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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • Have you ever thought about why black people are often criminalized or why so many kids grow up without dads? It’s due to centuries of systemic injustices.

    Redlining is probably the biggest example. Redlining practices pushed black communities into areas given barely any resources. These places today have rough living conditions and rarely see revitalization efforts that actually uplift the people living there. This continued the years of generational poverty that came after slavery and the repeated destruction of any attempts for black people to get any crumb of prosperity. With little support from the government, combined with poverty, forces some into crime just to put food on the table. Now, with these areas being over-policed, you’ve got a recipe for high arrest rates.

    1: Black men are more often caught in this web. It’s not just about being targeted by the police. It’s about the dire living conditions, the lack of support, and then the heavy policing. All this means more black men end up behind bars, leaving families without fathers. The kids from these broken homes? They’re set up for a hard life from the start and some fall into the same cycle.

    2: Pulling your kids from public schools and opting for homeschooling restricts their exposure to diverse viewpoints and backgrounds. This is why many who’ve spent time in cities or universities tend to have less conservative views. It’s not about them being molded by others; it’s genuine exposure to diverse experiences and stories. This broadens understanding and breaks down barriers while leading less people to view different races negatively. I’m sharing this not to change your mind, but hoping you’ll see a different perspective, even if you don’t fully agree. Just as you believe in spreading your viewpoint, I believe in the value of diverse exposure. It’s how we learn and grow.


  • The BLM movement‘s purpose is to highlight the racial injustices black people face everyday in the United States especially in policing. Black neighborhoods are over-policed, their citizens are harassed and in the worst cases murdered in unprovoked situations by police officers. The fact that many people witness these injustices and either remain indifferent or choose to ignore them suggests that black lives do not matter in this country.

    Supporting the movement doesn’t mean you automatically think all white people are racist. All it means is that you recognize the racial injustices in society and support people, legislation and the steps it takes to eliminate as many of these as possible. This is why when someone doesn’t support black lives matter, the implication can be viewed as racist. It implies that they wish to keep these injustices ingrained in society. Highlighting the division that still exists in society is the only way to solve these problems. How can you heal the wound if you “won’t even admit the knife is there”?



  • Unfortunately, Valve would also have to build a CPU translation layer (Like Rosetta 2) since games run on x86 architectures and snapdragon uses an ARM architecture. The steam deck uses a Zen 2 CPU architecture which is already x86 so there would be little motivation on their part to do this. Currently proton uses wine to convert windows api calls into linux calls. The big thing Proton does is allowing games that use DirectX to run on Vulkan which is natively supported in Linux. So unless Valve makes the Steam Deck 2 with ARM or another company decides to make an x86 to ARM translation layer, then I don’t see something like Proton coming to android any time soon.


  • The performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 GPU is already about 10-20% faster than the A16 chip, depending on the benchmark.

    Even if Qualcomm only gives the Gen 3 a 10% performance increase, that is enough to beat or even surpass the A17 in gpu performance (rumors suggest something closer to a 30% increase). The Gen 2 already outcompetes the A16 in GPU power consumption and efficiency as well. This may change with the A17 since it’s on TSMC’s 3N node, however this node has been having issues which is why TSMC introduced the 3NE and 3NP so we will have to wait for power usage numbers from the A17 to see.

    Overall I’m disappointed with the improvements between the A16 and A17. 10% on the CPU and 20% on the GPU (due to have 20% more cores) doesn’t seem like the type of upgrade I would expect from switching nodes. Hopefully next year they can do more with the improved N3 nodes. I’m also getting the feeling that Apple is trying to deploy more complex transformer models on their devices which is why we are seeing such a focus on the NPU.

    I think you hit on the main point which is that nobody will pour money into developing for android. Apple also has the ability to make deals with companies with Capcom and Ubisoft to ensure games come to their platforms. I can’t see Google doing this since they already “tried” and failed to have a AAA mobile gaming platform with stadia. The only other company with enough motivation and money to bring big games to android is Samsung, but their mobile chips aren’t doing too well (despite their RDNA 2 architecture making it easier to port games).





  • A lot of consumer’s buying habits for products with inelastic demand is driven by cost. If companies weren’t driven by ever increasing profits then there might be more of an incentive to offer a wider variety of crops to consumers. Certain crops are already subsidized by the government to make it profitable for farmers. If other crops were subsidized then perhaps farmers would be more encouraged to grow them and if people see these at normal prices they might also be more interested in buying them. Of course, this would rely on multiple parts of farming being overhauled. For example, there’s a lot of cost sinks, one I can think of is the locked down maintenance of farming equipment (once again driven by the need for increasing profits via fiduciary duty). Eliminating these and other overheads would not only lead to more cost efficient farming, but also cheaper crops and increased variety offered to consumers.


  • On the flip side I’m worried about manufacturers realizing that the continuous revenue stream from autonomous vehicles is more profitable than selling vehicles outright thereby increasing the cost of buying a vehicle to the point where ownership becomes functionally obsolete except to the ultra-wealthy. This also makes it much easier to restrict the movement of people. Self driving car companies could easily disable the ability to travel to entire areas either because they say they’re too dangerous or not profitable enough to operate in. I can imagine entire cities and rural areas becoming ghost towns. While personally I think autonomous vehicles, in a vacuum, have the potential to save countless lives, the reality is that in time we will be giving the companies making these vehicles the ability to dictate where we can and cannot go.


  • What’s interesting about homophobia in Iraq and West Asia in general is that it was originally imported by the British during their colonial rule. Prior to this these countries were much less strict about homosexuality. It was still frowned upon at certain points in time, but not violently persecuted. After these countries gained independence they stuck with the British stance regarding homosexuality. Ironically, western nations becoming more open about same sex relationships made fundamentalists in these former colonies even more homophonic and violent because it had the appearance of going against western hegemony (despite homophobia still being firmly engrained into western society).



  • The American dream is essentially trying to tell people that the United States is a meritocratic society. The more work you put in the more you get out. However, I’m sure most of us know this isn’t true. Where you were born and what family you were born into is the primary factor in determining someone’s success. So you grow up hearing stories of “hard working” billionaires and think “I can make it there if I work hard” while ignoring your family who worked their asses off and got nowhere. You see more of the lie of meritocracy as you age. People around you work hard and fail, you might succeed with less effort or fail with more. The idiotic decisions of today’s billionaires solidifies the notion that the American dream never existed and was fabricated to get people to work more for less in the hopes that one day they will make it. In reality, it all comes down to the zip code you were born in.



  • The only way Apple Maps is good is if you put in a million requests to fix all of the issues with mislabeled business, incorrect routing, nonexistent places, etc. Only then would I consider Apple Maps to be on par with Google Maps. Since I have an iPhone and like the interface I tend to use Apple Maps more often, but the terrible search (which routinely doesn’t list easy to find locations), awful routing (it loves to take the express lane which has different exits without providing a toggle not to use these lanes), and out of date mapping data (I’ve gone to multiple nonexistent locations) makes me go back to Google Maps every time. I will admit I do love their 3D maps and street view which I find to be higher quality than Google Maps. Besides this and the interface, Apple Maps is inferior to Google Maps.