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Joined 3 years ago
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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?



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    This…shines a totally new light on a bunch of decisions that originally made me fairly upset and caused me to quit playing the game.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



  • 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.



  • I personally feel like anyone who’s not a bigot IS by nature a feminist at least in a solidarity for the ENTIRE human race sense, but keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective as a male, so I might be missing something by virtue of it not regularly impacting me personally.

    I’d love a less-abused word, personally.

    As a guy, I don’t think I’d WANT to call myself a feminist, lest I be incorrectly associated with the likes of Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, or a whole host of other clearly NON-feminists who hid behind the word to cover their actions.



  • Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

    Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

    You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

    Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.



  • Why do you think a different word is needed?

    Because the word has been largely washed of all negative connotations, at least across the minds of the majority of the populace in the U.S.

    If you are trying to convey what the word settler means in a dictionary by using it in casual conversation, you are likely to find that it is not carrying the full weight of its intended meaning in the mind(s) of the listener(s).

    This makes it a FUNCTIONALLY inadequate word despite being a technically correct one.


  • they could really tell the IRS to audit 501© and remove their status from the churches and bullshit Republican charities

    That would be juuuuuust about the dumbest thing they could possibly do. It would mobilize gigantic swaths of voters who are heavily invested in rhetoric over fact-checking.

    Doing away with Roe mobilized many of those voters who could be considered to be fence sitters towards the left. Removing church tax exemptions would move them right back and it would do NOTHING to solve the problem, because while the actual big offenders are happily USING the hell out of that tax exemption, they’re rich enough that they’ll get along fine without it.

    It WOULD hurt a whole lot of TINY churches that employ 1-50 people per church and actually do community work, though. All of those would go away. That’s a LOT of rural food shelves.

    I’m largely against the religious tax exemption, but that’s a problem we should worry about AFTER we can replace the nationwide infrastructure we’d be dismantling by doing so with something at least as effective as what’s there now.


  • Okay, so I hit rotten tomatoes, checked movies that were both critics rotten AND audience rotten, and started perusing titles for stuff I thought rocked.

    abraham lincoln: vampire hunter

    waterworld

    hellboy (how is this in here? I thought this was universally loved)

    mars attacks! (56 and 53, I also feel like this shouldn’t be on the list. It’s too good, and not in a bad way)

    x-men origins: wolverine (again, is this not considered awesome? I thought it was great)

    daredevil/elektra (I enjoyed both movies)

    and now for stuff I’ve watched at least five times:

    the ninth gate

    planet of the apes (2001)

    avp

    prince of persia

    green lantern

    van helsing

    I’m dead serious, I was looking forward to MORE green lantern movies along the lines of that first one. I bought it on amazon having heard nothing about it (I was in a societal black hole for a few years there), watched it, loved it, and was like “sweet, when’s the sequel coming out? I wanna see sinestro do his thing…wow, this did not do well. Fuck.”

    I wasn’t super happy with ALL of the writing, but that’s comic stuff in general and I thought the whole thing was still quite enjoyable. Like, multiple rewatches enjoyable. Seeing Hal Jordan on screen and having Ryan Reynolds do it was great.