Not everyone earns tech bro salaries and can sustain a thousand cuts. Many hobbiests are scraping and saving money to acquire hardware. For some it very well msy be the end of their world.
We are talking about brand new latest gen hardware here. People with low budgets are always scraping and saving for deals and don’t need to buy something brand new from a pricey brand name like raspberry pi.
You can still jump on eBay and buy all kinds of dirt cheap used pieces of hardware.
My buddy just bought a used ThinkPad T14 with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for about $500. You can get by with a whole lot less.
In this context, I will also present the idea that Rasperry Pi has represented quite poor cost value for many years now.
Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is? eBay covers just a few countries, the rest of us can't buy there because we'll be paying 10 times the cost of hardware to get it over here.
I already moaned about this recently, but to briefly reiterate: the only hardware that's becoming available for most people in my region are Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of. This is pushing ever more people towards smartphones and away from actual computers.
But at least we got the bullshit machine in return, that's something, I guess.
> Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is?
It really shocks me how bad shipping has gotten. It's nearly unaffordable to buy things on eBay from the US as a Canadian due to shipping costs, so I can only imagine just how bad it is for people from other countries.
It's probably unaffordable for anyone to buy things from the US due to shipping costs, because the Trump administration has completely screwed up everything there with tariffs and mismanagement of the USPS and more. But the US is not the world. A better comparison is how much it cost to ship things from China a year ago compared to today.
> Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of.
I've heard reports that these are actually surprisingly good. I wouldn't want to use one in a production environment, but for homelab stuff they're an incredible deal.
Yes, 90%+ of sellers refuse to ship here (and we're not even under any sanctions and/or political pressure of any sort). I hear about these magical 100$ Thinkpads all the time; I'm yet to see anything cheaper than 300$ (add another 100$+ for shipping).
Sometimes goes the other way. I was recently looking for a specific PC case (Fractal Design Torrent Compact without a window) and it's entirely unavailable in North America.
Placed an order with a Polish seller on eBay, received a message that Fedex wouldn't take the package due to size, replied that they could send with any shipping company and that I'm not concerned with shipping speed, after which they cancelled the order on me.
Good code is extremely subjective, most bad code is built on a good code foundation. And most foundational software (think linux, ffmpeg, curl, v8, etc.) maintainers are pushing back.
Once AI/Agents actually master all tools we currently use (profilers, disassembly, debuggers) this may change but this won't be for a few years.
For what, being slightly less greedy than his peers?
Steam is what normalized always online DRM in gaming. Steam and Valve games also normalized micro-transactions and gambling mechanics. The guy is far from being a saint.
Steam does not require always online, you can login, download your game, then go offline.
Steam also does not require DRM, developers can choose not to use it, if they do you can just copy the game install dir to a separate folder and run your game without steam.
I guess you could say Valve made this easy, but its not like games didn't have DRM befores team or wouldn't have required always online without steam.
Agreed, the DRM and the always online and forced updates have bothered me ever since steam became a big thing.
I really like that on gog I can choose to install every version of a game ever released. So they can't remove content like music due to expired licenses etc.
Gabe is pretty cool and Valve is an amazing company that has done great things for both PC and Linux gaming. But this is not enough to counter the absolute shitshow that is USA right now.
But hey, they have midterms coming up this year. That's a great opportunity to redeem some of their earlier sanity. That is, if the democracy still exists then. It's not just the left that is worried -- many american centrists have started to wonder.
In democracies money going to governments isn't sucked to some kind of vacuum. It's reinvested in infrastructure, social programs, investment programs, etc.
The US would be better off if it had more money to invest in healthcare and education, and Gabe would still be fine living in a house worth a few millions instead of on a half billion yacht.
> In democracies money going to governments isn't sucked to some kind of vacuum. It's reinvested in infrastructure, social programs, investment programs, etc.
In practice it mostly goes to other rich people/corporations and affluent retirees.
Around half of federal revenues go to retirees (and disproportionately to the affluent ones), another trillion+ dollars goes to defense/VA contractors, another trillion dollars goes to interest (i.e. other rich people/corporations), and then all the rest of it combined is less than any one of those things individually.
If the money is currently going to the wrong places, and collecting more money only causes it to go to the same places, then you need to focus on getting the existing money to go to the right places and prove that you can actually accomplish that before "just collect more money" becomes anything resembling a reasonable proposal.
At which point you wouldn't need to collect more money, because there is already scads of money being collected, it's just going to the wrong things.
You don't think food security is something a country should invest in? Sure, let's have everything we need to live be produced in China, what could possibly go wrong.
This comes right after the news that Gabe purchased another Yacht (like his 6th or 7th?), so at least some fraction of the money is going towards normal billionaire stuff, which certainly doesn't help the homeless, or the even more oppressed Gamers.
I really need better generics support before ty becomes useful. Currently decorators just make all return types unknown. I need something this to work:
Yea whenever the idea of a company's profit is under a microscope, people often reflex to exec "greed" but it's typically because it's easier to blame a fictional disney villain, than it is to dig into the root of the problem.
If you can explain why anyone needs $8.469 billion of profit (2023), I'll gladly hear you out about greed. But something tells me I'm not going to get a great answer. :)
It would however have second-order effects; having less wealthy people would drive down rents/etc. If the wealthy just keep getting wealthier you'll end up in a situation where the wealthy just trade between each other out because of higher margins and the working class has nowhere to buy things.
Yes, it was written by a SoTA AGI trained for more than 30 years.
I would like to add that predictable generation defeats the very purpose of generative AI, so prompt engineering in this context will never equate to what engineering means in general.
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