Woo. Chud souls.

Also figures the only way they could get on the keighelys was to pay for it.

To elaborate a bit. Even ignoring the chud anti-transphobe shit the studio actively courted in the hopes of making asmongold-senpai love them (it failed?), it is just a really bad Souls game.

The concept of the lantern to shift dimensions is REALLY cool. In practice? it just means that you go as far as you can in one realm, shift, and go as far as you can in the next. There is no real sense of inter-connectivity or navigability because the coherence between the shifted realms is so poor. You just get a new bonfire right before the boss.

The idea of tying item descriptions to ability scores SEEMS interesting… except that it mostly means you can’t plan ahead because you genuinely have no idea what a skill does without going to the wiki. So… it defeats the purpose entirely and just penalizes those who try to actually play the game.

And the combat balance is also real questionable. If you pick a “meta” weapon, you shred. Otherwise you are doing constant chip damage. Which, ironically, is a problem Lords of the Fallen 1 had… on new game plus. Not new game.

All this game had going for it was that they wanted to glaze the chuds.

A wok? The raised sides of the wok are not supposed to get too warm. That is actually the “secret” of the pan. You have very centralized heat in the middle and you move things to the edges to just keep them warm while you cook the new ingredients through in the center/bottom.

How much of a gradient does indeed depend on your heat source. The propane tornado of horror in my backyard makes the center ridiculously hot but the edges are no slouch. A campfire is going to be a lesser and more controlled version of that. A smaller gas burner or an induction burner is mostly going to just heat up the center a lot.

But that is also why you let the wok come to temperature, same as any pan. ALL heat sources have hot spots. Some bits of wood burn hotter than other. The actual flame jets from your gas stove are hotter than the ceramic bit on top. Even the flamenado has hot and less hot spots. Hence why you always agitate food. Or, in the case of going for a sear and not understanding why restaraunt chefs insist you only flip once, you rotate/move the pan itself.

Your mileage may vary, obviously

But a friend has one of the bigass battery models (the expensive fancy one because he was impressing his inlaws). Cooked a full friendsgiving dinner with the only problem being his burners being tiny (which we all knew but didn’t want to say…).

Which, conceptually, makes sense. I basically only have my induction at full power when I am rapidly bringing something to a boil so I can then add the noodles and back off. So maybe a minute every 30-60 minutes during a big cooking day? And the rest of the time it is at between 40-70% on 1-2 of the 4 burners.

So if we assume the stoves are properly rated to power all four burners at 100% on a 240V circuit? That should actually be pretty within reason for a 120V circuit to handle with the battery pack being for bursting beyond that.

I would still be incredibly wary of buying one since the batteries do have a limited number of cycles. But if you are spending that much for a new stove? You probably are planning to do that again within the next decade?

A proper range hood (so one that vents externally as opposed to in a cabinet…) is pretty much an essential. Both for cooking in general and for lighting gas on fire a few feet from your face for extended periods of time.

Been a minute but I want to say the Technology Connections video where he put an air quality sensor next to a gas stove also talked about opening a window?

But my not a doctor and not that kind of scientist statement: What you need is air circulation. So fans and open windows.

Yeah… homie, I think you are very much overthinking this.

Understand that “stir fry” is kind of a catch all for how a lot of Chinese folk (I think more the Southern regions but don’t quote me on that) cook. It is conceptually no different than sauteeing some food for dinner and it is 100% a “week night dinner” deal.

Go watch a video or two on what a (home) stir fry should look like. J Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chinese Cooking Demistyfied did a collab a few years back on almost this exact topic. Then… just make sure you are doing that when you cook. If stuff doesn’t sizzle “right” you are adding too much or the heat is too low and you should adjust that. And then, after a few times, it just becomes second nature.

No different than knowing that if you put the meat in the pan and there is no sizzle then you aren’t going to get a good brown and need to raise the heat or wait longer. Similarly, if the oil explodes across the kitchen when you put that thigh down? Maybe turn it down a notch or five.

A lot of this is just what you grew up with. A LOT of people (self included) over-stuff tacos. And I am sure there are people who get confused over how to make a sandwich. Hell, a friend always laughs when I am “over thinking curry” and points out it is just a stew that even kids make and I shouldn’t be measuring anything beyond “two bricks or four”. And stir fries are a lot like that.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some truly heinous things you can do with a wok. But stir fries are almost always what people are talking about when they insist that electric can’t be used for authentic Chinese cooking (and then ignore how much of China actually have electric stoves…).

OH. Another thing people tend to forget: There are flat bottom woks for a reason. Yes, it is less “authentic”. Except… most woks were cheap ass family everything pans and would get dinged and dented anyway. And as long as you are agitating the food, it doesn’t matter if the bottom is perfectly round or has a big flat spot so that the heat can be more directly applied.

The good news is that is super easy to remedy.

I will never understand why people will buy twenty tiny bowls so they can properly mise en place every single ingredient before they even look at the stove. But ask them to just get a big serving bowl and keep the components of a stir fry in there after you cook them but before you mix everything together with the sauce? It is like pulling teeth.

Technology Connections has a great video or three on the subject. People very much underestimate just how much “bad stuff” is given off from burning gas indoors.

And from an anecdotal perspective? I am of Chinese descent and cook with a wok probably 3-4 times a week. I grew up on a shitty resistive heat stove. I have stayed in apartments with gas and with modern resistive heat. I now have an induction stove.

Induction is, hands down, the fastest for boiling water by a very large margin. And I can cook in the summer with minimal worries about making the house way too hot. Don’t get me wrong, gas is fun as hell and I actually ended up getting an outdoor propane burner for the big/fancy wok nights. But there is a lot to be said about people perceiving gas to be a lot more powerful than it is just because it looks powerful.

As for resistive? It is definitely a step down. But… not that much of a step down. Mostly it just maths out to when I turn on the stove. For gas or induction it is a minute or so before I plan to cook. For resistive? Usually when I have maybe one more bit of veg left to prep. As for stir fries? it just means I cook in smaller batches which you generally should be doing anyway unless you have a full industrial kitchen stove (or said outdoor burner). And… you probably still want to because most people (self included) just aren’t coordinated enough to handle a full blown meal and all the positioning to avoid burning or overcooking stuff over the course of a minute or three of actual cook time.

But if you think that consumer grade gas stove is giving you “wok hei”?

1. Wok hei is something that is almost exclusively about very regional street food and is not actually what you or the white guy you watched on youtube think it is
2. Your home stove does not provide anywhere near enough heat or open flames to pull that off
3. your home stove ALSO doesn’t have enough to keep a wok fully “charged” with heat. And what you think is “lack of wok hei” is actually just you overcrowding the pan and steaming things in soggy oil rather than rapidly pan frying it

Western Europe had an “advantage” in that, for whatever reason, many of their factories were rebuilt in the 1950s or later. So a lot of the tooling was closer to Japan (who ALSO weirdly had to rebuild a lot of factories in the back half of the 20th…) and China (who were more or less industrializing during that period). But all the jokes about the electrical system in (Western) European cars being a mess is “truth in television” due to having a lot of the tooling but not the expertise.

Much of it goes back to the 60s-80s when Western factories were largely outdated and realizing that East Asian factories were rapidly outpacing them and able to offer better products for MUCH cheaper. Rather than acknowledge they had become complacent and didn’t want to train their worekrs they instead focused on “made in America” bullshit and insisting that that new vacuum was no longer repairable. And… mostly that boils down to the idea that if you have vacuum tube transistors you can replace them easily whereas you can’t replace a transistor on a single chip.

But, as we have learned in the intervening decades, you can… just replace the board. And many of those evil computers in cars actually drastically increased repairability/maintainability because you can actually tune many aspects with a computer and get VERY useful data out of the sensors.

Because the reality is that you can make an SOC device that is INCREDIBLY repairable by focusing on how you do chip layout and what modules can be repaired. And you can make a multi-board setup that is immensely unrepairable by locking down parts with effectively DRM. And… there are also times where it actually does make sense to lock down/register those parts just like there are times it actually does make sense to glue the fuck out of that assembly.

But that is nuance. And nuance is for women and The Gays™. So buy American and purchase a radio that you can repair until the day you die! And then buy a new radio next year.

git checkout -b main
git branch -D master
git config --global init.defaultBranch main

You don’t have to deal with shit if you don’t want to.

To be clear:

EVERYONE should have a cheap set of electronics screwdriver bits (and the ifixit kit is really nice. So are the much cheaper knockoffs from the same factories. Up to you if you care). And having basic soldering skills and knowing when you can get away with heat shrink connectors is a really useful skill. You’ll be repairing the headphones the dog ripped off your desk in no time and save yourself a lot of money.

But when you are listening to people tlak about how this cell phone needs to be repairable or how you NEED to have the DAC be a separate board so it can be removed and replaced? Same with demanding chip diagrams for that SOC in your laptop. Ask yourself: How likely is it that you will EVER do a repair like that? How often do you actually hold onto hardware? And how much do you trust the guy with a shop in the mall to not scam you on this?

I am generally a strong supporter of Right To Repair, even when it is something I, as a consumer, am never going to even consider doing. But it is also worth remembering that a lot of the “this is horrible because it is all computers” is still rooted in racism and xenophobia. And it is always worth looking at what a repair actually will cost versus buying a new one.

For example. Last year my dishwasher failed. I did some diagnostics, did some very deep cleans, and even opened it up. And I mostly narrowed it down to a failure in one of three parts. I looked up the price of those parts and… they were all most of the cost of a dishwasher on their own. And if I paid a professional to replace them, it would be well over the price of a new dishwasher. So… I could try and get lucky and replace the right one, by myself, on the first try… or I could just buy a new dishwasher during a holiday sale. And… damn I love my new dishwasher.

… This is somehow going to be a ridiculously strong argument for requiring signed deploys because users are idiots, huh?

Yeah. Believe it or not but the sex pest who actively didn’t warn his contemporaries about the impact of the honey plugin and who now advertises on kiwi farms might be kind of a piece of shit who will say anything for a buck?

And now for a word from d-brand!

Apalrd has done some great “popular computer science” videos on the various remote KVM devices that is well worth looking up. One of them specifically goes into the ridiculously sketchy methods that are used to fetch and execute unsigned code in random buckets to handle firmware updates.

But as for the mic? Honestly, if you open up a LOT of consumer devices you are going to find random microphones. Not because they are all secretly spying on you. But because they use “off the shelf” chips and boards that already have those embedded. Especially since microphones and speakers are kind of the same hardware in most cases and we ALL love a good beep.

I 100% agree the software stack shouldn’t be on there. But, as the blog post points out, there is a LOT of developmental code and packages in that image that shouldn’t be. It is likely just a case of not removing unnecessary packages from the base image.

Because… the entire point of a device like this is that you plug it in somewhere you aren’t. MAYBE JetKVM corp can hear me muttering profanity or wondering where I left that USB c splitter when I am trying to assemble it the first time. The rest of the time? It is plugged into the back of a server that I am booting up so that I can install proxmox without having to drag a monitor over. And while you can potentially get some juicy info out of that? It is not at all worth the hassle to set up fake companies and market a fake (moderately high demand in the right circles) device.

deleted by creator

I’m explicitly not going to link to it as I can’t personally vet how safe it is or its origins but:

No. Check the various issues related to the subject matter. And hobbyist threads on sites like resetera.

Yeah. If you just want HDR, Cable Matters is the way to go.

If you buy one and flash it with a sketchy firmware, you can get VRR. But my understanding is the HDR is a smaller range. How much that matters when the vast majority of games aren’t taking advantage of HDR is up to you.

Personally? I love how much HDR pops. I more or less need VRR to not have to care about frame tearing and the like. And when I am running games on an underpowered glorified AMD NUC (or, in my case, ACTUALLY an AMD NUC)… my framerates are neither high nor stable.

In the sense that we have dongles/docks, sure. In the sense of monitors with native USB-c input? These are still fairly rare as the accepted pattern is that your dock has an HDMI/DP port and you connect via that (which actually is a very good pattern for laptops).

As for TVs? I am not seeing ANYTHING with usb c in for display. In large part because the vast majority of devices are going to rely on HDMI. As I said above.

I’ll also add that many (most?) of those docks don’t solve this problem. The good ones are configured such that they can pass the handshake information through. I… genuinely don’t know if you can do HDCP over USBC->HDMI as I have never had reason to test it. Regardless, it would require both devices at the end of that chain to be able to resolve the handshakes to enable the right HDMI protocol which gets us back to the exact same problem we started with.

And the less good docks can’t even pass those along. Hence why there is a semi-ongoing search for a good Switch dock among users and so forth.

In terms of management of what content gets made? Yeah, probably about the same. A lot better than ellison where you can bet that stuff like The Pitt would have been instantly halted until they added enough scenes where the guy who beat up a nurse is shown to be the real hero and the southeast asian doctors all get deported before the shift ends.

But the zazlovian “if we cancel this we get more money than if we show it” nonsense will likely accelerate.

In terms of media quality? The best “joke” I have seen is that the new season of White Lotus is going to just be filmed on a green screen set. And… yeah. There are genuine arguments for and against that. Massively inflated budgets that more or less pay for vacations for the production team (Adam Sandler has entered the chat) are definitely bad. But there is a lot to be said about the kind of beautiful lighting and “energy” that comes from an on set. BUT you can also look at stuff like fucking How I Met Your Mother that are kind of universally praised for using green screens to get iconic moments like conversations on bridges in NYC. I’ll always prefer on location-ish filming but I totally get that that may be something that is a net negative these days.

The bigger problem on the Netflix side is what this means for theatres (and… I kind of honestly lean on the side of “fuck 'em” but understand they serve a purpose) and the price of streaming services in general. The best case scenario is increasingly looking like Netflix effectively becoming Cable where you have a base package and then pick what networks/studios you want on top of that. Which, to be fair, is what we already see with Disney and ESPN on Hulu or whatever. But… prices are going up regardless.

Also, it is still a bit murky as to exactly what is and isn’t in this deal. My understanding is that WBD studios and productions are but the network channels aren’t. So ellison is still likely to own CNN by 2027. But Netflix will likely be John Oliver’s new Business Daddy (although I increasingly suspect LWT is planning to go independent).

And… as a wrestling sicko, things look real bleak. TNT/TBS will likely go to ellison. But AEW’s streaming contract (not sure if it expires in that timeframe) is potentially going to be owned by Netflix who already do streaming for wwe/ufc. And… pretty sure the super horny super gay wrestling show where the World Men’s Champion gets out and cuts a promo in high school Spanish while the coolest male tag team come out in “fuck ICE” clothing are going to get killed in favor of the promotion putting pyramid power on their turnbuckles and constantly making sure no black man can ever be successful under HH Helmseley.

It is REAL fucked that fucking Comcast was probably the best outcome for all this…

Not that easy.

To get HDMI 2.1 support for the Gabe Cube itself essentially requires kernel level patches. Which on a “normal” Linux device is possible (but ill advised) but on these atomic distros where even something like syncthing involves shenanigans to keep active week to week? Ain’t happening. Because HDMI is not just mapping data to pins and using the right codecs. There are a LOT of handshakes involved along the way (which is also the basis for HDCP which essentially all commercial streaming services utilize to some degree).

There ARE methods (that I have personally used) to take a DP->HDMI dongle and flash a super sketchy Chinese (the best source for sketchy tech) firmware to effectively cheat the handshakes. It isn’t true HDMI 2.1 but it provides VRR and “good enough for 2025” HDR at 4k/120Hz. But… I would wager money that is violating at least one law or another.

So expect a lot of those “This ini change fixes all of Windows 11. Just give money to my patreon for it” level fixes. And… idiots will believe it since you can use a dongle to already get like HDMI 2.05 or whatever with no extra effort. And there will likely be a LOT of super sketchy dongles on AliExpress that come pre-flashed that get people up to 2.09 (which is genuinely good enough for most people). But it is gonna be a cluster.

And that is why all of us with AMD NUCs already knew what a clusterfuck this was going to be.

There are also ways to fake the handshake in software. I personally did not try that but from what I have seen on message boards? It is VERY temporary (potentially having to redo every single time you change inputs on your TV/receiver) and it is unclear if the folk who think it works actually tested anything or just said “My script printed out ‘Handshake Successful’, it works with this game that doesn’t even output HDR!”