paultimate14
@paultimate14@lemmy.world
- Comment on PlayStation Store Dynamic Pricing Is Real 2 weeks ago:
It’s also known as Price Discrimination, and depending on the details and jurisdiction sometimes it IS illegal.
Laws need to be updated to keep up with tech, and ENFORCED.
- Comment on What Phone do you guys use? 2 weeks ago:
Sony Xperia 1 IV. Their naming scheme is terrible.
Main reason is because I wanted a future-proof, flagship phone with a headphone jack and micro SD card slot. Both have proven very useful, and I am still kind of in shock that most manufacturers have dropped them.
Stock android. Still using the NoVa launcher because I haven’t had the free time to try out others, plus my pi-hole seems to block the ads they have been introducing for now.
The Xperia has a weirdly narrow screen. I like it in a vacuum better than todays phablets, but I think the occasional webpage scales weirdly.
- Comment on Did we win? 2 weeks ago:
Congratulations!
- Comment on Human experimentation, one way or the other. 3 weeks ago:
I honestly am starting to think the anti-vaxx crowd has been astroturfed by pharmaceutical corporations in order to convince the general public that anyone who questions Big Pharma is some loomy who thinks vaccines cause autism wants to drink raw milk.
- Comment on Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash 3 weeks ago:
That’s why in rooting for a small mom and pop competitor to the space, like checks notes … Intel.
We’re fucked aren’t we?
- Comment on Streaming didnt exist in 1970 3 weeks ago:
What about 1870 then?
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 4 weeks ago:
I never claimed Uber was 100% safe. There’s also plenty of cases of non-sexual assault and robbery. There’s way more cases of simple negligent driving resulting in injury and death.
Uber’s own data indicates 99.9998% of trips in 2021-2022 were completed with no safety incident. Now if you want to discredit that self-reporting as biased, fair enough.
What would you say is the threshold for justifying gender segregation? 99.9999%? 99.99999%? 99.999999%?
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 4 weeks ago:
Transphobes will use any excuse to be transphobic.
I’m not sure what your point here is.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 4 weeks ago:
I’m comparing gender identity to other forms of protected identity: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.
I’m not making any judgements about any group being superior or inferior to another. You’re the one doing that. Being “physically imposing” is subjective and variable. There is significant overlap between the largest women and smallest men, and that’s just staying withing the confines of binary cis people. Not to mention… Guns exist. Cars themselves are weapons far more dangerous than any human regardless of gender.
Building a just society means we need to leave behind our biases and fears. To judge individuals not on the circumstances of their birth but the content of their character. That means discarding the luxury of pre-judging people, not just when it is easy, but also when it is hard.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 4 weeks ago:
I’m sure a lot of anxious Nazi’s got a lot of peace of mind in the early 1940’s too.
I sure a lot of anxipis transphobes got a lot of peace of mind when Trump banned trans people from military service.
Giving anxious people peace of mind it’s the point of segregation. That doesn’t make it right or good.
- Comment on 18-26 year olds, How do you plan to dodge the draft? 4 weeks ago:
The US government has been investing billions into AI, drones, and other autonomous and remote weapons systems.
Sending a bunch of young men to the opposite side of the world would be not just unpopular, it incredibly expensive. Food, clothing, equipment, healthcare costs. I highly doubt the end goal is to actually annex Iran, so they’re much better off trying to find a local group to support in taking over the country and establishing a US-friendly puppet state. There’s no need to have Americans in guerilla warfare for that.
The only way I see them doing that is if they WANT to kill off a chunk of the male population in that age group. Which… Maybe? I could certainly see Trump and Hegseth trying to send “undesirables” overseas to die, but they’ve also made moves like banning trans people from military service. Unless they reverse policies, it looks like Trump will prefer to cozy up to the military rather than use it as a tool for getting rid of people.
Maybe Trump will just do what Netenyahu tells him to. But I think this is more about trying to manufacture a reason to cancel mid-term elections like they outlined in 2025 than anything else. With the added benefit of funneling more government money into the military-industrial complex.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 4 weeks ago:
It’s shocking to me how so many people I know who are woke as fuck and quick to shout down any bigotry are so quick to drop all of their principles to hate men.
Segregation never works, and only serves to foster fear, hatred, and division within society You cannot define what a “woman” is in a way that excluded trans-women without also excluding some cis-women with them Your gender identity is what you say it is. Others should do their best to remember any pronouns or name changes Crime is too complicated and nuanced to be reduced to statistics, which are often used by racists and bigots to justify racist and bigoted policies It’s racist to cross to the other side of the street when a person of color comes walking towards you on the side you currently are on. It’s up to you to “Men” are evil monsters who cannot be trusted and need to be locked away
It baffles me how so many people can have all of these ideas, including the last one, and not see the cognitive dissonance there. It’s succumbing to fear and hatred, the same methods of divisive propaganda that has harmed every other group.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 4 weeks ago:
Uber stopped doing then, but their own data through 2022 claims that 99.9998% of rides ended without a safety incident.
Most sexual assault is committed by abusers who know their victims, not random strangers.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 4 weeks ago:
The vast majority of sexual assault is by people who know the victim, not random strangers. This is Uber trying to capitalize on fear to sell a more “premium” product they will inevitably charge more for, not actually helping anyone.
- Comment on Uber is letting women avoid male drivers and riders in the US 4 weeks ago:
I can’t help but I imagine JK Rowling tweeting some day about how she used this feature and was appalled to be driven by a trans-woman.
A lot of white people are afraid of black people. Should we let people choose their driver by the color of their skin? Their ethnicity? The language they speak? Their sexual orientation? Their religion?
Discrimination is bad for everyone else, but somehow for men we just say “eh they have it coming”.
- Comment on Make sure you know what your kid is getting themselves into 5 weeks ago:
I was a good boy who didn’t do drugs until adulthood, and I have medical marijuana now. The feedback I’ve gotten from pretty much everyone who did drugs in the 90’s and 00’s vs today is the same as your experience. The “weed nerds” have spent decades in their labs and the state-by-state legalization has greatly accelerated their progress.
Even my pharmacist warned me when I first got my medical card “if this is your first time using medical marijuana it’s a lot stronger than what is usually on the street, so watch out”.
- Comment on Make sure you know what your kid is getting themselves into 5 weeks ago:
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that article is just typical fear mongering BS. It keeps the eyes of parents glued to the screen and consuming ads. Doesn’t even say what “spice” is. Articles like this are basically broiler-llate and come out every few months. Notice how they manage to blame social media, and how they don’t mention any adults using it at all.
I found the wikipedia article on these things more useful and less biased. Spice seems to mostly refer to a designer drug that is similar to THC, but is not THC. And while it is often used to lace marijuana or mixed with weed vapes, it isn’t just weed.
It’s like hearing about people adding PCP or LSD to weed and freaking out about how dangerous weed is. Like… Yeah you shouldn’t buy drugs from some random guy on Snapchat.
- Comment on WhatsApp officially names Mullvad and Amnezia VPN as go-to tools for bypassing censorship 5 weeks ago:
- owned by Israeli billionaire
- based in the UK, subject to UK laws
- chief tech officer was previously the CEO of a Bitcoin exchange company and was convicted of fraud for stealing from it
- Comment on the two party system is just one big party 5 weeks ago:
DOGE would not have happened under Biden or Harris. Millions of people are dying because of cuts to US AID.
Venezuela would not have happened. Like, how crazy is it that you lost a handful of the most egregious things Trump has done recently and yet somehow invading another country and kidnapping their leader a couple months ago doesn’t make the cut? I don’t mean that as a criticism of you, just how much insane shit Trump has done.
Cuts to Education have been and will be devastating for years. Shutting down tons of science and information-gathering agencies. Economic data is going to be non-existent or useless for the foreseeable future. All the lovely anti-trust action Lina Khan was starting to do under Biden has been erased. All the work Jessica Rosenworcel was doing to restore Net Neutrality under Biden has been erased. The Republican party is about to pass a bill that will disenfranchise both trans people and women. The EPA has been gutted. Trump has given and cut off funds to states, both for regular projects and disaster relief funds, based on how they voted for him, while Biden (and no other president I am aware of) has done anything like that before.
So-called “communists” have a tendency to become EnLiGhTeNeD cEnTrIsTs.
- Comment on Is the Memory Shortage Intentional? 5 weeks ago:
For those who don’t want to read several pages of unnecessary text telling you what you probably already know:
The math, while pretty involved, may tell a straightforward story (if you’re interested in the details of our analysis, see the Appendix). OpenAI has contracted 900K memory wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix. Partner commentary seems to indicate that’s a monthly number, so that represents 10.8 million wafers over 12 months. In terms of demand, a fully built-out 10GW Stargate cluster would require ~3 million GB200 Bianca Boards. Each board requires ~50% of a memory wafer in total; split between the HBM3e stacks embedded into its two B200 GPU (~30%) and its 480 GB of LPDDR5X system memory (~20%). That puts total wafer demand for the entire cluster at ~3 million wafers.
Therefore, according to our best estimates, OpenAI likely needs less than 30% of the 10.8 million wafers it’s planning to buy
So this is just putting some numbers to what a lot of people already guessed. The AI companies are not just buying a ton of RAM to build out their data centers. They aren’t buying enough other components to even use that RAM. They’re buying it so that no one else can.
- Comment on Which game have you been most patient for? 1 month ago:
I do have Mass Effect pirated. Just need a hardware upgrade to run RPCS3 better.
Another alternative is to buy on console. I bought the PS4 version of Yakuza: Like a Dragon because the steam version has Denuvo. I’m kind of torn between generally preferring physical over digital media, versus the openness and flexibility of PC vs the closed-off proprietary-ness of consoles. Trade-offs either way.
- Comment on Make a note 1 month ago:
You need to wait ~45 minutes, then loudly complain “these edibles ain’t shit!”
That’s the activation phrase. The THC in your metabolism needs to hear that to start working.
- Comment on Which game have you been most patient for? 1 month ago:
The Mass Effect series, LA Noire, and Sonic Frontiers are all examples of games where I am waiting for DRM-free versions.
- Comment on 29 years since our homecoming queen was taken from us 1 month ago:
My wife and I just started watching this a couple months ago. We’re partway through Season 3.
Over the weekend we saw Nine Inch Nails live. To our complete shock, once the band left the stage and the lights came on the house music that played while everyone left was… The mysterious and sad piano theme from Twin Peaks.
A bit of research later revealed that David Lynch directed a NIN music video, and he has featured their songs in movies. And perhaps more notable… NIN appeared on the show in season 3, just two episodes ahead of where we were. It was a wild coincidence.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Wandering Bard > Bad Dragon
- Comment on "Game preservation only works if people care" As GOG doubles down on its commitment to saving old games, it's asking players "who give a s**t" to support its crusade 1 month ago:
What incredible hyperbole. It is superisleading to describe that as going “All-In on AI”. It’s a change to the disclosure rules Valve requires for publishers, not that Valve is using AI themselves like GOG is.
I would prefer if they required disclosure of the use of any AI tools involved, but at this point AI has been so thoroughly shoved into every piece of software you can really just assume that some AI somewhere touched anything made after 2022. Generative AI is the bigger problem and this move focuses the attention on that.
- Comment on You ever wake up and question, "am i the bad guy"? 1 month ago:
I think these thoughts are healthy and necessary, and exactly the kind of thoughts I like to have in the shower. It’s great to, as you’re waking up, reflect on the day before with a little bit of distance.
We all fuck up. Sometimes it takes another person pointing it out for us to realize it and apologize. But I find apologies are even more meaningful when the wrongdoer realizes it and apologizes on their own.
- Comment on Video games are losing the "attention war" to gambling, porn, and crypto, according to industry report 1 month ago:
That’s being mean to gas station sandwiches, but otherwise I agree
- Comment on Video games are losing the "attention war" to gambling, porn, and crypto, according to industry report 1 month ago:
For a the past few years, I had wondered why videogames, movies, and TV shows nowadays feel so… Bland. Meaningless. Soulless. Corporate. Like, I know they ARE corporate, but these industries have all been dominated by gigantic corporations for my entire life. What changed recently? Am I just getting old and curmudgeonly and preferring content that was made back when I was younger?
Then I was watching DoorMonster talk about some show (I could be wrong, but I think it was the video about how Arcane had a great Season 1 that was largely ruined by Season 2) where they kept joking about not accusing them of using AI to write things.
Then it clicked. The Writer’s Strike from May-September 2023. On paper, the Writer’s Guild secured restrictions on the use of AI. And I can’t point to anything specific and say “that was clearly written by AI”. But I can say that for the past few years everything put out by pretty much every company has felt very… “Meh”. Nothing new has grabbed me and said “wow I need to watch/play that”. Could be a coincidence, but I also have to wonder whether AI tools involved in writing and visuals have cost us something intangible that I can still feel.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls 6 Is Powered By New Version Of Creation Engine 1 month ago:
This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.
Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.
An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.
I don’t want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I’ll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be “Skyrim with better combat” that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.