sushibowl

So weird that only 15% of Steam sessions are using controllers. I thought everyone had a controller. Most games are just better with a gamepad.

Even if that was true, not all games have the same number of players. Counterstrike and dota 2 regularly top the most played list on steam, and are terrible with a controller. It shouldn't be surprising that most sessions have a kb/m if that's what people are mostly playing.

VW is good at making cars, but bad at software. They've had to delay the introduction of new models (Golf, ID.3) because of software issues. Rivian has sort of the opposite problem: their production lines sit still often because of problems in the supply chain.

Volkswagen has the expertise to solve Rivian's production and supplier problems, and the cash they will need to survive and develop some cheaper models (the EV market is stagnating right now for a lack of budget options, and Rivian only sells trucks and SUVs). And they're hoping Rivian software engineers can help them fix their software woes.

The problems listed in the article are real. we've built a system:

1. Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
2. That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.

Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won't be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there's no economic growth.

It's sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is "make more babies." It's short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it's rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).

Unfortunately I don't see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn't be easy but it seems no one is even trying.

The essence of capitalism in one sentence.

I commend your optimism, but personally I'm not sure automation is actually going to carry us through this in the time frames that we need. This population problem is going to hit really hard in the next twenty to thirty years. I don't think we're going to fully automate the world economy in that time.

It's pretty common even in academic literature to treat implied multiplication as having higher precedence than explicit multiplication/division. Otherwise an expression like 1 / 2n would have to be interpreted as (1 / 2) * n rather than the more natural 1 / (2 * n).

A lot of this bullshit can be avoided with better notation systems, but calculators tend to be limited in what you can write, so meh. Unless you want to mislead people for the memes, just put parentheses around things.

How could you learn anything about what people think of microtransactions from the success of a game that doesn't have them? If a beloved franchise added a sequel with microtransactions in it and that sequel tanked, then maybe you'd have a case. From the success of Baldur's Gate 3 the most you could conclude is "people will still buy a game that doesn't have microtransactions," which is not particularly revelatory.

A bunch of AAA games that heavily feature microtransactions are smash hits and made millions of dollars. Sure, people complain about it, but they also purchase tons of them (may not be the same people, mind you). I'm pretty sure we can conclude that not all people hate microtransactions. Hell, publishers will look at Baldur's Gate 3 and probably go "man, this game is good but if they put some paid cosmetics in there they could have made even more money."

And it's probably true.

I kinda skimmed it. So from what I understand, they put a cooling layer behind regular solar panels. Panels get less efficient when they heat up so keeping them cool is where the extra efficiency comes from. The cooling layer is inspired by how plants cool themselves, it seems sort of similar to sweating in a way. Water moves through by capillary action, absorbs heat from the panel, and evaporates. Additionally they discuss:

• using salt water as input water, which will result in some clean water output. It seems you need to kinda flush the cooling layer at night to get rid of salt crystal build up, but this could be a nice bonus in less developed areas.
• use a condenser down the line to recover heat energy from the evaporated output water. Has the potential to raise total efficiency by a bunch of you can use the warm water for heating and the PV generated electricity for power.

They claim the cooling layer doesn't add much extra cost (6 months extra operation to recoup your investment). I wonder what the lifetime of the cooling layer is compared to the photovoltaics themselves. They use some natural fiber I think so maintenance could be an issue.

Does that not mean that reddit would have made a 113 Million profit before his $193 million compensation package?

No. His normal salary is around 300k a year. This $193 million figure was the presumed valuation of a stock/options package he received ahead of the IPO. It doesn't cost the company anything to pay him in stock, so it doesn't affect the profit/loss calculation.

Email is kind of an oligopoly though, if you're not one of the big guys it can get pretty frustrating to run an email server. Even if you do everything right, sometimes you just get randomly blacklisted anyway, you're at the mercy of the big email providers.

Same with JK Rowling, Kanye West, Notch, etc. It's literally so fucking easy for people like this to remain loved by everyone. Just keep your fucking mouth shut. Give nice polite interviews about your job, stay out of politics, let a boring publicity agent manage your social media for you, and enjoy your billions of dollars in peace.

Why is it so hard?

The main problem is that most countries don't have their economic system set up for it. The retirement system also in many cases is not sustainable with a shrinking population. This is going to cause a lot of pain and probably countries will start out with policies aiming to increase birth rates to attempt to maintain the status quo.

You're going to face a lot of resistance trying to actually adapt economic policies to a shrinking population. Especially from older people.

My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don't do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.

They haven't done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they've added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they're adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building... the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.

The problem for me is, it's not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you're free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.

I was curious because of how unashamedly propagandist this article is. So I clicked on the author link. It seems this is the only article he's ever written for this website (I hesitate to call it a news outlet). Also, it says he's a former republican political consultant now working for the Lincoln Project. That's apparently the name of a moderate republican PAC that is trying to fight Trumpism.

So why would a political news website outright publish propaganda from a PAC without any commentary? I've never heard of the new republic before, but they seem to be an otherwise unremarkable progressive political magazine. I couldn't say whether the new republic is getting paid by the PAC to publish this, or whether they just took it because it generally aligns with their own stated political views. I will say that, although it is mentioned at the bottom that the author currently works for the Lincoln Project, I had to really look for that. it also wasn't clear to me at first this was a PAC. So in my opinion, proper journalistic ethical standards are not being upheld here.

Given the article's origins, it's pretty safe to say none of this is genuine. These are moderate republicans who hate Trump, trying desperately to destroy Trumpism. If they truly believed their own article they'd be democrats. And if you're here wondering if the article is worth reading, I'd say it is practically fully content-free. It's all just hopium.

They are worse on the environment then gasoline cars due to the rare earth materials needed to make a EV and it is harsher on the environment when it comes to dispose a EV once they reach end of life.

While it's typically true that making an EV car has more environmental impact than an ICE vehicle, this is more than compensated for by the emissions while driving, says also the EPA. Additionally, new LFP batteries are taking over the EV market and do not require rare earth minerals.

And all a EV car does is demand energy from a power plant which are either using coal or natural gas for the most part. The only "green" efficient power plant option out there is nuclear but no one wants to go nuclear.

Yes, let's just ignore hydro, solar and wind power altogether. Renewable sources are currently almost 25% of US electricity production (more than coal) and growing rapidly. Also, even if you charge the EV with energy from a coal power plant, it's still better than a gasoline car. The reason is efficiency. Power plants are more efficient at getting energy from fuel than a car engine, and electrical engines are more efficiently converting energy to motion.

If your concered about the climate and want to take that into account when getting a new vehicle. I always tell people to buy a used vehicle since it already exists and by driving a used car

This is not bad advice, but even better would be to buy a used EV.

It is occasionally amusing to go to Wikipedia's manual of style "words to watch" page:

This page in a nutshell: Be cautious with expressions that may introduce bias, lack precision, or include offensive terms. Use clear, direct language. Let facts alone do the talking.

Then look at some news headlines and see how many of them violate the rules on that page. Headlines are shit.

I don't get this article, it's clearly got a bone to pick with self-checkout and seems to be contradicting itself in the process:

Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. [...] In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice

Okay, so even given the myriad of poor implementations out there, a majority of people prefer it. But then at the end:

Simply, "customers hate it".

Oh really? Because your quoted survey seems to say the opposite. And then there's stuff like this:

In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn't lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. Just as Dollar General appears poised to add more employees to its check-out areas, presumably increasing staffing costs, other companies have done the same.

This is too light on data. Even a luxurious 1 cashier per 2 self-checkout stations will result in large cost savings for a business where employee costs are a significant fraction of total expenses. Especially in low margin businesses like grocery stores, removing even small amounts of overhead makes a big difference. Just because stores are adding a few employees back, doesn't mean cost-savings are completely negated.

Despite self-checkout kiosks becoming ubiquitous throughout the past decade or so, the US still has more than 3.3 million cashiers working around the nation, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Surprise, a large nation did not completely get rid of cashiers! The number is meaningless without more context: did the number of cashiers go down? What about average cashiers per store? Where is the data?

My point is, maybe companies just went too hard on the cost-cutting and are trying to find the right balance. What is the best ratio of self-checkout to classic cashier checkout? What is the right amount of self-checkout assistants? How do we make checking out yourself a good user experience? All of these things are still being experimented with. What does seem to be clear is that self-checkout has become near ubiquitous, and therefore it is most certainly not a "spectacular failure" by any definition.

It would be pretty funny if GPT starts putting licence notices under its answers because that's what people do in its training data.

It's not impossible, although the loudness wars are pretty much over nowadays. All major music services and players have volume normalisation, many by default, so there's not much point to it any longer.

Also it's pretty tough to find a decades old record still in mint condition, and the sound quality of vinyl gets worse every time you play it.

but is this prompt the entirety of what differentiates it from other GPT-4 LLMs?

Yes. Probably 90% of AI implementations based on GPT use this technique.

you can really have a product that's just someone else's extremely complicated product but you staple some shit to the front of every prompt?

Oh yeah. In fact that is what OpenAI wants, it's their whole business model: they get paid by gab for every conversation people have with this thing.

I see where you're coming from, but I don't think that excuses anything. If you bought a hard copy with the understanding that a digital copy came with the purchase and now they're taking away the digital copy, that's still a Darth Vader "I'm altering the deal" type move.

Fructose is converted into glucose by the liver, so it won't solve much in the end.

But I looked it up. This is just a bunch of herb/fruit extracts. Ginseng, guarana, maca root, that sort of thing. Does nothing of course. And they charge $50 per bottle.

I think you're missing a couple letters there bud.

I had to go and check but this is actually real. Notably, according to the twitter translator he actually said "it's a pain to go around collecting them, so I wish they'd be sent to me in a zip file every week." He's not talking about sharing them at all, he just wants it for the personal spank bank. Incredibly based.

At will employment is really the crux that erodes all other possibilities of strong worker rights. In most European nations, firing employees functions on a sort of whitelist principle. You may not fire your employee except in one of this specific set of situations. This also puts a burden of proof on the company to demonstrate cause for dismissal. The situation in (most of) the US is more like a blacklist: all reasons for firing an employee are valid except for this specific set of situations. Now the burden of proof is on the employee, to show his situation was part of the blacklist.

If any (or) no reason for dismissal is a valid reason, it takes the tooth out of any worker's rights law you might seek to enforce. If you cause trouble for the company you can simply be fired (for "no reason" of course). Yes, that's technically illegal, and you can sue and/or contact the department of labor. They now have to investigate and find proof that you were fired for an illegal reason. Whether you get justice now depends on whether the department of labor is adequately funded, how good (expensive) your lawyer is, how well the company covered their tracks...

This is why many people in the US complain that "they have labor laws, the main problem is lack of enforcement!" The structure of the system is such that good enforcement is required for workers to benefit, but businesses benefit from bad enforcement.

I agree but also disagree. It's true that machines are capable of fine motor control much more quickly and accurately than humans. But this by itself is often not enough.

This achievement should be somewhat surprising because of Moravec's paradox: the observation that, opposite to what early AI researchers expected, intelligence and reasoning skills are comparatively easy for a computer to simulate, while sensorimotor skills are in fact incredibly hard. Notice how, for example, chess engines started beating human players in the 90s or so, but we still don't have a robot that can do something as simple as pick raspberries (because surprise, for a machine picking a raspberry is actually hard as shit).

He paid around $20 billion cash (by selling Tesla stock) and loaned another 6.25 billion personally (loan secured by more Tesla stock). The rest was funded by various bank loans that are now owed by Twitter itself.

One of the neat tricks you can do when you're wealthy is loan billions of dollars to buy a company, then you put those loans in the name of the company you just bought, so you don't have any personal risk. The reason he still needed to pony up $26 billion in cash is because banks thought it was too risky to loan the full amount. They might now regret loaning even this much, Twitter has a substantial debt burden and I understand ad revenues aren't doing great.

Obviously, since the company is private now we don't get as much insight into financials.

When your audience is five years old you don't really need to go anywhere with it.

The numbers are different because the site doesn't naively count every line but merges some as a single package. For example, at the very top of the Debian list we have 0ad, 0ad-data, 0ad-data-common. These are all counted as one single "package."

One might argue that doing the comparison in that way is more useful to an average user asking "which distribution has more software available."

Practically all of us know that the difference between these memory modules is pocket change, when mass produced like this, but for those extra couple cents, they get an extra 100$ from you

This is called capturing consumer surplus through segmentation. There's a pretty good explanation of it here.

The long and short of it is that some people are just perfectly fine spending more money on a macbook, and apple wants to give them a good enough excuse to do so.

Honestly, I hope Reddit stays popular so that most people stay there. As long as Lemmy doesn't turn into another escape for CP/Nazi's/random shit groups.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if various extremist groups end up setting up their own lemmy instances. The whole point of the decentralisation is you can't stop them from doing that. I doubt the big instance will connect with those instances though. We might end up with a sort of alternate mini-fediverse for various groups that don't get accepted into the main one.

This is also your solution if main instances start getting too popular and you don't like them anymore. Set up your own instance and disconnect from the rest. The main selling point of lemmy is you always keep some control over the platform.

protecting their content by licensing it explicitly.

You can do whatever you want, of course. But any license you put on your content here protects it less than not putting any license at all. That's after all what licenses are for, granting people use of your content.

So you're not so much protecting your comments, but graciously allowing them to be used for training for non-commercial purposes, where most people are greedily keeping them to themselves. I suppose that's admirable.

That flail is certainly the worst of the lot. Terrible impractical weapon with scant evidence of it ever being used by anyone.

There's a two-handed version of the flail that is basically an agricultural threshing tool with spikes stuck into the head, which is much more plausible as a peasant's weapon (very similar development process as the nunchaku, also a highly overrated weapon). However most weapons that feature a flexible rope/chain part in their design all suffer from the same drawbacks: difficult to control, and limited striking power.

Yes, it is. Because the area of wind that a turbine can capture is pi*r^2, (where r is the length of the blades), the area increases with the square of the blade length. So doubling blade length gives you four times the wind area.

This isn't about phones. It's mainly about cameras recording 4k/8k video, and devices such as the steamdeck storing lots of games.

Offsetting your own breath seems unnecessary. A human being does not produce CO2 out of nowhere. It comes from oxygen, which we breathe in, and carbon which we eat. The food absorbs the carbon from the atmosphere when it grows, so taken in total the whole cycle is completely carbon neutral.

The reason CO2 concentration is increasing is because we're digging it up from the ground and releasing it into the air. Taking CO2 from the air and then putting it back a short time later is not really an issue.

Also, I'm really questioning OP's numbers here. The CO2 a person produces should be absorbed by about 15 trees, from what I can find. Or is he trying to solve the global climate problem with only potted plants?

Any leftover protons will just combine with oxygen in the air and become water. Really pure water!

Really hot water too, that reaction is just a tad exothermic.

They do not require any online connection. AACS has some ability to revoke media player keys, but it does so by encrypting future releases in such a way that the revoked player can not decrypt them (how this works technically is a bit complicated).

So if they decide to revoke your player, it can still play every Blu-ray disc manufactured before the revokation went into effect.

I don't know if it makes any sense to assign blame here to another party than Sony. As a customer who bought a license to watch these shows, that's the company that you have an arrangement with. It seems that their licensing arrangements with Warner Brothers were limited time, and either WB isn't inclined to renew them or is asking more than Sony is willing to cough up.

Probably a combination of both if I had to guess. WB is seeking to maximise the value of their own ~HBO~ Max streaming platform, so they want the content to be exclusive and not license it out to others. At the same time Sony is probably not excited to keep spending cash every few years just to keep content available to customers, they're not making any additional money from that.

So the end result is the current situation. Obviously customers agreed to whatever terms Sony put in their EULA at the time so I'm sure it's legally covered and whatever, but it seems pretty scummy and misleading nonetheless. Like, if they were honest on the purchase screen and said "you can pay $20 for the right to watch this season of mythbusters, but any time we like we can take it away from you again and there's nothing you can do," how many people would have bought that? But effectively that is what people bought, they just weren't aware.

"Theoretically" is worth very little. It is pretty much the same for every concept NPP, that once construction starts on an actual practical plant, ugly problems start coming up all over the place that were not considered or thought of in the concept stage. Corrosion is one of the biggest ones.

See also the Rickover memo.