crtified

Primarily, other rich people - waiting keenly in the wings for the Buy Signal.

Because the nature of this whole thing is a cycle. The worst of it is that the consequences echo downwards until they hit social strata that can't handle any loss (because they have little). That's where the social cost really beds in, in the thousands and millions of ruined lives of ordinary people that are the collateral damage each time there's a failed round of the RL Investment Board Game funded by the world's wealthiest 10%.

Advertising is an economy of scale.

You give notice about your business, but it only becomes advertising by virtue of the socialised energy expenditure it takes to process the unsolicited imposition en-masse. Thus it is an economy of scale, leveraged by a singular entity.

Conceptually we might look at the simple Market Hawker. He finds that changing the environment to impose his message at scale (by loudly shouting at 30-second intervals) increases his revenue.

Abstracting that core mechanism of advertising into business jargon allows us to frame it as "giving notice about our business to increase revenue with more or bigger transactions". Nothing about that statement is false, after all. So a completely true balance sheet of the advertising proves that "Costs = I Shout, Revenue = Business Is Good". Pretty good deal. Really good deal, once the scale rides up, and he has a loudly-shouting-man installed at every corner.

Business balance sheet is very good, now. Revenue = Business_Is_Good x 500, Costs = 500 Men Shout. This is a very beneficial abstraction indeed. Formally omitting the scaled social and environmental costs of our business advertising by simply not including the vocabulary for those things makes it a wonderful revenue-increasing tool.

What do you think "business" means?

> basic notification that something exists brings business

That's an abstraction, though. The real-world logic behind that statement is that by bringing net benefit to The Whole (through your chosen acts), you will be duly recognised as a contributor of value, and accordingly you will be busy.

The way that modern formal terminology (like Notification Brings Business) has become a set of self-standing tenets in its own right has let humanity forget that our entire motivation for this whole practice of being busy ("busi-ness") is to make everybody happier. Preferably by doing things that don't suck.

Not to 'Maximise Our Business'.

Given that our knowing-and-seeing industry is also the thing which enabled and then desperately shepherded humanity out-of every IT deficiency that has ever existed, our inside perspective is still highly fallible too.

Is not the average life of a non-PhD holder an equally-sustained and long amount of time spent on the intractable problem of reaching whatever incredibly complex state-of-humanity they embody?

So much of human political discourse of late is dedicated to ring-fencing off a particular demographic and presenting them as either The Solution or The Problem.

It may be that some types of academic ('of the Academy') learning predispose their adherents to see that distinct failure pattern, behind all the noise. I hope so.

There might be more awareness if, rather than the mainstream [people and news] narrative of "Oh no, some giant event is building and about to happen!", these financial schemes and their socialised downfalls were primarily, rightly labelled as simply the latest in a clearly repeating pattern of behaviour that we as a species are enabling.

I'm finding it almost hard to feel much angst about this cycle, not due to a lack of compassion, but because of the learned reality that if I spend all my energy on today's Big Finance misadventure, well it seems there'll be another tomorrow anyway...

The libertarian ideals seem to overlook humanity's very strong preference that money be freer to Come In, than to Go Out.

Individual people claiming to have a superior Big Picture for humanity is basically what big politicians are. We assign them, then give them 3-4 years to remake the world in their vision.

And once we have a few dozen of them in a room together, it's the recipe for endless passionate arguments about exactly what Truth is, and what Value is, and what Goodness is, about anything and everything.

One of the biggest challenges is that rules are set by experience, but every new rule is also the start of a new story we've never read (called 'The Future'). And humanity changes pretty fast!

I am not asserting that it applies in the above instance, but...

In broader medicine, one basis that can lead to the above sort of dynamic is compassionate protocol ("we are losing a little money on this deal, but you are in-need and we're here to help everyone"), as opposed to greed protocol ("we medicos are here for the big insurance money, and only charge the True Low Cost when forced").

And on balance, the nature of the people who choose the occupation of medicine tends towards the former.

...while, generally, being thoroughly fleeced by whichever set of wolves (who do understand monetary systems very well indeed) gets wind of the situation and manages to snag the best seats at the feeding trough filled with naive money.

Reviewers have limited data with which to rate longer-term reliability. Nobody can blame them for not doing-the-impossible.

The actual friction point is the subtle divergence of expectations. "User review" is a psychologically powerful concept - an extension of the "my friend/neighbour told me this" trust elevation.

But paradoxically, in today's popular society the reach of any given user review is (quasi) proportional to the amount of commercial involvement driving the exposure. Providing the platform, its userbase, and incentivising the content creator by metric of popularity.

So, now we have entire (minor) demographics in the business of finding new things to review. Class-leading tool of amazing reliability already exists for 10 years and is the benchmark for enduring quality in the field? That is wonderful, but the career reviewer still needs to review 10 new good-bad-and-ugly ones each year. Several will get a positive overall verdict from the reviewer, and some followers who make their purchase choices based upon the latest opinion they've heard from a person-of-respect will go out and buy those ones.

A reviewer who ended every new review for several years with "..but overall, the industry consensus of the Old Trusty 2000 is still the wisest holistic choice" would not be terribly compatible with the evolved world of User Reviews that we have.

Reading suggests that much of the coal-plant building in China of late is purposed as backup-only, and that their vast expansion of clean energy production overall is swallowing almost all power demand in that country. Accordingly, if you look at the figures we have, China's emissions are relatively stable in recent years.

According to the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), China and India combined (~35.5% of the human population) account for roughly 38% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Which is indeed an overshoot, albeit not of terribly epic proportions.

However, per-capita - on both a 100-year-effect and a 20-year-effect timeframe - the USA is easily the leader in emissions per person, and the USA also records the largest absolute increases ongoing.

The figures, which already take the variable potency/effect of different gas types into account, show annual per-person greenhouse gas emissions (in CO2 equivalent) of 17.3 Tonnes-per-person (USA), 11.1 Tpp (China), 5.6 Tpp (EU27), 2.2 Tpp (India) on the 100 year impact scale.

On the 20 year impact scale ("the amount 1 person releases in 1 year will trap the same amount of heat as XX tonnes of pure carbon-dioxide would"), which much better takes into account the balance of current agricultural practices etc, the USA = 21.5 Tpp, China = 15.8, EU = 6.8, India = 4.1.

The United States also recorded the largest absolute increase between 2024 and 2025 (+131.5 Mt CO2eq, or +2.2%), followed by Indonesia (+16.1 Mt CO2eq, or +1.2%).

So, any message which - when translated through the lens of practical reality - is essentially saying to the developing world "Please either tighten your belts, or be less populous" seems a very challenging expectation, if not outright-unviable by almost any other metric or ethic.

The trend is unfortunately active a lot further afield than just Europe or the USA. Similar recent spikes in political polarisation are showing up everywhere. Everywhere that there's been free social media for the past ~20 years, that is.

Whether it's Australia : Pauline Hanson, an anti-immigration nationalist widely lampooned as a walking faux-pas for the past two decades, now virtually leads the polls with her One Nation party, which has gone from about 5% support (when the current center-left government was elected mid-2025) to over 25%! today. In the space of 17 months.

New Zealand : From the globally-lauded center-left Jacinda Ardern, at home she was soon all-but-bullied out of politics by a significant and very vocal portion of NZ males angry at her shortcomings - she lives in Australia now - and NZ has since been led by a coalition of three increasingly-right-wing businessmen doing their best to "crack down" on the poorer classes to "balance the books".

Brazil : The big swing from Bolsonaro on the right to Lula on the left.

Japan : Increasingly fragmented, moving rightward and nationalist, centrist rule threatened for the first time since 1955.

Argentina : The populist president Milei, whose strategy-of-least-thought - rip off the whole bandage, right now - proudly sacrifices the hopes of a generation-or-three to gain a form of Economic Satisfaction post-haste.

That's a fair point.

To clarify my angle, I'm asserting that the effective collegiality shared by people who are successful in those areas begins far earlier in life than university or career.

The dominant factors are socioeconomic.

A shared social history, which over many years cements in place a set of common habits and bonds, is what determines a good collaborative fit within the mainstream of a given field.

That isn't an inherent skill to be 'naturally' good or bad at, as it's the holistic result of an entire social existence to that point.

Those engineers may (or not!) have been especially brilliant at collab&comms, when interacting with people very like themselves - had there been any present.

Yes, it was (and some places, sadly continues to be) the ultimate horror that people can visit upon each-other.

Suffering it, over and over and over, was what led humanity down the natural, logical path to becoming civilised and cooperative.

It's the lesson we need to learn well, if our self-appointed badge of Very Intelligent Species is to actually mean anything more than a pointless, neverending game of forming factions and battling other factions.

A small toy xylophone with each note painted a different colour works by the same principle of abstracting melody into a simple system whose mechanics are already mastered. That kind of device has given children a way to learn Happy Birthday (by simply going Red Red Blue Red Yellow Green.....) for many generations now.

The full challenge however is that "knowing how to play an instrument" in the musical context is a deeeeep, deep well, and that any musician is only as informed as their experience. Hitting-notes-in-order means you've just walked into the atrium of a potentially lifelong learning experience, no matter what the instrument.

It seems like the size criticism is one of proportionality-of-effect (in various domains such as energy usage, utility costs to citizens, and environmental effects upon water supplies and quality, land usage, noise pollution etc) upon the given locales in which they are proposed to be centralised.

Bear in mind that the world is getting ever fuller with hobbyist hardware designers that are very good at paring expensive devices back to schematic and component basics, and producing open-source versions to encompass any useful OSS functionality, which they share freely.

Championing free systems and simultaneously having an end-goal of commercial success is a tight line to tread.

We need to get low-latency audio interfaces for this usage context down to (low) dozens of dollars rather than hundreds.

I'm not aware of any of the really cheap pedals found online being capable of Full NAM A2.

The only ones I've seen run on sub-$1 chips that can only do NAM A2 Lite at best, generally by 'down-converting' NAM profiles to their own internal format. They are still very impressive but they aren't doing what this claims. Yet.

I don't disagree with you. I just have an equal wish to state my equally valid piece on the matter :

The majority of the world's guitar players - or hobbyists if you prefer - don't play in bands (yet, or maybe ever), and it's likely - given urban realities - that most don't have regular access to a space where amplifiers can be meaningfully used. After all, you don't buy an amplifier to run it at 2.

For a lot of those people, guitar playing has a different meaning than the rock-band meme of "Fender/Gibson/Ibanez/... & Marshall/Peavey/Mesa/Fender/..., jamming penta-blues on stage with the boys" that's persisted as the carbon-copy expected setup since before The Beatles and Hendrix. That's ok. Nothing wrong with either.

And the economics of real amplifiers aren't kind to guitar players. We all have a friend whose biggest lifetime purchases consist of a long line of Holy Grail Amplifiers, the amp to end all amps, sooooo much better than all the rest... once every 4 years for the past 40.

Let alone ones from poorer economies.

I suspect the author understands the concept of a spheroid, though they don't mention the term as such.

There is a fair bit of statistical rigour described in the original article at : https://www.spaceweather.com/starlink/starlink_drag_explaine...

That's possible, but it's more likely the decades of consistently laudable values that underpin metal's dominant sentiments. The true sentiments, behind the costumery of black clothes and aggressive stylings.

As young metallers we listened to Black Sabbath and Slayer warning us about the horrors of war and the people who take advantage of it. Sepultura telling us about racism and how it completely screws people over. Metallica and Megadeth are as full of philosophy and psychology as any contemporary music, and almost literally warning young generations about various 'monsters' of the world, like commercialism and greed and power. Korn pioneered being open about childhood trauma. Rage Against The Machine (if we may call them on the fringe of metal), well, need no introduction. Nor Devin Townsend. Fear Factory and Porcupine Tree about the relationship between humanity and technology. I could go on all day.

I am really proud of the influence that the metal genre of music has had in forming my personal set of life values.

And this is normal. It's why metal gigs are, by-and-large, chill and safe, and always have been.

The core is available at github and should run fine on your SS1, afaik. Be aware it's an experimental core.

https://github.com/nand2mario/z486_MiSTer

There is also a recent fork by github user janisc which is developing a direct 31khz output.

--

Speaking to general : To be clear, none of these MiSTer cores include the Voodoo graphics portion discussed in the parent link.

I doubt that the degree of sheer hyper-optimisation required to get a Voodoo (plus the Pentium to make it meaningful!) into a DE10-Nano necessarily exists. Never-say-never, sure, but also, just-no - hahaha.

That work is for higher specced boards like the Xilinx discussed.

The obvious irony of such formal studies and their confident reveal is that, as people who've had animals (particularly mammals) as part of their close 'family' long term, we know all that. In so much greater detail (10-20 full years of 365 full days worth) than they'll ever be able to perceive from a quick data sweep/inspect.

We develop bespoke languages to 'speak' with our long term animals, comprised of nuance between vocalisation type, and tone, body posture and bearing, type of approach, gestures, eye contact, actions.

Really live with another mammal for 5+ years (or full lifespan, for those animals with less) - e.g. as somebody who doesn't leave home much - and by the end of those years you will be living in a complex symphony with them, full of nuanced communication and understandings and mutual routines. Their moods and feelings and facial expressions will be almost as obvious to you as your own child's.

So when we-who-know-this from living it see these formal studies where a team of young scholars are essentially collating the outline of that reality and present it as a found conclusion - "the nature of the interactions between owner-and-horse actually defines part of the horse!" - we cannot help but feel a little as though we were just told that (e.g.) Food is Nutritious!

And conversely, there exists that cadre of formal animal studies which release findings which lean broadly-opposite to the above, such as "Actually, dog owners who think they can read their animal's facial expression, cannot". Quite funny when you think about it.

Hey, I'm not complaining about the existence of studies like the title. There are probably a great many people whose ways of thinking would be greatly changed - for the better - if they understood how similar many animals (especially mammals, but others too) really are to us, beyond the fantasies of great separation and uniqueness that we build around our own species with complex stories.

And formal releases like this are one positive part of that improvement.

The problem is that part of "the people" that these new digital world corporations are dictating to... is 'our governments'.

I mean, the big ones are more powerful than most of the world's countries. And in ways incredibly influential.

I had an abusive stepfather who began seriously hitting me when I was 6. No change to any family court system or foster care system would've changed that a single whit. Those may be the primary factors you've settled upon for yourself and others in your specific view, but were we to adopt that as "The Way" (to protect children from intergenerational harm), then we'd be leaving great swathes of children in harm's way for whom authorities like those aren't even a part of the picture.

That man was always going to hit people. Because he was mercilessly hit as a kid himself. And it was baked into the culture of the country. And because society had, by that time, broken my young mother down with a chain of weird family dysfunction, sexual abuse, naturally leading to school failure, turfing out of society, and then mental health issues, young pregnancy, married, divorced by 21. So y'know, she wasn't available to protect me. Nobody was. Nobody was ever going to call any court or tell any authority. It's society, and it's many many layers deep.

"Let's spin up extra bureaucracy, to increase our technical efficiency at rooting out the issue" is, I am sorry to say, never going to solve more than a small portion.

It is society we need to change.