• 0 Posts
  • 57 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • Some of the charity is self-serving, e.g. eradicating diseases means he’s less likely to catch them (and really any billionaire not funnelling funds to pandemic prevention etc. is being moronic), and founding charter schools on land he owns so over the life of the school they pay more in rent for the lease than they cost to build is just a tax dodge. Most billionaires are just so evil that they won’t spend money on themselves if other people who aren’t paying also benefit, so in comparison, Gates’ better ability to judge what’s in his interests makes him look good.



  • You should be leaving enough stopping distance between yourself and the next car that someone can merge easily and you have time to react by slowing down or moving to the next lane to make space for them. If you don’t have that much stopping distance, then you’re already in danger if the car in front brakes suddenly, e.g. if they need to do an emergency stop because of something you’ve not seen, they have a medical event making them lose consciousness and accidentally step on the brake pedal, or their car breaks down in a way that forces the breaks on.


  • In a lot of the world they’re regulated as novelty items, so free from the regulation that stops harmful chemicals being in things like kitchen utensils and childrens’ toys, despite many of the same potential risks being present. You don’t need to use a corner-cutting regulation-ignoring retailer like Wish to get your fix of toxic plasticisers etc…




  • They focus on the low end, but a lot of people who only want low end GPUs care about Minecraft, and their OpenGL performance is abysmal, so Minecraft runs like molasses. If you play a lot of Minecraft, Nvidia’s cards manage to be much better value. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be fixed if they’re willing to invest in writing native OpenGL drivers instead of going through a compatibility player or mitigated if they invested more in making the compatibility layer faster, but that would mean deciding they’re losing a lot of sales this way, as it wouldn’t be cheap.







  • Investors have been happy to incentivise companies to hire idiot CEOs and managers who say the right buzzwords but reduce output by making bad decisions and only hiring people who don’t think they’re bad decisions, so an automated buzzword-dispensing idiot isn’t necessarily going to seem to investors like a downgrade compared to what they think most workers are. They’re just as likely to think AI lets them invest in companies where even the lowest tier employees are potential CEO material, and continue not noticing that the per-employee efficiency keeps going down. Data showing that layoffs nearly never pay for themselves doesn’t stop stock prices soaring whenever one happens, so I wouldn’t expect data showing AI makes companies less profitable to stop stock prices going up when a company announces a new dumb way they’ll use it.





  • If you trust Adam Smith, an efficient market would quickly make new goods and services available for the lowest possible price. People are supposed to be incentivised to sell things, and competition is supposed to stop an excessive amount of money being diverted to profits instead of reinvestment and price cuts. There are supposed to be systems in place that ensure that there are always opportunities for competition, but the wealthiest have the most power to erode those mechanisms and the most interest in eroding them, and neoliberals think an Ayn Rand novel is the definitive text on how capitalism works rather than Adam Smith’s work, so even if you land in the capitalism makes everyone better off mode, it doesn’t last for long before it falls back into fuedalism with extra steps mode.


  • It’s pretty obviously both things that were a problem. A mediocre prebuilt with a $200 premium over other mediocre prebuilts was unattractive, but plenty of people do buy overpriced mediocre prebuilts. The killer feature being that nearly no games were compatible was going to kill it even if the price was right, though.

    Now we’re in the era of Proton, and games just work, if the price is fair, it’ll sell. If the price is you cannot get anything like this without spending much more like the Deck or how consoles used to be priced when the hardware made a loss and the profits came from games, then it’ll sell really well.


  • I don’t think anyone who ever texted like that is still under 25 anymore. It rapidly dropped off around 2010 as smartphones with full keyboards became widespread, and not using full words was a signal that you hadn’t got one yet. That was fifteen years ago, so to still be under 25, you’d have had to be texting people while aged under ten, and people didn’t give preteens phones back then.