You know, as long as their management structure stays relatively similar to what it is, I think I’d be more fine with them being the big evil, compared to basically anyone else.

Edit: and also as long as they stay a private company, that would also be a big concern, but I guess that’s maybe the same as saying their management structure stays the same

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

Not to sound like a ancap idiot or whatever, but I’d imagine that has to do with the fact that streaming services don’t actually compete with one another. Exclusivity deals mean they don’t actually compete in terms of user experience, features, ease of use, higher video or audio quality than their competition, improved bitrate, whatever. Instead, they just compete based on who can snap up what IPs for the cheapest, which is just a game of whoever has the most money, whoever can outbid their competitors. Then, you’re not going to netflix or hulu or disney+ because of the features of the platform, you’re going to them because they have some IP that the other platforms just straight up don’t, and if you want to watch both IPs you gotta pay for both. So, it’s not really competition, in the conventional sense.

The idea is less that someone makes a competitor and then they actually compete. The idea is that a competitor service is able to lock away one or several big titles, like, say, overwatch, league, fortnite, or whatever else, behind exterior launchers that are maybe more free to do data harvesting. Then, that competitor theoretically eats away more and more of the largest market share, and tries to drive those users from just using their platform for a single game, to maybe using multiple games, maybe with something like a games pass or with free weekend deals or whatever. Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit and steam won’t be, maybe with some sort of exclusivity contract baked in, purposely undercutting steam. Then, steam’s been put on the back foot, and the rest is just kind of what has happened to streaming services.

It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition. It’s like age of empires 2, the first couple minutes of the game is the part that matters the most. That being said, steam has been around for quite some time, and has a good amount of brand loyalty and goodwill built up, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon as they keep one-upping their competition with actual improvements to their platform, like family sharing, screencasting, big picture mode, increased controller support and reassigning, and a full standalone version of linux, that basically all their competitors seem incapable of. So maybe steam has enough of a headstart that, even with a long term gains strategy, even with a, basically, non-evil mentality, they can stay afloat. Who can say.

I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.

So an interesting thing I’ve noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the “real evil”, right. “Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!” or “Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!”. You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.

The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it’s not so much that they’re funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they’ve successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn’t the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when “we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted” right, as part of this “emergency mode” is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.

Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That’s dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be “correct” in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn’t matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can’t as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can’t exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they’re not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.

These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we’re just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what’s possible, probable, or what’s the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.

If you wanna have a top-down take on what’s the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.

Fuck that shit, all the gas lawn tools should be backwards converted to run on hydrolysis-produced rocket fuel, feasibility and efficiency and safety be damned.

I’m gonna be honest most times when I write a response I’m taking a shit and not paying very much attention to the thread which it belongs beyond my vaguest recollection to what was said

I mean I just don’t think it’s so much a calculated effort by the ruling class as kind of a natural evolution of the market taking hold of and exploiting the human mind to the nth possible degree, such as they have always done.

What’s the pod?

i’m fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.

It’s more stupid than that. The idea is that 140 characters is a lower barrier of entry for a reader, compared to reading a series of paragraphs that might be able to at least talk about something, or attempt to summarize an issue. It’s why accounts like wint can pop off, and become so prolific.

They’re not. If you make your car light enough, and potentially aerodynamic enough (things which should already be done to electric cars/cars in general), it makes sense, especially for the real life practical application of people who don’t have outlets they can run to their car. Aerodynamics is mostly just an efficiency increase, but decreasing weight gives a myriad of benefits, potentially including increased power to weight ratio, decreased road wear, decreased road noise at speed, increased efficiency, improved crash safety as a result of decreasing the total amount of weight you have to stop, which can actually improve the efficiency of the interior space as you can now make things like roof pillars less thick. Could also lead to increased parking space, better maneuverability, and better visibility, if you make the car itself smaller as a result of decreased weight.

Cars should be like1/3rd of their current size. Clown cars ftw.

I dunno I’m just gonna drop a 50 minute video link on this one and bounce, 'cause if I chronically post my dogshit opinions every time one of these boomer ass articles gets posted here and gets upvoted a million times by the masturbatory elder millennial ex-redditor linux userbase, then I’m gonna be here for a fuckin eternity

All of em, really. I don’t see much of a reason why the vast majority of platforms wouldn’t benefit from it, except for maybe an argument around it allowing the creation of larger and larger echo chambers, but that’s probably fine as long as it’s managed to only be to a certain degree.

Really? I went on it like I wanna say two or three months ago and it wasn’t that bad. You had a couple troll threads, obviously, because (you)s and getting your thread bumped are what the platform incentivizes over anything else, but it didn’t seem that bad.

I mean they’re literally just the guys who read about like, say, 4chan being bad, right, but then never actually use the site itself to see. I mean, yeah, if you go on /pol/ or /r9k/, and then scroll around for like 5 minutes, you can find some content that’s going to reinforce your bias that the site is kind of an ontologically evil fascist hellscape, but if you go on /mu/ it’s gonna be no more toxic than basically any other forum you could go on. It’s just people thoughtlessly parroting the narratives that they’ve heard from other people.

I don’t like tiktok, I don’t like lemmy, I kind of hate social media even though it’s like infested my life because I have no self control, but I’m not gonna be like. This is such an epic pog moment! I’m so pegged outta my gourd! when it gets banned. Because I’ve used it, thoroughly, not just first glance, and I actually understand the pros and cons of the platform. These guys don’t have that, they only have like, the white stale wonderbread and wood chips of social media usage, they only have reddit, and even more libbed up privacy reddit, i.e. the most obvious and in your face social media platforms of all time that give you (ostensibly, in practice, it’s the opposite) a very high amount of control over what they’re seeing. Of course they hate tiktok. On top of the brainrot privacy concerns they all probably have, they’re gonna discard it on the basis that they don’t have the self-control to use its platform, and project that onto everyone else. It’s like a puritan hating coffee, or cocaine, without understanding that it’s a great morning drink, or without understanding that it makes pro wrestling promos wayyyyy fucking better.

The nice part of that is that the fire conducts along the electricity

Edit: this was like two weeks ago but it was the other way around I am dumb

I haven’t gotten shoveled this shit for the entire course of my install, which has been since win 10 came out

I’d say I expected better but it’s becoming more obvious every day that lemmy is where the old and out of touch people migrated to.

No yeah this whole deal is like. Just a bunch of mildly liberal gen X Linux users, basically, that think they’re hot shit because they were right about like half of their opinions like a decade ago and haven’t changed since. The amount of people hating on even basic shit like discord here is nuts.

Get with the times, grandpa, we all use pirated windows LTSC with Microsoft activation scripts and various privacy and installation scripts! C’mon! We all use YouTube revanced grandpa! Libtube? What the fuck are you talking about?

The optimal sweet spot is probably like 40 meters or something, within 20 or 10 meters and the drone is probably in range to drop a grenade or explode, and becomes much harder to hit because it’s capable of making much quicker direction changes relative to where you’re standing even as it presents a larger target to you as a consequence of being closer, and a whole lot farther out, and birdshot can’t really cut it.

Edit: Oh I was also gonna say, for indoor spaces, it’d maybe be not a good idea even just for hearing protection, but barring that, you could just opt for something lower velocity which you’d probably pack for this occasion if you’re defending a set location, and then just load what you need in like 2 seconds. I imagine most drones are going to be flying around above head height anyways, so the main worry would be debris and falloff. You can’t prevent debris from the drone really unless you have a net drone or something, and the falloff on the backend of a lower velocity or frangible birdshot with less mass is probably not super consequential except maybe in the case of eye protection. Some sort of ceramic bullet or maybe even steel bbs would probably work without doing too much damage. More than a drone, anyways. It’s not as though a drone that rams into another drone is a particularly safe thing, in any case.

These other people are pulling ya, the answer is yes, you can shoot them down, we have a full sport for it called skeet shooting. A drone can’t pivot out of the way in the 0.1 seconds it takes for you to pull the trigger and for the bird shot to travel and take it out. The biggest problem is the range of the gun (which isn’t that bad) and spotting the drone beforehand. The noise a drone of that size makes is not that much consider it could be like 40 or 50 feet up in the dead of night with no lights, buzz past you, drop a grenade down, kablooie. If the drone backs off or otherwise pivots to try to avoid getting shot, it probably couldn’t do what it was there to do anyways.

Obviously, a big array of military industrial camera technology running in a big fence is going to be able to spot the drone pretty quick, but the video doesn’t focus on the tech there because presumably that’d be too interesting and probably the company would not like that.