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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Will it though? I could easily see Trump just writing off the deaths of any service members as a favor to his best buddy Putin or even ordering them to help Russia with the invasion. Best case scenario he just has the entire base stand down and sit on their asses while Russia does what it wants. He’s already indicated he doesn’t give a single flying fuck about NATO, and it’s not like he’s ever let little things like laws or treaties stop him before.





  • The crux of the case is whether Valve is applying that rule to non-Steam keys or not. Lawsuit says they are, Valve says they aren’t. If Valve is telling the truth, they’ve done nothing wrong. If Valve is lying however that is an anticompetitive practice that should be punished. We won’t really know until the trial concludes though.

    Personally I think the most likely answer is that some junior support people at Valve misunderstood the policy and told some people the wrong thing. There’s a decent chance that when those accusations first surfaced a decade or so ago (yes this has been a thing for that long) Valve probably sent some internal memos to clarify what the rule actually covers and what it doesn’t and hopefully that was that.



  • Primarily their review system which is hands down the best in the industry, as well as the laundry list of shady practices they’ve banned companies from employing. They’re not perfect by any means but they’re still head and shoulders above the competition. They’re also at least somewhat responsive to the community with them either implementing new policies to protect consumers when major scandals happen and even occasionally being proactive and banning bad practices when companies start talking about implementing them.

    As for GOG they’re a bit of a mixed bag recently. They started carrying games with DRM at some point so they’re no longer the DRM free zone they once were, although the majority of their catalog is still DRM free. I believe they do warn you when a game has DRM though. On the plus side though they recently committed to improving their support for Linux which many people will be happy to see.


  • Multiple companies have tried to become the de facto games store and every last one of them has failed not because Steam uses its dominant position to crush them, but because not a single one of them has been willing to invest in the features, capabilities, and pro consumer policies that Steam has. Every single one of them thought that doing the bare minimum and then throwing cash at ads and publishers would be the path to victory. It wasn’t. Yeah, Steam may be effectively a monopoly, but it’s because nobody else really wants to compete with them at their level. The closest anyone has ever come is GOG.


  • It’s not a question of how good or bad the LLM is, it’s a question of watt hours and bandwidth. It takes a certain amount of electricity to run so your prices and profit margins are directly correlated with the price of electricity.

    LLMs run out of data centers with cheap electricity and cheap bandwidth are going to be the cheapest ones on the market. For electricity this would typically be places with cheap renewables nearby like large hydroelectric plants. Bandwidth is a little trickier as there’s not as obvious an indicator of where bandwidth is cheap and plentiful but typically it’s going to be near major population centers. Putting those together there’s probably only a small handful of locations in the world where it’s economically viable to run these data centers.



  • So I guess they’re prepping for that hyper-inflation now. Can’t wait for a cup of coffee to cost $75 and a month’s rent to be $20,000. But hey, look on the bright side, I’m sure the stock market will look amazing breaking through all those all time records.

    Speaking of, that would be an interesting exercise. They always talk about how various funds and stocks are up or down some percent over the previous day/week/year or whatever. It would be interesting to see that same data but adjusted for inflation. Like is the dow jones up 2% from last year or is it really down 0.5% due to inflation?




  • Just thinking out loud but going after the power seems like a bad approach. Instead you should target the cooling infrastructure. Not sure what you could throw in the air intake to do maximum damage, but I think that’s going to be a lot easier to damage than the power would be. Either that or you get clever on the power side. Don’t try to do a big spike, instead stress the failovers. Rapidly alternate between low voltage (maybe connecting a massive power shunt across the incoming line) to trip the backup power and normal voltage to get it to switch off of the backup. I’d bet it would handle rapidly swapping back and forth a lot worse than one big spike.

    PSA, it’s a really bad idea to mess with the kind of high voltage lines that feed these data centers. That’s a really good way to end up dead in a very painful manner.




  • The biggest problem I have with Kobo isn’t even really something that’s their fault or that they can do anything about. Amazon through their Amazon Unlimited program has locked a bunch of major authors into exclusivity contracts where they’re contractually barred from distributing their ebooks on other platforms. That in turn means a bunch of major authors are just completely unavailable anywhere but Amazon, and of course Amazon ebooks exclusively only work on Kindle devices. It’s a vicious feedback loop where authors refuse to leave Amazon because it’s the market dominator by a large margin and consumers refuse to use anything else because all the authors are only on Amazon.

    If you can make do with non-Amazon sources of ebooks it’s great to do so and we really need more people doing exactly that in order to convince authors that the Amazon shackles aren’t worth it, but it’s definitely a struggle sometimes.