It can do both, lossiness is toggleable.
If you’ve seen a picture on Lemmy, you’ve almost certainly seen a WebP. A fair bit of software – most egregiously from Microsoft – refuses to decode them still, but every major browser has supported WebP for years and since superior data efficiency compared to JPG/PNG means is already very widely used on the web. Bandwidth is not that cheap.
I looked it up because I already forgot, but you need to do half of the puzzle I’m talking about to do the big one. And that one is annoying as fuck to do because even if you immediately understand how it works (it is very neat) you’ll be looking at it for literal hours getting tiny details right with zero feedback from the game, and the “this is neat” feeling quickly turned into intense frustration for me. Doubly frustrating because I was not in the right headspace after being forced to do a bunch of content filler puzzles to even get there. I just can’t find any joy in the tedium of figuring out a bazillion very similar puzzles over and over again to solve a bigger puzzle I already know how to solve. I figured out your trick, game, where is my damn reward? I guess that’s why I could never get into Rubik’s Cube…
Outer Wilds approaches this very differently, I definitely spent hours wandering because I misunderstood one very specific thing. But once I did understand that thing, everything clicked into place and the game revealed itself to me. Late-game Tunic instead punishes discovery with more grind.
The combat was fine, I never touched the difficulty either. Though I will say the difficulty scaling was a bit all over the place, most of the regular enemies were barely a threat, while the bosses were pretty all over the place in terms of difficulty. But overall the combat progression was quite enjoyable.
It’s more of a “souls-lite” meets Outer Wilds for sure. You gotta be relatively on top of things mechanically to beat it, and on top of that in the second half of the game it switches to puzzles that are (IMO) infuriatingly grindy and will take hours to complete after you’ve figured out the mechanic.
Which is perfectly fine for those who like that, but I was sold “knowledge base game like Outer Wilds” which doesn’t accurately capture how disgustingly grindy Tunic really is IMO. That’s like saying Elden Ring is an “open world walking simulator with gorgeous graphics and compelling combat”. I mean, yeah, it’s all that and it’s a great game. But that’s kind of underselling the fact that if it’s your first Souls you’ll probably break a couple keyboards after meeting Margit.
For me the end-game was the wrong ratio of grind-to-payoff. Everything after unlocking that one secret ability got quite repetitive. I watched a video essay from someone who praised it specifically because they’re a hardcore gamer who loves the grind and pouring sweat into it and the accompanying feeling of accomplishment, but after I discovered 90 % of the secrets of the world it felt really annoying to spend the second half of the game scouring every nook and cranny of the game for the remaining 10 %. Some of these puzzle have very long solutions with absolutely zero feedback if you do even one tiny thing wrong and that’s absolutely infuriating. I think I would have preferred it if credits had rolled at the halfway point.
However I loved Outer Wilds because while it’s huge and full of sometimes very difficult puzzles, it never gets grindy. Either you get it or you don’t, the game never presents you with a “congratulations you understand the mechanic, now go stare at every wall in the game for the next 3 hours”. I get that some people love that but it clearly wasn’t for me.
I will argue there is something very different between Rowling and Bezos.
Both are rich beyond measure and can fund lobbying efforts indefinitely. But Rowling has something that Bezos doesn’t have, cultural capital. When she says something, people listen, from journalists to citizens to lawmakers, and not just because she’s rich.
Truth is social capital matters. A lot. Which is good because it’s the only thing we, the people, can hope to have that most billionaires don’t. But a corollary of this statement is that giving social capital to Rowling is, in fact, worse than giving actual capital to Bezos, all else being equal.
Now I can’t tell you how to live your life and we all have our vices. Just giving food for thought.
Opposite statements. Either they follow orders or they are loyal to the constitution. Can’t do both right now.
I can’t fathom the industrial amounts of pure propagandium that Americans must have been huffing to think the military will ever be on their side. Blind and unconditional obedience is literally the only way militaries can function properly and everything about them is organized to promote that.
US military apologists (even before Trump) will say “but soldiers are legally obligated to follow the constitution first and must refuse unlawful orders” like Abu Ghraib didn’t happen in my lifetime. We all know that 90 % of soldiers will wipe themselves with the original copy of the declaration of independence if Trump orders them to. And those that refuse will be dishonorably discharged, or worse.
Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.
Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from
The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.
Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?
The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.
This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.
Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.
Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever “hey BTW this device is at those coordinates”.
Google already uses this with WiFi to help “bootstrap” GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn’t change, this did.
Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple’s database with GPS coordinates.
So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn’t disable the “enhanced localization” feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.
Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.
There’s lots of room to give additional info in between that and “brake light is on because the driver doesn’t understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights”. It’s like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they’re on when the car isn’t meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.
There are ways to own very high quality movies. Those ways just happen to not be legal. Still less of a hassle than maintaining a physical media collection.
I do own a record player so I see the point of added physicality though.
Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.
Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.
As a European software developer I would love to see that.
Unfortunately I’m afraid those most likely to cry foul aren’t Americans, but the majority of European tech businesses who are either reselling MSFT bullshit or completely locked in AWS/Azure/GCP. Open-source/sovereign software services are the exception, not the rule.
With what money? NPPs only get built on public funds, private equity cannot make the economics viable due to the multi-decade amortization. It’s fine on public debt but breaks down if you have to pay shareholders for billions of euros of loans over 20 years which amounts to so much money the cost is uncompetitive with fossil fuels + renewables. Private equity has been trying to make private nuclear power for 20 years now, mostly with SMRs, with little success and nothing to show for it up to now.
If Belgium ever builds a new NPP, it will be because the government voted on a multi-decade funding plan, which is not guaranteed to happen when the left wants no nuclear and the right wants fiscal austerity. Until then there’s nothing that Engie can do but wait.
TBF work was done to keep it sound until 2025 and it was possible to extend the operational life further (basically you can just keep throwing hundreds of millions at them every 10 years for a long time to come).
What’s fucked up is that in the last few years a bunch of maintenance wasn’t done because the government said “no for real though super pinky promise we’re not extending the contract again they will definitely be shut down in 2025 it’s the law”.
So now Electrabel/Engie is rightfully super pissed because this flip-flopping is going to cost us billions just to keep the existing reactors running. And they have zero guarantee the greens won’t come back into a government coalition in 2029 and fuck the schedule up again.
It’s because the ~*~tech~*~ sector fundamentally relies on different economics than most engineering companies, and that has investors absolutely bricked up.
What investors being sold by “tech” companies is infinite ROI. Sure, [YouTube/Twitter/Uber/whoever] has never been profitable more than a few quarters in a row (if that), but think! They have virtually no fixed costs! That means if we just inject a few more millions in R&D we will finally reach the threshold where we can scale deployments to hundreds of millions of users who will be paying us MRR! Hosting costs are virtually nothing and at that scale R&D is basically free as well! And if push comes to shove, we can reduce costs to nearly zero by firing all the engineers! The economies of scale are practically infinite, they say.
It’s the rare instance where capitalists actually care about long-terms gain a bit too much. The tech industry tends to be single-mindedly chasing monthly user counts first and revenue second or third. Then at some point reality catches up, the accountants start getting their way, the product starts getting enshittified, and the users leave for something else. Did the product actually turn a net profit over its lifetime? Who knows, who cares. Everyone who made those early business decisions has long since cashed out.
Where the markets are unbelievably irrational is that this frenzy has spilled over into industries where the the sales pitch for infinite economies of scale doesn’t even make theoretical sense. Tesla sells physical products, so why are they worth more than every other automotive company combined? OpenAI operates at an enormous loss because LLMs are just expensive to train and run by nature, so they cannot be profitable under the current business model at any scale. Yet here we are. Just because it’s labeled as “tech”, investors are throwing our retirement funds into it. And any time the markets are being irrational, there’s a risk that investors wise up to the bad fundamentals and the whole thing comes crashing down.
In Europe we’ve been spared some of the worst of the craziness. Although venture capitalism is alive and well in the software sector, I would wager that European companies tend to have stronger fundamentals on average (but that’s just a gut feeling, I’m not an economist).
Vanishingly little of the hordes of little hands who immediately crumbled to Trump actually answer to him. And those that do are still supposed to uphold the constitution first and foremost.
Resistance has always been an option, Americans are just almost unanimously choosing not to exercise it.
Suse has been trying pretty hard with Harvester. KVM-based, VMs-as-k8s-pods which leverages all existing k8s tooling, as well as the same multi-cluster federation as RKE2.
Seems pretty great from afar, though it’s very much under active development.
At the end of the day these are commodity items. It’s reasonable for consumers to buy whatever’s cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.
The solution can’t come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can’t be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.
The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don’t often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can’t buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore… So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.