jaycifer

What they didn’t mention is that Baldur’s Gate is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise. DnD is magnitudes more popular than it was when BG2 released, to the point of being at worst nearly mainstream. What has sold people on BG3 is being able to play their tabletop game in video game form.

I do think Larian’s pedigree and the Baldur’s Gate name were contributors to its success, but if there was one driving factor it’s the brand recognition of DnD with the marketing of an AA to AAA game.

There’s a sentence in the article I linked to in another comment that, in the city the article was about, there were data centers for Microsoft and similar companies that had required high-speed internet infrastructure be built in town despite its small size. I suppose, based on what you said, that speed wouldn’t be too essential but you would want stability to maintain a connection. Satellite internet probably wouldn’t be great for that (maybe Starlink is?) in which case you still want to run some kind of cable.

I’ll concede there’s probably something to miners footing the initial capital to build the infrastructure, and if it’s in a remote area it may be prohibitively expensive for public utilities to extend the grid to it. But mining setups still require high internet speed connections to use the network, and I just have to wonder if installing that is a better use of resources than installing power lines to take some load off non-renewable power sources.

I dug up the original article: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/

In this case, they already were exporting 80% of the hydro-energy generated, about enough to power Los Angeles in 2018 when it was written. Maybe there are some cases for your suggestion on a small scale, but if a site is generating enough excess electricity to make mining worthwhile, why would it be less worthwhile to connect it to a larger grid?

There is a caveat to this. It’s been a few years since I read the article, but oftentimes the reason Bitcoin miners run on renewables is because they set up shop in places that have established local cheap electricity.

The example in the article was a town with ideal geography for hydro power, to the point electricity was cheap enough to sell it to the next town over. Crypto-miners set up in the first town and quickly began using more power, driving up the cost and eventually causing serious issues for the second town as there wasn’t enough electricity leftover to send their way anymore.

If a large chunk of their production is exported the market could be influenced to reduce the amount they can export, such as expanding US chip production to replace Chinese imports. Then their industries would be less profitable and have to spend time scaling down to meet the lower demand, which would also reduce their capacity to develop.

I think that fits between one extreme and another?

Yeah, but behind that wrong side is a valid person, and without a discussion you’ll never know how they ended up on that wrong side. Without knowing how they got there, you’ll never be able to sway them away from the wrong side and they will continue to be wrong.

I think everyone has something worth saying, but in the majority of cases I just don’t have the time, energy, or patience to get to that something.

Company A was created independently. In a sense, it owned itself. After a while Company A decided it needed capital or a close business partner. Company A told company B “We will sell you a 49% share of our company for capital and close business relations.” Company B accepted. Now what happened to the other 51%? They’re still with Company A, so we can say that Company A owns shares of itself.

If the author no longer has passion for his OSS project, and isn’t being paid for it, why is he still working on it? Why should he feel responsible for companies building their processes on a free piece of software without guaranteed support? Why the heck is he sacrificing sleep for something he claims not to care about anymore? It sounds to me like he’s not living his values.

If compensation for volunteer work is mandated, it becomes less volunteer work and more of a part(or in some cases full)-time job. My understanding is that a core pillar of open source software is that anyone can contribute to it, which should make it easier for contributors to come and go. Based on the graph shown it would take more than a full-time job worth of money to meet his demand, which seems unlikely in any case, and it’s time for him to go. Either someone else will volunteer to pick up the slack, the companies using it will pay someone to pick up the slack like the author mentioned, or the software will languish, degrade, and stop being used.

I don’t see how any of those outcomes suggest that people need to be paid for the time they voluntarily give. I could get behind finding better ways to monetarily support those who do want to get paid, but “how could it be easier to pay OSS contributors after their passion is gone?” is a lot less provocative of a headline.

Imagine you have a big board on your front lawn where people can come to write stuff and respond to others on the board. This board is an instance.

Your neighbor has their own board, which they have “federated” with yours. Messages from your board can show up on their board, and people there can write on those messages same as ones native to that board.

You can federate with them so their stuff shows on your board, or defederate if you don’t like the people there.

Anyone with the ability to make a board can have one federated with other boards to make a really big web of boards, but to a person looking at your lawn’s board it feels like one big one.

Who tells the people instructing the computers how the book keeping should be done if not the book keepers?

I have a print hanging on my bedroom wall! It’s a very interesting picture.

30 seconds for what?

It’s the perfect time to quit when they’re making it so easy!

Sure, same here, but how many of those did you pay $70 for less than two weeks after it released?

I was reading a blog post that talks about exactly how much the author is able to put in the public domain. My understanding is that Willingham has a fairly individualized contract with DC that he is grandfathered in on and is rather abnormal nowadays and gives him more control. DC has been trying to, as stated above, “reinterpret” that contract to give them more control.

Essentially, DC may own the rights to the individual products they published, but the world and characters Willingham created can be used outside of those in new or reimagined context.

I actually think this is one of the few times I’ve seen the template used 100% correctly. The original comic had the dog wanting to play fetch, then saying “No ball” when the person tries to get the ball they need to play fetch. The dog then demands fetch again, despite having denied the person what they need to do so.

Regardless of this meme’s accuracy, I do not understand how it misuses the comic template as a user asks for a bug fix, refuses to share the details needed to complete the bug fix, then demands the bug fix once again, just as the dog does with playing fetch and the ball. Could you please explain your thinking?