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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • They focus on the low end, but a lot of people who only want low end GPUs care about Minecraft, and their OpenGL performance is abysmal, so Minecraft runs like molasses. If you play a lot of Minecraft, Nvidia’s cards manage to be much better value. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be fixed if they’re willing to invest in writing native OpenGL drivers instead of going through a compatibility player or mitigated if they invested more in making the compatibility layer faster, but that would mean deciding they’re losing a lot of sales this way, as it wouldn’t be cheap.



  • It’s nitpicking and also not quite right. Stock of a corportation is shares, whether or not they’re publicly traded. It becomes plural when it’s shares of multiple corporation.

    However, LLCs aren’t corporations at all (the C is Company), and in the US, stock is specifically of corporations. I’m in the UK, where the equivalent to an LLC’s shares are still considered stock, and I’ve been googling whether private corporations have stock in the US, which they do, so the confusion’s been that the public/private distinction isn’t the important one and I’ve been arguing the definition of a word that’s defined differently in the relevant country.



  • The billion dollars in superyatchts is just the personally-owned luxury kind that billionaries like to hoard, not marine research boats that he has funded. Him giving away some of his money doesn’t mean that he’s not also frivilously spent more money than most people could hope to see in a lifetime.

    Fundamentally, I don’t think we’re going to agree here, as I fundamentally believe that there’s an amount of money beyond which there are no ethical grounds for keeping it, and it’s much lower than $11 billion. Newell has kept money above that threshold instead of giving everything he made beyond that threshold away (even illiquid stuff like part of his stake in Valve could, in principle, be given to a charity so the profit from Steam went straight into the charity), and I and plenty of other people would see that as greedy. Others might say that the fact that he’s given anything away that he wasn’t legally required to means that he’s not greedy. These are subjective ethical opinions, so even though they can’t be reconciled, it’s not a big deal. Different people think different things are wrong.

    The reason I’ve been replying at all is that some of the things you’ve stated to be facts are untrue, not that I’m trying to convince you that all billionaires are unethical.


  • Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.

    Realising that ratfucking your customers and suppliers at every opportunity makes them less willing to do business with you in the future, and therefore you’ll potentially make more money by not doing that, so then not doing that, is exactly what a greedy person would do if they weren’t also a moron. Gabe Newell is certainly not a moron. Lots of other billionaires are, or have other empathy-limiting conditions that mean they don’t realise people won’t want to do repeat business with them if they got screwed over the last time.

    There’s obviously a majority of billionaires that are much less ethical than Newell, but one superyatcht ought to be enough for anyone, and anyone buying a second one instead of putting the money directly to good causes is not benevolent.


  • It doesn’t have publicly-traded shares because it’s a private company, but it’s still correct to say someone has stock in a private company corporation (which isn’t relevant as Valve is unincorporated) that they own part or all of. Like with physical objects, they don’t stop existing just because they’re not for sale to the public. It’s an easy mistake to make, though, as the vast majority of the time people talk about stocks and shares it’s in the context of buying and selling publicly-traded stock.




  • Because we don’t have widespread deployment of treatments like this, we still understand next to nothing about the underlying autoimmune disorder that causes the body to attack its own pancreas in the first place - type 1 diabetes is effectively a symptom of something else rather than its own disease. Stem cell derived transplants are normally completely free from rejection risk due to being cells from the patient’s own body, but if your immune system destroyed something once, transplanting in something identical to replace it wouldn’t be expected to go any better. That means you still need immunosuppressants like you would if you had a transplant from someone else, and those are generally considered riskier than having type 1 diabetes is in the first place. The patient in the study had already had two liver transplants and a failed pancreas transplant, so was already taking the necessary drugs. Offering this treatment to someone who hadn’t already had a transplant would probably be pretty unlikely unless their blood sugar control with insulin injections and sensible eating was genuinely awful.

    There are other experimental treatments that involve other ways of protecting the insulin-generating cells from the immune system, like membranes that allow insulin and sugar through, but not white blood cells. That’s apparently a harder thing to do as that’s been in progress since before stem cells were viable. However, once it is working, you can just use off-the-shelf genetically modified bacteria rather than bespoke stem cells, and avoid the need for immunosuppressants, so it should work out as the better treatment eventually.


  • Investors have been happy to incentivise companies to hire idiot CEOs and managers who say the right buzzwords but reduce output by making bad decisions and only hiring people who don’t think they’re bad decisions, so an automated buzzword-dispensing idiot isn’t necessarily going to seem to investors like a downgrade compared to what they think most workers are. They’re just as likely to think AI lets them invest in companies where even the lowest tier employees are potential CEO material, and continue not noticing that the per-employee efficiency keeps going down. Data showing that layoffs nearly never pay for themselves doesn’t stop stock prices soaring whenever one happens, so I wouldn’t expect data showing AI makes companies less profitable to stop stock prices going up when a company announces a new dumb way they’ll use it.



  • The discussion on the talk page was basically nuh uh, loads of reputable sources like the Israeli and German governments say there’s no evidence of genocide, and even if they’re biased, anti-genocide NGOs are more biased because they have to accuse nations of genocide to justify their existence, with people responding to point out that’s not how Wikipedia’s rules work, and if it were, they’d have to rename the pages on various other genocides because there are very few that no nations deny.


  • If you trust Adam Smith, an efficient market would quickly make new goods and services available for the lowest possible price. People are supposed to be incentivised to sell things, and competition is supposed to stop an excessive amount of money being diverted to profits instead of reinvestment and price cuts. There are supposed to be systems in place that ensure that there are always opportunities for competition, but the wealthiest have the most power to erode those mechanisms and the most interest in eroding them, and neoliberals think an Ayn Rand novel is the definitive text on how capitalism works rather than Adam Smith’s work, so even if you land in the capitalism makes everyone better off mode, it doesn’t last for long before it falls back into fuedalism with extra steps mode.




  • There are a fair few troubleshooting things I’ve seen where I could have smugly pointed out a clever way Windows avoids the same problem or an easy way it provides to solve it, so it doesn’t even always need the lol at the end. It’s just an annoying thing to see when you’re already annoyed at a disobedient computer, unless learning the technical details would be an interesting distraction, so should be saved for when you know your audience and know it’s interesting.