FreeFacts

Well, Nato did expand toward them, Sweden and Finland, and what did Russia do? Did they immediately start strengthening their defences against these new Nato countries? Nope, on the contrary, the baltic bases are near empty of forces. It is concrete proof that Russia does not see Nato as a real threat, they know fully well that Nato will not be the aggressor. The whole Nato expansion excuse is the propaganda, and you are eating it.

Remember Chamberlain? He made his allies submit to german concessions because that would maintain peace. Fast forward five years and we had 40+ million more dead Europeans and the continent bombed to rubble.

Valve does nothing to suppress competition (it can’t really either)

They at least used to have a rule that publishers can’t sell cheaper on other platforms (outside of timed sales that is), meaning that consumers can’t get a better price on other storefronts even when those platforms would take a smaller cut. That was very much suppressing the competition as them taking smaller cuts can’t transfer into cheaper prices if the publisher also wanted to sell on Steam.

Putin will be happy, as now Andersson will be replaced in the finnish parliament by a Putin loyalist Johannes Yrttiaho, as Andersson can’t sit on both parliaments by law.

If you didn’t know, there are many Putin loyalists in the finnish Left Alliance, working as an internal opposition faction against Andersson’s faction.

If you have to pay for your imprisonment, you should also be able to pick the institution. Check La Catedral for implementation.

Imagine after 10 more years of cpu/gpu innovations, and chat applications that have actually been designed for information retrieval, how much that is going to transform how we interact with data and information.

LLMs are going to change how we interact with data and information, but not the way you think. The AI-generated spam will ruin the whole concept of internet search completely. Only information that we can trust is going to be human-curated.

Which is kind of a good thing. The console wars have been large irrelevant for the past 20 years, because PC already won.

Nope, Mobile won. PC and Consoles combined are not even reaching the revenue, number of releases or players of mobile gaming.

The thing is, what constitutes a living wage is based on the home location, and all other wages reflect to that level. Most of the wages go to the cost of living everywhere, especially to housing. There is the leeching class, landowners, leeching the fruit of labor from the workforce, and in the west they are leeching that much more in pure dollars. The sad thing is that wages increasing in India wouldn’t go to increasing the value of life of the workforce, but the landowning leeches of that region.

Take it with a grain of salt, there are lots of pure falsehoods stated there. For example, Spez’s first stint in Reddit lasted two years longer than Swartz was involved (2007 for Swartz, 2009 for Spez).

For me, I also served my full time in the Finnish army because I was a coward. Back then, in the year 2000, they still put you in actual prison. (Well, minimum security one where convicts are allowed to work and study outside the facility on weekdays, but still prison). But even bigger deterrent than that was the lie that future employer would not hire you if you did not go through military service. That was a complete lie, it is actually illegal for them to ask about your service, and I haven’t included my military service record voluntarily either in my CV since the early 2000s and nobody has cared. And there is also a law which dictates that if you are sentenced as conscientious objector (“totaalikieltäytyminen”), that does not go to your criminal record, so that stays clean as well.

But why I was contemplating refusing military service, and civilian service too, was and is completely ideological. I do wish to protect and fight for the good things in this country (democracy, civil liberties, equality) against outside invader (which would obviously be Russia, and they have none of those things), but the fact that conscription is forced labour without pay just doesn’t fit right with me. It’s basically slavery, and that should be opposed, always, everywhere.

Well at least here in Finland, where we also have conscription, you go to a normal prison and serve six months (or at least it used to be 6months, the same as the shortest conscription time).

That hasn’t been the case for ages in Finland. These days you get 6 months of “house arrest” if you refuse conscription. Electronic tagging that is. You are allowed to leave your house to go to the grocery store, to work or to study etc at predetermined and agreed upon times.

I fail to see how seeing snippets of said work returned in a Google summary is any different than ChatGPT or any other LLM doing the same.

Just because it was available for the public internet doesn’t mean it was available legally. Google has a way to remove it from their index when asked, while it seems that OpenAI has no way to do so (or will to do so).

they usually mean they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices.

But they do. They forbid devs to sell their games cheaper on other storefronts (outside of timed sales). Basically they enforce anti-competitive pricing on products in a way that makes it impossible for the devs to move the platform costs into consumer prices.

Devs could sell the product on Epic for example for $49 and make the same amount of profit as they do on Steam when priced $59 due to lower cut, but they can’t do it because Valve forbids it. It anti-competitively protects Valve and their 30% cut against competitors who would take lesser cuts, at the expense of end customers.

Basically the company board has approved a policy where the company will issue new shares if one owner reaches a certain percentage of current shares. Those shares can be then purchased by the existing shareholders (excluding the one(s) that already owns more than the percentage) with a discount.

So Nintendo could have such a policy in place that if one shareholder goes over 20%, new shares will be issued to other shareholders, lowering the value of each share, and effectively also the relative amount of shares (percentage) owned by that one shareholder. That basically leaves only one option, the buyer attempting the takeover would have to negotiate with the board directly. And in the case of Microsoft, the board would laugh at their face.

Maybe they could achieve the takeover via shell shareholders remaining under the percentage each, and get them to vote in a new board that would revoke the policy, but that’s way more difficult to pull off.

Around where I live people, media and politicians have been talking about “diginative” generation for years. The generation that will have no problem adapting to ever digitizing worklife. But lately the reality has creeped in even in media, these young adults are having difficult time adapting to the software and hardware used by the corporate world. The devices and apps they grew up using are so dumbed down and strictly guided that they are lost with the amount of options and processes supported by the professional applications.

The ease-of-use of consumer apps is counterproductive on that regard. Being able to use them is as valuable to businesses as being able to put a square block through the square hole and triangle block through the triangle hole. It’s essentially worthless as nearly every single human can do it, it’s designed to be just so easy and streamlined.

But maybe business world is wrong and should adapt instead? Maybe they should also concentrate on making their processes as streamlined? Maybe generative AI could help with that? Who knows. In my opinion the problem isn’t in the “physical” processes, those are often in the end just mundane tasks, but in the mental processes that the dumbed down apps kids grow up using do not feed. They often give you one way to go through a use case and that’s it. No outside of the box thinking, no evaluation of options and requirements.

I think that the best solution is probably “best practices” and defederatiom used to enforce some sort of minimal Code of Conduct wrt the actual mechanics of running an instance.

In reality, this will be the end of small instances. Only feasible way to enforce this is federation whitelists, and it will be very hard to get whitelisted. Not necessarily a bad thing in the big scheme of things when we weight the positives and negatives, but still sucks for anyone “self hosting” an instance.

Considering that Bethesda doesn’t seem to have enough people to work full time with two major releases simultaneously, giving Fallout to other studios wouldn’t be that far fetched. Otherwise Microsoft would have to wait for Elder Scrolls 6 release to have a full team working on a Fallout game, and that release window is rumoured to be 5-6 years from now. So 8+ more years without a real main series game in one of their big franchises seems like bad business…

Interesting thing is that Microsoft has the key building blocks from Interplay era under their banner already. Through Obsidian they have Tim Cain, Chris Jones and Feargus Urquhart, who lead the first two Fallout games. inExile has Brian Fargo, the original idea man of the series. And Bethesda has the IP. They could really get the original team together to cook up a new game.