But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming
You’re forgetting that the “targeted” component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you’re suggesting they’d have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they’d want to serve to different customers.
Because it’s much more expensive. What they’re talking about here is basically modifying the video file as they stream it. That costs CPU/GPU cycles. Given that only about 10% of users block ads, this is only worth doing if they can get the cost down low enough that those extra ad views actually net them revenue.
Banning cars only makes sense at the municipal level. It’s not something that will ever be completely practical at any larger scale than that, unless you just want to completely fuck over everyone who doesn’t live in a big city.
It’s more important to focus on building out better public transit infrastructure. More buses, more trains, more bike lanes, more options for people to avoid using cars, while still leaving that option available for where its needed.
God that looks delicious.
NB as well. October 21st: https://www.electionsnb.ca/content/enb/en.html.html
Please show up and vote Higgs the fuck out. We deserve better than a transphobic asshole who wants to sell our healthcare to the highest bidder.
And please remember that in any Canadian election, you can register on the day at the booth if you have to. It takes five minutes as long as you bring a couple of pieces of ID (the list of what counts as acceptable ID is unbelievably long; I guarantee you’ll be OK. You can even just get someone else to vouch for you are).
Don’t get caught up in the horror stories from the US. Voting in Canada is incredibly fast and easy, even if you’re not registered. You’ll almost always be in and out in less than 20 minutes. Polls open early and stay open late, there are early voting days ahead of the actual election, and on election day your work are required to give you time off to vote if you need it. Know your rights and have your vote counted.
This is very well said.
I think what people imagine will happen, if they’re thinking about the economic conundrum at all, is something rather like the Warframe economy. Players with real dollars to spare buy platinum (the premium currency), which they then either use to buy things directly from DE, or trade to other players in return for loot those players want to sell. Effectively, players flush with time grind on behalf of players flush with dollars. If there was a way to convert platinum back into dollars, it could be imagined that a player in a country with a weak currency might make a living from selling rare mods and prime parts.
In practice the reason this doesn’t work is because DE would lose a huge amount of their income if players could cash out platinum. Any dollars put into the system for the purpose of buying things from other players would then leave the system when those players cash out. So there’s no incentive for DE to do this. There’s also the problem that you need to make a game that is actually worth putting real dollars into, and these crypto games are universally dogshit (ideal time to plug Jauwn’s YouTube channel, his crypto game reviews are hilarious and really highlight what utter trash the entire field is). So no one has any incentive to buy the tokens that the play-to-earn players are trying to sell. That’s a big part of why the price always instantly crashes.
The only way to make cashing out work is to have players directly sell their tokens to other players, instead of the money coming out of the developer, but that means now the players are competing with the developer on price. Whatever price the dev sells the token for becomes the ceiling. And if course, every token sold by a player basically steals income from the developer. If the dev instead gives the token out for playing the game, then there’s no mechanism at all for the dev to make any money from the token, other than issuing large amounts to themselves and ultimately crashing the price by cashing out. None of these options work, and the model these games actually go with basically guarantees rug pulls as the only actual way for the developers to make any money.
Yup. Smart contracts aren’t even contracts, and they certainly aren’t smart.
An algorithm is, by its nature, dumb. It does the thing it’s programmed to do, without any hesitation. It doesn’t stop to consider the situation or ask relevant questions. This is a terrible idea for a system that facilitates trades, because all someone has to do, to use the example you cited, is wash trade a newly minted token back and forth a few times to set a price, and then find a smart contract that’s happy to spew out some amount of a token you want, at the price you just set, like a busted slot machine.
Better if they just banned connected vehicles, period.
It’s not really that Concord was bad, and more that it was unremarkable.
The game was trying so hard to be a clone of Overwatch that what they ended up with was the gaming equivalent of those knock-off GI Joe clones your mother would buy you from the dollar store. Except that Overwatch is free, and Concord was $40. Why am I going to spend more money on getting the knock-off version?
Copying what works only gets you so far. At some point, you have to actually step ahead of the thing you’re copying.
The content isn’t the problem. It’s the delivery system. No one else has the storage and network capacity that Youtube has. And as a result of that, no one else has the built-in audience Youtube has. Putting your videos on YT is simply the best way to get views.
Even with the critical slant of applies to the gameplay of these “games” this article still ultimately neglects to describe the biggest problem with the “play to earn” aspect, which is that it fundamentally doesn’t work.
The article describes the notional highs and lows of these tokens, but overlooks the fact that trading volume is far more important than a hypothetical trade price.
If one person buys one of these utterly useless tokens for 10 cents, that sets the price at 10 cents. But if I then try to cash out a thousand dollars of that same token, I’m probably not going to get a thousand dollars, because that requires there to be someone on the other side of great trade who thinks its actually worth putting a thousand dollars into this otherwise useless token.
To make matters worse, crypto prices are generally set by crypto trades. What I mean by that is that the person who bought one token for ten cents, actually didn’t. They traded fifty BLOB tokens, notionally worth ten cents. What can you do with BLOB tokens? Nothing, they’re worthless, they were made for a game that doesn’t even exist anymore. The guy who owned those fifty BLOB tokens got them by trading a bunch of POOP tokens for them. Those are from a DAO that has since collapsed, they’re worthless too. He bought those POOP tokens with a fraction of a DOGE coin, which he got from selling an airdropped Bad Monkey NFT that he was lucky enough to get one time (and even luckier to sell before the rug pull).
See the problem? It’s all people trading Monopoly dollars for Game of Life dollars and arguing over the exchange rate. At no point did a real US dollar enter this process. So when you try to sell your BLOB tokens for real US dollars, no one is buying. The notion that people in developing nations will make a lining playing these games is a complete fantasy.
OK, interesting. I’m a little unclear on how they’re calculating rMax and rPeak though?
I would really want a measure of actual compute power, like teraflops per capita or something. Still imperfect, but better than just counting the number of buildings.
It’s the second one. They are all in on this AI bullshit because they’ve got nothing else. There are no other exponential growth markets left. Capitalism has gotten so autocanibalistic that simply being a global monopoly in multiple different fields isn’t good enough. For investors it’s not about how big your company is, how reliable your yearly returns are, how stable your customer base; the only thing that matters is how fast your business is growing. But small businesses have no space to grow because of the monopolies filling every available space, and the monopolies are already monopolies. There are no worlds left to conquer. They’ve already turned every single piece of our digital lives into a subscription, blockchain was a total bust, the metaverse was a demented fever dream, VR turned out to be a niche toy at best; unless someone comes up with some brand new thing that no one has ever heard of before, AI is the last big boondoggle they have left to hit the public with.
And it’s a ride-on??! Damn dude, what are you complaining about, I just have a stupid walk-behind.
Aren’t the Republicans own strategists screaming that this tactic isn’t working?
Could be fewer but larger. China likes megastructures. Could just be that their compute power is much more heavily consolidated.
Personally I think it’d be interesting to see this per capita, so here’s my back of a napkin math for data centers per 1 million pop (c. 2022):
Worth noting of course that this only lists the quantity of discrete data centers and says nothing about the capacity of those data centers. I think it’d be really interesting to break down total compute power and total storage by country and by population.
I’d also be interested to know what qualifies as a “data center”? For example, are ASIC based crypto mining operations counted, even though their machinery cannot be repurposed to any other function? That would certainly account for a chunk of the the US (almost all of it in Texas).
I guess what they’re trying to say is “We do not endorse this candidate, she doesn’t represent our views, but you need to vote for her anyway because that’s the only choice that will prevent a far worse outcome.”
But if that’s so, I feel like they probably should have just said it, instead of dancing around the point like this.
Generation X by Douglas Copeland
Virtual Light by William Gibson
The Ocean at The End of The Lane by Neil Gaiman
Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett