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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • Where I live fall is basically a completely random mix of anything between +15 °C and dry weather (but the ground is still wet from yesterday) and rain at +1 °C, with nights being anything between +10 and -5.

    Winter is basically two months of damp +2°C days followed by a February with actual snow that nobody is really happy about because it happens at the worst time possible.

    Spring is nice. Then summer rolls around with temps between 30 and 40 °C because of climate change. It’s still better than fall and winter.


  • I don’t know if they get a share or if they get a flat payment for every device that has crap preinstalled. Either way, not doing it would reduce profits and therefore go against the interest of the shareholders who would then have grounds to the CEO for failing to do their job.

    I’m very much unhappy with how that works but it’s a consequence of how publicly traded companies work. Companies that make it their legally binding goal to maximize shareholder gains attract more investors, have more money, and are thus more effective in increasing their market share. Over time they outcompete their rivals until the market is dominated by maximally profitable companies.

    At that point, shit-free products are only available if there is a clear indication that they will generate more profit than shitty products. And the handful of major players will happily collude to make sure only shitty products enter the market, increasing profits for everyone. Welcome to cartelville, population: the three companies that make up 95% of the world market.



  • Would be great but the manufacturer would be at a disadvantage because that bundled bullshit effectively subsidizes the device. So you’d have to either raise prices or accept a lower profit margin.

    Due to the high barrier of entry (e.g. because of patents) it’s unlikely that a privately owned company can make a big market entry, especially across countries. And a public company will be forced by the shareholders to maximize profit so either you bundle crapware or they fire you as CEO.

    Of course if you look outside the TV market such devices already exist. High-quality digital signage devices can easily be had – for about three times the price of an equivalently-sized TV.








  • To put in context how much they are driving up demand: OpenAI just bought 40% of the global wafer production from two of the three major RAM manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix. SK Hynix Micron (best known for their Crucial brand) decided to drop out of the consumer market entirely.

    Of course the other AI companies are going to try to nail down supply as well. If they get similar deals, 10 € per GB of DDR5 will look cheap.

    This will increase the cost of computers, phones, and laptops, both directly and indirectly (e.g. GPUs will also become more expensive; VRAM doesn’t grow on trees). We’re already at a point where Samsung Semiconductors reportedly refused to sell RAM to Samsung Electronics. I fear we might enter into an age of 2000 € basic office PCs and 1000 € mid-tier phones if the AI bubble won’t pop first. Even when it does, the repercussions will be felt for some time.


  • Jesus_666@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldquesting
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    17 days ago

    I’m not complaining about a hero having some kind of advantage that allows them to go on an epic quest. I’m complaining about the devices of a) fantasy universes inexplicably having game mechanics like character levels and numeric stats and b) the protagonist being ridiculously overpowered, usually without expending any effort.

    The former feels like a lazy shorthand so the author doesn’t have to be able to actually depict power differences well; just pretend everything is Dragon Quest and throw around a few numbers. The latter is instant gratification wish fulfillment that may be nice every once in a while but feels wildly overused.

    Heroes can win without being overpowered. They can start out weak and grow with their challenges. They can even stay weak but persevere through it all. I think a heavily condensed Lord of the Rings clone would probably make for a more compelling story than yet another cookie cutter story à la “I Got Reincarnated In Another World And My Cheat Skill Made Me Level 9999 Instantly”.



  • Those two studios for the game because it was Hardsuit’s idea to make the game in the first place and TCR barely kept Paradox from canceling the have after they kicked Hardsuit out of the project.

    I think it basically went like this (simplified):

    Hardsuit: “Hey Paradox, we wanna make Bloodlines 2. We have everything worked out, we have the best possible writers involved, and it’s a real passion project; here’s our pitch.”

    Paradox: “Wow, that pitch convinced us completely! You get all the green lights in the world!”

    Hardsuit: “Now keep in mind we’ve never done a project on this scale before so we’ll need plenty of time—”

    Paradox: “We set you on an extremely aggressive schedule. Surely that’ll motivate you into delivering perfection!”

    Hardsuit: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we need.”

    Paradox: “But it’s the exact non-opposite of what you get. Now chop chop, we already gave the release date to the press.”

    Hardsuit: “We’re not getting the game done in that timeframe.”

    Paradox: “No problem; we’ll delay a little bit. Surely nobody will mind.”

    Hardsuit: “It’ll take more than ‘a little bit’. We told you that—”

    Paradox: “Okay, sure, whatever, the game’s canceled now. Don’t call us back.”

    TCR: “Hey, can we try to salvage this? We really wanna see this made. But we’d like to throw away all of the writing, characters, and gameplay. Everything except the setting, really.”

    Paradox: “Okay, sounds reasonable. But make it snappy.”

    TCR: “We’d also like to change the name because what we can deliver won’t really be a proper sequel to—”

    Paradox: “Bloodlines 2 it is. Good discussion. Glad we talked about this.”

    TCR: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we asked for.”

    Paradox: “Can’t hear you; too busy launching the sequel to one of the most beloved cult classics in the action RPG genre.”

    Customers: “Well, this is a pretty bad sequel. Decent game but they really shouldn’t have called it Bloodlines 2. We’re disappointed.”

    Paradox: “The only logical course of action is to swear to never release a non-strategy game ever again because nobody appreciates our art.”



  • Except if they then have to run it on their machine and the setup instructions start with setting up a venv. I find that a lot of Python software in the ML realm makes no effort to isolate the end user from the complexities of the platform. At best you get a setup script that may or may not create a working venv without manual intervention, usually the latter. It might be more of a Torch issue than a Python one but it still means spending a lot of time messing with the Python environment to get things running.

    This may color my perception but the parts of the Python ecosystem I get exposed to as an end user these days feel very hacky. (Not all of it is, though; I remember from my Gentoo days that Portage was rock solid.)