rastilin

They probably are, but it’s not really about cost, it’s about fear. I fear that while it costs $x to switch to Unreal Enigne now, it’ll cost $x+10 after a few weeks when they do their next decision, and $x+20 a month or so after that.

I remember Yudowski being a thing like a decade ago, and people were making fun of his “AI” research even then. It’s scary to realize that not only did some people take him seriously, but those people are at the helm of AI companies and making decisions affecting tens of billions of investment capital. I think there was a quote by Kurt Vonnegut that “true horror is waking up one morning and realizing your high school class is running the country”.

For the other poster lower down, I’d almost successfully forgotten about his Harry Potter fanfiction, people kept praising it so I actually read through a bit of it, it’s painful reading. He also wrote a Superman fanfiction and that’s even worse. I think they both say a lot about his internal mental state and his perception of other people though.

Maybe, but I’m betting that the CEO who floated the idea that FPS players would be willing to pay per-reload didn’t push back too hard against the board’s ideas.

That’s not why I play games though…

I think they expected a Skyrim style modding community to spring up over the next few years. To be fair, I think they might be right, since there are already Starfield mods and I’m still playing Skyrim 10 years after it came out.

Possibly. It also suggest you’d get all these benefits by just disabling one of the GPUs, because unless battery life is a concern for your gaming laptop the difference in power draw on the desktop will be fairly minor.

This actually sounds like a really cool feature.

I’ve never had a bluetooth device that worked well and connected reliably, so “better than bluetooth” is not hard.

Absolutely. The security argument is used so often I’m surprised people aren’t more cynical about it.

They’re not offsetting anything, they still charge money for the boxed copy sold in stores. This is pure profit for them.

I think they’ll go even harder, making Windows only run stuff purchased through the Windows Store so they can completely lock in the market.

I already donate to my Mastodon instance, if my instance needs or wants money for any reason, they should set up a donation button and I’ll subscribe. Which will give them a lot more money than they would ever make from showing me ads. We should normalize removing all ads from the internet, forever.

I use a physical sim. I’m not sure it even supports eSIM, but I’d be hesitant to ditch the physical sim for precisely the reasons you mentioned. I’ve swapped sims around between phones and even borrowed them from people when I was in a new area, something that’s much harder with eSIMs.

Harsh but true. I also need to sell stuff to people, and I hate ads, I realize that other people hate ads too and that in fact ads generally suck. The solution is word of mouth advertising, not ever-more-intricate tools. The real truth is that what the ad companies are selling is the idea that ads are actually cost efficient and worthwhile, and the gullible customers are actually the advertisers, not the people who they’re trying to flog stuff to.

It’s better because Bing may still have selling ads as a priority when building the indexer. If you’re not the one paying, you’re the product.

I think people just don’t want to believe that the wealthy and powerful can be that stupid. But why not? Elon Musk was born into a wealthy family and then got super, super lucky during the .com boom. He can absolutely make stupid decisions.

Because last time I checked they just used Bing anwyay, while Kagi runs their own indexer.

I can tell you from experience I have a Samsung T5 (500GB) that has over 95TB of writes over 5+ years to it and it’s only used up 17% of its spare blocks. The T7 which is the newer model is like $40, I’d just get one of those. They’re very reliable, I’ve bought a few and none of them have failed. The larger drives have more spare blocks and are even more resistant to writes.

Personally I would recommend a portable SSD, over a HDD as I’ve had several HDDs fail but never lost an SSD, BackBlaze backs this up with their total drive failure statistics being 2.5% for HDDs and under 0.5% for SSDs. Your real danger will be that a portable drive is guaranteed to get jostled and an SSD is far more resilient to that.

Google’s becoming pretty terrible anyway, it only seems to return pages that are selling things. I’ve switched to Kagi at this point and it seems to work better, it’s subscription only, but you know you’re the one paying for it and that means that you’re the end customer.

I donate to all the services I use. Including my Mastodon instance, Wikipedia, Habitica, etc…

EDIT: And I mean monthly. Except for Wikipedia where it’s just yearly.