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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Throwing untrained people out of a commercial airliner at high speed in the middle of a emergency is a good way to ensure no one survives. The equipment would add a significant amount of space, fuel and maintenance burden too, and require major compromises to the aircraft design itself. All to resolve a problem that effectively never happens.








  • The thing is, steam’s market dominance is one of user choice rather than anticompetitive strategies or lack of alternatives. Steam doesn’t do exclusives, they don’t charge you for external sales, they don’t even prevent you from selling steam keys outside the platform, or users from launching non steam games in the client. The only real restriction is that access to steam services requires a license in the active steam account. Even valve-produced devices like the steam deck can install from other stores.

    Sure, dominance is bad in an abstract theoretical way and it’d be nice if Gog, itch.io, etc were more competitive, but Steam is dominant because consumers actively choose it.





  • You have to search using language that papers might actually use though. “Parachute effectiveness” means what the satirical paper is exploring, whether it prevents death or not. The only serious studies that might have used that language would be old WW2 studies that threw people out of planes with different parachutes to see how many survived.

    If you want to know how to design an effective parachute, you should be looking at reference books like Parachute Recovery Systems instead.


  • No, the “non-fungibility” simply means that anyone who creates an NFT with the same link will be distinct from your link to the image, even if the actual URL is the same. Both NFTs can also be traced back to when they were created/minted because they’re on a blockchain, a property called provenance. If the authentic tokens came from a well known minting, you can establish that your token is “authentic” and the copy token is a recreation, even if the actual link (or other content) is completely identical.

    Nothing about having the “authentic” token would give you actual legal rights though.


  • Billion dollar costs aren’t rounding errors even at YouTube/Google’s scale. They’re a measurable percentage of total revenue. I agree that it slightly improves the user experience, it’s hard to imagine a worse cost/benefit tradeoff from an engineering perspective even at more realistic costs. It’s especially hard to justify when there’s an easy alternative for users in the form of downloading videos.




  • No. Nvidia will be licensing the designs to mediatek, who will build out the ASIC/silicon in their scaler boards. That solves a few different issues. For one, no FPGAs involved = big cost savings. For another, mediatek can do much higher volume than Nvidia, which brings costs down. The licensing fee is also going to be significantly lower than the combined BOM cost + licensing fee they currently charge. I assume Nvidia will continue charging for certification, but that may lead to a situation where many displays are gsync compatible and simply don’t advertise it on the box except on high end SKUs.