frezik
@frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Could you though? 👀 1 day ago:
Lemmy is disappointing me.
- Comment on Winner winner! 3 days ago:
Venison dinner!
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
This is true. The 2008 crisis was about banks. Banks are linked to everything. Most companies aren’t that deep into an AI transition. They can still shrug it off and go back to what they were doing.
The big tech companies are fucked. The Saudis who just bought EA are fucked (their plan was to reduce costs by making games with a lot of AI tools). Nvidia is really fucked. The rest? They may have to reverse some plans, but they can shrug it off.
- Comment on Nobody who complains about video games costing more than $60 ever considers inflation 4 days ago:
They were fairly substantial.
Consider the SHVC-BA3M-10, which is the PCB used for Super Metroid. Some of what’s on there are commodity parts, such as the MS6264CLL (an 8k SRAM chip).
Hard to track down exact prices from 1994, but we can get close. A Jaemco catalog from 1994 lists a series of SRAM chips on page 15. Per the datasheet above, we’re looking for regular (not fast) SRAM in an 8x8KB configuration. Those are listed in the neighborhood of $4 each, though bulk pricing would reduce that.
Doesn’t sound like much? Consider that a good rule of thumb for pricing hardware is 2.5x cost of goods sold. So even if we assume $4 becomes $3 in bulk, we’re still looking at $7.50 added to the retail cost. That’s for just one chip, and it’s probably not the most expensive one on there.
- Comment on FlatEarthers will work around it 4 days ago:
The Final Experiment in Antarctica about a year ago fractured the community. The way this sort of thing generally works is that a lot of them break off, but the remaining ones are even crazier than before. As examples, see the Great Disappointment among Adventists, or 1975 among Jehovah’s Witnesses.
That said, they still lost some major voices. If you don’t follow this sort of thing on YouTube a lot, you’re probably going to miss them completely.
- Comment on FlatEarthers will work around it 4 days ago:
There’s a few different solutions. They tend to invent brand new physics in the course of explaining it.
- Comment on FlatEarthers will work around it 4 days ago:
The great circle route doesn’t quite get over Antarctica, but it’s close. Planes generally avoid going over Antarctica for safety reasons even when it’s technically the shortest route. It’s better to go down in cold ocean where there’s a chance of being picked up by a boat, rather than going down over an icy hellscape where nobody can get to you.
- Comment on FlatEarthers will work around it 4 days ago:
You can do this same sort of thing in the Northern Hemisphere. It just gets more obvious the further you go south.
For example, check a direct flight from LA to Seoul. On a Gleason map (the most common flat earth map, though there are a few others), flights between those two should be going well over Alaska and parts of Russia. On a great circle route, they barely go over the Aleutians and don’t go into Russian airspace at all. Guess which one flights actually use?
- Comment on Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before" 4 days ago:
Truth. A big chunk of that book is explaining to nobels that war is expensive, and maybe you just shouldn’t.
- Comment on PHP is the English of programming languages 4 days ago:
What of it?
All I’m saying is that British English is just as much as a mess as everywhere else.
- Comment on Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before" 4 days ago:
How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?
Not that there’s anything wrong with what they’re saying. I just feel like it only sounds like deep wisdom because the industry is so fucking broken.
- Comment on Nobody who complains about video games costing more than $60 ever considers inflation 4 days ago:
Seph Sterling has directly addressed this in the past. Inflation has no connection to minimum wage, or wages in general. Trickle down only happens if there’s something forcing business owners to give that money to workers. Also, they aren’t actually selling $60 games. They’re selling $60 games with a bunch of gambling mechanics attached that tend to extract money from certain neurodivergant people, such as those who escaped gambling addiction and got into video games to help control it.
I would add that there have been times when the industry has reduced its cost, but that cost was never passed on to customers. The cartridge to CD transition, for example. That was likely in the neighborhood of a $20 reduction in cost, but games did not come down in price. They pocketed that money.
(The transition from CD to downloadable games did have a drop as well, though it’s not as much as you might think.)
Software is also a business where you either pay millions of dollars for one copy, or you pay a few dollars for millions of copies. Games generally pick the volume side of that equation. For most of the time period since the 90s, games were still growing in volume, and the increase in costs could be covered by an increase in volume. The inflation during much of that time period was irrelevant because of this. You can’t just pick an arbitrary date in the 90s and calculate inflation since then.
That said, at this point, video games have likely found the size of the market they are likely to find. On that basis, I would concede there is a place for costs to rise with inflation from here on out. But I would also say that we don’t need video games to be these giant, expensive open worlds with mediocre game play. While I haven’t sworn off AAA entirely (I’m currently finishing up my first run through of Cyberpunk 2077), tight indie games have been the bulk of my enjoyment for a long time now.
- Comment on PHP is the English of programming languages 4 days ago:
- Comment on Does the filament path of ruby nozzles degrade + is DUROZZLE any good? 4 days ago:
Durozzle is just a brand name slapped on some Chinese manufacturer. It’s probably fine, but I doubt anybody is going to come out raving about it compared to everything else on Amazon.
IIRC, rubies are great at handling abrasive filaments, but they lack accuracy. Been a while since I looked into them, though. I use abrasive filaments so seldom that I can consider a cheap nozzle to be a disposable part of the project. Metal is generally one of the easier things to recycle.
- Comment on PHP is the English of programming languages 4 days ago:
Briton can’t even decide on whether to pronounce all the R’s or not.
- Comment on U.S. solar will pass wind in 2025 and leave coal in the dust soon after 5 days ago:
Yes, and we’re already seeing prices go negative with that mix. This shouldn’t happen (at least not very often) if it’s built properly.
- Comment on Intel in early talks to add AMD as foundry customer 5 days ago:
Gelsinger wanted to do it. Biden Admin shut it down, saying the federal money they were getting to build a fab was contingent on them staying together.
- Comment on U.S. solar will pass wind in 2025 and leave coal in the dust soon after 5 days ago:
That’s actually a problem.
All realistic plans for 100% renewable (or even 95% renewable, which is substantially easier) rely on a multipronged approach of wind, water, solar, and grid upgrades. Each one has upsides and downsides, but you can use the upsides of one to cover the downsides of another. Combined, you get a reliable grid based on intermittent but cheap sources.
Capitalism sees this plan and decides to deploy the one with the best immediate ROI. Which happens to be solar. Problem is that you can’t just rely on solar. The grid is hitting limits where electrical production is sending prices to basically zero at certain times, but not able to provide enough the rest of the time. That will shift the economic incentives. Eventually.
It’ll figure out what researchers have already written down, but it’ll take too long to get there.
- Comment on In space, nobody can hear your construction noise. 5 days ago:
This reminds me of a very dumb column I read a long time ago about moon mining.
Wouldn’t it be terrible to mine the moon? You would look up and see dust clouds covering it. All the natural ecosystem being ripped up for pit mines. It’d be awful.
If you said “that’s not how things would work on the moon”, congratulations, you know more about how space works than the author.
- Comment on What, greedy, powerful people would do to keep and increase their power in a world that is approaching a period of increasing weather disasters? Would a post-scarcity society benefit those people? 6 days ago:
Can you narrow down which parts cover this?
- Comment on What, greedy, powerful people would do to keep and increase their power in a world that is approaching a period of increasing weather disasters? Would a post-scarcity society benefit those people? 6 days ago:
For more than a few, the answer is luxury prepper bunkers. Spez has one of those.
- Comment on YSK that only by being yourself will you find people who like the real you. No one can beat you at being you, but you’ll only ever be second best at pretending to be someone else. 1 week ago:
I was able to follow it, but it meant finding a completely different community from the one I was in. That’s not an easy thing to do.
The rewards are 100% worth it, though.
- Comment on There is a limit how much power the pedal assist of an e-Bike is allowed to provide (at least in many countries). There is no limit though on how strong the exoskeletton is that you use on a regular b 1 week ago:
It’s not speed so much as torque. Class 3 ebikes ate already pushing the limit. You have to be careful with part selection, and tolerances on derailier adjustment is tighter.
And brakes. Then it is a matter of speed. You just need bigger parts to take more heat so you don’t get brake fade. It’s why anything more than a class 3 needs scooter/motorcycle parts. If they don’t, run away.
- Comment on There is a limit how much power the pedal assist of an e-Bike is allowed to provide (at least in many countries). There is no limit though on how strong the exoskeletton is that you use on a regular b 1 week ago:
Legally, yes. The drive train on bikes has something else to say.
- Comment on Penis Party 1 week ago:
If you disagree that the problem is penis, you’re just a prude.
- Comment on LinuX is The Most Un-Secure Barely Glued Operating System That Barely Work. 1 week ago:
Line-ew-ex
- Comment on Jeebuz Rode A Velocirapture 1 week ago:
Coincidentally, 41% is also approximately Trump’s approval rating.
- Comment on 'Windmill': China tests world’s first megawatt-level airship to capture high winds 1 week ago:
Can they preference the generation to favor voltage over current? Current is what tends to need really thick cables.
- Comment on 'Windmill': China tests world’s first megawatt-level airship to capture high winds 1 week ago:
Hydrogen wouldn’t burn inside the balloon, because there’s no oxygen. If a fire started on the surface of the balloon, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s helium or hydrogen. Hindenburg would have happened no matter what it was filled with. IIRC, there’s an argument out there that hydrogen actually saved people in that case, though I don’t remember the physics of it all.
There’s some safety issues involving working with it on the ground, but you can mitigate that with procedures. Helium has an asphyxiation risk, especially when you’re working with enough to fill a blimp, so it’s not like it’s totally safe there, either.
Historically, the really bad thing with blimps/dirigibles is how the ground crew can get thrown into the air when they’re holding it down with rope and a gust of wind suddenly picks up. Hard to find numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more deaths involving ground crew operations of dirigibles than the 35 people who died on the Hindenburg.
- Comment on 'Windmill': China tests world’s first megawatt-level airship to capture high winds 1 week ago:
Tom Scott visited the US National Helium Reserve and talked to the field manager of the facility. According to him, it’s not that big of a deal.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8
(Relevant bit starts around 2:58)