Yeah, artists skew left but you won’t find a more bigoted libertarian than a young polish programmer. Most of them are also pretty spoiled too because of the degressive tax system that favours them so much.

The temporarily embarrassed millionaires don’t tend to be the ones going into gamedev: Our wages suck and being an indie is about as likely to make you rich as playing the lottery. I’d mostly limit that kind of behaviour to FAANG folks as well as people who should have studied business economics instead (or actually did) and probably can’t code for shit anyway, in short: Techbros. They’re about as toxic as your average corporate lawyer.

Assholes existing is a general feature of contemporary society, don’t pin it on people understanding “there are 10 kinds of people” jokes.

About 50% of developers are 25-35. We skew young due to more and more people becoming programmers, that is, for the same reason that cobblers skew old, but not first vote kind of young.

And your source doesn’t even make an attempt to correlate voting behaviour to profession, much less specialised field (programmer vs gamedev), not to mention that not every gamedev is a programmer, all in all not enough data to slander a whole profession. Do better.

The reason gamedevs skews progressive, btw, is because artists do.

But OTOH yes you’re right in Poland’s case it’s not imported culture war BS it’s Catholicism.

Super Hexagon!

Actually I read that as misandry. Especially considering that when it comes to trans enmity TERFs are very much a driving force and those tend to be almost exclusively cis women, not men.

Thinking that posting “kill all men” is a net benefit to society?

My point being: You’ll have to dare a perspective shift to actually understand the issue. No, it’s not about gay marriage and stuff. People by and large, at the utmost, just don’t give a fuck. Live and let live is popular as ever. Hearing, as a 12yold boy, “Men ruled the world for millennia now it’s our turn, you have no problems, men, boys, by definition can’t have any problems, also mutilating your genitals is perfectly justified look at this one random study which says that if you don’t wash yourself then circumcision reduces AIDS rates”… yeah. 12 years is significantly less than millennia, why in the everloving fuck would you blame the poor kid for it and don’t get me started on the circumcision shit the US is cooked.

As said: Dare that perspective shift. It’s not about queer theory, it’s not about emancipation, it’s about institutionalised cattiness and bitter, over-zealous rhetoric creating a particular appearance. It’s also pretty much limited to the US, there’s bits and pieces floating over the Atlantic but our gender relations and politics over here aren’t fucked-up enough to generate that kind of shit ourselves. Also we don’t mutilate genitals.

Or, differently put: Take all the pain you’ve ever seen within the community created by ace and bi erasure, about TERFy enmity, about transmeds, about whatnot, and funnel it onto a young kid who has no letter, not even the “A” for ally they stole from the aces, because why would you give a fuck about ally status when you’re bitter and want to let off steam. Do that in queer spaces. Do that with your therapist, don’t do it in a public political space – the 12yolds are reading – and even more so don’t try to justify it as “part of the struggle”. And actively work against queer spaces becoming self-pity circlejerks of bitterness. Be uppity, be brash, be loud, be fun, be colourful, don’t be aggressive. Hug a homophobe they hate that, don’t spit fire on them their neuroses love that.

There’s some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that’s called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people’s choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.

In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying “there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith’s free market”, neoliberals say “there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn’t like monopolies but we do so let’s poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free”.

Many of which won’t be recognised, at least not without further qualification. And no you can’t become an English teacher with a US degree in literature: You need to study second language acquisition pedagogics, ideally for that specific language pair. Nobody cares about your interpretation of To kill a Mockingbird.

All minimums taken together only sum up to 497025. The million signatures is the actual hurdle, any campaign that is not horribly lopsided should easily get the seven countries.

The idea is that if your initiative is excessively national it has no business being a EU initiative.

A strange wibble is that small countries need more signatures per capita to count towards the minimum because they have more MEPs per capita. Which brings me to putain de merde où es-tu France.

Because the world isn’t “ending”.

It isn’t.

Now I might be an old disillusioned fart but nope, social media hasn’t changed a thing… for me. The anxiety, depression, and anger was already there, full force, in the 80s and 90s. I mean come on listen to Punk and Grunge. Coincides pretty well with the rise of Neoliberalism and New Labour, wait why did I use the same term twice. It’s at the tail wave of boomers having had their revolution and subsequently declaring the end of history.

What differs though is that (yeah I’m going to do it) the young’uns who never experienced life without the internet, worse, without a smartphone or tablet, don’t even go to fucking concerts any more where they could touch some grass and get laid. Also media competency falls off drastically again I think somewhere in the middle of gen Z.

Nope. Aldi was created by brothers who, after pioneering the discounter model and being quite successful with their stores, broke apart their empire over a disagreement – which was whether selling cigarettes was a good idea, in particular whether the theft rate would be too high. Completely fucking un-dramatic (very much in contrast to Puma/Adidas which is a feud that’s still going on), they always cooperated a lot in procurement etc, and definitely don’t compete with each other: The world is split into Aldi North and Aldi South, referring to their territories in Germany. The only other country where both are present is in the US because Aldi North bought Trader Joes, ages ago, it’s the only country where they’re technically competing but not really because they’re serving quite different market segments. Aldi South (under the Aldi brand) has been in the US for ages too, btw, but mostly kept a low profile. They both like to grow organically, no flashy fancy billion buck investments. In Aldi North stores at least in Germany Trader Joe’s is the store brand for nuts, dried fruits etc.

The two Albrechts got into the business because their father, a learned baker, got ill with baker’s asthma and turned to bread trading instead, they expanded the product range of the business, after the war focussed heavily on high throughput on low margins and opened more locations, then introduced the supermarket model in Germany. Even in Germany it took some people quite a while that their quality was never shabby, on the contrary, but combine their low prices with the back then right-out warehouse atmosphere and you definitely didn’t see rich people there.

Lidl is wholly separate and not founded by brothers. It technically predates Aldi and also the brother’s expansion before the split and rebrand (they were known as Albrecht Discount before), it was a small fruit trader which then got bought by Joseph Schwarz, then turned into a larger but still regional fruit trader. Lidl stores as we know them only go back to the 1970s when Dieter, son of Joseph, was already at the helm.

Lidl is much more common outside of Germany than inside, though, long story short establishing yourself as a hard discounter in a market where Aldi is already present is hard. They did make Aldi turn away from the warehouse aesthetic, though, yes you can have nice signage and lighting and stiff be efficient.

Hmm it also got pulled from gog.

UT2004 Onslaught is still the best game mode ever btw. Haven’t played in a long while but like ten years ago there were still a good number of servers around. Not enough players for the big maps, though, those need like 20 people per team and good luck convincing a server full of deathmatch players to play as teams.

I have a steam account. I write like half a review and maybe a handful of comments a year, talking mechanics. The amount of people who don’t even lurk because they are there to play games has to be absolutely overwhelming.

3d not being required makes a hell a lot of sense and of course it wasn’t people have been drafting on paper for ages. They might’ve ended up on Mac or maybe Amiga, but an SGI workstation is quite an investment when you don’t even need to spin polygons. IRIS GL dates back to the early 80s, doesn’t seem so much to be a timeline but price and need thing. And it’s not like you can’t have a 3d view without acceleration, just would take a while to render and a frame every five seconds might still be usable.

There apparently was an IRIX version at one time but with no user base preference, more likely they were thinking “where’s my C: drive” so once 3d acceleration hit the mainstream everyone happily switched back to Microsoft. Meanwhile you have 3d artists complaining that they can’t move windows with meta+lmb on windows.

I mean back in the days they should have been running on IRIX, and SGI switched over to Linux when they made the switch to x86 CPUs. Plenty of movie studios switched over to Linux workstations because of that, porting from IRIX to Linux is trivial compared to porting to Windows, why didn’t the same happen with CAD?

Wintel-PCs for the longest time just weren’t suitable for 3d work, they were office machines.

AutoCAD

It’s always funny with 3d. Graphics? You need Houdini? Of course it runs on Linux, it’s a UNIX-native program after all, first version ran on IRIX because what else would you use for 3d work but an SGI workstation and Linux is the commercial successor to IRIX. Blender, the same, just 5k bucks cheaper (and not everything is nodes, not yet). CAD? Everything’s suddenly windows-only because… how the hell did that came to be? Were they running 1990’s CAD software on Excel machines?

OpenEXR. Though it probably could use a spec upgrade, in particular add JPEG-XL to the list of compression algorithms. It’s not like OpenEXR’s choices are bad, the lossy ones are just more geared towards fidelity than space savings, kind of the opposite of what you want for the web where saving space is often paramount and fidelity a bonus.

Bonus: Supports multi-channel, so not just RGBA. Not terribly useful for your run off the mill camera, very useful in production where you might want to attach the depth buffer, cryptomatte etc and I guess you could also use it for the output of light field cameras. Oh there’s also multi-view so you can store not just stereo images but also whole all-around captures and stuff. There’s practically nothing pixel-related you can’t do with it though it might require custom tooling.

Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason. Same goes for business methods and other stuff.

In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.

DeepL has always used machine learning, and they already switched to LLMs for some language pairs – not rebranded ChatGPT, but their own stuff. They’re also quite open about the model not being perfect, they’re advertising with things like “blind tests show our results sound more natural than the competition”, “our model output needs fewer edits than the competition”, etc.

And yeah they definitely didn’t edit this one much from the English original. English sentence structure and American idiomatics all over the place, it’s tedious to read. Quite, but not entirely, as bad as this.

The vast majority of sales are made to US based firms so they likely have a lot of sway.

The sway is TSMC uses ASML EUV lithography machines and the US holds patents on those because they did foundational research regarding EUV lithography. Also, the EU hasn’t put China on the “it is illegal for EU companies to kowtow to US sanctions” list. Ironically ASML could sell to Cuba and Iran. If the EU were to tell ASML to sell to China the US would be free to not buy ASML machines any more and, doing that, kill off Intel’s fabs.

None of this stuff has military relevance, you don’t need or even want to use small nodes (which require EUV) in military applications you want hardened chips instead. Run off the mill consumer chips go all frizzy if an EMP looks at them sideways. This is about the US protecting US fabs, foremost Intel. Not the chip design part but the manufacturing one.

Europe hasn’t played the high-end end-consumer chip market for ages and I doubt we’ll do it any time soon. Having ASML, Zeiss etc. means that whoever actually produces that stuff wants to be friendly with us and strategically, both military and economy, our own production facilities are perfectly sufficient. Hence also why ESMC will only go as small as 12nm, it’s the most cost-effective node size and performance is perfectly adequate for a missile, a CNC mill, or a car infotainment system. Or the gyroscope chip in your phone (it’s almost certainly a Bosch), EUV doesn’t make a lick of sense when you’re doing MEMS. Where we have to catch up is chip design lets see how that RISC-V supercomputer chip turns out.