English Mobster

If the good folks on Lemmygrad or Lemmy.ml could read they would be very upset at this comment.

Lemmy was always on the fringe. The founders are literal hardcore unironic “China did nothing wrong” communist tankies.

Microsoft is bigger.

Nintendo’s market cap is about $56.7 billion.

Microsoft’s market cap is $2.44 trillion, with $111 billion worth of cash (not equity, cash) in the bank.

Microsoft is 43 times bigger than Nintendo. They can pay for Nintendo with only cash, if they desire.

These trillion-dollar players are an order of magnitude larger than anyone around them. They can do what they want, same as how Apple ($2.8 trillion) can easily buy Disney ($150.5 billion) if they wished.

This isn’t an exact science, but you can use market cap to ballpark these things and get an idea of how much an acquisition would cost. For example, Twitter had a market cap of $31 billion in August 2022, and Elon bought it a few months later for $44 billion. That’s a 1.4x increase, so applying the same math buying all of Disney would “only” cost about $214 billion - which both Apple and Microsoft (and Google) could do. Nintendo would cost about $80 billion, which Microsoft could do without even taking out a loan.

The issue isn’t necessarily the price; it’s the regulators.

What are they going to do? Ban them?

Honestly if I was migrating away from Fandom I’d do everything I can to burn every bridge. Go through and edit every page to have every link redirect to the better wiki. Ignore their 2-week period, and don’t inform the Fandom overlords that the wiki is being shut down (it’s not like they’re going to check without being prompted).

I’d make them ban me, and then good luck finding an admin.

Do you agree that retrievers are bred to retrieve things?

Do you agree that herding dogs are bred to herd things?

Do you agree that pointer dogs are bred to find things?

Surely you’ve been around these kinds of dogs before. It’s not something that they learn; they are specifically bred to do a job and they will do that job even without training. You’ve seen or heard of how a sheepdog will herd small children, I’m sure. It’s why the breed exists; they are specifically bred to do a certain thing and genetically their instinct is to do the thing that they were bred for over the course of thousands of years. You can remove them from their mom and not give them any training and they will naturally do the thing that they were bred to do. You don’t have to train a golden to bring you back a ball.

So is it a surprise that a dog bred to kill things will want to kill things?

That’s not simply because of “a poor owner”, although the fact that people refuse to train their killer dogs to not be killers is part of it. It’s because their dogs are genetically predisposed to kill, just like a pointer dog is genetically predisposed to find things.

It is absolutely a bad breed. Killer dogs should be banned worldwide. Every single pitbull, rottweiler, etc. should be spayed/neutered and the breed should end. They’re too dangerous and dumb owners have proven that you can’t rely on humans to keep them under control.

It’s not the dogs’ fault, mind - it’s their instinct. But that doesn’t mean that future generations should have to deal with it.

https://lemmy.world/instances

Replace it with your instance domain.

What about all the games that have already been cracked?

Bear in mind this affects every game, including games that have already been released. So if that stuff wasn’t patched out before, then devs would be charged for piracy.

I dunno. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree that crackers aren’t bad people, but it leaves some unknowns because you’re counting on them to go above and beyond, essentially.

I dunno if Epic’s licensing is worse. At least it’s a cut of revenue and not charging per install.

Not to mention that Epic gives sweetheart deals to indies periodically. They make their money from Fortnite, not the engine.

This actively hurts the developers and helps Unity.

The devs will be charged for every install. Even if that install wasn’t legitimate.

So if you pirate a Unity game, it’s no longer a victimless crime. You’re actively making the developer pay for your piracy.

Like normally, I am totally cool with piracy. But giving piracy as a solution here is actually detrimental to the developers and doesn’t hurt Unity the company at all.

FWIW, CashApp Taxes (formerly Credit Karma Taxes) is free for state and federal.

Except this one’s answer is yes?

They gave examples of new high-speed rail coming online within the next few years. This year, 2028, and 2030…

More specifically - see the credits by any means necessary.

You do not need to fight any bosses or even play the actual game, necessarily.

The Pokemon Yellow Any% never has you leave your house.

The Baldur’s Gate 3 Any% likewise doesn’t have you fight anyone important and is over in less than 5 minutes. (There are Act 2 spoilers. Yes, you can reach Act 2 in under 5 minutes.)

I’ve been literally saying this for years. Yang had the right idea, and every year it becomes more obvious.

Most industries will be automated within 10-20 years, or so transformed as to be unrecognizable. I’m not just talking about stuff that can be done by AI art tools or a future version of ChatGPT (which is in itself a large chunk of the economy). There’s also logistics (self-driving trucks, trains, taxis, planes, and boats), there’s food service (burger-flipping robots are already a thing), there’s groceries (robot stockers and self-checkouts), there’s hospitality (Japan already has automated hotels), there’s construction (we already see robots at construction sites), etc.

Within a couple decades I see no reason why these jobs would still be commonplace. Compare the world of the 1980s and 1990s to the world of today. Computers in the 80s and 90s are comparable to AI today, and in 2040-2050 I see no reason why we wouldn’t be living in a completely different world.

It’s true that some jobs will simply transform - programmers might become prompt engineers, for example. But many jobs will be eliminated completely, and I don’t buy the argument that people will just find new things to do. At a certain point, people will be automated out of the economy - to borrow an analogy from CGP Grey, the invention of the stagecoach may have been great for horses… but the invention of the car was less great.

I firmly believe that UBI is the only way forward, long-term. COVID already worked as a trial for it, and we’re seeing the economy contract in part because it stopped (in addition to other things, e.g. the Fed).

China doesn’t care. They’ll betray anyone in an instant, because they’re fascists masquerading as the “party of the people”.

The fact that there are so many pro-China supporters on Lemmy that want this shit makes me sad. Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad (same people), Hexbear…

Fuck tankies!

My brain thought I was on !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone for a second

Any time you make something, you have a copyright on it.

You have a copyright on the comment you just made, for example. And I have a copyright on this reply. It just magically happens once you create the work.

You can give your copyright away (for example, allowing Lemmy to publish your work on other instances or show it to others). You can also sell your copyright; when a publisher buys a book from an author, they actually buy the copyright to the words the author wrote (and thus the author loses their copyright over the work).

This goes beyond just words - pictures and whatnot have the same inherent copyright.

So the problem is that white noise doesn’t compress very easily.

Compression algorithms are generally designed to reduce noise; if you have something that’s extremely noisy it’s really hard to compress because that’s not what the algorithms were designed to do.

This means that these podcasts take up more space, which means they use more bandwidth than an equivalent non-white-noise solution.

A middle ground would be banning these “podcasts” and then having a white noise generator built into the app. The white noise generator would run locally on your device (very easy to make white noise) and wouldn’t cost any bandwidth at all.

Courts have been blocking them consistently. They’ve been a touch more aggressive, but Congress needs to pass more aggressive laws. Many of these companies are vertically integrated, not horizontally - and the laws aren’t really equipped to deal with that.

Google does the same.

I don’t use Chrome. Every single time I go to any Google service, it tells me I need to be using Chrome. It doesn’t take “no” for an answer; it’s a constant nag.

Google Docs especially gets mad and doesn’t even let you paste without formatting.