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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • “Standing on the shoulders of giants” is a saying in science. We build on the work that came before.

    Same with Rockstar. Go back and play GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas.

    You really feel how these were built on the same engine/platform and how each game kinda just feels like the game they made while making the other game. If you look at the timelines San Andreas came quickly after Vice City (by modern standards at least). Imagine if they didn’t upgrade and reuse assets? If everything was to be built from scratch.






  • Plenty of known loopholes for tax avoidance.

    Used to work for a company that made killer profit, but 85-90% of it was funneled to the parent company to pay for the leverage of the PE investors who bought the company for 10x their EBITDA. Say we made 100 million EBITDA, the official result was around 10-15 million, and was the basis for our taxation.

    All this money was paid as various fees and licenses and was calculated into the budget the year before. We had specific goals that we needed to hit and, and bonus payment was based on these goals. Our collective bonuses was a drop in the ocean compared to the result of the company.

    The parent company in Germany then had at least three levels of holding companies, all incorporated in Luxembourg, between them and the owners.

    Was a fun place to work when we got sold as suddenly there were som extra rounds of bonuses to go around as carrots for us to stay on during the sale, and even more stay-on bonuses for those who staid on after the sale.

    According to my boss at the time - the perk of being in a PE backed company.

    Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re up for sales again next year.



  • Apple has shown that the market could be willing to adapt.

    But then again, they’ve always had more leverage than the Wintel-crowd.

    But what people seem to ignore is that there is another option as well: hardware emulation.

    IIRC correctly old AMD CPU’s, notably the K6, was actually a RISC core with a translation layer turning X86 instructions into the necessary chain of RISC instructions.

    That could also be a potential approach to swapping outright. If 80% of your code runs natively and then 20% passes this hardware layer where the energy loss is bigger than the performance loss you might have a compelling product.








  • Well, the player can choose which gender V is, plus there’s a lot of catering to gender fluidity.

    It’s definitely a conscious choice, but I can’t say if it’s to not have to record more variations of dialogue, and maybe NPC’s use it less so not to draw attention to them not knowing V’s gender.

    That said, nothing that really bothered me, although I still haven’t gone through the entire game.

    But maybe it’s just how they picture 2077? Just look at recent history and draw an exponential curve and assume pronouns just went out of fashion?



  • It’s a common misconception that blockchain gives trust. If you control a majority of nodes in a Blockchain system you decide what the truth is.

    This opens the door for illicit players to manipulate things their way.

    Lack of trust doesn’t replace trust.

    Central, provable/accountable, trust is needed for financial systems to work.

    Everything else is “Wild West”.


  • The biggest problem is people trying to peddle it as currency.

    It isn’t currency, never will be. Much more alike to bonds.

    It’s an investment object with a speculative value, and no tangible value. The only value it has is what the next guy is willing to pay for it.

    While currency is deflationary by nature, crypto is entirely based on demand and supply, and sure, as long as people think it will be worth more tomorrow - sky’s the limit.

    Like any pyramid scheme it pays out to get in early, and get out before it collapses.

    Relying on crypto is high stakes gambling, and people being people is the only reason I can find for it not having collapsed totally already.