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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The difference is availability of choice. On apple phones, Xbox, Nintendo, and PlayStation you are locked into a single source of software. On a PC there are myriad of game stores you can choose from. Sometimes you can even buy the software directly from the developer. Usually people are upset when this choice is taken away (for example epic exclusive games). Nobody would bat an eye if a developer offered their game on epic or their own platform with a ~20% discount compared to steam. But it is up to the developers to make their game available on any of the PC game stores.

    In conclusion, steam is not a platform holder, they could charge whatever they wanted. If the markup was too high, you could simply choose to buy your games elsewhere. For most people, this 30% is worth it for the features and buyer protection that steam offers compared to other platforms.



  • I think that’s one of the dilemmas of westworld. William starts off as you describe: peaceful, not really wanting to hurt the hosts at first. But he’s kind of like a fish out of water. To me it seems heavily implied that the only ones able to afford to go to Westworld are the rich psychopaths who exploit their own environment for personal gain. And we also get a look at how William turns out by the end…









  • You’re never really sitting at a 90° angle for the whole screen, only the middle. For very large screens the effect can get quite pronounced. One possible solution is to look for a display with better off-center viewing performance in terms of colour and brightness shift. The other comment about rtings is a great resource.

    Alternatively you can get a curved display where the entire surface area is at a perpendicular angle to your eyes (this is most common in ultra wide displays). These come with their own tradeoffs of course. One of them is the viewing sweet spot is not only from left to right, but also at a given distance from the screen. You can calculate the desired curvature based on display size and how far you will be sitting from the screen.







  • Along what everyone else said, so it’s more broadly marketable. In theory a humanoid robot could do any job a real human is doing now, meaning you don’t need a high tech production line to go along with it. You don’t need to automate your entire production line to get started.

    Also, it’s more of a commodity. A business could sell the robot once they don’t need it and anyone else could just buy it to use for a different purpose. Not many will have a use for highly customised robots ment for a specific task.


  • While Romans did acknowledge how long ago the Roman empire began the actual day-to-day calendar was based on the year of the ruling Consul, or later, Emperor. Meaning a new year count was started when a new Consul rose to power.

    So for the Americans it’s only a couple of weeks to the first year of Donald Trump. Or 5th? I wonder how the Romans would have handled a “re-election”.

    Edit: around year 500 there was this Christian monk Dionysius who didn’t like the current ruling emperor, as the emperor persecuted Christians. So Dionysius came up with using the birth of christ as year zero. While this didn’t catch on as the official calendar for a thousand years, this is where we got our current year zero from.

    Basically some guy was upset about their current Donald Trump and refused to count years by him.