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Tanoc

826 karmajoined 4 jaar geleden

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Tanoc
·3 dagen geleden·discuss
The issue is both. They're inefficient in that they hire too many people to work on things people don't want. They collate all of their workforce and capital into projects that will perform poorly, rather than splitting that up between different projects that will individually vary but have a much healthier release and lifetime. The thing that people very high up in the organization lose a view on is that while there are operating costs to running multiple individual small projects, overall they balance themselves out because the risk isn't concentrated and each budget is an entity unto itself that doesn't affect the others. A supermassive failure like Concord however takes everyone's budgets and puts it into one giant project that has to succeed well beyond reasonable or even sustainable returns because now you have the costs of the core developers, the half dozen assistant studios, and the dozens to hundreds of asset producers on contract. And because of that you have to target as many demographics as possible, which for marketers means shaving off as many of the pieces that are necessary for complex mechanisms functioning within their niche but are incongruous with the other complex mechanisms that have been deemed as appealing. In other words, they're gambling their entire income on the equivalent of a spaceship boat plane car that can't land on water, can't re-enter the atmosphere, can't drive on the roads because it's too big, and is awful to fly because it's all of those other things.
Tanoc
·20 dagen geleden·discuss
There's been a plague recently of people taking videogame songs from classic games and rapping over them, putting them on Soundcloud or other services, and then automating the copyright process. So people who are playing through Donkey Kong Country or Dynamite Heddy are getting videos copyright claimed by someone who likely wasn't even born when the games came out and has no legal right to.
Tanoc
·20 dagen geleden·discuss
A problem in isolation this is not, however. Large portions of Windows now have this same bloat in terms of executable filesize, runtime needed for basic functions, and RAM usage. Windows Media Player by itself might not be an issue, but it's part of a trend that now affects Explorer, Desktop Window Manager, and a bunch of other core components to the operating system.
Tanoc
·vorige maand·discuss
They don't "prefer" anything. They just take what's given to them because they don't know that there are other methods. Companies purposely keep them uninformed to reduce hassle when dealing with customers and to make them more likely to follow the route that the company prefers.
Tanoc
·vorige maand·discuss
Kratos in God Of War Chains Of Olympus through to God Of War III (if we're speaking Chronologically) didn't enjoy conflict. He was originally a soldier fighting the Persians that was then cursed to be a representation of war. He had a family that Ares took them away, and so he willingly took on the curse in order to kill every god and free humanity from their helplessness under the gods. A huge thread of the sequel series is him realizing that the Pantheon were not the only gods, and that killing them all isn't as powerful as enabling humanity to defy them. And he sees his own son as the bridge that will link the humans to their own innate potential. Kratos has been entrenched in blood and warfare since he was a teenager, and has come to see conflict to be a result of those unwilling to separate their needs and wants.
Tanoc
·vorige maand·discuss
Exactly. That's treating a symptom, which creates more and more extreme symptoms. After a while though it's far more costly and complex to keep treating the wide variety of symptoms than it ever would've been to treat the cause, but because so much infrastructure has been built around treating those symptoms it's too difficult to dedicate resources to treating the cause.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from the unreasonable responses, but you can sell protection against them as well. A large portion of the economy actually revolves around this as a consequence of the shift towards service rather than production.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
It appears to be not so much about the datacenters themselves as it is limiting the growth capabilities for the LLMs. From their understanding fewer datacenters means more congestion which means less possibility LLMs can be shoved into more places where the public thinks they are intrusive. Which seems to be everywhere.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
Dude I'm likely on so many lists already it doesn't even matter. Considering the government of my nation is currently levying new threats against the citizenry just about every day it's not even that much to talk about.

I'm just hoping that enough people can be convinced that systems of governance are not immune ethereal constructs run like videogame logic where you cannot do anything not explicitly written down. Too many people think that enforcement of anything works like a zap from God instead of being a mechanism that needs enforcers to pull it off.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
Considering that Ferrari has been making very ugly cars since about 2004 thanks to their penchant for overexaggerating every single design feature, it's somewhat surprising that they managed to keep it up despite hiring an outsider. Even moreso that they somehow managed to do that by swinging in the complete opposite direction and simplifying everything as much as they could. The Roma and Amalfi show the design language they're currently using after abandoning the caricature that started with the F430, and yet they chose this instead.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
Governments, regardless of what threat they wield against those they supposedly govern, are limited by the fact that they are organizations run by humans. For now. God forbid we ever reach the point where there are no humans... Anyways, because of that they require humans to ensure enforcement. A major reason why Yoti is able to do what it's doing is because there are no humans enforcing privacy and data protection laws against them. This means the reverse can also be true, where enough people motivated to do so can simply not enforce whatever requirement there is for Yoti's services to be used. Because the social contract's been not only breached but shredded and spread to the wind this is very likely to occur. In my viewpoint unfortunately the most likely reason is because they'll go with somebody else other than Yoti that provides more favourable terms, but that's an aside to the likely situation I outlined.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
One of the dangers is in the ability to cross-nationally attack someone. As digital infrastructure continues to encompass more and more facets of necessary interactions with the government and governments force more and more points of interaction someone from a foreign nation could destroy the life of someone who is interfering with their aims. Say someone has published an article that reveals the terrible behaviour of a given company. Someone hired by the company can use a variety of data points to not only track down who that person is, but where they live and even which room in their house they spend the most time in. With that kind of information it would be easy to financially, reputationally, or mortally wound someone. With the worryingly swift growth rate of corruption this could apply at any level for any reason. And unlike for example the difficulty of getting into a car crash or robbing a cash register, digital infrastructure makes all of this remarkably easy and for some parts even free. With modern LLM agents it could be entirely automated so that no human is ever involved, and because there's so few current guardrails and such a vehement protestation against any being implemented the agent could wipe it's connection to it's handler so that nobody ever faces any consequences.

The thing is, this kind of stuff already happens all the time. The number of spam calls people suffer through are a direct result of companies digging through the contacts list after being granted that permission (though often without being granted that permission), then selling that data to brokers. Data breaches that wipe people's credit or force a credit freeze because they bought something ten years ago are another common one. Or think about package stalking, where people get access to someone's purchase history and the tracking number to a purchase so that they can steal it in transit or once it arrives. There's a number of beatings and murders that have happened because of police officers being able to access surveillance tools to track former romantic partners or spouses. All of these are different parts of the lack of privacy, and they're all getting worse because the tools that are used to surveil are becoming more widespread and more accessible.

Privacy is a protection against the intelligent attacks of other humans. It is not a frill that can be taken away without ridiculous and trailing harm.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
I've been telling people for years now not to engage with systems such as these. Some say I'm just being paranoid. But a growing number concerningly reply with either "So? What are they gonna do with it?" or "They already have it, it doesn't matter." Normal people either don't know the dangers present or they don't understand that stopping the flow hurts the machine. And they want neither to know or understand. Apathy or the desire for convenience cannot adequately explain why.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
Because in reality they don't actually bring in any revenue for the first few years thanks to all the subsidies and tax breaks they demand upfront before construction. At best it would be state and federal taxes used for operations that any operating business brings like federal payroll, but there wouldn't be any property taxes for at least five to ten years and the federal corporate income tax would likely be from the state the company is based in rather than the state the datacenter is based in. The municipality, be that the county or city the datacenter's in, gets screwed.

Meanwhile just to run a trucking depot you'd have the heavy vehicle tax, international fuel agreement tax, registration tax, sales taxes for the trucks and trailers, property taxes, and whatever incidental taxes required by the state you're operating in. The property tax, IFAT, and local payroll taxes meanwhile all go to the municipality and don't skip straight up to the state or national level. This is with no expectation of any of this being waived or delayed because the trucking industry doesn't have the surface visible financial performance of the industries municipalities are more lenient towards.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
One could feasibly make their debate topic that the U.S. is not actually a functioning country but instead has morphed into an extensive financialization scheme, and they could win that debate.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
Datacenters are financially a net negative for whichever municipality they end up in. They're operated mostly remotely with little staff and they have no tangible production, meaning any wealth they generate ends up vast distances away. Meanwhile the municipality ends up with increased costs because of the inefficiencies of bruteforcing computation, and because of the subsidies and tax breaks that the companies not only expect but demand for construction, there's no revenue being generated even for the local government.

That alone is enough of an argument against them.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
As far as I know it's mostly rich hobbyists or people purchasing for decoration that buy Fenders just because of name recognition. Almost everyone else gets guitars from small custom shops because they're cheaper, better built, and you're not stuck with a single bridge style and two choices of pickups. That's if they don't just buy off the rack stuff from ESP or Ibanez, who have absolutely devoured Fender's market share in the under $2,000 category. Which incidentally is the largest consumer base. The only thing Fender sells consistently is the Telecaster and the Jaguar, both of which people prefer off the shelf versions of rather than getting from the custom shop because you can't really mess with the design of either without drastically altering the sound.

If you want an example of when this kind of lawsuit backfires and causes reputational loss like you say, look at Gibson. A few years ago they sued Music Man, First Act, Jackson, Dean, and a few others over the "flying V" design that came out in 1958 and had already been genericized by the early '80s. They won on trademark grounds against Dean and the resulting fear over the other open lawsuits caused a few Flying V and Explorer lookalikes to go out of production. Since then anyone who remembers the ordeal has warned people away from ever purchasing their guitars. Gibson were in terrible but improving condition in 2024 having just left bankruptcy in 2019 and the fallout from the lawsuit being revived last year has massively hurt their sales and left them right on the track to death again.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in the 1890s likely would've had education be entirely optional. He lived through the change from school being a privilege to being required and watched as it grew from six to eight to twelve years. The film itself is literally about the dichotomy between a post-agrarian tribe and nuclear age civilians and how less than a century separated most of the world from being one before they became the other. He wasn't reaching back to some pre-modern past, he was commenting on the rapid expansive changes he had seen during his own lifetime.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
Almost nothing this scale can be built without subsidies because in the U.S. no company is willing to actually buy anything on their own. Wal-Mart forces local municipalities to pay for the buildings to be built through subsidies and taxation delays. Amazon does the same with their warehouses, distribution centers, and Whole Foods. NFL and NBA stadiums as well. Either the locals pay for the "privilege" of having their money vacuumed out of the area or these places don't get built. And as many city and county level politicians are very poorly versed in terms of macroeconomics they fail to understand that the addition of those two hundred jobs will cost the area two to three times as much as the employees will make because they can't collect taxes from an entity that is increasing wear on the roads, increasing load on the electrical and water infrastructure, and creating new external costs in the form of garbage disposal or light and noise pollution.

These datacenters are like that, but taken even further because they're attached to an industry used to ridiculous tax breaks or lack of taxation in the first place, constant investor capital, and continuous rapid growth. Software production and digital infrastructure have grown up in a wildly different environment from traditional retail and shipping logistics, but they're taking the most successful (and harmful) expansion tactics from retail and shipping.

Unless you can kill subsidies outright for anything connected to a national or international entity and provide enough specifics to prevent them from hiding behind shell companies then it's a losing battle to say "don't subsidize them." They'll either force you to pay for them or they'll move somewhere that will, and those with a poor understanding of the situation will complain for years that everyone lost out on a "big opportunity" by refusing to pay for their own predation. That complaining can echo into local politics for years afterwards and affect the outcome of various policies, either by denials out of spite or misplaced regret over the previous big project, or by politicians being voted out because of their opposition to a Wal-Mart or such being built via extensive subsidies and an agreement to collect no taxes for ten years.
Tanoc
·2 maanden geleden·discuss
With electrically actuated brakes the default power off state is fully engaged. Meaning if the power dies the brakes lock up. That causes it's own issues, obviously, but a sudden deceleration is better than no deceleration at most road speeds.

edit: as formerlyproven below states, the ones currently for sale also have a hydraulic backup.