saw a setup like that at work, until it was determined to be a fire hazard. which it was.
had to short the start pins of the MoBa with a paperclip to start the damn thing.
we called it “the scorpion”, cause it would shock you if you touched it wrong, and it kinda looked like a scorpion with the cables hanging out all over the floor…
#tales-from-IT
mosquito nets in third world countries
oooohhh…yeah…about those…
turns out the mosquito nets are devastating local fish populations, because people use them to fish, since they get them as a finished product instead of having to knit nets themselves. and starvation being a bigger immediate threat, they prioritize that over malaria.
the nets are also laced with toxic chemicals (against the mosquitoes), which are extremely toxic to fish.
they also have much smaller holes, so they catch the young offspring as well, leading to rapid depletion of stocks.
so, yeah…good idea in theory, but didn’t turn out so great…
probably highly dependent on your work environment:
it’s the exact opposite at our office…
head>desk
yeah, took me a sec to figure out what they were talking about too…
username of the commenter below the pics
having not looked into it at all: it probably doesn’t “need” to be fresh water, but it’ll probably be rivers anyways.
i assume it works similarly to other large scale cooling operations: you have a closed loop for the heat exchangers and the cooling towers are fed by a local source of flowing water.
doesn’t need to be all that clean, or fresh water, but since rivers are pretty much the only source of moving water in most places, there’s not really many other options. (for the cooling towers, not AI datacanters…they could just NOT build them, if they weren’t fuckwits)
same as nuclear power plants, or any other industrial application that needs a lot of cooling!
yes, that’s why it’s called fingerprinting:
it’s a kind of mathematical function that takes the entire code as input and outputs a unique result.
the result is just some string of symbols (which really just represent a unique string of 1’s and 0’s).
this unique string of characters is, as mentioned, unique for any given input.
this string can then be compared to any arbitrary other string, and if they match, then you know it’s the same code.
so in the case of signal anybody can download the source, compile it, and verify that it matches the fingerprint of the compiled code on their own device.
that’s why it can’t be faked: you compare the already compiled code.
if even a single digit of the code is out of place, it’s not going to result in the same string, and thus immediately get flagged as a mismatch.
it’s mathematically impossible to fake.
yeah, alright then:
you are arguing from ignorance, ask for evidence, then reject said evidence in the first paragraph instead of reading the entire thing because of a boilerplate disclaimer (which you of course do not understand to be boilerplate).
you read the executive summary, even though you asked for the methodology, which is explained in the studies linked under the sources of the article.
you need to click through to the actual study to see the methodology.
the link i provided is just a summary of multiple studies.
the studies lack this disclaimer, which was added by factually, probably for legal reasons, not because the data is faulty.
since you’re apparently too lazy to even click the links already pointing to the exact information you asked for, here’s the abstract of the NBER/Stanford paper (most relevant part at the end highlighted):
This paper examines the impact of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process. Comparing these with contemporary forecasts – providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning micro-literature of social science predictions – shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade
from the CEPR/VoxEU article (already in plain language and easy to read):
So, taking all this together, what’s the bottom line? First, the public is right. Brexit has damaged the UK economy. But, inevitably, the mechanisms and hence the impacts have been considerably more complex than economists could incorporate in macroeconomic or trade models, with their inevitably simplifying assumptions. To simplify hugely, however, it would be reasonable to say that the impact on trade overall has been broadly consistent with predictions so far, that on immigration much less negative (and perhaps even positive) and on investment somewhat worse.
so, yes, brexit has been bad for the UK economy. definitely, without question.
what IS still in question is how bad exactly it was.
THAT’S were the uncertainty is.
whether or not it was detrimental has been answered with abundant certainty: it was bad.
maybe check the actual papers i linked?
all the sources, including their methodology and their conclusions are linked.
that’s why i chose an article that aggregates multiple studies, from multiple countries, including the UK, as the provided evidence.
it’s all explained in the paper; go read it.
if we only ever look at past data, and never compare that data to alternative scenarios, then it gets really difficult to make better decisions in the future.
in circumstances where the sample size is naturally limited to just 1, it is necessary to perform simulations in order to gain insight into the outcome of any given event. there’s not really any other way to do this.
what you call “wank estimates” (very scientific, thank you) is a collection of well established research methodologies that have been used with great success in both predicting future outcomes and analyzing past outcomes.
this is evidence. it provides mathematical certainty, in this case about brexit.
this is factual evidence, not simply “wank estimates”.
and the evidence suggests that the UK economy would be significantly better off without brexit.
this is simply fact.
that the UK economy did mostly fine on its own is not relevant, because that’s not the point.
the point is, that it would have been better for the economy, if the UK had remained.
yeah, nah, brexit did have a major negative Impact on the UK economy:
Taken together, independent assessments paint a consistent picture: Brexit has reduced UK GDP (estimates commonly span roughly 2–8% to date, with central academic estimates clustering around 6–8% by 2025), slashed business investment (commonly estimated down 12–18% by mid‑2020s and in some scenarios far larger over decades), and trimmed productivity (roughly 3–4% in many studies and up to 4% in OBR scenarios), and they identify trade frictions, uncertainty and misallocation as core drivers—facts that point to policy levers on trade facilitation, investment incentives and productivity reforms if the UK seeks to narrow the gap with its peers [2] [4] [1] [3].
damn near all economy experts agree on a negative, long-term impact fo the UK economy. they just can’t be entirely sure how bad it was, just that it was quite bad.
single digit percentage points don’t sound too bad, but when it’s entire percentage points pf an entire economy that actually works out to billions in lost economic activity.
the stats you provided do not show any comparison to a no-brexit/remain scenario, which is what should be compared.
no, just no.
none of that is how this actually works in practice.
again, all of this has happened before, and I’ve laid out how it turned out.
there’s no “maybe”, no “perhaps”, no “possibly” about any of this.
the reason it can’t happen, is because corpos will not ever allow a secondary market to form around their IP. because that would mean less profit for them. in the corpo mindset any profit someone else makes off their IP is profit stolen from them. it’s bullshit, of course, but that’s how it is.
why do you think ALL of the paid mods are only ever available in in-game stores that the company controls?
there is no scenario under capitalism where a corporation allows random people to make money off of their property. zero chance for that.
Well, I doubt frameworks would become for-pay. There are not enough modders to sell to for that to be a realistic business model.
there definitely are enough modders around to sell frameworks to:
Script extenders for literally all fallout and elder scrolls games, highlander in games like xcom(2) and ark, vanilla expanded framework in rimworld, cyberpunk has the atelier store and a couple others, various modloaders like forge, neo-forge, and fabric for Minecraft, and on and on the list goes.
there’s potentially millions of “customers”. (in quotes, because without frameworks almost nothing works)
all you need to do to see how ignorant of a comment you made is go on nexusmods and check the skyrim pages for most downloaded/unique downloaded. the top 5 alone are:
that’s just a single game, and a single platform. there’s many more platforms and modding communities out there. that’s the kind of scale we’re talking about here. and we haven’t even looked at Minecraft yet, definitely the biggest!
I expect most mods would not be paid. There is a thriving community of modders who make things without charging a cent. Why would this paid VR mod change that? I expect most mods are not worth paying for. But I could imagine, say, paying for a very high quality mod, like a set of well-reviewed and cohesive portal map packs.
i touched on that in the first few paragraphs, but that’s the core of the issue right here:
this is NOT a free and open market!
if paid mods become a thing, you will not (legally) have the choice “just not pay”. it will be either you pay, or you get no mods. this isn’t even a question, of course that’s what would happen, because bethesda tried to do exactly that, at least twice already, and it’s been a catastrophic failure every time!
on top of that, the mod creators would be paid next to nothing anyway, because now they would need to be paid by the company that owns the store, and they obviously don’t want to pay a fair value for their labor, and will instead squeeze every damn cent out of modders. of course this won’t go over well for most of the truly talented modders, so slop is all that’s left in the end.
this is all just simple enshittification, like with everything else.
As for slop, I will point out that there is a LOT of slop in mods. I mean just look at how many low-effort sprite hack mods of sonic there are. Nonetheless, I concede that with a monetary incentive, passionless money-seekers will be attracted to the market to sell slop. However, that is the state of many markets already; so why do you insist mods specifically must be protected? Pick a lane – either oppose capitalism everywhere, or accept that people can sell software modifications.
i have picked a lane here: free and open modding. never changed my mind about that. and definitely yes on the oppose capitalism everywhere part. of course that’s the lane i pick, why would you assume otherwise?
current slop in mods is harmless, because users get to choose to use it or not. there’s alternatives.
with paid mods incentivizing companies to remove that choice, slop is all that is left!
As for corporate shoe leather – back off, please. I’m not trying to start a fight. I hate big corporations more than most. But the big guys don’t get a cent from somebody’s 3rd party VR mod.
yeah, alright, that was a bit far and unnecessary. sorry about that.
still, why would you be so hell-bent to open the doors to enshittification of an entire hobby for the sole reason of profit and think that’s a good idea? name one hobby that got better for the community when payment got involved!? because i sure can’t think of any!
they kind of are (from Wikipedia, too lazy to look up the government source):
The non-EU member states of Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland participate in the single market but not in the customs union.
Switzerland and Norway actually ARE “in the EU”. at least more so than the UK.
they are both Schengen countries.
there are multiple levels of EU membership, and the UK has none.
that’s why those two are included and the UK is not.
are you serious?
fragmentation:
dependencies are a common practice in modding. they allow for modularized packaging of software, making maintenance easier for devs, and content choices easier for users. win-win.
paid mods hinder this by incentivizing modders to put frameworks - which would be the most profitable - behind paywalls.
low effort slop:
see the horse armor bullshit, or any other time bethesda tried to introduce paid mods, including creation club (which is literally paid mods). every time this happened the “stores” got flooded with low effort, low quality, but super expensive bullshit.
this then buried high quality content under mountains of shit, made worse by rampant bot abuse and algorithm manipulation.
this is the obvious result of paywalls in modding: when it’s not about passion, it’s about money. and when it’s about money, there is no low that sellers won’t sink to.
incompatibilities:
with paywalls in place modders will actively seek to interfere and break other mods. this has already happened in free modding, also many times, but that were either instances of egotistical infighting between modders, or straight-up malware deployments.
what’s different when mods are paid, is that there is a financial incentive to build a walled garden. to build a system of software only compatible with your own creations, and nobody else’s, so users can’t mix and match and have no choice about where to buy from.
this alone would effectively end modding entirely.
cost:
paywalls would be stupidly expensive. again, the best (or rather worst) example of this is bethesda. CC content is stupidly overpriced, and at the same time lower quality than what is available for free. the cost alone is so absurd, that it would definitely destroy the entire community of any game that implemented paywalls, because, again, the incentives align to encourage high prices to target whales instead of normal users. this is the case for every single paywall in gaming, and it certainly applies to modding.
and more:
paywalls in modding are a legal nightmare. I’m not a fan of the current copyright system, but at least right now modders don’t have much incentive to enforce their IP with DRM tools. paywalls mean there would definitely be DRM tools in mods.
apart from that there’s also the issue of law itself. in the EU for example the return policy for digital goods would probably force some kind of compliance check into any software that tried to do paywalls for mods outside of the original companies stores; that’s why bethesda only sells on internal stores. that and vendor lock-in.
vendor lock-in itself would be catastrophic for many communities. this would basically mean that some company controls all aspects of modding, including what content you’re allowed to create. so say goodbye to anything credit card companies, i.e. the U.S., doesn’t like, because all of that is immediately forbidden.
remember the porn ban credit card companies tried to enforce on steam and itch.io a couple months back? that’s a guaranteed scenario for paywalled mods. someone has to handle the “pay” part of the paywall, and credit card companies will enforce their weird moral guidelines on everyone if paywalls become a thing.
any single one of these would ruin a community.
and you seriously couldn’t even come up with a single one?
how high on corporate shoe leather are you?
modders also often do commissions. that’s entirely fine, because in that case people pay for the devs time, not the mod, which is still freely available or entirely private, both of which are fair game.
but you can’t put a paywall in front of mods.
there’s many reasons for that, but most importantly for the community: it ruins the community.
that’s literally not how any of this works…
no, this is super toxic to the entire modding ecosystem.
if even a single modder starts charging for access to mods, the entire system becomes utter shit over night.
this isn’t theoretical: it has already happened multiple times.
the most famous example, i think, is skyrim.
bethesda tried to create a modding economy with paid mods, and immediately the entire store was filled with extremely low quality bullshit, with little information as to what the mod actually does, with the sole intention to rip users off for basically no effort. quality content got buried, bots were rampant and pushing slop to the top. a complete mess.
this is the guaranteed outcome of any such monetization scheme.
random people can be just as shitty as corporations, if they are financially incentivized to be.
that’s why most modding communities are extremely opposed to paid mods, not because they like corporations.
if it’s just gaming, consider a side-grade to bazzite:
it’s an atomic fedora distro (even has a dedicated Nvidia installer), meaning it’s more difficult to break and easier to rollback when it breaks!
and it has a bunch of gaming related tools pre-installed, which is helpful, but not the main selling point imo.
anyways, yeah, linux gaming is really, REALLY easy these days!
it only sounds like that, because it is. :/