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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • There is in most countries. Unless you mean shortfills you are meant to add nic to? In the US those still firmly fall under the laws restricting sale of vapes. Don’t know about the UK or Europe, I know those products exist there though.

    Otherwise you can’t legally sell bulk nicotine to underage people, obviously the other ingredients are used for such a wide variety of things they can’t really be restricted like that.


  • Alkaline batteries are great for remotes and stuff like that, where they potentially last years, in those applications it seems very reasonable, my TV remote still has the included AA batts and I bought it 3 years ago. But they end up getting used in higher drain devices and it gets a bit absurd. Still, at least people aren’t rocking around with their boombox with 6 D cells that last 8hours.


  • As a long time e-cig user and enthusiast I agree. I thought we got away from that garbage a decade ago, but then it came back. I don’t get it, it’s expensive, it sucks, and it’s mind bogglingly awful for the environment.

    I don’t even love the idea of pre built coils but I compromised for the convenience now that they are actually good. Feels a lot less bad to toss a little bit of steel and kanthal every few weeks.

    I can’t really get behind banning flavors, but less attractive packaging and only allowing open refillable systems would be a huge step to slowing adolescent use, they pretty much all use disposables because they can be bought at gas stations and you have to go to a smoke shop to get the refillables. Not to mention dropping $60 on a mod+tank isn’t as easy to start as $10 for a disposable.

    I think the flavors are a big part of why they can be effective as cessation aids you start to no longer associate tobacco with it which helps a lot. I no longer smell someone smoking and get cravings.






  • Israel definitely is well within their rights to retaliate against Hamas, it would be foolish to claim otherwise. It’s the exact way they are doing it that is the issue, they are behaving nearly as poorly as their enemy. You can’t just tell the world “look at the barbarity of Hamas slaughtering innocent civilians just out there kibbutzing” and then turn around and bomb civilian hospitals, completely disregard rules of engagement around medical aid killing humanitarian volunteers you were aware of, shutting off all power, water and closing food supply to the Gaza strip, and then act like it’s somehow better than that.

    Hamas absolutely sucks and Israel has every right to defend themselves from terrorism, but the Palestinian children buried under rubble didn’t deserve any of this. (Neither did the Israeli citizens who were slaughtered and kidnapped for that matter.)

    Israel has the technology, the troops, and the tactics to be far more precise and surgical in their retaliation, but their response has been punitive and brutal, and seems to almost maximize collateral damage. Of course that’s what Netanyahu and his thugs will all but directly say they want given the opportunity to speak. I do not believe that properly represents the citizens of Israel who are generally much more sympathetic to the people of Palestine.

    Both the citizens of Israel and Palestine have been failed by their leadership. Agree or disagree, at this point, I just had to write that down somewhere. I know people from both Palestine and Israel, wonderful people, all this is heartbreaking.

    War is hell, even if you play by the rules, why make it even worse?













  • Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1

    I think you may have rose tinted glasses on this point, the level of detail in environments and accuracy of shading, especially of dynamic objects, has increased greatly. Material shading has also gotten insanely good compared to what we had then. Just peep the PBR materials on guns in modern FPS games, it’s incredible, Crysis just had normals and specular maps all black or grey guns that are kinda shiny and normal mapped. If you went inside of a small building or whatever there was hardly any shading or shadows to make it look right either.

    Crysis is a very clever use of what was available to make it look good, but we can do a hell of a lot better now (without raytracing) At the time shaders were getting really computationally cheap to implement so those still look relatively good, but geometry and framebuffer size just did not keep pace at all, tesselation was the next hotness after that because it was supposed to help fix the limited geometry horsepower contemporary cards had by utilizing their extremely powerful shader cores to do some of the heavy lifting. Just look at the rocks in Crysis compared to the foliage and it’s really obvious this was the case. Bad Company 2 is another good example of good shaders with really crushingly limited geometry though there are clever workarounds there to make it look pretty good still.

    I could see the argument that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze to you, but graphics have very noticeably advanced in that time.