• 0 Posts
  • 3.44K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • I think it would be a net zero for babies getting access to food because it’s not like it’s being stolen to be destroyed or processed into something that won’t eventually get fed to some baby.

    Though it might be equivalent to scalping if the goal is to create a shortage to sell at a higher price in the same area. But I’d bet that if it’s being sold locally, it’s at a discount.


  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldThe rule of law
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 days ago

    With the current two party system, voting seems more like picking whether you want to sit on the left or ride side of the train because one side has a nicer view and less aggressive billboards. And, depending on which side has more people sitting on it, they either pick a conductor that insists on maximum power at all times or one willing to use the brakes.

    Either way, the tracks are going to the same destination. And we’re currently approaching a station.



  • Thing is, if they have backups, even editing data doesn’t do anything. Or they could even just have it set up to only display the most recent version but still keep each edit on the db. Wouldn’t even be hard to implement. Hell, it wouldn’t even be that hard to implement a historical series of diffs so they don’t have to store the full comments for each edit if the edit is a small one.

    Like if I wanted to run a service that made it easier to find interesting data, part of that would be to flag deletes and edits as “whatever was there before has a higher chance of being interesting”.

    Once something is posted, IMO just assume that it can’t be unposted and trying to unpost it might work similarly to the Streisand effect.

    Even here. Sure, the source is open and I’d bet looking at the delete and edit functions would make it look like everything is fine. But other federated servers don’t have to run the same code and can react to delete and edit directives from other servers however they want. The main difference between this platform and Reddit in regards to control over posted information is the fediverse can’t prevent entities from accessing the data for free (albeit with less user metadata like IP and email).


  • Exactly. Oh and I also just remembered another angle: their anti-linux stance. They used to make games with native Linux support, but as I understand it, they’ve even removed Linux support from some games that already had it, trying to keep the Microsoft monopoly going. I wonder how much money ms is giving epic for that.

    Same reason why a lot of the non-steam handhelds are non-starters for me. And yeah, I can live without games that depend on Windows kernel-level anti-cheat.

    My backlog is so full I could keep entertained even if I ignore every single game I don’t currently have in my steam library. Hell, I even ignore some that are there when I realized they have denuvo or something like that after buying and the refund window has already passed when I do notice.


  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldMeme.
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 days ago

    Yeah, from my pov, it’s not about silencing their opinions as much as it is wanting to avoid their authority because they abuse it to push their opinions.

    Same reason I ultimately left Reddit. Admins were making choices I didn’t like and forcing them on their users. The new site and official app both suck, but I had the option of using other apps or the old site. Even the old site isn’t a great experience on mobile vs some 3rd party apps, but then they killed off the apps in a way that looked like they weren’t being honest about (though in hindsight it was more about wanting to price access for AI training than specifically wanting to kill the 3rd party apps imo).

    Lemmy isn’t immune from any of that, but the impact isn’t as high because federation gives options. And corruption turns into more of a game of whack a mole instead of “throw lots of money at the one entity controlling it” like Reddit and Twitter.



  • Yeah, they expressed that they wanted to join the online game store scene and the big feature they were offering to draw in users was… anticompetitive exclusivity deals!

    Plus the company killed off the unreal tournament franchise because they didn’t want it to compete with fortnite.

    I have no interest in supporting a company that thinks removing options is the best way to get users to use their products.

    It’s the same shit that has turned streaming services from great back when it was new to now having content spread across many competing services. I’d rather they competed based on their own platform’s features and advantages than the whole “if you want to watch x, you must use service y”. It’s just a series of mini monopolies.






  • Doesn’t really apply in this case.

    TSMC charges per wafer. If yield improves, that means each wafer will have higher quality chips, on average. Which could mean less junk chips and/or more chips that will make it to a higher bin (which could mean more speed or less that needs to be fused off due to a flaw).

    Also, you’re not the customer they are talking about. They mean their customers, like Apple, AMD, Nvidia, etc.

    Though you might see some savings because higher yields means inventory levels increase, which could mean a lower optimal price on the supply/demand curve. Even if the MSRP is lower than the optimal price, it would still mean less opportunity to scalp the chips for profit.



  • A part that complicates it is nutrition. Nutrients are related to food cravings, but if you don’t have access to food that has the nutrients your body is craving, you might eat other things in an attempt to satisfy that craving. But since they don’t contain what your body needs, the craving doesn’t go away, so the drive to eat more remains.

    It’s like the difference between being satisfied and full. For the first one, your body decides it doesn’t need anything more and the desire to eat just isn’t urgent (comfort/habit eating can still be a thing though). When you’re full, it just means your stomach is full and you can’t eat more without discomfort. But once there’s room again, the hunger might return.

    It was something I’d always notice with McDonald’s. One big Mac never felt like it was enough. I’d eat the food and then be disappointed because it was all gone but I still wanted to eat.

    But a good meal with a variety of ingredients can satisfy even if the volume of food isn’t high. Like I’ve only tried fine dining once and went in to the 9 course meal expecting to need to stop for a burger or something afterwards because I knew the portions of each course would be tiny. I walked out of that restaurant with room in my belly but no desire to fill it with anything else.

    It’s also why pregnancy cravings are so strong. The body needs more nutrients when building another body, plus the timing of accessing those nutrients is more important.


  • It’s a story that’s been repeating for decades now. Company creates a new market with new useful tech, run by engineers passionate about the tech, experiences exceptional growth, becomes large corporation, much larger than any competition. Uses relative wealth to keep competition from catching up. Eventually saturates market to the point where market growth doesn’t finance the growing R&D expenses (which were tuned assuming previous rate of growth would just continue). At some point, profit increases start coming from business/marketing side of things more than engineering side, resulting in MBAs and marketers getting more promotions and eventually control of the company. Then tech stagnates because they don’t think investing in R&D is as worthwhile. Also aren’t able to prioritize what R&D is still happening effectively because they don’t really understand the tech as well as engineers. But they tread water and even increase profits because they dominate the market.

    Until competition that is engineering focused (often also made up of former engineers from the dominant company) catches up or creates a new market that makes theirs start going obsolete. Suddenly trouble, then they either pivot to quietly supporting businesses that continue using their products, or gets in trouble with the law because of increasingly anticompetitive practices.

    Xerox could have owned the PC market but thought they could continue being a household name sticking with copiers. IBM outsourced everything and people eventually realized they didn’t need IBM. FoxconnFairchild had two groups of engineers leave and create Intel and AMD when they were dissatisfied with how management was running the company. And now Intel coasted while AMD floundered and was completely unprepared for TSMC and AMD to make large technical leaps and surpass them.



  • Yeah, it is kinda both in general. Though in this case, the math about this is well-defined: it’s possible to increase a percentage either with addition or multiplication and both of those can make sense, just the words we would use to describe them are the same so it ends up ambiguous when you try going from math to English or vice versa.

    But the fact that switching between communication language and a formal language/system like math isn’t clear cut does throw a bit of a wrench in the “math doesn’t lie”. It’s pretty well-established that statistics can be made to imply many different things, even contradictory things, depending on how they are measured and communicated.

    This can apply to science more generally, too, because the scientific process depends on hypotheses expressed in communication language, experiments that rely on interpretation of the hypothesis, and conclusions that add another layer of interpretation on the whole thing. Science doesn’t lie but humans can make mistakes when trying to do science. And it’s also pretty well established that science media can often claim things that even the scientists it’s trying to report on will disagree strongly with.

    Though I will clarify that the “both” part is just on the translation. Formal systems like math are intended to be explicit about what they say. If you prove something in math, it’s as true as anything else is in that system, assuming you didn’t make a mistake in the proof.

    Though even in a formal system, not everything that is true is provable, and it is still possible to express paradoxes (though I’d be surprised if it was possible to prove a paradox… And it would break the system if you could).


  • Yeah I was just curious because it’s a difficult thing to wrap my mind around on the physics side of things. Like it is capable of generating energy and that energy could be used to spin the motor, but the two parts are opposites. It’s like using the energy from a flywheel to spin that same flywheel.