sp3ctr4l

@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...is this retro?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  YOLO is now old enough to legally drive a car.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I can tell, social media that is actually directly tied to your real identity might actually be the worst thing humanity has ever invented.

  Oops!

  Turns out we’re mostly vain and stupid, in our default state.

  Now amplify.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey wow its like I’ve been saying that for a decade, but because I’m poor and I say that, clearly I am some kind of antisocial insane person, not somebody who can read a bunch of existing studies and data and form a conclusion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple to Soon Take Up to 30% Cut From All Patreon Creators in iOS App⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  “Walled garden initiates tollbooth policy.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...is this retro?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Holy shit that reminds me, I’m so far behind on my Zelda shit that I haven’t even yet played OoT master quest or whatever its called?

  But yeah, its… pretty sad, the state of Nintendo these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...is this retro?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.

  Spock, Civilization 4 (2005)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...is this retro?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  This is your life, and its iterating one internal clock cycle at a time.

  (I recommend not tying too many vital specific timed calls directly to the clock speed of your particular hardware)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...is this retro?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I can still remember I think some new grounds stick figure type animated comic, made back when it was Macromedia Flash, not Adobe Flash, and it was mocking the idea of 20 years in the future we would have Call of Duty 16.

  … I think if you actually count them numerically we are now beyond 20.

  … 24 mainline games, apparently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...is this retro?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  … and Nintendo still hasn’t figured out how to run it at an actually stable 60 fps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...is this retro?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Heres how that works:

  Gaming got popular.

  Normies like fancy graphics, production value, and are swayed by fake trailers.

  Corpos discovered they could turn everything into primarily a market for subscriptions and micro transactions, that houses a game, and most normies kept paying for all that untill the economy entered the Second Great Depression.

  … its basically Dutch Disease, but for video gaming.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨...is this retro?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You know that ‘Cleopatra is temporally further away from the Great Pyramid’ thing?

  Grand Theft Auto V’s release date is closer to Half Life 2’s release date, than to the present.

  Grand Theft Auto 4’s release date is closer to the release date of the original Starfox or Street Fighter 2, than it is to the present.

  And you don’t even want me to do any date comparison for the following:

  … Let’s do the time warp Againnn!~

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Currency⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Question for you:

  Is there any gold involved in the process of you typing and posting that comment?

  Could there maybe be, I dunno, gold, literally as a direct component in, or vital to the manufacturing process of … maybe some kind of computer chip or something?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Currency⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, you got it.

  Gold and silver originally become commonplace as money, as currency, because they are excellent material to make coins out of.

  You can carry bits or coins of gold and silver on your person, and you can denominate them fairly easily, you can store them and they won’t corrode, and its not that hard to weigh them or melt them down.

  Compare that to trying to haul around a backpack or trailer full of bigmacs.

  Yeah, they’re pumped full of preservatives, but they won’t last anywhere near as long as a non reactive metal.

  Nowadays… well, gold and silver are massively important components in computer technology.

  So they’ve got the historical basis as money, and the commodity basis of having a significant amount of vital industy dependant on them.

  Bitcoin people used to argue that bitcoin would be a superior currency to all other currencies for a myriad of reasons… but you will always need some kind of computer thing that is either made out of or at some stage of industrial production involves gold/silver/other metals to even be able to transact with bitcoin.

  In a modern, capitalist, international fiat currency context, you also can’t escape some kind of supply/demand based on use case dynamic for currencies.

  Oh, your economy is imploding due to a debt/bond/stock/trade balance crisis?

  Less ongoing demand for holding your wealth in that economy’s currency, even if it is in bonds that pay interest or stocks that are nominally appreciating.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

  We are currently basically reverting to a pre Breton Woods international monetary system as the USD implodes, central banks everywhere are hoarding and repatriating gold as the de facto international exchange mechanism, as geopolitical monetary turmoil rises.

  www.macrotrends.net/…/sp500-to-gold-ratio-chart

  Image

  So basically, if at the beginning of 2024, you had $100k in the SP500, you would have ~$146k right now.

  If you had $100k of gold at the beginning of 2024… you would have ~$275k right now.

  Thats 1.46x vs 2.75x.

  That’s gold outperforming the SP500 by 88%.

  That is a dying economy and currency.

  Gold went from about $2000/oz in early 2024 to about $5500/oz at time of me writing this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Owner Valve Faces $900 Million Lawsuit Over PC Monopoly Claims, Following UK Tribunal Ruling - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not really trying to critique you, I just know that a ton of people only read the headline or don’t read things thoroughly, or don’t even click into the actual article at all.

  I am just adding my 2 cents as someone with a degree in economics, so I’m not citing the article, I’m citing my years or education in economics and work that made use of it.

  The article does not really go into the difference between US and UK law around monopolies, so I wanted to explore that a bit myself.

  Also, when you say ‘the first lines of the linked article says what I said’… do you mean the OP linked article, or the lexology link that I provided?

  Because the IGN article says nothing about whether simply being a monopoly is illegal, that’s why I provided the lexology link, to clarify that.

  Sorry if I am not quite understanding what you are saying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Owner Valve Faces $900 Million Lawsuit Over PC Monopoly Claims, Following UK Tribunal Ruling - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a great write up to which I can only add that I know that in the ongoing US case, Valve has been arguing that not only is the 30% cut not particularly onerous, and is actually pretty close to the industry norm…

  … they also make the argument that Steam provides much, much more to both the consumer and the prospective game seller that…well they just do actually offer many more features and services than existing comparable platform, many of them.

  The DLC thing is an interesting idea, but… oh god, basically, is my database manager brain’s response to that.

  You’d have to construct like a shared standard of game key liscenses across all digital platforms, you know, the not unlike the kind of thing every single idiot a few years back claimed would be possible with their NFT games.

  This is… an interesting idea, but I don’t see how you could actually implement this in practice without basically creating a government agency to manage it.

  … Which would then also probably mean that said government would now directly know every game you own.

  And then you’d have to think about how that would play with things like game key selling sites…

  Yeah. This would be a nightmare to try to actually implement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Owner Valve Faces $900 Million Lawsuit Over PC Monopoly Claims, Following UK Tribunal Ruling - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Valve is an effective monopoly.

  A lot of people seem to think ‘monopoly’ means ‘literally 0 alternatives for the consumer’, but this is not the case in either actual economic jargon/theory nor in basically any legal definition of it I am aware of.

  To be a monopoly you basically just need to be the clear dominant actor in some market. Not the only one, just the main one.

  Its… very rare for a ‘true’ or ‘perfect’ monopoly to ever exist for basically anything other than a public utility/service. It almost never happens.

  This is the kind of pedantry that is annoying but unfortunately important, similar to how ‘Impeachment’ by the House on its own is actually pointless beyond a mark of shame unless it is also followed by a ‘conviction’ by the Senate.

  You are correct that in US law, a major factor that is considered is whether or not the company did absuive, deceptive, underhanded stuff to achieve its monopopy status.

  But UK law appears to be different:

  www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c5b1e681-5…

  You could be doing ‘abuse of dominance’ whether or not you achieved that dominance by underhanded means.

  So… while I am not a lawyer, I would be genuinely surprised if Valve was found in serious violation of existing US monopoly laws, but I would be less surprised if they were found to be in violation if existing UK monopoly laws.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Kind of pretty important and relevant:

  The main reason why this process isn’t “something for nothing” is that it takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline. As Aircela told The Autopian:

  Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.
  

  So basically juat imagine a gas powered generator hooked up to this to power.

  Ok, see how that’s silly?

  Right, now, if you do run it off solar power, than sure! That makes more sense.

  But the thing isn’t magic, it takes energy to convert air into basically a form of liquid energy.

  And… you’d probably have to refine it or chemically treat it at least somewhat.

  I’m not a chemist, but I am guessing this is the case, if you want gasoline that is just equivalent to what your car would expect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bungee jumping⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  … That roughly encapsulates many uh, exciting encounters I’ve had with various consenting, mutually nude people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ring Cameras Join Flock and Amazon to Now Create Direct Data Access for ICE⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Every liberal yuppie that got one of these things is an idiot and a hypocrite.

  Everyone else who got one is an idiot, but goddamnit were these trendy amongst the hypocrite liberal yuppie crowd.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rules for a gun fight⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well alright, thanks for the info!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rules for a gun fight⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, yep, you’re right.

  Dozzi92 set me straight, I goofed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs are already doing fascists a favor by ensuring that anything that is reasonably eloquently formulated on social media is automatically suspected of having been written by LLMs.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I would counter that no, no it did not.

  It just turned people into hypocrites, hypocrites with better marketability.

  Brevity? Maybe, kind of, if you count a barrage of snippets as brief.

  Clarity? … No. Because without a format that fully allows a nuanced but actually coherent and consistent position or explanation… it just makes you into a hypocrite.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rules for a gun fight⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  takes out ear phones

  Oh, haha!

  Whoops, I made a typo.

  Bio engineered, not ‘buo’.

  Either way… you don’t happen to have a donut, do you?

  pathetic puppy eyes

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rules for a gun fight⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, fuck you’re completely right.

  I somehow totally glossed over the digi cam.

  … In my defense, I did not have my glasses on, and… well, the camo worked.

  Fuck.

  Ok, ok so… by your uh, constraints, this would have been basically more like mid 00s?

  04 or later, but… prior to 09?

  And, by old deserts… you mean the ole ‘chocolate chip camo’?

  … I guess if you’re willing to induldge my mil-nerd questioning… do you know if the Army and Marines are mostly swapped over to some variant of MultiCam now?

  Or does the digi stuff still exist in large numbers?

  … Or am I just wildly off base with that line of questions?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rules for a gun fight⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I made another comment but my guess is the image in the meme is roughly Gulf War era… I’ve not been in the military but I don’t think ACOGs became a thing that was basically standard issue untill… well even before you went to boot in 09.

  I’m thinking this picture was taken some time in the 90s, probably, is what I’m trying to say.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rules for a gun fight⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the used picture is even older than the meme itself, my guess would be that it is from roughly the Gulf War era.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rules for a gun fight⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And I know a mutant half human half angel thing who prefers .45 Long Colt…

  … but also prefers to never use it to kill.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rules for a gun fight⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rules for a gun fight⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, this rule really irked me.

  This is… its an older meme, motivational poster format, wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was made by a gung ho Gulf War vet either before or not long after Iraq 2 Electric Boogaloo commenced, drenched in Americana gun culture pride.

  There are plently of pistol rounds other than .45 ACP that are quite good in combat scenarios, most at this point would probably agree that having more 9mm over less .45 is preferable, otherwise 2011s wouldn’t even be a thing.

  Also: its less common, but uh… 5.7?

  5.7 is actually more likely to pen body armor, than a 9mm or a .45, if your scenario is you’re fighting against other people with body armor.

  And you can make a double stack magazine with it.

  And there are a fair number of Police, Intelligence, Military organizations that use the FiveSeven regularly.

  And… there are now even a growing number of hunters who will tell you that some kind of pistol in 5.7 is their backup, in case of something big ambushing them.

  357 is of course very powerful, but they’re also huge rounds in comparison to .45 or 9m… kinda hard to fit into a semi-auto pistol.

  Unless you wanna talk about the .357 SIG.

  … but we don’t talk about the .357 SIG …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean… its worse than that.

  Its definitive proof that we live in an anti-meritocratic society, that is ruled by nepotism and violent and dangerous sociopaths.

  Yes, its violence if it goes through a complex system for the violence to happen, is done indirectly.

  So yeah, our lives are ruled by utterly incompetent dangerous sociopaths, who will gleefully destroy the entire economy because… they like buzzwords and feeling like they are smart.

  We either need to kill these people, or they will kill all of us, just give a decade.