Some of them do… Or at least, they did - I mostly remember seeing it when I was in high school, and it sort of faded out when I was in college. Not sure if it fell out of style, or if it’s only a thing with the Hot Topic/mall goth crowd

Edit: uncorrected an accidental autocorrect

…Wait a second, that shooting was at a different nightclub named Pulse.

Pulse might not be the Titanic of clubs, but apparently naming your club Pulse is about as lucky as naming your ship the Titanic.

I never really thought about their succession of consoles, but to me, seeing them listed like that feels surprisingly additive.

Like, the N64 had analog sticks, and the Gameboy was portable… And people liked both of those, so they released the GameCube, which had analog sticks and a handle, so you could take it to your friend’s house. They followed up with the DS’ touchscreen and the Wii’s motion controls, and when people liked those too, they bundled all of that into the Switch: it has analog sticks, a touchscreen, and motion controls; it’s a handheld and a very portable plug-in console.

But, as they’ve done that, they’ve always pushed the limits of what they could do. As it stands, there’s not much that can be added to the Switch, so they’re releasing an improved version - like they did with the Gameboys Color, Advance, and SP. Essentially, the limiting factor isn’t Nintendo’s ability to innovate, but rather the technology available to them.

Give it a few years for other aspects of technology to advance, and I’m sure they’ll start pushing the envelope again. They’ll probably wait until they can pack an entire console into a VR headset without a bulky battery pack, then release it with something wacky like a charging dock with a built-in projector, or something crazy like that.

A lot of people conflate “knowledge” and “intelligence.” Not the guy you replied to, they seem like a troll; but still, a lot of people.

Our ancestors had intelligence in spades. They figured out an insane amount of stuff just to survive; and it’s not too far back in the grand scheme of things that they had to remember it all because they had no way to record it. The first caveman to make a handaxe had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but they figured it out. Wheels, bows, fire, the entire concept of agriculture… They figured out how all of that worked from scratch, with no reference material.

Modern humanity builds on that with knowledge. We’ve figured out how to record everything our ancestors discovered, and all of our new discoveries as well. We’ve put men on the moon, figured out how to make electricity from things like waterfalls and glowing rocks, and almost everyone has a tiny computer in their pocket.

None of that means that we’re more intelligent now, though. All of that knowledge is iterative, so we’ve just been applying that same intelligence at a continually higher level throughout history.

They also usually use some weasel words like “up to.” That way, if it doesn’t last the full 72 hours (which it won’t), they can claim that they stated “72 hours MAXIMUM” rather than just “72 hours.” It’s basically shifts the statement from “lasts three days” to “definitely won’t last four days.”

It’s either a typo, or a lot or sass for a PopSci article.

“Look at this huge, unparalleled rise in carbon levels millions of years ago, it’s so huge… Psych! We do that every five years! Buckle in, buckaroo, things are about to get bad!”

If you’re into hard sci-fi and you’re looking for a good read, they actually dropped a pretty good recommendation with that reference at the end - Larry Niven does a great job of blending real-world theories like Dyson spheres and advanced propulsion drives, with some of the more far-flung standards of the genre like an intra-planetary teleportation grid.

It really bugs me when people do stuff like that… I grew up in VT, where laws are lax, tons of people have guns, and nothing ever happens. Responsibly handled and in the hands of a stable person, guns can be pretty safe - but, if you remove either one of those things, they’re incredibly dangerous.

In light of that, I wouldn’t mind if access were restricted somewhat. I’m totally fine with my neighbor having a rifle to kill varmints on their property, but way less fine with folks like my paranoid uncle having a safe full of assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammo in a densely populated suburb.

I don’t know anything about fancy lecterns, but looking at the Amazon link someone posted, I can certainly recognize particleboard with a wood-grain veneer on it… Honestly, $2k feels expensive for that, I’d say it should be about $500 at Ikea.

it’s like building stuff with Legos.

I got Minecraft when it was still in beta, for exactly that reason. I was in college, I had some free time, and I liked messing around with the demo - it reminded me of all of the fun I had playing with Legos as a kid. I think it cost me maybe $15?

Now, a decade later, I still play it fairly often, and given all of the content that’s come out since then, it might be the most worthwhile $15 I’ve ever spent.

It’s pretty easy to break water down, but it’s also super easy to make it - just burn anything organic.

Usually you can’t see the water being formed, but there’s actually a really common example: car exhausts on a cold day. If you notice a bit of water dripping out of the tailpipe of the car in front of you at a red light, that’s actually the moisture in the exhaust fumes condensing on the cold tailpipe.

That’s… Actually probably exactly how Star Trek would handle modern Earth. Part of the prime directive is that any species that gets contacted by the Federation has to achieve a certain level of technological and societal advancement first, and we’re close, but I’m pretty sure we’d get put on the “check back in a century” list.

So, if they’re nice aliens and they just watch us for a while and leave, maybe our first contact just got waitlisted?

You nailed just about everything that I’ve been enjoying about Lemmy, too!

To me, it’s definitely reminiscent of reddit circa 2011-2012. There aren’t any bots yet, so discussions feel more grounded; and it has a similar air of wonder to it, like people are still excited for both what the community is and what it can be.

…Except for the sorting. Sorting by Subscribed or Local feel reddit-ish, with the former being a self-curated feed and the latter being a broader discovery feed of whatever going on in your chosen instance. Sorting by All, though, feels a bit like stepping back to my old high-school 4chan days, but with less sharpies in buttholes.

It’s not just tech companies, though - Twitter and Reddit are circling the drain for the same reason that you can never find an employee in Target and call center waits are so bad. There are two basic ways for a company to increase profits, and everyone is picking the wrong one.

The first way to increase profits is to invest some of them back into the company, by paying staff more/paying for more staff and getting better equipment to enhance the customer experience. This method relies on happy customers sticking with the company, but because of that, it takes time, and they can’t immediately tell if it’s working, so they might not know if their improvements are actually helping or not for quite a while. A very human analogy for this is trying to improve how much energy you have through self-care, exercise, and a good diet - it’ll probably work given time, but it won’t do much by tomorrow or next week, and it might even seem actively unpleasant at first.

The second way to increase profits is to cut costs. This is basically instant gratification for businesses: anything they cut is an immediate boost to their profits because it’s money that stays in the company’s coffers. The flip side of this is that it completely hamstrings their ability to do just about anything. Less staff means more stress on the remaining staff, increased turnover, and less man-hours to devote to projects that might increase profits when completed. Still, companies tend to choose this method because it makes the shareholders happy now and it makes the C-suite look like they made the company a bunch of money. To continue my analogy from earlier, this method is basically like trying to improve your daily energy level by doing cocaine: it works really well right now, but it’ll leave you feeling like garbage tomorrow, and if you keep doing it to maintain that energy, you end up feeling worse and worse without it, and eventually you might end up selling something that you need to get more.

So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they’re a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.