MudMan

We do “my dick sweats”, for the same thing, which I now realize sounds super gross.

I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?

It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.

I haven’t faceplanted, but I have punched myself in the headset repeatedly. Turns out looking at things up close is not advisable when your face happens to have an invisible box strapped to it.

It’s not a matter of science vs belief, it’s a matter of law versus dogma.

Law is a consensus that, at least in a democracy, aims to set some rule and the consequences of it in advance so that whenever a case applies it is at least relatively predictable and applied equally in each case.

If you pass judgement based on the things you like, or in the religious beliefs you profess you’re not following the law, your imparting dogma. Imposing it, in fact, over others.

You can absolutely make unjust laws, but at least those are the result of a process. In a democracy you can at least understands what steps lead to rectifying an unjust law.

If a person with power decides they don’t like you and they apply that belief inconsistently, irrationally and without following consistent rules there is no recourse or path for society to correct itself (beyond violent revolt, presumably).

Judges don’t need to listen to their heart. Judges need to apply laws generated in a functional system that captures the will of an informed people in a predictable, equitable manner. Judges ruling based on personal beliefs, whether you agree with them or not, are a tyranical manifestation and a very scary thing.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

If the risk is that I’ll have an upset stomach for two days like a toddler coming down from a sugar rush and my knees will also hurt for some reason, then yes, the WHO is right.

I mean… alcohol? You can already buy it easily prepared in all sorts of delicious ways.

Am I not in the spirit of the thing?

Quit drinking if you haven’t. The cost/benefit analysis on that one probably broke a few years ago and you just hadn’t noticed.

Otherwise, meh, do your own thing.

It’s not lip service if I can send messages and other people can receive them.

Again, the status quo is you can’t do that. Hell, in the spectrum of being dragged into reasonableness by the EU kicking and screaming, Meta is orders of magnitude below Apple here.

I mean, we can debate the finer points of the implementation once it’s live, but for now this is nothing but positive movement. If people got over rejecting cookies they can get over dismissing warnings regarding interoperability, and if they don’t, the same regulators have a history of re-spanking unruly malicious compliers.