LetMeEatCake

@LetMeEatCake@lemmy.world
0 Post – 112 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Tuberville's asinine blockade of military promotions presumably played a big part in this. I think it's a smart idea even in a vacuum though. The types of people that would be interested in serving in Space Command positions are, I expect, going to be the types of people least likely to find living in Alabama to be tolerable. Locating the HQ in Colorado is going to be a lot better for their recruitment efforts.

That's not to mention the official reasons offered, that it would be a clusterfuck to relocate the HQ. Which is a perfectly sufficient reason on its own too.

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I always hated that argument from people.

Even if they're right — which we all know they are not — it wouldn't matter. Climate change is going to devastate human life if we do nothing. If, somehow, the source of the warming wasn't human-caused, we'd still need to find a way to counteract it. It's not our fault doesn't prevent it from being our problem.

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But why male models?

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Does Boeing have any recent projects that are an unmitigated success? Everything I see from them is about a new project being a disaster in some manner.

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Kotick gets rewarded by the deal going through. Billions of dollars from the sale. Worst case for him after that is a few hundred million from a golden parachute if he's fired. We have no real reason to think he will (or won't, to be clear) be fired though, so there's a very real chance this is full reward for him: giant piles of money and continues to get to run Activision-Blizzard, just with Microsoft bosses above him.

The deal going through isn't something you want if you hate him.

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It's smart, I don't know how people will feel about it but it's smart.

The US and China are in an escalating economic cold war. It's goes completely against US interests to invest finite resources into growing the economy of an economic rival — and ditto for the converse of China investing into growing the US economy. Especially in an aggressively competitive economic sector where relative technological advancement is king for competitive purposes.

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That's the automod for the sub in question. It's not a reddit wide bot in this case.

Of course, it could be that reddit's admins are helping mods make these kinds of reactions. I'd believe that. But the account itself in question (automoderator) doesn't tell us anything about how reddit's admins feel.

Lots of things.

Use public transportation.
Have multiple experiences available nearby to do as a day activity.
Have a large pool of people available to meet and know.
Walk to anything interesting.
In general just have lots of options and variety for anything: work, groceries, eating out, etc.

Some small towns might have some walkability for downtown but nothing more than that.

The overall state matters far more than the local area for determining what your government is going to be like. Colorado Springs cannot make abortion illegal for its residents; Colorado can. Colorado Springs cannot ignore the state's laws on minimum wages, or LGBTQ rights, or any myriad other laws.

It's why I, as a progressive, would have no interest in living in Austin Texas: as left-leaning as Austin is, the state of Texas plays a bigger part in that governance and would make it an undesirable place for me to live.

Incidentally, Colorado Springs has been moving left. It has a non-republican independent mayor now, and the democratic governor even won the city in his reelection campaign (still lost the county, but came close). Trump won the county by 10% in 2020, after winning it by 20% in 2016. Likewise, Romney and McCain won it by 20%; Bush Jr. won it by 30% and 34%. In 1988 Bush Sr. won it by 40%. I expect the city-only results are even closer at the presidential level but cannot find data for that quickly.

I can send a tab from my mobile Firefox to my desktop Firefox by default, so that's at least one of those that doesn't need an extension.

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Thought this was going to be a more specific complaint about computer hardware/accessories. So much of the high end stuff is just littered with bullshit RGB lighting. Coolers, GPUs, keyboards, mice, monitors, case fans, even fucking RAM sticks! It's insane.

For general appliances my complaint wouldn't be the single LED on it but the brightness. Like you I cover up the bright ones with electrical tape. It wouldn't even cost them any extra money to make it lighter. Just requires a different resistor value.

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Only thing I'd dispute here is the "after that" part — republicans and conservatives in general are already coming for LGB, women, and minorities. Transphobia is their smokescreen / highest priority, rather than a first step. If they succeed (I hope not!) that will result in more of their energy going into attacking the other marginalized groups, rather than starting to attack those groups.

Convenience fee is the best name they can apply to soften a fee, which is really just a way for them to charge more than the list price.

Fees should be universally folded into the list price by default.

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Microsoft got Zenimax and was then rather excessive in how they handled it, and that is a large part of what prompted this degree of pushback by regulatory bodies.

If Xbox wants to leave the door open for future acquisitions they are very much aware they need to tread carefully moving forward.

This reads like a rather optimistic take to me.

What Microsoft learned here is that they can buy a publisher (Bethesda), make that publisher's games exclusive, and still get the biggest gaming acquisition in history approved by regulators.

Microsoft will likely pause acquisitions for a bit, but everyone else that wants to get into/stay in gaming is going to look into them even more than before. I'd be surprised if Sony doesn't end up buying someone decently large (but not as large as Activision: Sony cannot afford anything like that). Everyone seems to think Sony would go for Square Enix but I think they would make a different choice.

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They're run more effectively than Microsoft has run their gaming division for the past ~15 years or so... Microsoft's gaming leadership has seen one of the most valuable gaming IPs, Halo, flounder again and again and again. They closed all their game studios and spent a whole generation with minimal first party exclusives, they did I don't know how much damage to Arkane with Redfall...

More generally, Microsoft's approach to leading their game studios is to leave them to run the way the studio was ran pre-acquisition. Activision-Blizzard is not going to see major changes to the way they run if this deal does go through (pending CMA). Microsoft will Activision to be run the way it is now, and only intervene if profits dip too much (considering Halo, though, that might take quite the dip).

I don't get the assumption that Activision is going to see some major cleanup from this. They won't.

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I'd tell my friend that this one is on me. If they protested I'd offer to let them take the next time we ate at a restaurant.

I'm a big fan of paying bills separately though.

They have been picking their battles.

Breaking an existing company up into multiple smaller companies is an order of magnitude more difficult for a US regulator than stopping a company from buying another one. The FTC is running face first into a legal system that has methodically chipped away at anti trust law for generations. That's the obstacle here, not picking the wrong battles.

I agree and I suspect companions are carrying a lot of the weight for this calculation.

Hypothetically, if there's 10 companions with 10 individual endings each you'd get 100 endings right there. Add in 10 main endings and you get 1000, add in 4 major side quests and 4 variations each and you're at 16,000 ending variations.

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I'd be surprised if USB-C was a limitation on phone technology even by 2040. The bandwidth and power delivery capacity are way beyond what are needed now. Data transfers from phones are going to increasingly move to wireless in that time frame too, I expect.

The limitation on the viability of USB-C with phones won't be the actual technological viability of the standard with respect to phones. Instead, the problem for USB-C for phones will be if another standard comes out and starts being used by other devices that do need higher bandwidth or power delivery capability. Monitors, storage devices, laptops (etc.) will eventually need more than USB-C can provide, even with future updates to its capacity. When those switch over to something new, that will be when phones (and other devices) will need to consider a new standard too.

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Err... the first sentence that you quoted directly refutes what you said.

If there hasn't been an election for 60+ years in the town, that means everyone has "assumed office through paperwork." He's the only one that's faced resistance. This is entirely a result of racism. Don't pretend otherwise.

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"Relative" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence!

I so wish that Apple and Google would clamp down on this kind of rampant data collection abuse. Users should be able to individually block any data collection point with it only breaking anything that fundamentally relies on it. And it should be done such that the app cannot tell that it's being blocked, so as to prevent stupid attempts to build everything to rely on data collection even if it doesn't make any sense.

Neither Apple nor Google will do so of course. Doesn't change that I wish that they would.

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The DGA ratified an agreement last month. If they hadn't, we would have three major video unions on strike instead of two.

What grinds my gears with all the people (whether Denuvo officials or elsewhere) that claim that it has no effect on performance: they only focus on average FPS. Never a consideration for FPS lows or FPS time spent on frames that took more than N milliseconds. Definitely not any look at loading times.

I'm willing to believe a good implementation of Denuvo has a negligible impact on average FPS. I think every time I saw anyone test loading times though, it had a clear and consistent negative impact. I've never seen anyone check FPS lows (or similar) but with the way Denuvo works I expect it's similar.

Performance is more than average framerate and they hide behind a veil of pretending that it is the totality of all performance metrics.

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Service charge I would presume is primarily paid out to the non-wait staff at the restaurant. The kitchen in particular.
Tips go to the wait staff, and they will pay some of that out to other staff (e.g. front staff) depending on how the restaurant works.

These are going to be separate. The service charge is there so they can increase prices by a tightly controlled amount without needing to fuck up the carefully targeted price points ($8 or $7.99 is a lot better than $9.44). Which is shitty, to be clear: it's a hidden way to increase prices while still advertising the same price. But it's not something that replaces or complements the tip, it's just a shitty price-adjustment.

A waiter or waitress is still going to be dependent on the actual tip.

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And here I thought he had finally disappeared from gaming.

Let's be realistic: this is another scam by him. Everyone likes to brush it off as him as dreaming bigger than he can pull off and getting caught up in his own hype or whatever. But no, after you do it enough times in a row for enough decades without deviation, it's hard to deny what it is.

Especially after his most recent game of Godus and all the bullshit from that.

This dude doesn't deserve the coverage this article gave him, and the only discussion worth having is to warn people off of his lies.

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I doubt anyone will complain if Blizzard's games are brought to other storefronts too.

I like Steam. Steam has the best features, best UI, good sales, and while they are not without faults (systems can stay unchanged for a long time!), they are run by a company that by and large respects its userbase.

I don't mind if games are brought to Steam and any or all other storefronts. Put it on GOG, Windows Store, EGS, Itch.io, battlenet, Origin, Uplay... You name it, I approve of it going there also. If those other storefronts want me to use them, they need to provide a comparable or superior experience. GOG comes the closest, but its inability to get games in a timely or predictable manner, if at all, is too much of an obstacle for me.

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Apple has been pricing on what the market will bear for a long time, maybe the entirety of the iphone's existence. Prices may go up; they may not.
Apple will not be financially obligated to increase prices as a result of cost changes: an iphone costs something in the $300-500 range to manufacture, and Apple charges $800+ — even a doubling of the cost of the SoC will not fundamentally alter Apple's pricing calculations.

Price increases for the 15 will be determined entirely by if Apple thinks the market will bear that price increase such that doing so would result in more profit for them.

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On the timescale of 27 years, grid-scale storage is going to be a complete non-issue. There's already a decent amount of work being done at that level right now and battery tech has been improving at a consistent pace. Renewables can work quite well as-is with a good mix of location and source. Offshore wind is more consistent wind speeds, solar locations can mitigate light cloud coverage, solar output peaks during the times of greatest human use, and land based wind is typically dispersed over large areas.

I'm a huge proponent of nuclear power, but as things stand it isn't going to be necessary on these time tables. The value in nuclear is that it's another thing we can build now without needing to wait ten years for battery prices to continue to decline or for manufacturing capabilities to ramp up. Building 10 GW of nameplate capacity wind+solar is great. Building 10 GW of nameplate wind+solar and 5 GW of nameplate nuclear is better! That's the advantage of nuclear today, and we should fucking make use of it. That doesn't make it mandatory in the long-term.

People click on things that are at least vaguely familiar to them. RFK Jr. is propped up by the "K" part of his name. He'd get 1/20 as much coverage and attention if his name was Robert Francis Smith.

That's 95% of it right there. His last name. For the rest, there's an inherent desire in the media to create a horse race even if it makes no sense: competitive-ish elections get eyeballs, eyeballs get advertisers, advertisers give money. Pretending that he's anything other than a pointless loudmouth lets them get more money.

It's been that way since ~90nm nodes. First large scale 90nm production was for a revised PS2 chip in 2003. Intel's launched in 2004.

Node names haven't lined up with node sizes for nearly 20 years now. Not a recent development.

You'd be surprised at how many fabs there are in the US.

  • TI has something like a half dozen to a dozen, predominantly in Texas
  • Intel has more fabs than you can shake a stick at, mostly in Oregon but also Arizona
  • Samsung has a fab in Texas
  • GlobalFoundries exists in New York and Vermont
  • Micron is in Idaho
  • Wolfspeed has power electronics fabs in North Carolina and New York

And so on. The US has a lot of fabs. For best countries in the world to build a new fab, the US would rank somewhere between first and third place — and I think there's a strong argument for the answer being "first place." Unlike Taiwan and South Korea, US fab jobs and experience are not almost entirely dominated by one or two companies. The US isn't located in one of the most geopolitically risky parts of the developed world. The US has a huge population and plenty of money to put into fab expansion.

The only issues here are (a) the US has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction projects, and (b) TSMC wants to pay workers like shit and treat them even worse, which doesn't fly for technically skilled US workers. You can treat US technical workers workers poorly, but not as poorly as in much of Asia, and you definitely cannot do it without paying them very well.

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Maybe unpopular opinion... Should Halo invert its focus? Currently it's multiplayer first, singeplayer second. If the multiplayer modes cannot maintain a playerbase then its not going to be a main driver of success. The battle royale and hero shooter crazes haven't left much room for the Halo multiplayer format to succeed these days: most of the potential players are focusing on something else.

I think if they could deliver kickass campaigns consistently that they could keep Halo as a successful franchise. If they keep chasing multiplayer it'll fade into obscurity soon enough.

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Apple is the only customer after TSMC's N3B node. Everyone else wants N3E, which will not be available until next year. N3E has better yields but worse performance, while being easier/cheaper to manufacture. The increase in yields is greater than the loss in performance.

If TSMC didn't offer terms to make up for the faults of N3B, there's a very real chance that Apple would have balked and stuck with N4 again. In this case, Apple had a strong hand: without Apple, the entire N3B line would be idle and the capital expenditure to set them up would be wasted. If yields improve enough Apple might stick with N3B in the future, which would save TSMC even more money and allow them to shift back over to a better (for them) pricing model.

Apple had a comparatively strong hand for these negotiations.

Also I’m p sure Ko-Fi has a better revenue split with those who use it than Patreon does

This line made me curious so I looked. Best I can find is that Ko-fi charges either 0% or 5% on donations, dependent on the type of donation and the type of account the receiver has with them.

Patreon used to charge 5%, but now has: 5% for grandfathered pro accounts, 5% for lowest tier accounts, 8% for non-grandfathered accounts on a pro plan, and 12% for a higher premium tier.

So yup, Ko-fi has a better split.

The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.

AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as "Amazon") gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.

I think there's a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.

For the individual it doesn't matter what the company name is. It matters what they're paid.

I assume that's a reference to Mike Abbott, as he's a software VP at GM and used to work at Apple. He was only hired this year so I don't see salary data for him, but other "Executive Vice President" positions are paid ~$8.8m as of 2022. No idea what he was paid at Apple, but it's hard to consider a salary that is likely in the high 7 digits or low 8 digits to be a "proper fail." If it is, I would love to sign up for this kind of failure.

Candidates that will the whole party will find exciting are basically a once in a generation event, if that. This generation's such candidate was Obama. Democrats as a party are reliant on far too big of a tent to make this a viable strategy or thought process.

A candidate that I, a far left progressive, would get excited about is a candidate that a lot of center-of-left or moderate voters would find boring. Even within wings of the party there's not going to be lockstep excitement (go back to Dec 2019 and ask Sanders supporters how "excited" they'd be for a Warren candidacy!).

This line of argument is consistently just people pining for candidates that more closely reflect our own ideological views, not a reflection of the reality available to us. There was no such candidate in 2016 or 2020 and won't be for 2024. I'm not going to hold my breath for 2028 either. Maybe by 2032 we might see the next Obama, someone that excites the whole party.

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Agreed. Anti-trust law has been whittled away at for generations. FTC cannot do anything about that.

Even the idea of picking their battles will quickly become a damned if they do, damned if they don't scenario. If they only go after the safer cases, they'll let through a ton of big mergers/acquisitions, which in turn will signal that those cases are OK.

If they concluded that they could raise prices to increase profit, they'd do so regardless of theft rates. Those are separate issues.