Skip Navigation

User banner
Posts
0
Comments
802
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • It's not about if, it's about when.

    People had three years to convince Biden that he shouldn't run. They didn't. Now you get Biden, and until he's elected again criticism equals promoting the Trump campaign.

    I mean, Stewart isn't a complete idiot, he did make a case for both candidates being too old, which is a smarter counter than most of the Democratic campaign, let alone the Dem left, is using to push back. You're not gonna successfully deny Biden is old, but you can convince people that Trump is also, maaaaybe.

    But that doesn't change the fact that any statement right now is a campaign statement. People think they can ignore politics for years and then act all surprised when they're told to postpone "valid criticism". Nah. The one thing Stewart said that I agree with wholeheartedly is that this is life now. Forever. And in this life you don't mess with your candidate's campaign even a little bit until after the votes are counted.

  • Yeah, I'm confused about this take. RBG should have stepped down because by not doing it she created the opportunity for Trump to tilt the majorities in the Supreme Court. Notably, nobody had the balls to criticise her for it, even after she died and made that exact thing happen.

    If Biden dies in office Trump doesn't get to pick the vice president. And somehow he still gets constant crap despite the other guy being just as old.

    We're doing "but her emails" again. I thought we weren't gonna do "but her emails" again.

  • Yeah, well, welcome to why you don't talk shit about your candidate during a campaign. Your nuanced point is going to get flattened down to "even his allies are criticising him". Weirdly, this exact quote dismantles his entire monologue there.

    The best joke in that entire thing was Klepper accusing him of bothsiderism and asking whether he had saved democracy yet. Because it was poignant. Lampshading it is funny, but it doesn't change the outcome.

    Well, second best joke, the best was Ronnie Chieng going to town on potato skins, but that's neither here not there.

  • Man, I've had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

    I have enough coomputers laying around that I'd move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn't tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I'm not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

  • Hi, yes, I'm here. The user. Of both, in fact.

    Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren't relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.

    Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the "fediverse".

  • I'm not sure about the digital-only stuff, but the OP is specifically talking about yt-dlp as an alternative to ripping the BRs, and I have to agree that ripping the disks will be easier and yields better results.

    Hardware availability is the trickiest part, especially for UHD, but if you have a drive that will deal with the disks you have I certainly wouldn't bother with the stream rip.

    But hey, as a fallback, it's good to have the option.

  • I don't really know what this conversation was meant to be about at this point, and after re-reading the thread in order a few times I think you don't either.

  • For straight revenue, yeah, that'd be right. Technically everything else is a rounding error. But if Epic was one of those single game unicorns like Riot or Rovio this would not make much sense. The synergies of Unreal with both the movie and theme park buisness for Disney seem like a better fit. I mean, assuming the move makes actual sense, Disney is out there talking about game collaborations and it's not like it's the first time they've spent money randomly and poorly in the gaming business. I just think the investment would make sense even if Fortnite wasn't in the mix.

    And either way it's being blown out of proportion by the news because they haven't even bought the company. 1.5B is what? 10% as much as Tencent owns?

  • I genuinely never engaged with Reddit at all, so I'm not in a position to compare, but I don't think the numbers suggest that Reddit "is dying" or even that it got significantly impacted.

    Which is fine by me. If anything, the vibe here is less Reddit and more "late 90s/early 00s forums" and that's an improvement on my book.

  • I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so... meh.

    Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.

  • I'm not sure what you think "our" game is.

    I mean, in my game there is a functioning rule of law where separation of powers is real and universal access to the justice system is enforced regardless of income level. In that game when you set a rule that rule is applied across the board. And yeah, if the system is not playing that game you're supposed to make it play it.

    Is that the game? Because it's a good game.

  • That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

    From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.

  • Right, but that's my point, compute is compute is compute. There are tensor acceleration cores in commercially available hardware dating back five years. They capped things above a specific performance threshold, is my understanding, but that just means you need more of the less powerful hardware, so all you've done is make things more expensive/less energy-efficient, but not block any specific application. Not in cheap, portable chips, not in huge industrial data center processors.

    So not particularly useful to stop cyberwarfare, not particularly useful to stop military applications. The only use I see is making commercial applications less competitive. Specifically on the training side of things.

  • None of that makes any sense. "Western chips" all come from Taiwan in the first place. "Western designed chips" are also in laptops and mobile phones, including tons of Chinese devices, and that's assuming you mean to include South Korea as "Western", which is a bit of a stretch. Those are fundamentally interchangeable with military hardware. Nobody is putting 4090s and A100s in ICBMs.

    Make it make sense. What specific hardware is this stopping from getting to China and for what application?

  • I am very confused about this ongoing thing regarding "stifling China's access to AI models". Does the US government think GPUs are magic? All you need to make a ML model is some tensor math and a web crawler, maybe some human processing on the later bits. You're not gonna stop China from making them. You're not gonna stop college kids with gaming rigs making them.

    I'm guessing the endgame here is to make it slightly more expensive to do this in China to get American companies to have slightly better versions in the market and prevent a TikTok situation, rather than any legitimate strategic goal. Right? I mean, besides commercial protectionism I don't see how this type of language makes sense.

  • Ah, great, we should just let them run with it and never try, then.

    I swear, defeatism gets me so bad. It may just be the most conservative power at work, along with "all politicians are the same".

    Incidentally, anybody thinking about a class action over Sony removing lifetime access to Funimation movie downloads? Because it's the second time in a year they risk it on that one and I deeeeefinitely want to see that tested in court.

  • I... yeah, what? Disney is what does it? You were cool with Tencent, Sony, Lego, the massive fine for mishandling underage information? Disney. That's your line.

    Alright.

  • Hah. The framing from normie news is so weird. It's "bizarrely Disney is investing on Fortnite", instead of "Disney buys a stake on the people making Unreal, which at this point is like half of their and everybody else's VFX pipeline".

    I wonder if the gaming news guys will have a better picture or the "Disney Fornite whaaaa?!" angle is what people will take away from this across the board.

  • I mean, good luck getting past entertainment industry contracts.

    But also... please, please, PLEASE make it so that political opinions and conspiracy theories can't be used to fire people. I double dare the CEO of a social media network, an electric car company and an aerospace company create a labor market where you can sue for discrimination for that reason.

    I mean, I only want to see it if I can reset the timeline back to this point, but still, I REALLY want to see it.

  • You haven't changed my mind, but now I'm mildly concerned about you and I'm here if you need help.