telchior

There are multiple hyper-warming scenarios that have been postulated over the years. Look up the clathrate gun, ocean circulation collapse, arctic albedo flip.. some are now considered unlikely.

I don't know if any would be a Venus scenario, probably not. But we don't really need that much warming to kill ourselves off. Average global temps in the Eucene were up to double what they are today, that would do the job :)

According to census bureau data, 1 in 3 people aged 18-34 now live with parents, a huge change from past generations. So you're hardly an outlier in that respect.

There's good reason for a lot of the inaction around asbestos. If it's not moving, not being touched and not accessible to kids / pets etc then it's fine to leave alone. The alternative being extremely costly remediation, and there are still millions of structures with asbestos in them.

... Prop 65 is dumb though. Kind of a trend in California law.

You're at the least a good writer. It's a lot like music (or any other artform). No matter how good the result, even if it's utterly sublime, there will be a group who doesn't enjoy it.

Yes, but it must be the university approved version that costs 20x the consumer / business version.

Sounds like sarcasm, but the wheels appear to already be in motion on this.

One of the other key issues (besides FOV which was mentioned) is the size of the virtual space relative to the speed your character moves at. So for example, Half Life 2 has you moving around in a lab building pretty quickly > instant nausea for me. Meanwhile running around outdoors in Skyrim might not bother you at all.

Visual complexity ups the ante. Think of walking through a grocery store with high shelves filled with a variety of products -- this can cause migraine in some people and, to a lesser extent, also affects vertigo. So you may not want to play, say, grocery store simulators (although I have no idea who actually does anyway, why are those things popular!?).

Yeah I utterly despise using Google Maps now because of this. In my neighborhood, there are restaurants that will only appear at a very specific zoom level. Zoom in OR out and they'll disappear.

I see things when I'm out and about all the time that just never appear on Google Maps -- cafes for instance. You can search cafe, coffee, restaurant, etc and they won't appear. Search the exact name and it comes up with 300 reviews. Sometimes, they'll come up in general search in week 1, disappear in week 2, and reappear in week 3.

Google is not good at consumer software and not a responsible company in many ways; Maps really deserves to be replaced with something, but unfortunately there's no competitor to speak of. Apple Maps is nice but listings don't come up because they're literally not in the database.

I left over a decade ago, but I actually considered coming back around 2024, so I put some research into it. The result was grim.

- I'm now married to a non-American who is not white. We're not confident in the immigration process, to say the least

- Both of us are self-employed; the quote for decent (not good, I mean aggressively mediocre) insurance was very high

- Housing costs in any city we wanted to live in were very high; YMML on this obviously, but it covers a lot of cities

- Any social ill, irritation, etc that was annoying me around 2010 is unsolved with no signs of progress

- Extreme political polarization (actually a both sides thing)

- The rise of aggressive Christian nationalism (very much a one side thing)

- A horrifying pace of growth in political corruption

Everywhere has its bad points and none of these are necessarily worse than a randomly chosen second country. I think the final deciding factor is just vibes; I feel like America is declining, the culture I was born into is warping, and I don't particularly want to watch it happen from the inside, now that I'm already on the outside.

I think you've misunderstood the idea. Tim Bray and the OP of this thread aren't afraid to visit the US; the key phrase used in the post is "as a matter of principle".

That someone saw Google's claim that 75% of their code is written with AI and said "hold my beer".

Juiced stats? No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.

This makes an interesting assumption: that being told by any member of government that you're legally required to do something, means you're required to do that thing, and that they're definitely not making those things up as they go.

But that's not the case, is it? The government can say that it's legally required to give Donald Trump a gold bar every Sunday. That wouldn't even be too far off from the outlandish claims we've seen over the past year. The Trump administration is, as Chapelle would put it, a habitual line stepper.

Minor correction, expat income is deductible up to (currently) $130k under the FEIE. After that it's taxes as usual. There's also an array of other mandatory forms like FBAR for foreign accounts, and the nightmare that is form 5471, with absolutely wild allowances for the IRS to impose penalties, often with no statute of limitations and per-violation fines. For example, a US citizen with multiple bank accounts and a mistake in FBAR reporting for multiple years running will be liable for the (iirc) $10,000 fine for each bank account, and each year (e.g. 4 accounts, 8 years, $320,000 fine).

Living and doing business overseas is as a US citizen is a high risk endeavor.

Those AOL prices were insane. It has admittedly been so long that I'm not sure I trust my memory, but I seem to recall per-minute pricing that could rack up over $20 per hour just from playing any of their text based games. I begged and begged my parents to let me just try one for a few minutes and they very wisely said absolutely not.

A few years went by and suddenly playing MUD / MOOs was free. I honestly miss those days, text-based has a vibe that no graphical game can ever replicate.

I assume TikTok and similar apps are always doing this stuff.

The thing I'm curious about is whether the GDPR / DSB complaints are likely to have any result. Is that likely to just result in some cost of business fines and TikTok goes on with life? Or could those complaints bring about substantial repercussions?