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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Added some links to my original comment.

    It’s not instead of central currency, but in addition to it.

    The advantage is that businesses can transact with less conventional liquidity so they don’t have to rely on bank loans. This allows them to charge less to customers who use the local currency.

    In the long term, this makes money [in general – both kinds] move slightly faster within the local market, which makes the money [both kinds] more valuable [within the community]. And since the money [again, both kinds] is staying in the local market, the community’s wealth is less likely to be drained by external speculators.








  • Steam is so funny.

    Buying there instead of pirating is a joy, the ads actually feel like a benefit instead of a punishment, the analytics seem to be aimed at saving me time by highlighting stuff I’ll like instead of gaslighting me into emptying my wallet…

    The result is:

    I buy lots of games, watch lots of ads — share ads with friends even — go out of my way to give them more analytics data points, and trust their recommendations enough to shell out $2.99 for something on sale after only 10 seconds of research.

    Why are other companies not able to follow Steam’s approach?




  • I tried to be accurate instead of specific.

    If I didn’t have to work anymore, I’d have more time to explore potential things to work on, so whatever project I’d pick right now would probably not be my main focus after 3 months of settling into my new life.

    From where I am right now, I think it would be something to do with language-level features for distributed computing (but not that web3 nonsense). There’s a lot of potential to weaken the monopoly power of cloud providers by working on something like that, which is why it’s an under-explored area.

    But I’d need more people to work with, and some specific use cases to go after. So I would expect the effort to change a lot by the time I actually found the right group of people to work with.




  • Sounds like they are preparing to “pull an Apple” with more than just pricing there.

    Part of the benefit of Apple’s M series is the unified memory model. They’re able to convert that into increased GPU performance because you no longer have to transfer data in and out of VRAM.

    But Apple can only pull that off because they control the CPU, GPU, and the OS (specifically the graphics SDK). Writing graphics code in a unified model is quite a bit different from the conventional x86 model.

    Intel would need their own equivalent to Metal if they wanted to do a similar move.

    I don’t know enough about Vulkan to say if it’s compatible with this kind of approach, but if not then is Intel really up to starting from scratch?

    If they got Unreal and Unity on board, I guess that would give them a good chunk of the market right off the bat for new titles, but what about legacy ones?





  • The venerable master Qc Na was walking with his student, Anton. Hoping to prompt the master into a discussion, Anton said “Master, I have heard that objects are a very good thing - is this true?” Qc Na looked pityingly at his student and replied, “Foolish pupil - objects are merely a poor man’s closures.”

    Chastised, Anton took his leave from his master and returned to his cell, intent on studying closures. He carefully read the entire “Lambda: The Ultimate…” series of papers and its cousins, and implemented a small Scheme interpreter with a closure-based object system. He learned much, and looked forward to informing his master of his progress.

    On his next walk with Qc Na, Anton attempted to impress his master by saying “Master, I have diligently studied the matter, and now understand that objects are truly a poor man’s closures.” Qc Na responded by hitting Anton with his stick, saying “When will you learn? Closures are a poor man’s object.” At that moment, Anton became enlightened.