Valve didn’t invent lootboxes. The concept has physically existed for decades, they’re called trading card packs or kinder eggs or gashapon. The latter is the inspiration for what became known as lootboxes. The first “lootbox” was actually in the Japanese version of MapleStory in 2004 and it spread in eastern markets (because pay to win is more normalized there) and in mobile games. It wasn’t until 2009 when EA added card packs to FIFA. Hard to say if they were inspired by the lootboxes from the east of the insane football trading card market in the west, or by both. It was only after a year and a half later in 2010 when Valve added loot boxes to TF2. So Valve definitely didn’t invent lootboxes, they weren’t even the first in the west to use them. You could argue that they popularized loot boxes but even there is an argument to be made that Overwatch was a much bigger cultural hit than TF2 or CSGO or EAs FIFA games and normalized lootboxes.

I don’t mind the “Valve is bad” narrative, but at least keep your facts straight. The “strongest DRM” is also BS but others have already somewhat covered that part.

Trump would have a running chance regardless of who the democrats pick would be, the electoral college and republican party have made sure of that.

Up there as one of the most dangerous chemical compounds in the world, near 100% fatality rate.

Maybe in some very broad strokes, but in very broad strokes legs and cars are also the same because they move you from point A to point B.

So you’re mixing up two different meaning of AI to say that AI doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere? When people are talking about bats, the flying mammals, do you also interject with “bats are use to hit a ball” to make some point? No, because deliberately mixing up homonyms is stupid.

It’s pretty clear what kind of AI people are talking about here. Nobody was discussing game AI.

Genuinely not sure if joking or actually dumb.

Have you considered that it looks better because you’re used to seeing it that way? It’s the same with Fahrenheit vs Celsius, the one you’ve grown up with make more sense and is more pleasing to the eye.

So what are we supposed to do, halt all space flights until we figure this out?

Without further research going into how much damage it’s doing there’s no way to say what our next steps should be. Maybe everything we’re doing is still within acceptable limits? Maybe we need tighter regulation on materials going into space. Maybe some materials need to be outright banned.

The only reasonable thing we can do is study it further. Expecting instant result based on one study that only outlines a potential risk is quite frankly just doomerist behavior.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending corporations here. I’m simply stating the fact that climate change denial wasn’t the case of waiting until it’s “fully confirmed”, it was pretty much confirmed back in the 70s. They even had predictions for the next century on how things will go bad if nothing is done and the last time I checked we were pretty on course with their predictions. When it came to the scientific consensus, it was pretty much “fully confirmed”. It was simply the public opinion where it wasn’t “fully confirmed” because corporations deliberately ran disinformation to make it seem like scientists didn’t know what they were talking about.

But this paper isn’t really confirming anything. The paper itself says that the model does not account for all the factors and to literally quote the paper:

As reentry rates increase, it is crucial to further explore the concerns highlighted in this study.

This paper is not presenting a final conclusion, it’s presenting concerns that need further studies. let’s wait for further studies and if there’s scientific consensus about it being an issue I’m all for bringing out the pitchforks. In the mean let’s keep calm and dread over the doom and gloom that is climate change.

We were in the “we don’t know if we’re causing it” phase for a long time because big oil knew about global warming and deliberately ran disinformation campaigns so they could keep profiteering. Had Exxon done the right thing in the 70s we wouldn’t have this looming crisis.

I guess that’s the downside of not having a miniature reactor in your phone.

Luckily user replaceable batteries are coming with an EU regulation some time within the next 5 years, but so far fairphone is the most repairable phone you can have. I don’t think you can replace mobo or chipset, but it does allow replacing quite a few things. For me the 3 most important ones are battery, charging port and screen, as those are the most likely for me to get worn out or broken. I haven’t bought it yet because my current phone is still somewhat chugging along, but my next phone will definitely be a fairphone.

Interesting about about 2k, to give a nice round number.

Voyagers is estimated to have insufficient power for communication by 2032, so from its launch we’ll get a rounded 60 year battery life. Fairphone doesn’t have plutonium batteries (though that would be pretty cool) but you can replace batteries. Let’s say you replace the battery every 2 years which means you need 30 batteries. At 40€ a piece the cost of batteries is 1200€(and you get one extra battery with the phone). Add in the cost of the phone with the delivery of phone + 30 batteries and it comes out to about 2k.

Yeah. I’d totally buy an $800 million phone.

Realistically you can buy something like a Fairphone that lets you replace most parts that wear out or get damaged, which definitely increases the overall longevity of your phone. Or that CAT phone that’s supposed to be super durable if you’re prone to breaking your phone. Or if smart phones aren’t your deal you can maybe find the old reliable Nokia 3210, that phone does not break and the battery can be replaced.

If you have phone longevity issues then stop buying phones that are not designed to be used for a long time.

That’s like saying 14 lashes is more favorable than 15 lashes.

And the denazification claim was a stupid one in the first place because how does Russia verify that Ukraine is denazified? If Ukraine kicks out of the government all the suppose nazis, is Ukraine denazified? What if they all denounce nazism. Does that count? What’s stopping Russia from putting more people in their “nazi” list? It was a vague demand and shouldn’t have been a demand in the first place.

The company I work at “supports” Linux in the sense that you’re allowed to use Linux but then you’re essentially on your own when it comes to solving problems. I asked why there’s no proper Linux support and the short answer was “it’s too much trouble”. The long answer was “don’t ask. I don’t want to get into it”.

So my guess is that setting up a company wide policies and support for Linux is significantly more work than it is for Windows or Mac.

So that you can find that one porn video you watched six months ago that really got you off but you don’t remember how you found it.

You missed to point. Compare instances to communities.

Instances are not isolated. It doesn’t matter much which instance you join because as long as your instance is federated with other instances you can still participate in the communities you want to participate in. If you don’t like your instances, you can join a different instance and as long as that other instance is federated the same way you can get get the exact same experience on a different instance. That means instances are decentralized.

Communities are isolated. It matters which community you join because each post and comment is contained within that community. If you join a small community and there’s a bigger community elsewhere you won’t be able to participate in the bigger community. If you dislike a community and join a different community you can’t get the exact same experience because you can’t interact with the same posts. All of that means communities are centralized.

The reason we have popular communities in the first place is because communities are centralized. Centralized communities also work against the decentralization as your example also pointed out, because instances can leverage their communities.

This is also what I alluded to my steering wheels analogy. We don’t have tools to decentralize communities. We have a steering wheel for each community instead of one wheel for all communities that are essentially the same.

I disagree. The decentralization is thought through at an instance level, not community level. If it was thought through at a community level we’d have tools to aggregate different communities. The current solution is the equivalent of having multiple steering wheels on a car, nobody thought how you’d actually steer the car so you were given the option to steer each wheel separately. It might make sense on a superficial level but if you thought about how users actually use the thing you’d know it’s not the best way to do things.

Because of a lot of things. From graphics side RTX and DLSS left AMD catching up (even if RTX isn’t really that big of a deal now), then there was Nvidia cards being better at crypto mining and now it’s Nvidia cards being better at AI computation + Nvidia pivoting into AI hardware space…

If you want to boil it down to the undeniable, it’s that Nvidia is just better at marketing. Everyone knows what Nvidia is doing. What is AMD doing? Besides playing catch-up to Nvidia.