I mean, there was a period about 15 years ago when he seemed to be the only rich person actually talking about climate change, doing something that might make some difference (investing in an electric vehicle startup, and later a rooftop solar startup) and seemed to actually be concerned about it. I now question if that was just an act or not.

On the other hand there is the theory that he fell down the right wing social media pipeline during the pandemic and that’s why he’s seemed to have such a sudden shift on political party affiliation. I like that theory because I think it’s kinda funny to imagine one of the richest men in the world being too cooped up and spending too long doomscrolling to the point that he became radicalized by social media algorithms

I always say “Trace RT” in my head so I remember how they truncated traceroute

oof that site is pretty bad even with ublock origin. It also hijacks copy/paste so you can’t copy/paste the article to spare others, and any attempt to bypass that gets passed along to extracting the paid article below it rather than giving you the actual text of the article. Oh and it pops up to sign in with google, pops up with a discounted subscription offer, and pops up other animated elements on every edge of the screen (which actually link to real site content!) further making it difficult to just read the damn article

Good news is it literally doesn’t provide any information other than quoting his tweet about laying off his entire dev team and then his linked post from a few weeks later he was looking for devs (and the article quotes random people on reddit to fill it out of course)

That’s relying on them having the political will to do more than half-ass it. Let’s be real, everyone loyal to trump is loyal for one (or more) of three reasons:

1. They directly profit from the loyalty
2. They believe it will help them realize their career ambitions
3. They believe they can use him to ultimately achieve their own private ideological ambitions

These are the same reasons people joined the first Trump administration and literally none of them are attempting to join his second administration meaning they were not able to realize any of their goals through Trump (or they were shown exactly how far they could go before they found the line they could not cross)

Simply put, it’s not an environment conducive to actually realizing policy goals in any incredibly complex interconnected web. The last trump administration tried to block China from international logistics and instead made logistics more robust (and helped the Mexican economy by accidentally encouraging significant investment in manufacturing and logistics there) and got completely deadlocked by infighting when they attempted to realize their wet dream of “repealing and replacing” Obamacare/The Affordable Care Act. I’ll be extremely impressed if a trump Administration manages to actually achieve a meaningful disruption of the Internet, especially with how the rest of the world largely refuses to support his policy goals

Heck a tiny regional bank I worked at with less than 2 dozen locations was constantly flinging data between its Primary and DR datacenters, and they were too small for any dedicated fiber so that was just over standard ISPs (with some locations technically on residential plans because the ISPs didn’t offer any better options than that in the small towns the bank supported)

I think you’re misunderstanding what people are saying. The author of the article is clearly trying to say that major video game studios should stop focusing on high fidelity games, making unrealistic statements about market demands (let’s be real, that’s not how people select what games to purchase. The art style is certainly a factor, I’ve not played games with art styles that don’t jive with me and I’ve certainly had gaming experiences elevated by brilliant artwork, but regardless of art direction, of the gameplay isn’t for me I’m not going to play it) and honestly it feels like the author was told to write an article to support the title rather than reporting on actual industry trends or providing real criticism ongoing industry trends. The entire argument the author is trying to make falls over when you consider any market segment other than the AAA developers

I think the worst part is the author even points to freaking Minecraft and Roblox, both were indie titles when they first launched, and also compared triple-A titles to a live service game and Epic’s tech-demo-turned-Roblox-clone.

Honestly it reads more like they set out to write an article supporting a given narrative and carefully tuned their evidence to fit that narrative.

How about some studios that aren’t hurting and don’t fit that narrative? SCS software which makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator hasn’t released a new game since ATS’s launch in 2016 because their business model is to keep selling DLC to the same customers, and invest that money in continuing to refine the existing games. Urban Games has openly stated they exist solely to build the best modern Transport Tycoon game they can, releasing a new iteration every few years with significant game engine improvements each time. N3V Games was literally bought out by a community member of one of it’s earlier titles when it was facing bankruptcy and simply exists to refine the Trainz railroad simulator game. Or there’s the famous example of Bay12Games which released Dwarf Fortress (an entirely text mode game) as freeware and with the “agreement” that they’d continue development as long as donations continued rolling in

The answer isn’t a move to live service games as the author suggests, nor is it to stop developing high fidelity games but simply to make good games. Gaming is one of those rare “if you build it they will come” markets where there’s a practically infinite number of niches to fill and even making a new game in an existing niche can be extremely successful whether that be due to technical differences, design differences or just differences in gameplay. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Banished all have very similar basic gameplay elements but all can exist without eating eachother’s market share because they’re all incredibly different games. Banished focuses more on city building, RimWorld focuses on story and your colonists ultimately escaping the godforsaken planet they’ve crashed on, and Dwarf Fortress is about building the best dwarf civilization you can before something ultimately causes it’s collapse (because losing is fun!)

Having read the article I don’t see how the comment your replied to is out of context. It’s very in context, especially given the article literally points to highly successful indie games as examples of low fidelity games that are incredibly popular

The offline installers literally are the files to install the game.

It’s as close as we can get in this day to having the disc and installing from disc long after the publisher was bought out and absorbed so many times nobody truly knows exactly who owns the rights to the game anymore. As long as your disc (in this case, offline installer) was stored safely and is still readable you can install it on a compatible computer (and that’s often the harder part is finding a compatible computer!)

Ah I thought I had remembered their hard drive division being aquired but I was wrong! Per Wikipedia:

At least 218 companies have manufactured hard disk drives (HDDs) since 1956. Most of that industry has vanished through bankruptcy or mergers and acquisitions. None of the first several entrants (including IBM, who invented the HDD) continue in the industry today. Only three manufacturers have survived—Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital

I doubt the high pitched whine that you’re hearing is the SSD failing. The sheer amount of writes to fully wear out an SSD is…honestly difficult to achieve in the real world. I’ve got decade old budget SSDs in some of my computers that are still going strong!

And oftentimes some or all of the metadata that helps the filesystem find the files on the drive is stored in memory (zfs is famous for its automatic memory caching) so seek times are further irrelevant in the context of media playback

SSDs won’t hold data for much longer compared to HDDs

Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it’s being backed up (and if it’s not backed up it’s not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I’ll happily give real backup advise if you need it)

In my anecdotal experience across both my family’s various computers and computers I’ve seen bite the dust at work, I’ve not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I’ve only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I’ve never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)

Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don’t need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don’t even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB

Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.

Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)

So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh…check your backups I guess?

Realistically the difference is in how Linux mitigates the common vectors for attack that Windows doesn’t. Most malware targeting individual workstations gets in by either supply chain attack, vulnerable web renderer or by tricking the user into installing it.

Centralized repositories with centralized build tooling limits opportunities for supply chain attacks, plus helps prevent users from accidentally downloading a Trojan when trying to grab other software. Containerizing web applications helps limit browser exploits, and less “features” phoning home means a default incoming-deny firewall policy will largely prevent most vulnerabilities from being remotely serious.

So for an individual workstation, Linux is significantly safer from viruses. In the enterprise it’s a completely different story where the threat environment does require defense in depth regardless of your choices of vendors

XKCD did it long before you

They’ve been smart in continuing to invest in datacenter cards and investing in open compute tooling to support them. Nvidia is at the top of the world and has a long way to fall, so if they start restricting supply of datacenter GPUs or simply charging too much that leaves plenty of market for Intel and AMD both to feast on and build up healthy product stacks to eventually surpass Nvidia.

On the flipside Nvidia is smart to be diversifying right now. Their forays into GPU servers with custom ARM CPUs might become fruitful in the long term, plus their networking investments really allow them to build a unique and compelling datacenter package

VMware had some pretty cool stuff in the pipeline related to DPUs that would’ve been killer in hypervisor networking but I’m pretty sure that’s out the window post-acquisition.

Honestly with how good kvm and qemu have been getting and the number of competitors building hypervisor off of open source virtualization technologies it was probably a ticking time bomb before it fell to cheaper, freer competition. This way we have a bad guy to blame and not just pure corporate hubris

I do the same. My work buys Microsoft everything so it makes far more sense to use Microsoft everything at work and give it its best chance at selling me on the Microsoft ecosystem. Let’s just say cost isn’t the only reason I don’t run Microsoft anything on my own hardware

The part that bothers me the most about OneDrive is that it redirects the users Documents/Downloads/etc folders to its own entirely breaking stuff (and making it painfully difficult to find where files went because either it’s in Documents or Documents which are entirely different directories on the hard drive of course. This is particularly agregious given Microsoft already has a really well-made shadowcopy/file history solution which lets you restore files or grab old versions of files straight from the right-click menu. So if OneDrive was simply an optional filehistory endpoint it would be far less reviled. Instead they do this ass backwards redirect that kinda works but makes a mess of things once software not made by companies named Microsoft enters the picture.