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Comment Re:Loathing (Score 1, Insightful) 40

May I ask why you call firing people morally corrupt? Illegal, according to some artificial definitions of what is supposed to be the law, which is a system designed to force behaviors, maybe. But morally corrupt? Please explain, I really do not get it, absolutely don't understand what is morally corrupt about firing people that you don't want to work with because any reasons whatsoever. If it is your business, you should be able to fire anyone, it's not about morality, it is purely, completely a monetary decision. Do you feel morally corrupt for purchasing things on sale rather than overpaying for them?

Comment Re:Cue the hate... (Score 5, Interesting) 62

As a game developer: Even a few percent are, as the article points out, millions of users. Us indie devs cannot compete with AAA studios in marketing. It's not that the playing field isn't level, it's not even the same playing field.

But in a niche, you have a good chance to be noticed and word of mouth spreading. And that means grabbing as much of the niche as you possibly can.

And it matters to you Windos users as well, because it means games are developed without being tied to a specific OS or driver feature. Which means your new game will run even if you're not running it on the latest hardware.

And finally, it matters because Linux gamers are more useful to a game developer. Maybe 3% of the Steam users run Linux, but for my last game, at least 30% of the useful bug reports came from Linux users.

Comment nope (Score 1) 124

No, it is not. "Too big to fail" is just bullshit bingo. The reason banks et al managed to get saved by taxpayer money with that phrase wasn't that they were. It was that they had a solidly entrenched lobby and connections at the highest levels. "Too big to fail" was simply the icing they coated the shit with to make the public swallow it.

Comment Re: Google has a vested interest (Score 2) 51

Installing Windows of any kind is a security risk that can lead to death, on this much I agree with the AI. I still believe anyo e should be allowed to do it though.

I am 100% pro Israel, against Islam, against Hamas, there is no such thing as Palestine. People should be able to fuck whoever, if it is consenting adults.

Government power is evil in itself. Taxes are theft, laissez faire capitalism is the best economic system for long term benefits.

Climate change is real. Immigration is fine as long as there are no welfare systems based on taxes. ruzzians should be contained by a mote with alligators and lasers.

Feminism, welfare systems, urbanization is causing the declining birth rates, this cannot be easily reversed, we will suffer because of this more than from the changing climate as a species.

People must be able to own any weapon systema they can afford. Governments must be decentralized, presidents shouldn't have more power than city mayors. Democracy fails hard because of power monopolization. Power must be decentralized. Property taxes, death taxes, income taxes, capital gains, dividends must never be taxed.

Schools, health care, infrastructure, everything must be private, paid for by selling bonds. Governments must charge fees for use, not rely on taxes. Fees must be directly paying for services rendered, never used for things other than the services rendered.

Money is what the market decides, most of the time markets decide that gold is money. Governments must never be allowed to print money, they may coun it for a fee.

Trade must always be free of all and any government involvement.

etc.etc. I know how this will be moded, but that is the point of this thread.

Comment marketing (Score 1) 26

Hobby game developer here - same thing applies. It doesn't matter how good the game you make is. If nobody knows that it exists, it won't sell, simple as that. And there are literally a few hundred games published EVERY DAY, so no you can't hope to be somehow discovered by accident or through the Steam (Epic, GOG, etc.) recommendation features. Well, not at scale. Maybe a few people will randomly find you, but without some marketing efforts, it's just that - a few.

Marketing, no matter how much we techies dislike it, is an essential part of any at-scale business. Customers need to know you exist. They need to know your product exists. They need to know your product can do something they would like.

There's a fine line between advertisement as manipulative exploitation and getting information to people interested in it. For a while, I had hopes that the Internet and search engines would solve that problem. Imagine if there were no advertisement. Anywhere. At all. But you had a magic machine on your desk or in your hands that, if you need something, can tell you where to get it. Need new dishes - here's all the shops selling dishes in the vicinity. Need a new computer - here's all the places you can look at computers and here's all the online shops who'll send them to you. Need a blowjob - here... well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, it seems I massively underestimated how much advertisers like to keep their jobs, and the whole shit became even worse online.

Comment Re:Based on the article... (Score 2) 248

THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE LEPTON OF CONSCIOUSNESS,

You utterly misunderstand what consciousness is or, for that matter, what 99% of the universe are.

If you grind the universe to a fine powder and look at the result, you can also claim that trees don't exist. Or planets. Or, really, anything.

It is clear to everyone not a complete idiot or fanatic, that consciousness, whatever it ultimately is, is something where structure, organization, patterns and connectivity matter a whole lot. It's not just matter, it is also how that matter is organized in space and time. The exact same molecules can make a pile of trash or a car.

Comment Re:Lack of imagination (Score 1) 248

You dont need one equation to run a simulation, you can work with many.

More than that. A simulation can do things like introduce randomness, recursion, non-trivial dependencies or emergent behaviour that are not easily expressed in equations. There's a huge area where we use computer simulations because either the equations are not known or a calculation of the equations is computationally impossible but a simulation is possible.

Comment Re:Coming Soon: a new Teams feature or two (Score 1) 56

Or, if you need the actual Tinyflaccid Teams client, run it in a VM? Or, if you need to use your company-provided box, give it a HDMI frame-grabber as a monitor?

The latter BTW is a nice solution if they force you to use (and lug around everywhere) a company-provided laptop that does nothing but Tinyflaccid Lookout and Tinyflaccid Teams.

Comment Re: Where will they install the rootkits? (Score 2) 71

"lock-in" is the word you're looking for.

People can't switch without considerable cost in money and/or convenience. That could be as simple as using two different systems at home and at work, which adds to the mental load.

Windows has been winning for 30+ years because it's familiar shit. Everyone knows it's shit, but at least you already know the taste. Consumers know that if they use Windos their skills trained at work transfer. Businesses know that if they use Windos then new hires don't need basic computer training. Software developers know that if they support Windos, there's a huge market that runs it.

Everyone is locking everyone else into the shit, and Microsofts sits in the middle and laughs.

I would bet that there's an internal competition among the various teams how much utter crap they can put into their respective parts of the OS before the public rebels against it.

Comment Re:It's 2025 (Score 1) 71

Been a non-windows user for two decades now, and don't miss it one bit. Sometimes sad if a cool game is out only on Windos, but I anyway don't have as much time anymore as I used to.

It's not just Windos, though. DOS was equally horrible. I replaced MS-DOS with Novell DOS on one of my PCs for utterly different reasons (better to run a small BBS system on) and that was miles ahead of the Microsoft shit.

It keeps getting worse because we are not the customers anymore, we are the product. Your data is sold, your user habits are monitizied, and the main reason Windows still rules the games market is so kids grow up on Windows PCs and will demand them in their jobs (businesses are the main buyers of the OS).

And probably because Bill Gates is sad if market share falls. And who can stand old men crying?

Comment not a complete idiot (Score 3, Insightful) 25

he is.

The minimum that I can't think of a good argument against is that AI needs to disclose that it is AI.

The problem of access for minors is, of course, how to check someone's age online, where as the old saying goes, nobody knows that you're actually a dog. That's nearly impossible without serious privacy intrusions.

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