NIB
@NIB@lemmy.world
- Comment on Sweden, Norway rethink plans for cashless societies over fears that fully digital payment systems would leave them vulnerable to Russian security threats 2 weeks ago:
Swish is very popular in Sweden and has no fees(for individuals)
- Comment on Sweden, Norway rethink plans for cashless societies over fears that fully digital payment systems would leave them vulnerable to Russian security threats 2 weeks ago:
Noone uses cash in Sweden, except for maybe drug dealers and super old people. Most businesses dont even accept cash anymore.
It isnt just the convenience of not having to carry cash, it is also much safer. Much lower risk of getting robbed, for both individuals and businesses.
- Comment on ‘You basically have free hot water’: how Cyprus became a world leader in solar heating 1 month ago:
Pretty much all houses in Greece have this and no, it is only good for the summer or sunny days. But still it is a no brainer, unlimited free hot water during the summer and limited free hot water during most days.
The tricky part is calculating whether it was sunny enough(during the winter) to produce enough hot water for your shower or if you need to turn on the electric water heater.
Some greeks pre-emptively turn on the electric heater for 15-30 mins, other more financially stressed greeks prefer to gamble.
- Comment on Why Do People Still Play Destiny 2? 2 months ago:
What keeps them engaged with Destiny 2 despite its apparent lack of a clear path forward?
There is no alternative. The First Descendant is p2w. Once Human has different structure and resets your progress every season. Warframe is pretty different and similar to First Descendant. Overwatch basically cancelled its pve. Darktide is clunky.
And none of these games have the polish and shooting satisfaction that Destiny has. If people want a pve game, with long term progression that has enjoyable shooting, Destiny is all there is. What keeps them playing? Copium.
Slowly but steadily Destiny will die. And thats when Marathon will come out. But Marathon is very different, so i am not even so sure that most Destiny players will migrate to that.
I am not even playing Destiny. Destiny is the game that i want to love so much but always shits on me, so i gave up. It seems to me that the easiest thing in the world, is to keep Destiny going and address its minor issues. But somehow Bungie doesnt think so.
- Comment on Headlie 2 months ago:
The issue is the border of Gaza and Egypt, the philadelphi corridor. Israel wants to control it or at least have some presence there.
Thats because a lot of Hamas(and non Hamas palestianians) fled to Egypt. And once Israel pulls out, Israel doesnt want Hamas or military supplies to flow back into Gaza.
The american proposal offered reduced israeli presence in the area, with the Palestinian Authority managing it and Israel “supervising”.
Hamas rejected the proposal because they dont think Israel should be in Gaza in any capacity.
- Comment on fr*nce 3 months ago:
“Liberte” and “egalite” are latin words. “Electrolyte” is greek.
Mixing greek and latin is an abomination and we should put a stop to it. Say no to those mixed greek+latin words, it is an affront to God.
- Comment on Apple could announce a Google Gemini deal this fall 4 months ago:
An ai can help a lot of non tech savvy people. Imagine every time they want to do something, they could just ask the ai on how to do it, instead of asking you or having to go through a billion SEO garbage google results.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 6 months ago:
My entire postscript was just an attempt to make veganism more appealing. That extra little push might enable more people to become vegan. Which is why you see a lot more emphasis to the health benefits of veganism or the positive environmental impact of veganism.
These are things that might enable people to become vegan(or reduce their animal product consumption), because they dont make people feel attacked when you discuss these aspects of veganism. Ultimately, the animal doesnt care if it doesnt get killed(or created), because a human stopped eating animal products for the gains or because the human became a “woke” animal rights advocate. The end result is the same.
And while becoming “woke” is a more sustainable long term position, it can also be harder to sell to current mainstream because of social norms. And a lot of people might become vegan for the gains and then transition to be an animal rights advocate, because it is easier.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 6 months ago:
Most people think themselves as good people. Most people love, or claim to love, animals.
The existence of veganism and its implication is that there is an unnecessary animal holocaust happening, because of societal norms and for the entertainment of people’s palettes. So how do you reconcile these things? By claiming that veganism is something extreme, something unattractive, something that is impossible to do.
People who talk about how “militant vegans have turned them away from veganism” are mostly lying to themselves. If an asshole told you not to litter, would you litter because of that? If an asshole told you not to be racist would you go “well now, i will be even more racist”? But when people make arguments like this, leftists realize how ridiculous those arguments are. Except when it comes to veganism.
Obviously you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar but i want to believe that people in this site can see past that and think for themselves.
Legumes(beans/lentils), vegetables, fruits, potatoes, pasta and rice is what most of the world already eats. Nowadays there are vegan alternatives for stuff and most restaurants often have a vegan option. It isnt hard to be vegan but any lifestyle change can be hard, especially if real life is putting a lot of pressure on you.
Any change is hard, being vegan is easy. Millions of people are vegan and have been vegan for many years. I have been vegan for 12 years now. There has never been an easier time to be vegan than now. Being vegan is the easiest thing with the biggest impact you can do.
True Courage Is About Knowing Not When To Take A Life But When To Spare One
PS Salt potato chips and oreos are vegan. You dont need to eat healthy. And if you are a straight dude, vegan dudes are more attractive to women, even to non vegan women.
- Comment on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths 6 months ago:
If the cars run over people while going 30kmh because they use cameras and a bug crashed into the camera and that caused the car to go crazy, that is not acceptable, even if the cars crash “less than humans”.
Self driving needs to be highly regulated by law and demand to have some bare minimum sensors, including radars, lidars, etc. Camera only self driving is beyond stupid. Cameras cant see in snow or dark or whatever. Anyone who has a phone knows how fucky the camera can get under specific light exposures, etc.
Noone but tesla is doing camera only “self driving” and they are only doing it in order to cut down the cost. Their older cars had more sensors than their newer cars. But Musk is living in his Bioshock uber capitalistic dream. Who cares if a few people die in the process of developing visual based self driving.
- Comment on They lied to us 8 months ago:
By a greek in Canada inspired by chinese dishes. Truly mr worldwide food.
- Comment on Gearbox Is Reviving An Underrated MOBA-Hero Shooter In Gigantic: Rampage Edition 8 months ago:
So a multiplayer pvp moba game that failed as a f2p, is now being launched as a 20€ game? And they think this can work and be successful?
Good luck i guess.
- Comment on Skull and Bones - Skill Up Review 8 months ago:
The review is pretty fair and somewhat agrees with you.
- Comment on EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea" 8 months ago:
God of War? Elder Ring? Baldur’s Gate? Spiderman? Last of Us? Super Mario? Zelda? Red Dead Redemption? Cyberpunk?
- Comment on What’s a “sovereign citizen “? 9 months ago:
Cleopatra wasnt an egyptian, she was a greek macedonian. Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemy dynasty(greek macedonian) and was infamously isolated and incestuous. Their court was mostly greeks or hellenized(greekified) egyptians/jews. In fact, Cleopatra was the first Ptolemy to even bother to learn egyptian, in 200 years of their rule.
Also egyptians arent black, even today they have all kinds of skin colours. Primarily they fucked other mediterranean people, greeks, carthaginians, romans, phoenicians, hittites. Most black people live(lived) below the Sahara desert, so while there was some trade traffic towards/from that direction, it was pretty limited in comparison. You did have things like the kingdom of Kush but for the most part Egypt had more to do with mediterranean(and middle east) states than with subsaharan ones.
- Comment on YSK : Moral values of being nice, forgiving and generosity are justified by game theory to be successful strategies 10 months ago:
Also the results would be different for different betray and split values. The video is biased because it wanted to have a feel good message at the end. In real life, things are very different.
- Comment on What DID Apple innovate? 10 months ago:
Design flaws exist in most laptops. I have had tons of windows laptops failing on me. And yes lenovo thinkpads are nice but they are different. Also i am not so sure they still are good, everything seems to have gone to shit. Very few laptops last over 5 years.
Or phones. Though lately, phones seem to have become more reliable. Then again phones have 0 moving parts and passive cooling, so not many mechanical things that can break.
Apple tries REALLY fucking hard to avoid accepting hardware faults and recalls but I was plugged into all the Apple forums/communities and saw how often these things happened and every time without fail Apple would go blue in the face before accepting liability.
Apple is an asshole company, i dont think many will dispute that. They go the extra mile to fuck you.
I swore off Apple products
I have 0 apple products. But if Apple wasnt making the iphone, i would probably have had an iphone and i wouldnt even consider any other phone.
Apple products are NOT well built. They LOOK nice, but they’re shitty engineering.
They look nice and they are better than other “nice looking” alternatives. High end hp, high end dell, even high end asus. Though dell and asus seem to have improved lately, hp i have no idea, i avoid them like plague.
- Comment on What DID Apple innovate? 10 months ago:
A couple months are irrelevant, obviously both phones were designed and released in a similar timetable. Lg prada wasnt a smart phone and didnt have multitouch.
And while many people have turned against modern iphones, i think modern iphones are the best phones on the market. I wouldnt even recommend an iphone from 10+ years ago but modern iphones have addressed almost all issues that i had.
They had
- shit screen resolution
- not oled
- tiny screens
- terrible cameras
- not usb-c
- shitty cpu
- shitty gpu
- very little ram(they still do but most apps are designed with that in mind)
- no fm radio(now almost no phones have one)
- no headphone jack(same)
- inability to easily send media and files from one from to another
- limited variety of apps
I am probably forgetting tons of other issues that i had with iphones over the years. And apple took all these weaknesses and not only caught up to the competition, but surpassed it and made then a key marketing point.
Samsung also fought a patent war with Apple when Apple sued Samsung for creating a similar phone to the iPhone in 2008. The court docs had examples of Samsung’s first touchscreen phone.
I actually bought samsung wave in 2010, which was the first phone with an oled screen. And it was great, apart from the limited app support, since it was running Bada, a samsung created android competitor. And since then, i refused to get an non oled screen phone. Once you go black, you cant go back.
I think that samsung makes the best android phones.
Spend 5 mins watching videos by Louis Rossman fixing Macbooks and you’ll realise they are shitty products.
I dont care or know much about macbooks but it is obvious that Rossman has an agenda and keeps making “artificial outrage” videos(because they bring the views). From what little experience i have, it seems to me that expensive windows laptops fall apart more often than macbook pros. And all windows laptops have shit battery life, which is very important for many people.
- Comment on What DID Apple innovate? 10 months ago:
Designing phone ui for fingers first. While there were many other touch phones, many of which could be used with your finger(especially if you were a hipster, you could modify them to be more finger friendly), their ui was primarily designed for stylus use. This is a huge point that basically defined the OS and app design for the next 15 years.
Making capacitive screen popular. Before iphones, almost all(all?) phones had resistive touch screen, which required you to actually push your finger on the screen to do stuff. This was fine with stylus, less fine with finger. Capacitive worked with the lightest touch, which gave a smoother user experience.
Made multitouch mainstream and a core part of touch interface. Again, older touchscreen phones were mostly made to be used with a stylus, so multitouch wouldnt make much sense.
It is important to note that one of the reasons apple succeeded was because nokia was too stubborn and late to adopt and promote touchscreen phones. Thats why while nokia was the phone bid dog of that day, users had turned to sony ericsson(SE) for their flagship, touchscreen phones.
And for 5 years before the iphone, people were using phones like the p800, that had a large touchscreen and even a removable keyboard for that full touchscreen experience. SE had taken nokia’s symbian OS and made it more touch friendly. Nokia continued releasing super capable(great cameras, video, fm radio, etc) but non touchscreen phones or with a small touchscreen for years after that, allowing SE to dominate that market. For example nokia released the 6600, which was a great phone but didnt have a touchscreen and its screen was small in comparison to SE’s touchscreen flagships.
First iphone had a terrible camera and couldnt even film videos. Something that other “smart” phones could do for many years. The first iphone didnt have third party apps. Competitive smart phones had had apps for over a decade. First iphone wasnt even 3g, couldnt share stuff over bluetooth, etc. It was a pretty but pretty stupid phone in comparison to the competition.
But over time, apple kept improving, catching up and often surpassing competition by every aspect. Nowadays, iphones are the best or almost the best in everything. Now if only apple gave 120hz refresh on base iphones and a faster charging rate. And werent closed garden assholes.
- Comment on VW Is Putting Buttons Back in Cars Because People Complained Enough 10 months ago:
Volvo car touchscreens work with gloves on.
- Comment on Party with the sea queen 11 months ago:
This is her favourite song
- Comment on Hyundai unveils car tires with built-in, push-button snow chains 11 months ago:
Only in the US and only extremely cheap versions of models. Other countries have mandatory immobilizer.
- Comment on Fear of cheap Chinese EVs spurs automaker dash for affordable cars 11 months ago:
- Comment on China poised to break 5nm barrier — Huawei lists 5nm processor presumably built with SMIC tech, defying U.S. sanctions | Huawei and SMIC quietly rolled out a new Kirin 9000C processor. 11 months ago:
Wouldn’t China have seen the writing on the wall years ago?
Noone wants to spend tens of billions of dollars if they dont have to. Eventually, in the last 5-10 years, it became an absolute necessity for China, so they had no choice but to do it. In comparison, the West is still manufacturing most of its stuff in China because it is cheaper and it would be pretty expensive(and time consuming) to move all that manufacturing to EU/US. And most of that manufacturing is infinitely simpler than cutting edge microchips.
Hell, nvidia(an american company) is literally trying to “bypass” sanctions and sell their 4090 gpus in China. Once those sanctions were announced, their stock fell. And then nvidia made a “crippled” 4090, that in theory wasnt as capable in terms of AI calculations. But the US is still saying “are you fucking kidding me? no means no”.
In return, China is buying all 4090 graphic cards they can get in their hands, even older generation cards. If you are wondering why a 2000€ card is even more expensive now than it was a year ago. Of course thats how sanctions work in a capitalistic society, you can only increase the cost of doing business, not actually prevent someone from getting stuff.
It’s the same thing with Russia. You can ban Russia from buying stuff but then a random armenian or turkish or cypriot company can buy that stuff and secretly ship them to Russia.
Capitalism has created significant strategic weaknesses for all sides. Thats why the West is losing its mind with batteries and rare earth minerals. It isnt that we cant make batteries or mine rare earth minerals(they arent that rare), it’s that we have relied on China and now we need to start doing the work for ourselves(with increased monetary and potential environmental cost). It will take money and time but eventually we will get there.
is it too hard to believe that China, and maybe others have done the same and have been able to keep it a secret as well
This kind of technology is about the capability to mass produce cutting edge chips, in order to use it for AI, phones, missiles, etc. There is little reason to be able to do that and keep it a secret. This is a very iterative heavy technology, you start from something and you keep improving it, it isnt like nukes(you either have it or dont).
In fact, China is already making graphic cards for AI(and technically gaming). And they are absolutely terrible in terms of performance and power efficiency. But at least they are “homemade”(with tons of IP stolen from nvidia, etc). That is very impressive.
- Comment on China poised to break 5nm barrier — Huawei lists 5nm processor presumably built with SMIC tech, defying U.S. sanctions | Huawei and SMIC quietly rolled out a new Kirin 9000C processor. 11 months ago:
This kind of super high tech manufacturing is something that only a couple companies in the world can do. And they can only do it by using machines and technology from all over the, “western”, world.
If China wants to replicate that, they would need to create everything from scratch, since they wont have access to the knowledge, technology, machines and manufacturing techniques the other(taiwanese and korean) companies have access to.
This is a matter of time and money. Obviously at some point China would succeed as long as there is political will and funding. But there is a difference between China succeeding within the next 3 years or within the next 15 years.
If these claims are true(and it is a big IF), China is way ahead than expected.
No other country in the world can do it alone. The US cant and isnt producing high end chips. But thats because it didnt need to, since their allies are doing it. But because the situation in Taiwan is becoming hotter, both the US and the EU are inviting companies(tsmc and Intel) to create factories in their lands.
- Comment on Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake announced 11 months ago:
The control scheme and lack of coop are fundamental to the design and story telling of the game. The only game i have played that tells a story through actual gameplay.
- Comment on What would your recommended budget ($200-400) phones be? 11 months ago:
Poco F5. Great 120hz oled hdr 10+ screen, insane soc for the money(snapdragon 7+ gen 2), amazing fingerprint sensor on the power button instead of those shitty underscreen ones. And yes, even samsung s23 underscreen one is shitty in comparison, both in terms of speed and precision.
I dont understand why so many android phones force an objectively inferior experience on their users with those underscreen fingerprint sensors. And it isnt a small thing, it is something that you use dozens of times per day.
If you really care about photographs, then get a pixel. But i dont, i care about performance, so poco phones always offer best value for money(and the f5 actually has decent cameras too).
Alternatively, during Black Friday, you could buy really cheap oneplus 10t or 9 and 9pro(for around 350-450€). Also old sony flagships can be sometimes found at a significant discount too.
- Comment on Google Removes App That Helps People Boycott Pro-Israel Companies 11 months ago:
The slogan is being used by far right israelis too. And it is implicitly genocidal for both sides. Israel is here to stay and so is Palestine. Both sides need to accept this so we can move towards the next goal, defining which lands go to which side.
Israel needs to be charitable and give back land, remove settlers, etc. And in response Palestine needs to control its people and guarantee the safety of Israel.
A lot of Israel’s landgrab is because of security concerns or at least thats Israel’s excuse. If Palestine can remove that excuse by providing security, things can become a lot simpler.
The problem is that Palestine does not exist as a country with a unified government, partly because of Israel(supported hamas, etc), so Israel continues having legitimate security concerns.
- Comment on Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it 1 year ago:
Modularity/expand-ability comes at a cost. Both monetary cost and performance cost. We used to have gpus with expandable memory but we dont anymore.
Thats because by having the memory integrated into the board, we can put it much closer to the chip, greatly increasing the bandwidth and lowering the latency. This is exactly what Apple has done with its memory and why it isnt expandable anymore. Apple’s memory is 5x+ faster than ddr5 in terms of bandwidth. Also you fully take advantage of the entirety of the available memory bus, instead of having empty lanes chilling for potential upgrades.
By having an integrated battery, you can have the battery have all kinds of wacky shapes that fill your design better.
Having a microsd slot takes a lot of space and can result into a significant degraded user experience if the user uses a slow microsd. And even a fast microsd is slower than integrated storage.
All these things are possible but they come with some sacrifices. Part of the change is because of enshittification but some changes is because it makes sense.
- Comment on 8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple 1 year ago:
RAM is not RAM though. If a RAM is twice as fast than some other RAM, then it can swap shit back and forth really fast, making it more efficient per size. Because Apple is soldering ram next to the chip, it enables them to make their RAM a lot faster. M3 max’s ram has 6x more bandwidth than ddr5 and a lot lower latency too.
Also macos needs less ram in general. Is 8gB ram enough? No. But i would bet money on 12gB m3 over 16gB pc to have fewer ram issues and faster performance.
Most of the things that “use” ram on every day pc use, dont need ram. It is just parked assets, webpages, etc. Things that if you have a really fast ram, can be re-cached to ram pretty fast, especially if your storage is also really fast.