The one thing to criticise about steam (and that they’re slowly, but surely, losing a EU court case over) is inability for customers to sell their games.

Their marketshare is organic, based on being the choice of store both from the customer and developer POV. As a customer you get the usual painless returns, great interface, community features and whatnot, as a developer you get plenty of store features which make life and customer acquisition and gamedev a lot easier (things like playtesting, next fests) and most of all you get customers because steam has lots of customers and a real, I mean real good, recommendation algorithm. Sure, Epic wants a smaller cut but you’re also not going to sell much, there, which is why they had to lure devs in with advances, guaranteed sales, etc. Larger publisher might not like steam so much because they have gigantic marketing budgets in the first place so all the discoverability/recommendation stuff is not as relevant but, well, fuck EA, Ubi, etc IDGAF, I don’t want to hear it, cry silently.

As to the “can’t sell games for lower prices elsewhere” myth: That applies to when you’re selling steam keys in places that are not steam. Which is fair, if you’re selling steam keys then that’s incurring costs for them (if nothing else, bandwidth) and they don’t even get their usual cut when you sell a steam key off-steam, least you can do is not undercut them.

Every time I read news about Trump I always wonder what his end goal is.

Be adulated. Get a nobel peace price because Obama has one (for not inexplicable but inexcusable reasons)

but most of the ultra-wealthy’s money is tied up in the market, too.

The ultra-wealthy have enough of a buffer to buy out all the middling-wealthy when they go bankrupt. They can buy the dip without themselves going bankrupt.

Oracle is not a tech company it’s a racket run by an army of lawyers. Obligatory link to Bryan Cantrill’s talk.

Berlin currently has a black-red government. I have no idea what your map there is showing. State elections wouldn’t show a federal map and the last federal elections don’t match, compare e.g. SH’s districts (northernmost state).

Berlin is kinda notorious for being a police state, and of the “IDGAF” nature, not “stickler for law” one.

“obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power”. Which is far above what being in NATO requires states to do. Which just btw also covers Greenland. Only ones off the hook are Ireland and Austria due to being neutral, the treaty still covers them though.

You can’t call a ship a boat. Shippy McShipface would’ve been a different topic. Or maybe Chipper McShipface?

The going rate is 1:1027 for an NCO.

but Brazil was just not being competitive.

That’s quite the understatement: It was so bad Brazilian fans started to cheer for the German team. Which, under usual circumstances, only happens when we’re not playing against each other.

All in all it could’ve been worse for Brazil: It could have been Argentina. And it could have been better for Germany: It could have been the Dutch.

May be the case, we’ll probably see when the dust has settled. OTOH, it’s still a war crime to abduct non-combatants so my point stands. And no, reservists aren’t combatants.

The hostages aren’t even particularly valuable because the Israeli government couldn’t give less of a fuck about hippies who do things like protecting the Palestinian olive harvest from settler interference. Nab an in-service right-wing IDF commander off the street and you have something much more valuable and it’s a legitimate prisoner of war.

Or, differently put: Don’t get your strategic and tactical advise from the Russians of all people.

Armed struggle != war crimes. One does not justify the other. The October attacks were like 5% achieving military objectives, the rest mindless slaughter, to the point where one can legitimately question whether the military objectives were not completely incidental. Hamas could have bee-lined for as many IDF outposts as they could, they didn’t, they shot up Hippie Kibbutzim of all places. (Which is also why Netanjahu and triply so the Kahanites don’t care about the hostages: They’re by and large lefties).

Same, of course, goes for the IDF and what they’re currently doing. If both sides kept to not even self-defence but only military objectives there might actually be peace in sight.

Because Beijing should be using Chongqing time, yes, then the offset of clock noon to natural noon would be at most something like ±1.5 hours.

UTC all around the world is a completely different thing than UTC (or UTC+1) all over Europe. China also spans just over three natural timezones and they get by just fine with one.

I’m not enough into that industry to actually give a good estimate, here, but the amount of COBOL systems still up and running is certainly not even close to non-zero, and it’s going to stay that way for a while. From what I gather for companies moving away from COBOL is more of a “programmers are hard to find” situation, not “these systems absolutely must be replaced” one. It’s well-supported and scaled with their business, as in, in places they’re running the same 60 year old code on new mainframes because if there’s one thing that IBM mainframes are then it’s excessively backwards-compatible.

As far as the language is concerned: It’s not hard, it’s just weird, dating back from an age where people thought randomly calling things “divisions” would make businesspeople capable coders. The reason I’m not in that space isn’t because of the language but because of the type of software you write there, it’s all bookkeeping and representing business procedures, as said: Bureaucracy.

Also I’m not sure what “modernising” actually meant, there: SEPA instant payment was introduced, meaning that mainframes won’t batch up the day’s transactions and then talk to each other every night so cross-bank transfers took a day to process, now they’re doing it in ten seconds. Most banks already supported instant transfers within their own systems so they should only have had to rewrite the external interface as the rest was already up to the task.

When I’m forced into a qwerty situation it’s not just 30 seconds, I simply can’t touch-type qwerty and my current qwerty skills are way slower than 25 years ago where I had reached peak seven-and-a-half-fingers hunt-and-peck performance. In principle I should know where all the keys are, still, I can’t find them without looking. Somewhat similarly, I don’t really know where keys are with dvorak when my fingers aren’t on the home row but I am faster finding them on a touch display than finding qwerty keys. Also dvorak is nice on the smartphone your thumbs alternate more often.

I mean yes but no. Back at some old job all the devs had the local admin password so we could do things like install drivers for bluetooth dongles on our own (I said “old job”, didn’t I) and usually everything was fine but at some point my machine just barfed, it would neither install nor uninstall drivers. I called an admin because I have no idea about windows internals. They were ecstatic, finally, an actual problem, and not walking someone in marketing through how to write an email. Some arcane regedit magic later the problem was solved, and yes I had layout switching ready on the taskbar.

COBOL is the career advise you hear people give for people who want to make money but don’t want to deal with the VC clownshow. COBOL btw is only 13 years older than C and both language’s current standard dates to 2023.

It’s at its core a bog-standard procedural language, with some special builtins making it particularly suited to do mainframe stuff. Learning COBOL is no worse a career investment than learning ABAP, or any other language of the bureaucracy. Sure you’ll be a career bureaucrat but that’s up sufficiently many people’s alley, no “move fast and break things”, it’s “move slowly and keep things running”.

Stock images are a whole category of awful of their own.

However, as it stands the majority of the tools in place cost a fair bit of money to set up and run

You can get by with 4G of VRAM if all you want is to generate some pictures, or differently put every PC capable of 1080p gaming should do the trick. With good software (comfyui) you can do SDXL just fine, and almost crush SD1.

It’s fine-tuning much less training models where things get expensive but there’s other ways to get creative with those models. Training is only ever barely possible on gaming GPUs because those cap out at about 16G VRAM.

(Just for completeness’ sake, for anyone wondering “why don’t I just use my 32G worth of CPU RAM to supplement the VRAM?” – that’s already happening anyways. You need a minimum amount of VRAM or your box will be busier shuffling data from and to the GPU than it is actually doing calculations: Your GPU is going to thrash. If that happens it’s probably faster to run the AI on the CPU and, well, it’s just not build to run that kind of code).

Three days is the (generously calculated) time until civil defence will have soup kitchens up and running, and at least over here they stock three months worth of lentil stew, pea stew, and bread and more than enough diesel to keep logistics, kitchens and crucial infrastructure such as water pumps running. Heating, push come to shove, would be supplied at the gymnasium of your local school or suchlike. Recommendation is to have 7-10 days worth of stock.

But yes I’d recommend against (completely) relying on stocks that need preparation because electricity and water might fail. Canned soups and stews are good and don’t forget canned peaches or such so you can have dessert. Woodgas burners are cheap camping supplies and you’re bound to be able to find some sticks somewhere so with some water reserve you even can have your morning coffee.