAs could financialize things that didn’t need to be financialized. The late Charlie Munger infamously had UCSB over a barrel with his offer to fix their student housing situation, but only if he was allowed to make the design into a dystopian hell cube.. Not to mention all the donors who will only give money for sports facilities, nevermind what the academic needs are.

In short, the lack of sufficient state funds for the last 15-20 years has drastically worsened higher education in the US for everyone, and opened the door for millionaires and billionaires to exert undue influence on public institutions.

There’s a world of difference in disposition between new money and old money, in my experience, and flashy-car-and-expensive-jewelry rich is decidedly new money. Families with generational wealth tend to be more discreet about it, and often have a “noblesse obligee” mentally about how they engage with the world. New money’s much more likely to pull the “don’t you know who I am?!” card.

Similarly, there’s a split between working class folks who know the score and recognize that they’re all in it together with the guy behind the counter, and the sort of temporarily-embarrassed millionaires who have themselves convinced they’re better than they are.

Reddit’s great strength was that it was big enough that niche communities could attract enough users to have interesting conversations and a steady flow of content, and if you are a Reddit refugee looking for those sorts of communities you aren’t likely to find them on Lemmy. I’ve more or less made my peace with that, but if you’re not the kind to stand on principle, a falling user count is bad news for the hope that the Fediverse might snowball into the sort of place that can support discussions about your passions and hobbies even if they’re not the sort of thing that is popular with a specific set of tech-savvy anti-capitalist leftwing activists (and I say this with love as a fellow tech-savvy leftie… but y’all got one-track minds and it shows in what communities live and die around here).

What’s the cryptofascist equivalent of a Grauniad?

From Vanilla through Wrath I played with a core group of college buddies and we collected more friends as we moved between guilds on our server. Out of that extended group resulted two marriages and a half-dozen or so real-life friendships with people from all over the country and from all walks of life. I struggle to imagine anything like that happening on the Internet as we know it now. Social media seems engineered to promote only passing and often hostile interaction with people outside of your core group, and games have engineered away all of forced social interaction of community servers, clan/party/guild formation in favor of fast and frictionless matchmaking that pairs you up with randoms that you may never see again after one game. The early Internet promised to connect you with people from all over the world, but we’ve collectively decided instead that we just want easy, tokenized interactions with people who we never have to get to know.

Or give me the joy of discovering a webforum dedicated to some niche community you were interested in, and making actual, real-life friends with the people you met there. Can’t say that I’ve made a connection like that since, oh, Burning Crusade-era WoW at the latest.

Don’t get me wrong, I kept birds as well and I’m aware of the dangers of overheating Teflon pans around them – the same issues arise with 3D printers with PTFE-lined heatbreaks, by the by – but with some caution, in common cooking use those pans aren’t going to see the sorts of temperatures required to start decomposing the coating. Once it starts to wear out, certainly I’d say dump the Teflon cookware and get some stainless and/or cast-iron replacements, but a knee-jerk overreaction to throw out a sound pan is only going to make the plastic waste problem worse in the short term. Plastic the stuff may be, but (again, unless heated quite a bit) it’s one of the least chemically-reactive substances we know of.

PFOA was the surfactant that was used to keep Teflon in an emulsion during coating processes. It was replaced in the 2000s with an alternate product branded GenX that was supposed to be safer, but in actuality ended up being more toxic than PFOA.

In either case, the main exposure risk is to those surfactant chemicals, typically due to groundwater contamination near a plant or via occupational exposure. Once in a finished coating, Teflon itself is essentially inert unless you heat it up several hundred degrees, so existing nonstick pans and other finished products don’t pose too much risk.

Weird interference effect when you mix 4/4 and 7/8 time signatures, you start dropping bars that fall out of alignment with each other and the song gets shorter as a result.