LetMeEatCake

I'd agree, though I wonder how much of this is how appealing consumers find the competition? None of them seem to be making major inroads at the moment. The biggest competition is also raising prices, nullifying the competitive penalty Netflix would face from that move.

Yep. We can look at the source to see what their metrics are. They have economic freedoms and personal freedoms.

The metrics for economic freedoms they used are fiscal and regulatory freedom. Focusing on fiscal, that branches down into: state taxes, local taxes, government spending, government employment, government debt, and "cash & security assets." It's obviously a libertarian based definition of "economic freedom", wherein they feel someone with $5 to their name and no obligations is more economically free than someone with $100 to their name and $10 of taxes. Completely illogical bullshit.

But you can look at it and see that a lot of them are incoherent or intentionally overlapping even if you buy into their base ideology.

Why are government spending and government taxation separate entries? Is someone with low taxes less "economically free" because their government budget is able to afford to be larger anyway? Why does government employment factor in at all? Surely — especially after you've accounted for any budgetary, taxation, and debt based impacts — there's nothing inherent to government employees existing that can be argued to impact someone's "economic freedom." Even within their base libertarian fantasies, the overlap and design of the categories will specifically make a richer, but otherwise completely identical, state less free than a poorer copy-cat.

The rest of their categories are even more bullshit. They have an entire section under personal freedom categorized as "Travel Freedom." A sane person might define that as both the right and the capacity to travel places. They define it as "This category includes seat belt laws, helmet laws, mandatory insurance coverage, and cell phone usage laws." So a state is less "free" according to Cato if it makes it illegal to text while driving.

tl;dr it's all libertarian bullshit.

The spirit of your point is right, but: game patches existed back then. The first patch for Half Life was 1.0.0.8 released in 1999 (release version was 1.0.0.5). I cannot find the patch notes or exact release date as my search results are flooded with "25th anniversary patch" results.

What was true is that players patching their games was not a matter of course for many years. It was a pain in the ass. The game didn't update itself. You didn't have a launcher to update your game for you. No. Instead, you had to go to the game's website and download the patch executable yourself. But it wasn't just a simple "Game 1.1 update.exe" patch. That'd be too easy. It was a patch from 1.0.9 to 1.1, and if you were on 1.0.5.3 you had to get the patch for 1.0.5.3 to 1.0.6.2, then a patch from that to 1.0.8 then a patch from that to 1.0.9. Then you had to run all of those in sequence. This is a huge, huge part of why people eventually started to fall in love with Steam back in the day. Patches were easy and "just worked" — it was amazing compared to what came before.

The end result being that patches existed but the game that people remember (and played) was by and large defined by what it was on release. Also console games weren't patched, although newer printings of a game would see updates. Ocarina of Time's 1.0 release was exclusive to Japan; the North American release was 1.1 for the first batch of sales. After the initial batch was sold out the release was replaced by 1.2. That was common back then. As far as I know there was no way for consumers to get theirs updated, or to even find out about the updates. But they did exist.

Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I'd love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.

Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple's platform. That's incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It's the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.

Yeah I was going to say, the statue didn't capture her facial expression.

Election law varies from state to state. But generally from what I gather, a write-in candidate is only valid if the candidate registers with the state in advance.

If there's a winning plurality for Mickey Mouse in your state for a statewide office, it won't matter. The state won't be forced to see if there's anyone there that has the name Mickey Mouse and then pick which (if more than one) was the individual meant by the voters. Someone has to register with the state saying that they're going to run a write-in campaign for office with name XYZ.

Note that these details are a bit of a side track. The above person was talking about Trump being excluded due to the 14th amendment. However that doesn't say "not on the ballot" — it invalidates people from office entirely. If applied to Trump, the not being on the ballot would be a consequence of being determined ineligible for office, not a method to make him unable to win. Also it's all moot: while I think on the face of it the correct action would be to apply the 14th amendment to Trump, the fact of the matter is that this will not happen. States are not going to be willing to risk the political backlash from going down that path, so they will not.

The requirements are steep but whether it's a "good" steep or a "bad" steep will depend entirely on the end result. The pre-release footage looks good so it's entirely possible that the system requirements are entirely justified. Or that they aren't.

We'll need to wait and see the final result. Or, the handful of people on PC willing to put up with EGS will see the final result and the rest of us will debate that secondhand. Not sure how big the market will be on that front.

At the least I expect AW2 to have a healthy lifespan in hardware benchmarking...

(Note that since Epic funded this game from start to finish I don't begrudge them making it exclusive to their store, unlike the other exclusives. Doesn't mean I want to buy it, but I don't fault them.)

Typical corporate greed in that sense. It's stupid but I'm not at all surprised by that attitude.

The part that even if they were morally right in that sense... it's already too late. This is trying to close the barn door not just after the horse left, but after the horse already ran off and made it two states over. There's definitely value to LLM in having more data and more up to date data, but reddit is far from the only source and I cannot imagine that they possess enough value there to have any serious leverage.

Reddit would/will survive being taken out of internet search results. Not without costs though: it will arrest their growth rate (or accelerate shrink rate, as appropriate) and make people less interested in using the site.

It's not true, I saw a different meme on it the other day and looked it up. This came about because some company made an advertisement at Salzburg Airport that looked kind of like a help desk tag for someone that mistakingly flew to Austria instead.

The giveaway here is that it's Salzburg, not Vienna. International flyers into Austria are almost universally going to end up in Vienna by default. Vienna's airport sees ~20x the annual passenger count.

It could be that.

My first thought is that it might be the post-lockdown tech demand crash hitting Apple later than it hit the rest of the industry. If I remember right Apple was holding on fairly well when the market first started to crash as society shifted into a "post-Covid" mentality, relative to their competition.

Could be that for whatever reason the drop in demand for Apple was just delayed by about a year.

To do that the current party in favor of removing rights needs to be kept out of power long enough that they conclude that removing rights is an electoral loser and changes their ideology accordingly.

I'm not going to hold my breath.