boonhet
@boonhet@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Saw this at the store this morning, took a double take 1 day ago:
Here in Estonia you have to be 18 to buy alcohol free beer and wine. The idea being “hey maybe let’s not get kids used to the flavour of drinks that are bad for them to be consuming even once they ARE 18”
- Comment on Saw this at the store this morning, took a double take 1 day ago:
I’m having trouble telling if the poster is AI slop or the entire picture is.
The box of Budweiser looks 99% fine to me (bear in mind, I’m not American so I don’t know if that’s what it looks like), but the text on the close edge of the top side of the box looks weird to me. Buuut it could also just be compression artifacts.
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 2 days ago:
All that work has paid off for China.
True, they’re minting new billionaires faster than any other country in the world.
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 2 days ago:
Interesting, and I thought it was the workers who generated the wealth. Perhaps it should not belong to them after all then. Why tax the billionaires at all if they’re the ones generating the wealth?
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 2 days ago:
They side with the weak to obtain power, but as CGP Grey said, the keys for keeping power aren’t the same as the keys for obtaining power. You usually turn your back on whoever helped you win once you’re in power, particularly if you’re a dictator (and let’s be honest, “dictatorship of the proletariat” is still dictatorship of the vanguard over the proletariat)
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 2 days ago:
Yes, exactly like the working class in the US controls the government and holds the reins of the economy.
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 2 days ago:
embracing some limited capitalism
They were embracing some limited capitalism last century. They’re fully capitalist now, minting more brand new billionaires every year than any other country. Per capita the US still has more, but not for long. China’s working with some pretty bad inequality.
- Comment on More People Are Pre-ordering The $100 Edition Of GTA 6 3 days ago:
without seeing a single non-cgi frame
I know what you mean, but they’re all cgi frames in the game too lol
- Comment on Always when i'm busy 3 days ago:
It’s actually good for your drainage system to flush more often than strictly necessary. And the public sewer system actually.
- Comment on Cancelled Quake 4 expansion gets surprise GitHub release after former XCOM 2 developer discovers it on an old hard drive: 'This essentially saved my life' 3 days ago:
They don’t really own R* (yet?)
- Comment on Delicious 3 days ago:
It’s the metabolism one.
I could consume 4000 kcal most days as a teenager without putting on weight. That is no longer the case and adjusting has been difficult. I’d need to go under 2000 to lose weight.
- Comment on Cancelled Quake 4 expansion gets surprise GitHub release after former XCOM 2 developer discovers it on an old hard drive: 'This essentially saved my life' 3 days ago:
Makes you want to escape to the outer worlds.
- Comment on "I don't answer questions" 3 days ago:
In my youth (look, this was like a decade ago, I don’t speed much these days), I had a nice car with superb high-speed stability and a big engine (by my standards at the time anyway). It was a super beautiful spring evening, I’d just put on my grippy summer tires and the road was damn near empty. So I was cruising at 120 km/h and decided to overtake a bus going 90. Well it wasn’t very difficult to go from 120 to 180 in just a few seconds and then I coasted back to a more sane speed fairly quickly.
So when I got pulled over and the cop asked me if I knew how fast I was going, I said “I don’t know the exact number, I was looking at the road not the speedometer, could you tell me?” and was told they caught me at 120 km/h. Nearly sighed out in relief at that point.
- Comment on "I don't answer questions" 3 days ago:
Most German cars of the 00s have been limited to 155 mph or 250 km/h since about the 90s or 00s. Assuming they’ve got power to go faster, that is.
They’re not super difficult to unlock I hear. Never needed it myself so I’ve never done it, but if I was the kind to need to run away from police cars limited to 155, well… An unlimited 3 liter diesel without any mods to increase power can do a bit over 155. One with a few supporting mods and a remap can likely do near or over 200 on a budget. If gearing allows. In a car that still look and sounds like your ol’ family tractorwagon. You don’t need to get an RS6 or an M5.
Of course if your car chase is going to last several hours or something, you probably don’t want to do it in a 20 year old wagon you’ve modded in your own garage. But for a highway getaway car that’s also stealthy, that’s what I’d recommend. 5 series, A6, or E-Class wagon, 3 liter diesel (okay, the OM642 is not great - recommend an older 3.2 OM648 instead if you want to push big power).
- Comment on Take-Two CEO Says We'll All Be Streaming Our Games In 3 Years 4 days ago:
Plenty of people have laptops or old office desktops. Fiber is available pretty widely in much of the developed world and in a dense city 5G is likely to be better than copper. Availability of a decent connection is location dependent, ability to drop a grand on a console is dependent on your finances. Some people might live in a city but not have that much disposable income.
E.g in Romania, gigabit connection is 8 euros a month. Basically anyone can get it. But I don’t think bandwidth is anywhere near as important as latency. So the availability is even more location dependent
- Comment on BREAKING: Bernie Sanders just introduced the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act — a bill to guarantee at least two weeks of paid vacation to every full-time worker in America. Over 90 other members of Cong… 4 days ago:
Isn’t that like the only thing the US does properly when it comes to holidays and vacations? At least for federal employees - some employers may decide to be hardasses of course
- Comment on BREAKING: Bernie Sanders just introduced the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act — a bill to guarantee at least two weeks of paid vacation to every full-time worker in America. Over 90 other members of Cong… 4 days ago:
I mean you can always take unpaid vacations, at least with most employers. Like I get wanting more vacation time, but your employer also wants to remain profitable and the more vacation you take, the less you bring in. I’d love it if it was 8 weeks myself, but I don’t want to take the paycut that would make it possible.
- Comment on Take-Two CEO Says We'll All Be Streaming Our Games In 3 Years 5 days ago:
Aaaand downvotes from people who never read the article, we’ve reached peak reddit.
This is from an earnings call. He 1) says that increasing hardware prices are not a good thing and 2) thinks streaming is starting to be ready enough that people who can’t afford gaming PCs or consoles, can stream the games instead.
This came from a lengthy answer given in Take-Two’s quarterly earnings call this morning by Strauss Zelnick, in response to a question about the rising cost of hardware. He began his reply by saying that the rising price of hardware is “not a good thing” because it means fewer people will have machines on which to play games, but that it won’t slow Take-Two down as a business, “because we’re delivering experiences that people want.”
But Zelnick continued with a really interesting response about streaming. First, he pointed out that the world is increasingly moving to open systems, as demonstrated by the rise of PC gaming over the last 20 years. Then, he continued:
With the advent of streaming—which we really do believe is around the corner in terms of having something that’s low latency, and really works well for consumers—machines that weren’t game machines before will become game machines. So, without regard to what happens in the console business, which is of consequence to us, of course, we see the overall install base as a practical matter growing materially. And if you believe in streaming, to be clear, we really do, and I’m happy to put a timeline on it. I think we’ll be in commercial streaming mode in three years, and by commercial I mean low latency. That can 10x the effective the install base. That doesn’t mean we’re going to 10x our revenue, and we wouldn’t project that we would, because obviously your avid consumers already have access to video game machines. But I do think it creates great opportunity for titles that are broadly desirable even outside of core markets, and we do have titles like that, obviously.
This is VERY different from what the headline suggests, of course Kotaku editorialized the fuck out of it.
- Comment on Take-Two CEO Says We'll All Be Streaming Our Games In 3 Years 5 days ago:
If you read it, he says it’s a way to reach those who don’t have machines capable of running the games, therefore increasing the target audience size.
- Comment on The slopification of recruitment 5 days ago:
That’s how you know this was written by a human tbh. The original template, not the individual email
- Comment on 'Locking a gameplay trailer behind a Netflix subscription is a new level of greed' — GTA 6 callout Rockstar for 'paywalling' the game's extended look 5 days ago:
GTA V was pretty decent at release, that’s “only” 13 years. The enshittification began later, when Online came out and they realized what a cash cow it is
- Comment on Ford's affordable EV pickup is named Fathom, and it will start at $28,350 6 days ago:
They were one of the first non-tesla manufacturers to have a passable EV though? It’s called the Mach E. Now they’re going after the market that actually has decent sales in the US, with more cheap crap EVs to follow the pickup truck.
- Comment on The rich passing our money back & forth 6 days ago:
Most countries tax companies on profit or dividends paid out, not revenue. Revenue-based taxation would defeat any industry that depends on another industry that depends on another industry.
Think about it this way: You want to build an electric car. You need to buy a battery pack. Now the company that builds your battery pack, they need refined lithium. The lithium refiner? Well, they need raw lithium.
Say mining the raw lithium costs 1000€ for a battery’s worth. Now say all the companies involved make ZERO profit. Revenue tax is 10%.
Raw lithium mining company needs to charge 1100€ instead of 1000€ because of the tax. Now the lithium refiner needs to charge the battery manufacturer 1210€ because, again, the tax. And you now get to buy the battery for 1331€ because of the tax. Customer has to pay 1461€ for the battery in the car.
Meanwhile another company starts up. They mine raw lithium, process it, build the battery and then build the car. They only ever get paid once, so revenue tax is only on that 1000€. Customer pays 1100€ for the battery in the car.
This is also why companies get VAT back and only the final consumer really pays VAT. Otherwise every company would have to make everything from scratch to stay competitive, because every transaction gets taxed.
TL;DR: We only tax the actual profit. If you pass one dollar back and forth a billion times, you don’t have to pay tax on a billion dollars in revenue, only if it ends up with the person who didn’t have it originally does that person have to pay tax on that one dollar.
- Comment on "Digital Signatures" just ask you to type your name into a box now. Am I right in thinking this almost-completely defeats the purpose of a signature? 1 week ago:
In the US, they don’t do the cryptographic signatures, they do the image. There are document signing services where you just type your name and it creates a “handwritten” signature from that name and that’s legally binding apparently.
I found it very funny when I had to sign a contract with an American company that way. Not sure it would’ve been legally binding in my jurisdiction, but the contracts was more or less “don’t tell anyone about exact details of the sizable bonus you’re about to receive, or we’ll revoke it, also you’ll have to stick around for half a year to receive the other half”, when the company got sold to private equity and the original owner decided to give us all something to remember them by.
- Comment on "Digital Signatures" just ask you to type your name into a box now. Am I right in thinking this almost-completely defeats the purpose of a signature? 1 week ago:
- Comment on Languages 1 week ago:
Same for Estonian, which is why we need umlauts for letters that don’t exist in many other languages’ versions of the latin alphabet. But since we’re special snowflakes, we also have õ, which is such an uncommon letter in the world that we have a border sign on our biggest island to signify where the language border exists: On the mainland and most places we use õ, but people on Saaremaa people will use ö instead because they’re behind the times.
We also have ž and š but they’re a bit less special, many european languages use them. Because how would you even know how to pronounce gelatine without writing it as želatiin?
- Comment on Languages 1 week ago:
German: Dogs are male, cats are female, kids are middlesex
- Comment on Bloodbath Ahead For EA As It Looks To Cut $700 Million In Annual Costs Under Saudi Arabia 1 week ago:
Game devs make shit money so they were all in it for the games, but realistically most won’t have savings to work for free for the next few years to put out an indie game.
- Comment on Bloodbath Ahead For EA As It Looks To Cut $700 Million In Annual Costs Under Saudi Arabia 1 week ago:
They used to have good games in addition to the dogshit ones. Now it’s just the dogshit. Though to me the cutoff was 14 years ago, when they made the last Mass Effect game.
- Comment on how to cut aluminum pipe with hardly any comments about flock cameras 1 week ago:
You can get a knockoff Makita angle grinder off aliexpress for cheap and it works great if you guys still have access to aliexpress. I have a decent set of chinakita tools in the garage myself, only the garden tools and batteries are legit Makita.