Oinks

Sony Music is currently coming after DNS provider Quad9 for resolving a piracy related domain, and they’ve succeeded in two courts so far. At this point I don’t think any copyright lawsuit is too stupid to happen.

A podcast on engineering disasters that is also itself an engineering disaster.

You’re not wrong, but MMOs have been enshittifying the gaming experience by selling in game items in a shop for decades. Many even have player trading systems which inevitably create a real money black market for the game. While most don’t legitimise this in the way blockchain games do, there’s no technological reason they couldn’t, only legislative ones.

The only thing the “blockchain” part actually does is allow you to add another buzzword to your project and company, as well as make all of this cost a lot more electricity.

It’s all just buzzword bingo.

We can use the blockchain to track ownership of in game items!

That’s just called a database. Databases on a central account server are several magnitudes more efficient. Using blockchains for this is stupid.

You can transfer game items from one game to another game!

This would be a ton of efforts on part of the devs, and even then it wouldn’t really work in most cases because it turns out different games are different games. And even when it does the player experience of being handed end game items when starting a game is also questionable. Even if blockchains for games catch on, this idea never will.

The entire point of the blockchain is to create a decentralised zero trust database, but even if there are legitimate use cases for such a thing (which I’m not convinced of myself), games aren’t one of them.

The reason the blockchain pops up in games (and everything else) is that cryptocurrencies have an extreme illiquidity problem and the crypto “millionaires/billionaires” need new fools to buy cryptocoins so they can turn their illiquid cryptocoin “fortunes” into actual fortunes. This is why NFTs exist, this is why Axie Infinity (which is just NFTs with a terrible game built around them) exists, and sometimes they also dupe established companies into motioning something in the direction of “the future” (every crypto game project by an actual game studio).

The PC isn’t connected to power though, so somehow the fan has to be powered from the HDMI cable…

Yeah I definitely have no complaints about LibreOffice when it does decide to work, it’s far better than the web version of MS Office.

For LaTeX I use Visual Studio Code with a LaTeX Workshop plugin which works very well, it can auto compile documents on saving (with an automatically updating PDF view) and it lints the syntax properly. It does require installing a LaTeX distribution though. I’ve heard Overleaf is pretty decent as a starting point as well but I’ve never really used it.

About half the times I’ve used LibreOffice it’s given me problems, from crashing to taking an unreasonable time to start to not starting at all. This is across multiple PCs and installs so I guess I’m just cursed?

That said I don’t find myself reaching for an offline office suite very often anyway, I find it easier to create documents in LaTeX and for the times I need to collaborate on a uni presentation or something web options like Google Slides are better suited anyway.

I am wondering if Reddit’s content (and content on other social media sites too) is actually as valuable as everyone seems to think. OpenAI, Microsoft and Google already have enormous amounts of text data to train their LLMs and I would honestly be surprised if the barrier to making these LLMs better is needing even more data. So who is actually going to pay for this? AI startups don’t have the money, maybe if Amazon wants to get into the business?