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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I’m curious. Economically speaking, what would happen if Nvidia pulled a “Steam” and had a “February sale” where some models of video card were discounted enough to lead to a massive spike in sales numbers? A big enough discount to generate a greater total net return on sales for the quarter despite the fact that they were sold at a lower profit margin per individual sale? Assuming limitations like “you must create an account with a residential shipping address that can receive no more than x cards at the discounted price per street address” or some such to limit scalping, would simply showing increased profits do them any good?

    Or is the problem due to a lack of product quantity?



  • Kiernian@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldFirefox is really innovating
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    16 days ago

    These features are unwanted by many, keep increasing, and the methods used to turn each individual piece off keep changing, growing, and moving, and that’s JUST on the user level.

    It’s at least an order of magnitude worse to have to pull the unwanted stuff back out if you’re forking Firefox.

    Mozilla could make this straightforward and easy.

    They are specifically NOT doing that ON PURPOSE.

    Why do you suppose that is?



  • Oh good. /s

    Let’s push the idea that “good people are tired of being filmed by creeps”.

    Start the narrative out nice and soft.

    Countdown to "it’s okay to smash the phones of people filming ICE agents doing their jobs"or whatever agenda is most on the radar of people who are against video accountability when they’re in the wrong.

    I don’t particularly like the concept of these glasses or the fact that creeps will use them, but this is not how we tackle a problem we already have with creeps being able to use cell phones and easy-to-hide body cams.

    Puff pieces like this are how narratives get used to put bad things into law.

    Remember Cambridge Analytica and note the current state of xitter.



  • It’s also really bad for political optics.

    It’s as bad as or worse than (according to the people treating it as a political issue) low birth rates. (From a human perspective it’s much worse).

    So if you can suppress discussion of it, you don’t have to talk about solving the “problem” as frequently, you can downplay it, and you can shift blame to nebulous, faceless things like “social media” or “bullying” (both of which are real things and real concerns, but not things most places are willing to earnestly address politically, so in practically they function as a fits-all “evil” that allows redirection from the real problem, which includes things like lack of agency and security.)

    If the U.S., for example, had a true grasp on the scope of this issue across all age groups, I think our political landscape would look a lot different. Despite being an issue across all age groups, each age group tends to stratify their discourse to be primarily amongst themselves, so online silencing becomes a ridiculously powerful tool in downplaying the issue, because there’s already a semi-natural cultural isolation in place for discourse in general.

    We’ve seen the effectiveness of this silencing tactic when it comes to avoiding discussion of the problem for decades in one particular subset of humanity who, historically speaking, frequently seems to have regular horrible tragic mishaps while “cleaning their guns”.


  • terraria for minecraft + metroidvania

    This…shines a totally new light on a bunch of decisions that originally made me fairly upset and caused me to quit playing the game.

    I played the game with nearly every free moment I had between the time I bought it in 2012 and the 1.2 release in October of 2013. Multiple worlds. Multiplayer sessions with players in several countries possibly requiring port forwarding and VPN tunnels if I remember correctly, and all of it stopped dead for me when I had to quit focusing on creating and exploring and was instead spending most of my time struggling to survive.

    There were enemies before, and you could find one of the three bosses and just… Not go there, but 1.2 really made combat the forefront of the game and killed it for me entirely.

    In the intervening 12 years. I’d be surprised if had more than a couple of hours into the game.

    Viewing it through the lens of a metroidvania where you craft your own progression is not something I’d considered before.

    I might actually go back to the game on the rare occasion I’m in the mood for something like that.

    Thank you for the insight, while it probably sounds silly, it gives me some perspective into something that was so jarring it still causes me to panic when a game announces combat where combat was not previously the focus (I’m looking at you, Dyson Sphere Program 😄) and I really appreciate that.





  • Use it without telemetry Use it without mandatory notifications that turn themselves back on if you turn them off Use it without file grouping by date if I so choose

    There’s a giant list of configuration options they took away from 10 to 11 and more that they keep making more and more difficult to find, and this trend has been going on since aero was introduced in xp.

    Some of us liked the power user options in win2k and feel they should have been expanded, not removed.


  • I just figured he was trying to save Wikipedia from getting axed by those in power in some countries who are pushing back very hard against anything that has sentences containing both “Israel” and “genocide” in it.

    We’ve hit such staggeringly outrageous levels of “forced propaganda” in the U.S. (people getting fired from their jobs for speaking I’ll of a dead guy?) that if I was Jimmy, I’d be worried about the whole thing going away if it catches the eye of the wrong person at the wrong time. I don’t agree with what he’s doing for whatever reason, but the fact is that while Cloudflare may be able to survive 2.2 whattabytes[sic] per second, Wikipedia will not.


  • Do some of the same shit the Republicans have been doing for ages any time THEY are in the minority.

    There should be a daily press briefing with Pete B, Bernie S., or Alexandria O.C. that’s covered by every journalist who’s been kicked out of the white house. Call that shit “The American Way” briefing and compare the events of the last 24 hours of trump BS to the constitution and the declaration of independence.

    Obstruct every last piece of illegal garbage the Republican Nazis are trying to get away with loudly and publicly.

    Put themselves OUT THERE in the public eye as AGAINST FACISM and go full-on captain America on those Nazi Republicans.




  • The Official Walter Simonson Page’s post

    Aug 6, 2015

    Star Wars 53 cover. Pen and India ink. 10 x 15. 1981.

    I posted this cover because it represents something to me of the fun of comics back in the day. Maybe this sort of thing is still being done. No idea. But this issue of Star Wars began life as an issue of John Carter of Mars penciled by Carmine Infantino. :-) That title was canceled with an issue unpublished. And Marvel, in an effort to save a few bucks, mandated that the issue should be turned into a Star Wars story. It actually became two issues of Star Wars. I don’t remember if the John Carter story was two issues or if we merely stretched it out in order to convert the issue into an acceptable SW story.

    The basic idea was to use as many of the JC pages as possible with as few changes as possible. Some extra pages had to be done and some panels altered to a greater or lesser degree to get everything to fit together. That was my job, along with the covers.

    Chris Claremont wrote the issues and, I presume, wrote the original JC story. I’ve forgotten. I don’t know that it was the best way to make comics, but it was an interesting intellectual puzzle to try to solve in a readeable fashion. And it was the second time I got to do something like that. I’d helped Steven Grant convert an issue of Tarzan into a couple of Battlestar Galacticas a little earlier. It was fun, challenging, interesting and curious to do, whatever the final outcome.

    I chose this cover because the issues had these giant stormtroopers in them, stormtroopers that I presume never appeared in any Star Wars stuff again. And we had giant stormtroopers in the issue in the first place because they were converted Tharks. ;-)


  • Find an open source project that’s coded in your language of choice that you both care about (edit – or that looks interesting to you, at least) and want to add functionality to.

    Download a working copy, then, since you’re learning with this, pretend the repo doesn’t exist anymore and you’re on your on with your self-imposed assignment.

    Figure out what functionality you want to add, start with changing or augmenting something simple, and figure out where that would go in the existing code, and make it happen.

    See if you can manage to Google search your way past any errors you run into, preferably alternating between ai answers and things like stack overflow posts, only instead of copy-pasting the code that errors out (or the solution code you get from ai or posts) actually step through things and figure out what the “solution” code is doing differently and ask yourself why and how that makes a difference or has a different effect from the code that generated the error in the first place. Then decide whether it’s actually likely to fix the error or not. If you think it’s going to? Try using it.

    If it works, make sure you understand why.

    If it doesn’t, try to figure out why not.

    Keep going until you have a working new feature.

    Then try a more complicated feature.

    After a few of those, try tackling some of the bugs in the repo.