LetMeEatCake

Technology filters down. Once upon a time only the rich could afford corrective lenses, but that wasn't a waste of resources. How many of non-wealthy people will read this comment and wear glasses or contacts? I do. BEVs were limited to the wealthy at first too, and now are solidly affordable to much of the middle class: dependent more on their access to charging and their driving requirements than on their budget. The first residential fridges cost more than a brand new Model T when they came out: the inflation adjusted 1922 price was ~$13,000 today. Was inventing fridges worthless?

It's NASA developing new technologies. New stuff starts off more expensive, which means it will start off limited to the wealthy. If you don't want any new tech to come out that starts with rich people being the primary users, then you should go find your local luddite club to join.

There's only so much room for Intel to improve the 14900k without updating the architecture. Rocket Lake is itself a glorified refresh of Alder Lake too.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the CPU space in the near future. Intel launching a refresh of a refresh and then AMD launches Zen 5 sometime in the year, then Zen 5 + 3D cache. Should be a rather favorable exchange for AMD. Will Arrow Lake be able to reclaim the crown for Intel the year after? We might see a bit of see-sawing of CPU dominance each year at this rate.

Not the full answer but an encouraging detail, thanks for the info!

How does stuff like DLSS or similar work with Proton? I remember reading once that it wasn't a straight forward process. That was a few years ago though, I don't know if it's changed (or if I misunderstood what I read — always a possibility).

I suppose it doesn't matter much to me in the medium term, as I use mission-critical software while WFH, which is Windows only. But Linux-ifying my setup is something that always sounds appealing if I can get over the hurdles.

Almost certainly still stuck with their fork of gamebryo. On the bright side, the footage I've seen of Starfield suggests that they've actually gotten around to implementing a better animation system.

I'm not sure on the specifics of how animations work at the engine level (I know there's stuff about animation rigs, but not much beyond that) but all their games up until now have had the same system of character animations and it consistently looked ancient. Straight from the late 90s levels.

Republicans control the house and the senate is still subject to the filibuster and likely will remain that way until the next time there is 52+ dem senators + dem house + dem president simultaneously.

It is and it isn't, the reasons are in my comment.

The problem is that it depends on how you assess it. There are two, both perfectly valid, ways to look at this.

The way you're looking at it is you see it as a state-only contest. B got the fewest votes, B's votes go to C, C wins the state. The end. From an administrative level this is the simplest approach. I don't feel any need to expand on this assessment as you're in favor of it and seem to grok the principles behind it.

The other, equally correct, way to look at it is to assess this as a national contest. In that case, C is the one that actually gets the fewest votes because they have 0 electoral votes in any other state. C is incapable of winning, so C would be eliminated in the first round of the state level contest. After all, one of the points of RCV is to eliminate the impact of spoiler candidates that cannot win. With that in mind, it'd be dumb to design an RCV system that increases the impact of a spoiler candidate that cannot win.

The issue with the first interpretation is the risk of magnifying the impact of a spoiler candidate who cannot win. The issue with the second interpretation is the sheer administrative difficulty (if C were competitive in multiple states then each state needs to take into account how other states are doing their RCV process, etc.). Both flaws would be unlikely to matter >99% of the time, but that one time the flaw would matter could lead to a constitutional crisis or less dangerously result in fundamental dislike of RCV systems. That one time might also become more likely if voters feel more comfortable voting for third parties due to this system.

The problem here is that both systems are fair, logical, and valid; they also each present major issues in edge scenarios. That's why it's important to go for a popular vote first. That way the election is one election, which RCV is explicitly designed for. The current two layer 51-elections that lead to another election that we have for the US presidency is basically a nightmare scenario for an effective RCV system.

Some democrats don't like RCV (see the DC thread from the other day), but many do. NYC has RCV, and I assure you it didn't get there without democrats supporting it. So does Maine.

RCV wouldn't work well for presidential elections as they are anyway, because it's a two-stage election. What would RCV mean in an individual state? Pretend a 3rd party is in contention in that state but has no chance nationally. Candidates A and B are the major parties, and C is our third party. If the results are C=40, A=35, B=25, and B's support transfers to C, and C's support would transfer to C, does that mean B should be eliminated so C can win the state, or should C be eliminated (because they won't win any other states) and B should win the state? There's no obvious answer and it just invites more of a clusterfuck.

RCV is great for popular vote elections, which is what everything else is (mostly... there's... I think it's Mississippi governor?) and what the presidential election should be.

Popular vote first, RCV second.

Which is... never. At least for presidential elections. I can't speak for the marriage proposals.

The Republican party didn't appear out of nowhere in 1860 to win a presidential race. They were formed in 1854 and supplanted the Whig party entirely before the 1860 election. It was a majority party throughout the north before it won a presidential race — it wasn't a "third party."

Likewise, Democrats replaced the Democratic-Republican party in much the same way that republicans replaced the Whig party, and had been a major party from its very beginnings. Literally in their first election there were only two parties running!

There are only three other parties that have won the presidency: Federalists (there from the inception of the party system), Democratic-Republicans (ditto), and Whigs (major party years before first electoral win). There's been no "third party" that has ever won the US presidency. All three have the same story as democrats as starting off in an election with just two parties.

In this case Mozilla likely has staff and contributors working out of France. Chances are they make money from there too. Mozilla would either need to forfeit the above or comply if the law is implemented.

Enforcement from decent sized economies can often be as simple as having too much economic power to ignore, which often isn't that high of a threshold.

Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.

For PC: the vast majority of PCs don't have a blu ray drive. So that's a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.

Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It's a huge difference.