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LetMeEatCake

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LetMeEatCake ,

I’d agree, though I wonder how much of this is how appealing consumers find the competition? None of them seem to be making major inroads at the moment. The biggest competition is also raising prices, nullifying the competitive penalty Netflix would face from that move.

LetMeEatCake ,

Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I’d love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.

LetMeEatCake ,

Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple’s platform. That’s incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It’s the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.

LetMeEatCake ,

Typical corporate greed in that sense. It’s stupid but I’m not at all surprised by that attitude.

The part that even if they were morally right in that sense… it’s already too late. This is trying to close the barn door not just after the horse left, but after the horse already ran off and made it two states over. There’s definitely value to LLM in having more data and more up to date data, but reddit is far from the only source and I cannot imagine that they possess enough value there to have any serious leverage.

Reddit would/will survive being taken out of internet search results. Not without costs though: it will arrest their growth rate (or accelerate shrink rate, as appropriate) and make people less interested in using the site.

LetMeEatCake ,

It’s not true, I saw a different meme on it the other day and looked it up. This came about because some company made an advertisement at Salzburg Airport that looked kind of like a help desk tag for someone that mistakingly flew to Austria instead.

The giveaway here is that it’s Salzburg, not Vienna. International flyers into Austria are almost universally going to end up in Vienna by default. Vienna’s airport sees ~20x the annual passenger count.

LetMeEatCake ,

To do that the current party in favor of removing rights needs to be kept out of power long enough that they conclude that removing rights is an electoral loser and changes their ideology accordingly.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

LetMeEatCake ,

It could be that.

My first thought is that it might be the post-lockdown tech demand crash hitting Apple later than it hit the rest of the industry. If I remember right Apple was holding on fairly well when the market first started to crash as society shifted into a “post-Covid” mentality, relative to their competition.

Could be that for whatever reason the drop in demand for Apple was just delayed by about a year.

LetMeEatCake ,

That really depends on what their goal is.

From a business perspective it’s not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can “win” for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.

People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren’t also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.

LetMeEatCake ,

The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn’t truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been “fixed.” Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.

Vista’s issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista’s reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.

LetMeEatCake ,

The very start of that article:

October 6 Update: A newly published report has clarified that the discovered code bits are not related to Windows “12.” Also, the next-gen Windows version will not require a subscription.

LetMeEatCake ,

Unit Ready
Unit Ready
Unit Ready

Construction complete

Current PC is too bad for Cities Skylines 2. Can anyone judge the PCPartPicker list I've put together?

This is based off the “Great tier” AMD build, but I’m waffling a bit on the price. I don’t really know a whole lot about PC specs, but I read this is supposed to be a good long-lasting build based on the DDR5 and something newer in the CPU or Video card. That being said, I’ve only really ever build mid-tier and while I...

LetMeEatCake ,

Cities Skylines sees a fairly decent improvement going to the 3D cache chips from AMD (17% speedup here for the 5800x3D). Whats your ability to increase the budget to go for a 7800X3D look like? If this is a genre of game you like and you want to hold off as long as possible between upgrades, it might be worth springing the extra. The difference the 3D cache provides in some games is rather extraordinary. City builders, automation, and similar games tend to benefit the most. AAA games tend to benefit the least (some with effectively no gain).

A 7600X should be more than capable of handling the game though. So it’s not a question of need but if it’s worth it to you.

You do not want 4800 CL40 RAM though, that’s too slow. I’d strongly recommend going for 32GB of RAM as well; 16GB can be gobbled up quickly, especially if you want to use mods in Cities Skylines.

Going up even to DDR5-6000 is not much of a price increase. I’d suggest 6000 and something in the range of CL36-CL40. There’s a lot of 32GB kits in those specs in the ~$90 range. I would not build a gaming system today with 16GB of RAM.

LetMeEatCake ,

I don’t think Kotick is at all certain to be kicked out. As easily as I can see MS letting him go with an enormous golden parachute, I can just as easily imagine them keeping him onboard because all they care about is Activision’s ability to make money.

In all likelihood Blizzard isn’t going to be managed any differently. Microsoft’s modus operandi with gaming acquisitions is to leave the leadership in place and let the dev/publisher run itself. Why is everyone expecting different here? The most likely outcome is MS does nothing to Blizzard and Blizzard continues on more or less the same trajectory as before.

LetMeEatCake ,

It’s also because their current shows suck, and because any shows that are actually good get shitcanned after season 2, because Netflix sees less consumer growth after two seasons.

I’m always surprised at how often other people (not you) will defend this practice from Netflix. It’s classic case of following the data in a stupid way. If their data shows that interest drops off after two seasons, I don’t doubt it.

But… that comes with a cost. They have built a reputation as a company that doesn’t properly finish shows that they start, that will leave viewers hanging. That makes it harder to get people invested in a new series, even one that’s well reviewed. Why get interested in something you know will end on a cliffhanger?

That kind of secondary order impact from their decision isn’t going to show up in data. Doesn’t change that it happens all the same.

LetMeEatCake ,

Mine was never stolen, to break your streak. I had one of the little 4GB ones.

LetMeEatCake ,

So you’re saying I need to stalk them down and introduce myself? Seems like a lot of work to avoid being incorrect, but since this is the internet I am obliged to do what I must to be correct.

LetMeEatCake ,

But did you ever stop to think about how Italy’s system impacts the most important among us: the wealthy shareholders? A truly humane system would prioritize them at all costs.

/s (should be obvious, but I’ll put it there to be safe.)

LetMeEatCake ,

That and the EGS seem to be where Epic funneled all their profits from the height of Fornite. That neither has worked out puts them on shakier ground. How many billions of dollars has been spent on EGS with it being way behind their revenue targets?

As things stand, Epic has very little in the way of a next big revenue source when Fortnite starts to fade as something new takes its place. That (probably) isn’t right around the corner but it will happen eventually. Their bet was on running major digital storefronts; that hasn’t worked out. UE will continue to make good money but not anywhere near enough to sustain the company as it is. UE is simply far smaller than something like FN.

This is likely them realizing this in conjunction with what you said. They need a new big revenue source in the pipeline, since digital storefronts won’t be it. Whatever that next thing is will need lots of money.

LetMeEatCake ,

Curious why everyone in the comments (as of my own comment) is happy about this?

Sure, he exudes C-suite personality and doesn’t act like he’s a gamer. But that doesn’t matter. He oversaw Sony’s rise to dominance in the console market. That dominance is built on the foundation of their first party AAA games — which is a less than ten year old change for them. Sony porting their big games to PC was a project that was fully embraced under his leadership.

Point being, as a gamer it seems like he’s done a fairly decent job. I don’t care how boring his interviews or speeches are or that he looks and acts like he belongs in a board room — they’re all like that anyway even if their public persona says otherwise. I care about games and treatment of consumers.

LetMeEatCake ,

People underestimate how much production other countries are capable of. Of course, China does dominate the manufacturing game, especially mass production.

There’s no shortage of alternatives all the same. Vietnam in particular has been doing quite well taking manufacturing work that companies are moving out of China so as to diversify their production chain. India is rising on that front too. Not to mention that the west truly does far more manufacturing than people give credit for — I’ve found that nearly every category of general goods that I try to buy will have some US made options. That’s not even touching the rest of the west. The big exception being electronics, but those have Vietnam and India as growing alternatives, with Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore all as solid players in that market.

The overall point being: it’s entirely possible to remove China from the manufacturing chain if there’s enough money behind the push. The US economy is probably large enough to do so with some meaningful struggle. The US and major allies could do so more easily. The difficulty is more political and temporal. Getting everyone on board and committed plus going through with the multi-year long process.

LetMeEatCake ,

Kissinger is 100. He can’t last that much longer… can he?

LetMeEatCake ,

Unity cares. This whole fuckup is Unity trying to further monetize mobile games and get a stranglehold on mobile game advertising. Console/PC games are just collateral damage.

If this costs Unity enough money it might work. I’m not holding my breath but stuff like this has a better chance of working than PC indie devs abandoning Unity does.

Wait, is Unity allowed to just change its fee structure like that? | Confusing, contradictory terms of service clauses leave potential opening for lawsuits. (arstechnica.com)

Wait, is Unity allowed to just change its fee structure like that? | Confusing, contradictory terms of service clauses leave potential opening for lawsuits.::Confusing, contradictory terms of service clauses leave potential opening for lawsuits.

LetMeEatCake ,

Based on their comment, I don’t think they’re the person deciding what engine is used. They work for someone else that has already selected an engine. They need to keep their skills employable first and foremost here.

Hopefully Godot takes off a bit here, I think there’s good room for it to advance with indie devs and maybe use that growth to be able to be more of an alternative to UE sometime afterwards.

LetMeEatCake ,

This year’s new phones are for people that last bought a phone in 2020 or earlier. If the average user is on a three year upgrade cycle (what the data shows as I recall) then you’d expect roughly 1/3 of people to upgrade every year.

This is better for Apple, as it keeps their revenue more spread out instead of heavily concentrated in year one of a three year cycle.
This is better for consumers, as it means new features and upgrades are constantly being made. If they want to upgrade early they can, and they’ll get new features even if it’s only been two years.
This is also better for both Apple and consumers because there’s more opportunities to course-correct or respond to feedback over issues. If Apple only released a phone every other or every three years, it’d take that much longer for the switch to USB-C.

Just because a new product is launched does not mean you need to buy it. Nvidia released a new GPU last year, but I didn’t buy it even though it’s newer than what I currently have. Arguing that new phones shouldn’t come out each year is like arguing that new cars shouldn’t come out each year. It makes no sense.

LetMeEatCake ,

I’m planning to upgrade from a 12 mini, which partly influenced my choice of years too (having seen 3 year data was the main part!). If I had a 12 Pro I think I’d have kept it for an extra year, but the battery is just not sufficient for how my phone use has changed.

I think furthering your extra details here too is I saw someone point out that one of Apple’s slides for the base 15 was comparing its performance to the base 12. Apple knows how often people upgrade. Picking the 12 as a comparison point wouldn’t be an accident — we’re the single largest target audience for the 15. And in a year, they will in all likelihood compare the 16 to the 13 for the same reason.

LetMeEatCake ,

I wonder what the practical implementation would be here. I assume current water infrastructure is two sets of pipes, one for clean water and one for wastewater. Would the solution here be to add a third parallel set of pipes for greywater?

LetMeEatCake ,

This doesn’t need to immediately lower housing costs to have a positive impact.

Hypothetical numbers… If housing was going to go up 5% in the next year and this change causes that to go down to a 1% increase, it will have made things better. Of course, we’d all like to just go straight to lowered housing costs. But individual changes can still do good and bring us towards that goal without strictly accomplishing it.

Senate confirms Biden FCC pick as 5 Republicans join Democrats in 55-43 vote. Anna Gomez confirmation means "FCC can act swiftly to restore net neutrality." (arstechnica.com)

Senate confirms Biden FCC pick as 5 Republicans join Democrats in 55-43 vote. Anna Gomez confirmation means “FCC can act swiftly to restore net neutrality.”::Anna Gomez confirmation means “FCC can act swiftly to restore net neutrality.”

LetMeEatCake ,

Hopefully we’ll see the return of net neutrality. It was implemented the last time that the FCC was 3-2 dem, then it was revoked when that switched to 2-3. This is the first time that dems are in charge since that revocation.

LetMeEatCake , (edited )

That depends on how long FCC is able to keep it implemented for, IMO.

Something that gets lost a lot in policy discussion is that once you implement a business regulatory policy like this, you create a constituency for that policy. It’s an advantage in preserving hard fought gains but that also means the timelines need to work for it. The problem net neutrality faced the first time is that it was (a) late in Obama’s presidency, (b) held up by court cases, and (c) reversed early on by Trump’s FCC. There wasn’t much time for the internet business community to build a business model around it.

If net neutrality is regulated into existence for 5+ years, at that point businesses will have come to rely on its existence. Taking it away will be harder, especially for a big pro-business party if it’s getting an earful from megacorporations that want things to stay as they are.

Of course, I do agree that legislating it is the most robust option and would be the best course of action. I just don’t see legislation as the only option with any longevity. FCC rules can be that if the timelines work.

LetMeEatCake ,

The future of renewable energy is very promising. It’s easy to miss how fast it can turn around when growth it grows so much year-to-year but starts at a small place. Keep this kind of growth up and the grid will be clean a lot faster than seems possible.

Beyond solar I’m also very hopeful about offshore wind efforts in the US.

LetMeEatCake ,

As I understand it, most disc copies of games today aren’t viable in the first place. Either all of the game data is not on the disc and some needs to be downloaded anyway, or the game copy on the disc is in such a shit state that you wouldn’t want to play that specific copy.

Discs don’t really protect us in the sense of ownership. It’s still reliant on the same backend to enable it in most practical senses.

LetMeEatCake ,

We still live in the same society as others. People often adopt the cultures and ideologies of where they end up, or at least move closer to it than they were before. If reddit shifts its userbase to the right — even if the net effect is from “very very left” to “very left” — it will impact the lives of all of us that live in societies with large numbers of people using that site, as it’ll filter down into our politics. Even if we don’t interact with them.

For a long time, the “default” ideology of the internet was on the left. As internet usage has become dominated by a handful of sites owned by megacorporations, there has been a not at all subtle effort to nurture a conservative ideology on those sites. Stuff like reddit holding off on banning the Trump sub for however long or twitter refusing to implement their hate speech detection because it correlated too strongly with conservative politicians (not to mention what Musk has done there). I don’t think this is an accident.

LetMeEatCake ,

Even for the third party shipper, it’s still Amazon’s choice to contract out or permit shipping via that company.

The actual problem with these reviews is that the review is meant to tell us if the product is good, not the seller. A review of Amazon on the product page for… I don’t know, an electric toothbrush… on Amazon’s storefront doesn’t help me decide if that specific model of electric toothbrush is worth buying.

LetMeEatCake ,

Key word being history. Slavery was entrenched in the history of society and we successfully separated the two (although society still needs to work on the second order effects, sadly). Just saying it’s been that way in the past is not a valid argument for why it should continue. That’s basically an appeal to tradition fallacy.

LetMeEatCake ,

Gotta look at it the other way to trigger them. A vasectomy is an automated instantaneous abortion. You’re so pro-abortion that you’re causing them every single time you have sex!

LetMeEatCake ,

They believe… something. I know they hate contraceptives and in part because they can prevent conception. I don’t remember if it’s exactly in line with seeing them as equivalent to abortion. Either way it’s insane.

LetMeEatCake ,

In this case it’s not truly a result of limited fab availability.

TSMC has two main variants of their 3nm node. The original one, that Apple is using, is N3B. It has worse yields, so TSMC started work on another variant, N3E. N3E has much better yields but will not be ready until late 2023 or early 2024. Everyone else besides Apple opted to skip N3B and go for N3E. Apple, with their very consistent release cadence, didn’t want to wait for N3E. So Apple — and only Apple — is using N3B.

Thus, we have:
(1) TSMC only has one 3nm node in 2023: N3B.
(2) TSMC only has one customer for N3B: Apple.
(3) TSMC will never have any other customer use N3B, and have no incentives to build capacity beyond what is needed now.

It’s effectively tautological that their entire 3nm allocation will be sold exclusively to Apple in 2023.

LetMeEatCake ,

The practical performance differences between N3B and N3E should be more or less immaterial to the end user. N3E just has a lower defect rate, meaning a greater portion of chips will be valid when made under that process versus made under N3B. There was a fairly credible rumor a few weeks ago that Apple was paying TSMC per valid chip instead of the industry standard per wafer. So for us, the end users, the cost won’t even be passed down — that’s just a cost that TSMC has to bear.

That said, if you don’t need a new phone now, waiting is good in general. Whatever is out today, they’ll have something better next year. Wait as long as you’re willing and able between upgrades. Unless you’re absolutely loaded with money, I guess.

LetMeEatCake ,

GPU prices being affordable is definitely not a priority of AMD’s. They price everything to be barely competitive with the Nvidia equivalent. 10-15% cheaper for comparable raster performance but far worse RT performance and no DLSS.

Which is odd because back when AMD was in a similar performance deficit on the CPU front (Zen 1, Zen+, and Zen 2), AMD had absolutely no qualms or (public) reservations about pricing their CPUs where they needed to be. They were the value kings on that front, which is exactly what they needed to be at the time. They need that with GPUs and just refuse to go there. They follow Nvidia’s pricing lead.

LetMeEatCake ,

I agree, it’s just strange from a business perspective too. Obviously the people in charge of AMD feel that this is the correct course of action, but they’ve been losing ground for years and years in the GPU space. At least as an outside observer this approach is not serving them well for GPU. Pricing more aggressively today will hurt their margins temporarily but with such a mindshare dominated market they need to start to grow their marketshare early. They need people to use their shit and realize it’s fine. They did it with CPUs…

LetMeEatCake ,

It’s especially egregious with high end GPUs. Anyone paying >$500 for a GPU is someone that wants to enable ray tracing, let alone at a $1000. I don’t get what AMD is thinking at these price points.

FSR being an open feature is great in many ways but long-term its hardware agnostic approach is harming AMD. They need hardware accelerated upscaling like Nvidia and even Intel. Give it some stupid name similar name (Enhanced FSR or whatever) and make it use the same software hooks so that both versions can run off the same game functions (similar to what Intel did with XeSS).

LetMeEatCake ,

The movie made sense IMO, its main issues are that so much of the crew are hollow. Their characters are threadbare, they’re on screen for the express purpose of dying. Even if we don’t pick up on it specifically we pick up on it subconsciously and they feel off. The geologist and biologist that die early on have basically one trait each (biologist is fake tough guy, biologist is nerdy-nervous). They don’t feel like real people.

I liked Prometheus a lot, but the very-real problems with it would in my estimation require way more than a director’s cut to fix. Unless there’s a lot of filmed character development out there, I suppose. The insignificant characters needed to be replaced with a far smaller number of significant characters to join the handful of existing significant characters. Basically requires a rewrite.

LetMeEatCake ,

I wouldn’t be surprised if the ad supported tier made more money than the cheapest ad-free tier. Ads are a huge business.

LetMeEatCake ,

First question I had was what it was based on. Based on the FAQ answer of default outgoing connections, it would seem to be Firefox (has two connections to Mozilla for script and domain updates).

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warns remote workers: 'It's probably not going to work out for you' (nypost.com)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warns remote workers: ‘It’s probably not going to work out for you’::Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees who defy his edict to return to the office three days a week that “it’s probably not going to work out for you.”

LetMeEatCake ,

In other unbiased polling, the wolf spoke to all the other wolves in the pack and they all prefer that the sheep be eaten.

LetMeEatCake ,

This is true, but fuel taxes are very low. Most states that are charging an EV “road maintenance fee” (with whatever phrasing they select) are charging way more than an ICE vehicle would contribute in fuel taxes. And while it is true that BEVs are heavier than ICE vehicles, all else held equal, and that road wear and tear is strongly dependent on weight… as I recall reading, the overwhelming majority of road wear and tear is the result of freight trucks and similar vehicles.

I’m all for going electric, but an 8500lb truck is not helping the environment.

The issue here isn’t that it’s an EV in this case. It’s that it’s a truck. I’d wager than >95% of people buying trucks in the US would be perfectly served by a four door sedan or comparable sized vehicle. Trucks have largely become expensive vanity items to act as an external signal of a person’s cultural identity. Contractors and similar that actually use a truck for truck purposes still exist, but they’re comically outnumbered by people buying trucks for no good reason.

LetMeEatCake ,

You can look at it too for looking at what causes people to be conservative.

Conservatism at its core psychological roots is fear of change. In a vacuum, people who are well served by the status quo are the ones least likely to want change. The historical adage of people becoming more conservative as they age was basically a result of that: when you’re young you don’t have much to lose from change. As you age you gain the opportunity to buy a house, to get married, to have kids, to get promoted at work and see your income go up significantly, to develop some meaningful job security. And so on. Thus, as people age they gained things, status, accomplishments, all the various life goals being accomplished. Even if change would probably make things better for them, they didn’t want to risk it. Things were OK.

The reason we see that adage breakdown is because we’ve seen the core causes breakdown too. Buying a home five years ago was a struggle compared to how it was historically. Buying a home today costs so much that it makes buying a home five years ago look trivial. Many couples are now intentionally delaying or forgoing becoming parents because children cost so much: just giving birth can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s just to get them to day 1 of existence. Education costs keep going up. Job security is down. Wage increases are seen as something that even the “professional class” has to fight for, requiring a job hop to get a raise instead of getting one as par for the course from staying at an employer.

In light of that breakdown… far fewer people are afraid of the risk of change. The 30-something of today has a lot less at risk from change. Even much of the lower half of the upper middle class of today is far more able to stomach the risk of change.

It’s really not a surprise at all.

LetMeEatCake ,

It’s useless for answering a questions that wasn’t asked, sure. But I didn’t pretend to answer that question. What it is useful for is answering the topic question. You know, the whole damn point?

How much of a factor off do you think the estimate is? You think they need three drives of redundancy each? Ten? Chances are they’re paying half (or less) for storage drives compared to retail pricing. The estimate on what they could get with $100m was also 134 EB, a mind boggling sum of storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using up on the order of 1 EB/year in needed storage. There’s also a lot more room in their budget than 0.34%.

The point is to get a quick and simple estimate to show that there really will not be a problem in Google acquiring sufficient storage. If you want a very accurate estimate of their costs you’ll need data that we do not have. I was not aiming to get a highly accurate estimate of their costs. I made this clear, right from the beginning.

If each video was on a single hard drive the site would not be able to function as even the fastest multi actuator hard drive can only do 524 MB/s in a perfect vacuum.

The most popular videos are all going to be kept in RAM, they don’t read them all off disk with every single view request. If you wanted a comment going over the finer details of server architecture, you shouldn’t have looked at the one saying it was doing back of the envelope math on storage costs only, eh?

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