Not everyone can feasibly do this, you need to speak mandarin + read/write chinese, legally be able to work, and have some way to deal with the gfw. Also tap water may not be drinkable but thats more of a nuisance since you can filter/boil it.

Also idk what the article is talking about with flying delivery drones and self driving cars in shenzhen, if you order meituan delivery its probably gonna be delivered by a gig worker on a scooter cuz thats all young people can get employed as these days. Delivery is insanely cheap and can't possibly pay much, but also cost of living is relatively low, but still shenzhen is on the expensive end as far as living in china goes.

Finally paying for everything via alipay/wechat and visiting everywhere with biometrics is yet another convenience/privacy tradeoff. Visit china on a 10 year tourist visa, everywhere you go by train, every tourist attraction or national park you visit, every digital payment, is all linked to your passport. Equivalent for chinese citizens would be the national id card/number. China more or less skipped the credit card adoption phase afaik. Not that places won't take cash but it's less common especially in cities.

China is not a magical land where everything is perfect and futuristic. It's a big country with a lot of people in many, many big cities that operates on totally different cultural systems. It is affordable from the perspective of a tourist who earns USD/Euro etc.

Source: I spent a month there in 2025

Based on entries to his personal blog and social media posts, Mullenweg has been on safari in Africa this week. Mullenweg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Cherry on top, lmao. Of course he's off doing rich white CEO things.

Its probably reasonable to say that 25% of math majors cant solve this, therefore non-math majors aren't people

When I see Wikipe-tan make that face, I start feeling a little strange

Manjaro's packages being separate from the main arch linux repository is really the kicker. It's a completely preventable source of dependency issues especially when it comes to the aur. Instructions on the arch linux wiki won't quite line up with what you need to do on Manjaro sometimes, and eventually you'll be SOL if you only follow the arch wiki. You won't understand the components of your system as well if you install Manjaro so a first-time user will have a harder experience fixing their machine.

It's a classic case of "if it aint broke don't fix it". Manjaro fixes a problem that never existed. Arch linux works perfectly as a daily driver. The installation process continues to get easier, and really there is no experience required, if you can follow instructions, the wiki goes into great detail on everything you need to do to get to a working system and keep it that way.

Damn

I want to give everyone here a hug, but only if they are comfortable with it

I feel like this is a big miss by framework. Maybe I just don't understand because I already own a Velka 3 that i used happily for years and building small form factor with standard parts seems better than what this is offering. Better as in better performance, aesthetics, space optimization, upgradeability - SFF is not a cheap or easy way to build a computer.

The biggest constraint building in the sub-5 liter format is GPU compatibility because not many manufacturers even make boards in the <180mm length category. Also can't go much higher than 150-200 watts because cooling is so difficult. There are still options though, i rocked a PNY 1660 super for a long time, and the current most powerful option is a 4060ti. Although upgrades are limited to what manufacturers occasionally produce, it is upgradeable, and it is truly desktop performance.

On the CPU side, you can physically put in whatever CPU you want. The only limitation is that the cooler, alpenfohn black ridge or noctua l9a/l9i, probably won't have a good time cooling 100+ watts without aggressive undervolting and power limits. 65 watts TDP still gives you a ryzen 7 9700x.

Motherboards have the SFF tax but are high quality in general. Flex ATX PSUs were a bit harder to find 5 or 6 years ago but now the black 600W enhance ENP is readily available from Velkase's website. Drives and memory are completely standard. m.2 fits with the motherboard, 2.5in SATA also fits in one of the corners. Normal low profile DDR5 is replaceable / upgradeable.

What framework is releasing is more like a laptop board in a ~4 liter case and I really don't like that in order to upgrade any part of CPU, GPU or memory you have to replace the entire board because it's soldered on APU and not socketed or discrete components. Framework's enclosure hasn't been designed to hold a motherboard+discrete GPU and the board doesn't have a PCIe slot if you wanted to attach a card via riser in another case. It could be worse but I don't see this as a good use of development resources.

I mean... it doesn't have to be, though my experience is only from fflogs and not like a speedrun leaderboard or anything professional.

Getting rank1 means that you were the best in the world, by some metric, for some amount of time, under certain conditions and support factors. You can feel proud of it in a normal way without making it your entire identity.

Also i'm good friends with pretty much everyone who could conceivably compete for the top placements and none of us would be heartbroken to see that a new record had been achieved. I think this is a pretty common dynamic, at least in competitive fields where there is an objective measure of success (rather than something adversarial).

The joke is that the article doesn't list a single name.

I thought the vegas "loop" was a pathetic and useless project that transports basically no one at speeds of 15 mph, but thanks to this article I now know that it is also a scourge on the environment of planet earth due to the pollutants added during its construction! Which I suppose doesn't put it too far off most of the things in the las vegas strip. But it's seriously pathetic, they dig 1 tunnel from point A to point B and have a driver drive a tesla to transport people from A to B and B to A. The tunnel is only wide enough for traffic in one direction BTW so if people are waiting on either side, they have to wait for the 1 car to finish its trip.

I did not need to see that deer picture. Lmao

The name of the company that produced many of the greatest shmups of all time, starting with donpachi, is CAVE, unrelated to the indie game Cave Story

Ffxiv has a lot of content available in the free trial but it is not really a "free mmorpg" since if you want to do content that released less than 6 years ago, or join/use FC guilds or linkshell chats, or trade, have any significant quantity of gil, get housing, or use player markets, then you have to buy the game and pay a subscription. Mahjong is free though and it's quite a good mahjong client.

That said, it is a good way to figure out if you like the basic gameplay systems: the UI and menus which are very customizable, controls (switch to legacy if using M&KB), tab target combat and global cooldown, main scenario questing, instanced dungeons and normal mode bosses, unlocking multiple jobs to try out.

All this with the caveat that basically all jobs at level 70 feel like an empty shell of the combat rotation of level 100, and high end content is only available and populated for the most recent patches + the 6 ultimate raids.

Not everything needs to be built from source, true, but certain software that isn't in wide distribution may have source as the only option.

Or maybe some tool hasn't been properly updated and errors on your computer, maybe you can debug it and change a small amount of source code to fix it. Maybe the source release is far ahead of the stable binary release and you want to test or use new features.

If you download the source for something like linux or ffmpeg or your favorite emulator, you will learn a whole lot by doing a deep dive.

However. Gentoo. Have you ever built firefox from source? That shit contributes to global warming. It takes so much time and CPU power to build such a heavyweight application from source and the tangible productivity benefit that you get from compiling on your own machine rather than downloading a binary is far outweighed by waste from the sheer active CPU and real time spent building. Maybe if you had a threadripper distcc setup, and only a dial-up connection to update source, it would be faster to compile everything than to get new binaries all the time. But for everyone else, if all you want to do is use the software, downloading binaries for the most popular applications is the way to go.

(cont.) Guild wars 2 is another mmo that is worth trying to see if you like the feel of the action combat. You can again play a whole lot free, but you do have to pay if you want the expansion content (which i feel is kind of diabolical to lock mounts behind max level expansion content). I also do not like that you can buy in game currency with real money, and then buy legendary (best in slot) weapons off the trading post with in game currency.

Theres maplestory which is mainly singleplayer, just make sure you make your char on the reboot (non-p2w) servers. Scratches the itch.

Honorable mention to private/classic servers like tera classic which i've been meaning to try out. The population being tiny is the most obvious factor but it is nice that the game has been preserved at all for people to play.

Act-age

Not axed but unlimited hiatus works, Iris Zero

Same with Ruri Dragon

word of advice for anyone thinking of buying soda for the promo event

Dont

Instead, consider waiting a couple years for when all the rewards are gonna get put on the mogstation. And it'll probably be cheaper than however much mountain dew you would be pouring down the sink. Really, think about what you're missing? "Mountain Zu"? Think of your favorite mount, is some random zu any better? Zu is a regular enemy, you can go out and fight one anywhere, its not some Bajamut Blast or anything, the mount is just a fuckin regular green bird. If you don't participate in the promo then you aren't missing anything spectacular.

This has been a cynical XIV PSA

The 500 cigarettes adapter is so funny to me

Morphology is fun