It’s not strictly true that it didn’t mean anything, but I would say that it consisted of a couple weakly-defined and often mutually incompatible visions is what could be.

Meta thought they could sell people on the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on specialized hardware to allow them to do real life things, but in a shitty Miiverse alternate reality where every activity was monetized to help Zuck buy the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago for himself.

Cryptobros thought the Metaverse was going to be a decentralized hyper-capitalist utopia where they could live their best lives driving digital Lambos and banging their harem of fawning VR catgirl hotties after they all made their billions selling links to JPEGs of cartoon monkeys to each other.

Everybody else conflated the decentralized part of the cryptobros’ vision with the microtransactionalized walled garden of Meta’s implementation, and then either saw dollar signs and scrambled to get a grift going, or ran off to write think pieces about a wholly-imaginary utopia or dystopia they saw arising from that unholy amalgamation.

In reality, Meta couldn’t offer a compelling alternative to real life, and the cryptobros didn’t have the funds or talent to actually make their Snow Crash fever dream a reality, so for now the VR future remains firmly the domain of VRChat enthusiasts, hardcore flight simmers, and niche technical applications.

You trying to start a war, or what?

Energy is only “available” when there is a region of higher energy density and a region of lower energy density, that you can extract work from by allowing that energy to flow from the former to the latter until they are equalized, at which point no further energy can be extracted from that system.

In the case of air conditioning, you can make heat flow “uphill”, so to speak, by applying additional energy from outside of the inside air / outside air system, usually in the form of electricity generated at a power plant. In the very large picture, though, it’s all just moving energy around from other regions of higher and lower densities, a losing usable energy with each transfer. That’s what entropy means.

Veritasium did a really good video on this idea a couple months ago, if you’re interested: https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA?si=bru50t1VYEKXKmKX

W/r/t Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t think the bottleneck is the GPU. Act 3 is incredibly ambitious in terms of NPC density, and AI is one of those things that’s still very hard to parallelize.

When I read her thread, the first thing that came to mind was that in addition to whatever labor rights claims she could have, there’s a clear potential claim of promissory estoppel with regard to her move back to Canada and some of the statements made about how LMG would support her independent efforts.

I’ve only ever needed to use a tool like Wireshark a couple times, but when I needed it nothing else would do, and the convenience of being able to just download it and go instead of having to shepherd a purchase order through the organization was a lifesaver. It’s one of many reasons why I am a big proponent of open-source software.

I spent a fair portion of my youth on unthreaded forums and I kinda miss the way that discussion could ramble and sidebar conversations would spawn within posts and weave in and out of the main topic. With threaded/tree-format forums, individual conversations are easier to follow, but you get far enough down any one branch of a conversation and it’s just two people arguing without any moderating input from the rest of the group.