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inefficient

As a steam deck user, I wish GoG would do something to better support it and linux. I bought CP2077 on GoG and now I kind of wish I hadn't. Everything from steam just works so well from the moment of purchase. I wouldn't even mind an extra step of having to load up GoG galaxy to download stuff and then have it set it up to run in the deck launcher. But getting stuff from steam is just so smooth. And things like the shader precompilation can really make a world of difference to the overall experience.
Re:Woman who burned herself on Dunkin' coffee settles for $3M on Thursday October 26, 2023 @01:09PM (#38028588)
Huh. Guess I misremembered that part. Or perhaps what I was told in a class back in high school was incorrect. Good to know the correct information.

Nevertheless, going back to my knife analogy, if she were pulled over using a large kitchen knife cutting up something over her legs I wouldn't blame the people who sold her the knife.

Maybe it was too hot, but we should be treating hot things as dangerous by default.

Re:Woman who burned herself on Dunkin' coffee settles for $3M on Thursday October 26, 2023 @06:49AM (#38023925)
I worked in an extremely busy coffee shop on campus when I was in university. It made more by lunch than many of the restaurants I worked in made all day. We had 5 large plastic insulated containers the coffee was brewed in. No hot plate at all. They were nice because they were easily moved, held a lot of coffee, and no hot plate needed. They could keep that coffee hot all day without cooking it down making that stale coffee sludge people expect from old coffee. Also made it easy to make them and carry them to an event we catered.

But it also probably meant that they stayed incredibly hot for a good 2 hours.

I've always had mixed feelings about these law suits. I know so many people who had their minds changed after seeing the effect that the McDonald's coffee had on that woman's legs. I didn't. She was balancing it on her legs while driving. Why do people keep putting something they know is dangerously hot in a place that can severely hurt them. Even moreso if they are driving.

It only took me a few (dozen) burns to my tongue before I learned to not drink coffee immediately after purchase. But I wouldn't hold a hot coffee between my legs anymore that I would hold a knife between my legs. At what point does personal responsibility kick in? Knives don't need a warning label, because they are considered to have a knowable danger. Why not something that boils water in the process of making it?

I have to wonder if it would have made me liable when a person wanted his fresh coffee extra hot and I heated it up even more for him (real person, regular customer, like 80 years old).

I am really not anti lawsuit for negligence. The original McDonald's case just always stuck with me. Even if it hadn't been that hot, but was just hit enough that your skin might get red, that's still hot enough that she could've easily gotten into an accident if some spilled on her leg. If something is ice cold, the same thing could happen. We really shouldn't be balancing things on or squeezing them between our legs as if our legs are a shelf and not a part of our body.

Man I wanna hear those jokes that end as a riddle. Sounds way better than this.
Google controls way to much of the interaction on the internet. Between Gmail, search, android, and chrome they can and do abuse their position. And this isn't even looking at the backend and ad stuff. It should probably be broken up in to multiple companies each of which would have different business strategies and areas of focus. Allowing a company to essentially break the current internet so that they can guarantee more ad revenue seems like what anti-trust rules were built for. Honestly, google has much more control on the internet with chrome than MS ever did with IE.
When talking about modeling oligopolies and monopolies, often oligopolies have worse results.
Re:Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice on Saturday June 03, 2023 @07:26AM (#36175721)
I wouldn't be surprised if the reason has more to do with the number of users. I haven't used LO in some time, but back when I only used linux, I never found it to be a particularly pleasant experience. It definitely looks better now that I'm looking at it, but I switched to using google docs back at university. If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything about their solvency. Just a spreadsheet cost calculation.
13th amendment makes slave labor legal for those that are imprisoned. And do you make the same argument for community service?
Re:Amazon faces biggest union push in its history on Sunday February 14, 2021 @04:22AM (#26130834)
Good. America needs more unions. They helped build the country that America enjoys today. Meanwhile, as they've been made weaker and weaker, people are left wondering why wages have stagnated so bad. Unions lift wages for everyone. They increase worker strength against large companies with the ears of politicians.
Re:FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol on Saturday January 23, 2021 @06:26PM (#25887095)
Well that's just blatantly not true. They aren't even required to know the laws and can enforce laws that they think exist even if they do not. See Heien vs North Carolina.

Police exist to "keep the peace." The question is whose peace are they keeping. Well I suppose the reaction of police at the Jan. 6 insurrection vs that of the BLM protests tells us a little. Or the union busting police did in the past. Or blocking the polls for minorities.

But it absolutely isn't "that simple."

Re:FBI agents track cell phones that pinged near the Capitol on Saturday January 23, 2021 @06:16PM (#25887022)
That is only true if you assume they truly care about having the correct suspect rather than having a suspect they can get convicted.

However, there is a long history of wrongful convictions and police and prosecutors using bad data to get them. Check out the Central Park Five for a big name one.

Sure. I can help with this. I was actually discussing this earlier.

The economy has been shit for middle class Americans for quite a while. Rent and home prices have been increasing far faster than wages. Furthermore, lots more nickel and diming has led to more debt and misery for the average middle american. The situation is even worse for people lower than that. However, especially for lower middle class white Americans, they aren't too far removed from a time when that was enough to have an OK life. So they remember or have heard about it. And they are unhappy.

And for a while we were working on fixing that unhappiness. But then some people came along and said something different. They said that those other people over there are the reason for your unhappiness. If it weren't for them things would be better. They are your enemy. And they've been doing this for decades now.

And things were getting more tense. Then (probably with a little outside help) someone else came along and really encouraged ramping up that anger. And said all the right things. And said if we just take over, we'll be able to make it right this time. And so many people believed this that they didn't really stop what that actually meant.

This may seem like I'm just BSing here, but I'm not. It's the same technique used by gangs, cults, and neo-nazi's. They target the young, naive, and emotionally frail. And they promise companionship and strength. And for people that feel alone and left behind, that is enough. They don't need to be dumb or evil. Just a little broken. And then the evil ones come in and take advantage.

But if you haven't ever seen how difficult it is to help someone recover from being in a cult or a neo-nazi gang... then you wouldn't realize how hard it is to deal with these groups.

Re:5G Just Got Weird on Sunday August 09, 2020 @06:34PM (#24103522)
I think the biggest thing I have seen that is a reasonable use of the tech is game streaming. Stadia, XCloud, Geforce Now.

5G with low latency and unlimited data could be a game changer (pardon the pun) for mobile gaming. It works on 4G. I've tested. But you definitely run into latency issues.

Re:“The Shining” is perfect quarantine viewing on Sunday April 26, 2020 @05:22PM (#22990371)
I don't think I've ever seen anything stating that. He much preferred the later tv adaptation.

A big part of this is that he felt Jack Nicholson was just playing a crazy character. But the character in the book was a father first. And you could feel that. Not to mention this book had a lot to do with King himself and how he was lost in drugs and alcohol. There was a lot of internal and external struggle for him in the book that King felt was mostly ignored. This meant that by the end, the viewer had very little sympathy for him.

Personally, I love the movie and I love the book. But I completely understand King's criticism.

Re:iPhone SE on Monday March 21, 2016 @02:28PM (#11330478)
Honestly, I suspect they did it first for cost and second because they want to make sure it is only used to add a quick way to do small things. I would honestly be surprised if they weren't worried from the beginning that it could end up being an abused, overcrowded right click menu. Not in including it here helps ensure that it won't be used to add features unavailable in another way.
Exactly this. I got some free time with youtube red when I got a nexus 6p. In spite of already having spotify, I purchased some more google play music all access (which includes Red) simply to keep the ad-free youtube.
I've actually been working on doing just that. But it's a hobby and always seems to get pushed to the side. Certainly interested.
The Nobel committee would disagree: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/

Things change. For all intents and purposes, this is a nobel prize in economics, given that the winners are referred to as Nobel laureates by the Nobel committee.

If anything, I think we put a bit too much weight in these awards in general which leads to silly articles like this one.

This shouldn't necessarily be taken as support for the economic research selected for prizes as much as a response to attacking the prize on the basis of it being in economics.

> This is such an odd way to demonstrate results about a model. For hypothesis testing or preliminary research, sure. But as a result?

So these are typically some combination of dynamic and stochastic difference equations that are supposed to mimic the real economy and may not have any analytical solution. The goal is to include different types of shocks, different inputs, and different functional forms and run simulations to see if the output shows the same patterns as the real economy.

What we tend to find in these models is that we can easily get some of the characteristics to match while others do not: i.e. matching the volatility in unemployment while also matching the volatility in wages, output, consumption, etc.

This is more along the lines of trying to be engineers rather than mathematicians. Which I'm fine with. My issue is (1) the supposed relationships we are trying to match are not guaranteed across nations or time. Thus even if the model is describing a certain period of time very accurately, it isn't useful at all in general. And (2) we take these models and get the resulting parameter values from the simulation that is at best good at describing some of the stuff happening in the economy and treat them like they apply to the real world (an example parameter might be the risk aversion of consumers in the economy).

We then use these parameters to describe what changes should be made to the economy in the event of certain types of shocks.

And if I'm being honest, my biggest complaint for these models stems from the idea that they all need magical micro-foundations in order to be considered realistic. This stems from the Lucas Critique and is likely the biggest travesty of economics in its history as a science. It is along the lines of saying general relativity isn't realistic, because it needs to be built using quantum mechanics.

What absolutely kills me is that many economists obviously compartmentalize academic research from what they suggest doing in the real world (this can be seen by the fact that the majority of economists polled supported the stimulus in the U.S., felt that it helped recovery from the recession, or at least kept it from getting worse).

While I agree with the bulk of what you said, I do think it's important to understand that the difference with the Open Science Collaboration isn't really what you said. In my opinion it may be worse.

Being a (somewhat disillusioned) economist, I've read some of these papers but certainly not all of them. What I can tell you is that there isn't an "experiment" to replicate. These papers seem to be mostly or entirely computational macroeconomics and econometrics. In stuff like this, they design a model (a simple example is the real business cycle model), pump random data into it and see how different changes effect the model (i.e. the relationship between the volatility of unemployment with the volatility of output) and do those relationships match what we see in the data?

The replication as you define it (and I agree with the definition), should be pumping new random data into the model and still yielding the same results. However, it still leaves a few big issues. Such as, are these relationships really in the data? Because some of those relationships change depending on the time frame. So it the results may actually explain what occurred, but they shouldn't be used to explain what will occur later.

For reproduction and re-analysis, for this research, they probably need to go together. If we've defined a mathematical model, then it should be possible to program that model across platforms and software and still yield consistent results with different sources of random input data. And for verification, I think this is really important. Because I know I've messed up my programs before and gotten completely reasonable output that turned out to be incorrect. The authors didn't exactly describe how much they verified the programs were doing what they were supposed to do.

Honestly, I don't know that I can make myself care too much about the output results from the model until we can agree on what things are important for the model to show in the past, present, and future. And in academic economics, these important characteristics are almost canon and untouchable.