They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don’t play.
Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.
Other than that I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.
Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.
I mostly just pay for it because I’ve used it for ages and definitely get more value out of it than the subscription cost. I don’t think I use a single nitro feature.
Not in the middle of a fucking desert, on a military base, far away from any potential market.
Unless you are going to claim that the soldiers stole wheat to sell to locals, for local currency, that they can then use to… do what exactly?
This would’ve been more believable if they left off the wheat. Oil I can imagine, but no fucking way are US troops stealing wheat of all things.
Do they think there is a mill at their base? What the fuck would they use it for? It has negative value.
One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.
The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.
I think this is from Berserk, but it’s been years and I can’t quite tell.
Yeah, because modern skeletons have the marks of heavy manual labour on them…
Bro have you ever talked to anyone in the trades? They are all limping by 35.
Not everyone gets a do-nothing laptop job.
There will be more options, sure, but the fundamental limits on the performance of a handheld PC haven’t really changed since the steam deck launched 2 years ago.
We need either a big battery breakthrough or a big architecture breakthrough to actually push the space forward.
There are plenty of interesting games to play that don’t need super-powerful hardware, but the Deck doesn’t even handle all of those flawlessly. Case in point the Persona 3 remake that had very noticeable frame rate drops on the Deck.
Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.
I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.
The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.
Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.
That isn’t what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.
This isn’t to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can’t sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.
The raw spending figure isn’t what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia’s economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU’s in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.
This isn’t a ‘Russia stronk, Europe bad’ post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn’t, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.
The terms seem agreeable?
The terms that restrict the size of the Ukrainian military, bar Ukraine from receiving foreign assistance to rebuild its military, forbid it from seeking security guarantees from any country or bloc, … The terms that would have made it trivial for Russia to further invade at any point in the future?
Those terms seem agreeable?
A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.
The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.
With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.
These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.
An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.
The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.
The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.
To make a crude concrete example:
Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.
Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.
Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?
One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.
Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.
The form of silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing, specific formations of sand, is becoming harder to source from the environment. Silicon the element is incredibly abundant - the vast majority of all rocks on Earth are silicates - so there isn’t a risk that we run out of silicon itself any time soon.
What may happen, in several decades, is an increase in price due to the need to process more abundant rocks to obtain pure silicon.
Gold is rare, compared to just about every other element, in accessible areas of earth. All the gold ever discovered on Earth would fit inside a 23 meter (75 foot) cube. This is about 244 thousand tons, in all of human history.
Compare this to iron, where just the United States produces 46 Million tons in 2022 alone.
There is plenty of gold deep within the Earth - it is very dense, so it sank towards the core when Earth was recently formed - but on the surface and the proximal crust, it is not found in abundance.
Check it out to throw in the trash. Jared Diamond’s book is thoroughly condemned in anthropological and archaeological circles.
Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.
That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn’t much for tech.
AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all
No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn’t matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.
Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.
Further, this isn’t a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don’t want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.
Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.
That would give politicians another reason to raise the retirement age, in order to stay in power.