• 20 Posts
  • 237 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • This is actually backwards. Texas Instruments made so many bomb chips that they ended up with a surplus. This allowed them to throw those chips into calculators and edge out any competition with lower prices (because they already made the chips, so they weren’t paying for them.) Then once they had run off all the competition, they jacked their prices up.

    And that, kids, is why the TI-84 costs $100. It’s tech that costs all of $10 to make and program.





  • I still remember where I was when I saw that things had mathematically tipped past the point of no return for Hillary. It wasn’t a huge shock to me, but that’s mostly cuz I saw the writing on the wall when Hillary’s entire schtick for a while had been “no worries, we’ve got this, it’s not even a problem.” Democrat victories have historically hinged on whether or not they can motivate people to vote, and Hillary’s entire strategy did the exact opposite of that. Every single person independently went “she’s been saying for months that she already has it in the bag, so why bother voting?” And that led to her losing a lot of votes.






  • There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

    Yeah, fuck this specifically. I’d rather have a good troubleshooter. I work in live events; I don’t care if an audio technician can run a concert and have it sounding wonderful under ideal conditions. I care if they can salvage a concert after the entire fucking rig stops working 5 minutes before the show starts. I judge techs almost solely on their ability to troubleshoot.

    Anyone can run a system that is already built, but a truly good technician can identify where a problem is and work to fix it. I’ve seen too many “good” technicians freeze up and panic at the first sign of trouble, which really just tells me they’re not as good as they say. When you have a show starting in 10 minutes and you have no audio, you can’t waste time with panic.




  • Each mod includes a caution to review its source code on GitHub, ensuring users can make informed decisions before installing any customizations.

    About as useful as an “I agree to the terms and conditions” checkbox tbh. Open source code suffers horribly from misplaced community trust. The most deadly type of gathering for children is a pool party surrounded by adults. Because if everyone is watching the kids to make sure they don’t drown, nobody is watching the kids. Every single person independently goes “I don’t need to worry about it, cuz someone else will notice.” If everyone is auditing the code, nobody is auditing the code.



  • I’m a venue manager. If Trump’s team wanted to organize a rally at my venue, (and I was forced to allow it), I would require 100% payment in full before they were allowed in the building.

    In fact, my building collects a refundable cleaning/damage deposit, and I would intentionally over-estimate everything about the event; We estimate the event costs and require clients to pay up front. Then any overages can be claimed from that deposit, or invoiced after the event. Equipment costs, labor needs, room rental times, catering commission, merch commission, etc…

    I would intentionally over-estimate all of that. So when they inevitably have some overages, (like maybe they use more mics than expected, or maybe they show up two hours early), those are already paid for in their initial payment. Then I’d just return any unused overages with the deposit, which is SOP. Because I know that if I had unbudgeted overages and tried to invoice after the fact, I’d never see a single cent.



  • Now we just need a way to use that shelf with the same account so I don’t get booted from my steam deck games just because I left something running on my PC and vice versa.

    AFAIK, this is also a licensing issue. When Steam was launching, game publishers were concerned that people would simply share an account. So part of Steam’s licensing agreement is that the same account can’t have games (even different games) running on two machines at the same time. It’s specifically to prevent account sharing, because people would just share an account with their friends; Booting them out of their game every time their buddy boots something up is a pretty effective countermeasure.


  • The “same game at the same time” part is a licensing issue. It won’t ever be “solved” because it would get Steam into legal trouble to do so, just like the Internet Archive recently FAFO’ed. In order for two people to play the same game at the same time, you need to own two licenses for said game.

    But it does solve the issue of multiple people using the same library at the same time. Now your family members don’t get booted off of Skyrim just because you launched Persona. It basically combines your libraries, so any of you can choose any of the listed games to play at any time. Just like having a physical shelf full of CD cases.