raisin_churn

FOSS as infrastructure doesn't mean every piece of FOSS is. And infrastructure can be incidental. While we're using analogies tortured beyond all meaning, a goat path in the forest is infrastructure if I ride my bicycle on it to get somewhere, but the goat herder was just herding their goats. If you want to rely on something (code, forest path, whatever), you should probably take steps to ensure the longevity and security of that thing, especially if you depend on it to make money. If I really need my goat/bicycle path, I could do path maintenance on it or try to get the government to do it, but complaining that I'm late for work because the goat herder didn't clear a fallen tree that their goats can jump over but I can't bike around is both foolish and obnoxious.

Yes, I think that's what they're implying as well. All of the companies I mentioned do the same thing to a greater or lesser extent, so it's a pretty well-known practice in open source.

That isn't to say it isn't worthwhile that Valve is doing it, and the article kinda sorta touches on the scale of Valve's activities, but not really. Okay, they've contracted over a hundred devs to work on OSS projects that they rely on. Are those all full-time contracts, or part time? How long are they contracted for? How does that compare to other companies that have similarly contracted devs to work on OSS projects they rely on? As is, the article is essentially "water is wet" for anybody who pays any attention to the interaction between OSS and enterprise. I learned far more pertinent details from one comment[0] on another HN thread on this a couple days ago. PC Gamer couldn't find one of the contracted devs and ask them two or three questions to give some substance to the article?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34031431

You want to check out CoreCtrl[0] for GPU undervolting. I'm not sure exactly what features are available for RDNA1-3, I remember reading an issue that some level of control was lost at some point, but granular clock/voltage control, fan curves, etc were all available for my Vega 56.

[0] https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl

I guess "software company pays software developers to develop software" was a less catchy headline. Soon we'll be finding out that Intel, Red Hat, and even Google have been paying developers to keep their products based on open source software working.

ksuperkey[0] addresses this, though it is unfortunately not widely packaged so you likely have to compile it. I haven't used it in a while, but it worked well when last I did.

[0] https://github.com/hanschen/ksuperkey

Well, my comment was highly abbreviated for the sake of pithiness, but US ratification of the treaty would be more meaningful than the US simply not employing landmines itself. (NB While I place all the blame on senators for not ratifying it, technically no US president has signed it, so the Senate hasn't actually had the opportunity to ratify, but Senate leaders have made their opposition clear for decades so they definitely deserve the blame I'm pointing in their direction.)

Furthermore, landmines haven't actually been a weapon that the US military has considered tactically useful in nearly 50 years, so saying that we won'ist use them (because they're not useful to us), but not pressuring other countries which may find them useful despite their horrific downsides, isn't exactly upstanding. And, the article title on HN is misleading, because this isn't just about landmines, it's about unexploded ordnance (UXO) more generally. The US, in addition to not signing the Mine Ban Convention, refuses to sign/ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and has significant quantities of cluster munitions in the inventory, with an alarmingly high failure rate (meaning the munition doesn't detonate when it is supposed to, leaving dangerous UXO that only becomes more dangerous over time). So, yes, there's nuance, but honestly not enough to let US leaders off the hook for these horrors.

I would prefer to use US senators who refuse to ratify the Mine Ban Convention. They won't need any particular skills or training, just have them wander around possible UXO sites until they find one with their foot. The great thing about this is, US senators are a 100% renewable resource.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

This is not the driver. As stated in the first sentence of the link, what is being discussed is "part of their developer software suite for helping to profile ray-tracing performance/issues on Windows and Linux with both Direct3D 12 and the Vulkan API."

While I disagree that hydraulic brakes are a significant hurdle for home mechanics having learned to bleed hydraulic car brakes at 12 years old, and the author is probably wrong about electronic shifting as well, the fact is all these technologies are purely optional. I ride several thousand miles a year on bikes, road and mountain, with rim brakes and mechanical shifting, and have never felt the need to "upgrade." Apart from the fork and seatpost on one of my road bikes, there's also no carbon fiber anywhere to be found. I don't ride competitively (and most competitive riders don't personally maintain their racing bikes), but in the groups I ride with my bikes are the "lowest tech" and always the oldest, usually by a decade or two, and I'm almost never the slowest in the group.

That being said, many people like the newest technology, be that bikes, cars, cell phones, whatever, and that's fine. This same article could have been written (and was, many times) about integrated index shifters when they came out over 30 years ago (Shimano STI in particular, as Campy Ergopowers, at least Record, are rebuildable, if you can find spare parts for your 25 year old Titanium Record 9 Speed shifters). One of my road bikes, with well over 10k miles on it, has the original Shimano 105 levers, still kicking. Yes, if they break, I will probably not be able to repair them, but I also can't repair a broken aluminum chainring, I just get a new one.

E-bikes are a bit of a different story, but that's largely because of ignorance and fear of electricity and how it works more than anything else. It may prove to deter some people from getting their hands dirty on their bike, which is a shame, but if you just look at the size of the e-scooter hacking community, that should put to rest the notion that it's an absolute barrier to entry.

Maybe nothing, maybe EVGA, with their reputation for quality and sound engineering, would have looked at the garbage adapter cable Nvidia shipped to board partners and said "Hell no, we're not shipping that to customers" and sounded the alarm on it before thousands of these got into people's homes and offices where they may yet kill someone.

I don't personally like EVGA, had a bad experience trying (and failing) to get warranty replacement for a defective PSU, but I can certainly follow GP's thinking about how EVGA's involvement with this launch might have made a difference.

I recently replaced my decade old Blackberry because it either did not support VoLTE or I just couldn't find the appropriate firmware upgrade for the modem, but either way the telecom refused to service it. If it had support for scanning QR codes, it was very well hidden, as I actually spent time trying to get it to do that. I now have a Nokia of some sort, pointing the camera at the QR code doesn't open a web page, and that's all the effort I'm interested in investing, since the entire notion of QR menus only serves to make cellular telephones more mandatory for participation in society, which I wholeheartedly reject. The day I can't walk out my front door without a telephone and accomplish my tasks, I'll move to the mountains and become a hermit.

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, owned a telephone that can open QR codes, and I'm neither interested in finding out for sure, nor buying a different telephone. I've largely stopped going to restaurants anyways because of the outrageous unannounced and mysterious fees that many are now tacking on (I'm not opposed to paying what it costs to produce fine dining, but tell me the cost up-front), but I also will not go to a restaurant that won't just hand me a damn menu. I'm just a drop in the bucket, and no doubt nobody is missing my custom, but who knows, maybe there are more like me.

Or, since Betteridge's Law, like Moore's and Poe's, is a physical constant of the universe, it could implode in on itself and create a supermassive black hole.

> This is not a dome.

Thanks for the correction, I read the page without enabling JS on it, so the images didn't load, and every previous iteration of this technology I've seen has been limited to producing domes or arches. Nonetheless, even if you could, in practice, stack multiple floors using this new form, no developed country with any potential seismic activity or hurricane/typhoon threat will let you build multi-story structures like this (or perhaps even single-story ones), and I think you're right to use the word "magic" about using rebar with this, since installing rebar is a very labor intensive process, thus negating the only alleged benefit of this technique.

Yes, fly ash concrete seems more sustainable than concrete without it (provided that the fly ash already exists) in certain applications where its particular properties are beneficial. I seem to recall it having greater durability under compressive loads, so roads can be built that require less frequent repair. In the US, we have enough roads falling apart I think we could use all the fly ash concrete we could possibly make, and we wouldn't have any extra to build substandard, energy-inefficient housing.

Indeed, although I suspect the PVC in the inflatable form could be replaced with some other, actually sustainable material. It's therefore an even bigger indictment of this company that they didn't even bother to do this and are somehow touting their process as sustainable.

In what way is concrete a sustainable building material? It's a huge carbon emitter, a poor insulator, concrete production is devastating to natural habitats turned into sand quarries, etc. Plant-based construction materials, e.g. hemp, seem to be vastly superior on every ecological consideration.

Plus, an unreinforced concrete dome has to be one of the inherently least population dense structures, and density potential is probably as important a consideration in sustainability as actual construction techniques.

Edit: not necessarily a dome, but also not able to safely scale the structure very high with this technique without losing the only purported advantage, the low labor cost.

It doesn't seem to be a popular sentiment, but I agree. My parents are retired, moderately wealthy, and in reasonably good health, yet the burden to spend time with them seems to be entirely on my partner and me, who have demanding careers. Not to mention, my in-laws are in worse health than my parents, so now we have to prioritize our limited travel time between two sets of elderly parents, visiting our friends dispersed across the planet, and engaging in our own interests. Quitting our jobs and moving to be near my parents (or my partner's) isn't an option, so the status quo of seeing them every other year will remain until they decide to change it.

Indeed, I've hired many people. The nice thing is that as an employer in most of the US, you can just fire them for any reason or none at all. I don't think the possibility of doing multiple interviews only to discover that the candidate you've had ample opportunity to question is actually a complete incompetent justifies underpaying/attempting to underpay the rest of your, presumably competent, employees. I promise you, if you stop structuring compensation with the assumption that your employees are worthless, you'll stop getting so many incompetent or recalcitrant employees.

When I bought my house in a major US metro, any attempt to low-ball the seller simply meant your offer would go immediately in the trash in favor of one of the dozens of asking-plus bids, and continued attempts to do it was a surefire way to extend the unpleasantness of house hunting. And house prices in my city are up 20% since 2020, so I don't think the situation has become more amenable to low-ballers.

And that's all beside the point, because the information asymmetries in real estate markets are totally different from labor markets. This law reduces the information asymmetry to actually make labor markets more like real estate markets, in which all historical prices are public information and (in civilized jurisdictions, at least) all known relevant factors that might affect price are legally required to be disclosed.

I get 15-20 hours of battery on my laptop running Debian, at say 30% brightness, with an open ssh connection or two over wifi. So, there are clearly circumstances where it is fine, though I'm quite sure there are cases where it isn't, too. Use the tools that work for you when they work for you.

I had the opposite experience with their warranty. I had an EVGA PSU die after less than a year, called them for warranty replacement, and they point blank refused to provide service unless I signed up for an account on their website, the sole purpose of which as far as I could tell was to harvest data for marketing purposes. I had the original proof of purchase, receipt, retail box, etc, but they didn't care. So I just don't buy EVGA products now, which isn't hard since I also don't buy Nvidia products. And it's certainly possible that this is standard (bad) practice now, but I haven't had any other PC parts fail under warranty.

That being said, I think this is a good, principled move. Nvidia is infamous for being unpleasant to work with, but their overwhelming dominance of such a large market forces people to do it anyways, so it's nice to see someone stand up to that.

This is an awful lot of words to say "it works fine." I love craigslist, and use it both for listing and buying quite regularly. There's plenty of fair criticisms of craigslist, but the UI is one of the strongest features. Maybe turn it around and ask why most other websites have loud, jarring, complicated interfaces and copious 3rd party JavaScript from dozens of other domains?

Like all other parts for custom PC building, you can either arbitrarily pick a pricepoint and a cool-sounding name and slap it together, or you can read benchmark comparisons and have a rough idea what works best for you. Should I buy an Intel CPU or AMD? Which of the dozen models from each brand? Motherboards, power supplies, cases, coolers, this staggering array of choice is everywhere throughout the custom PC space. You also have the option to not deal with it and buy a full PC from an OEM or system integrator, even Dell if you hate both yourself and your money.

PS the 3080 and the 3080 Ti are different GPUs, so that is nothing to do with the AIB manufacturers, that's Nvidia directly. Like an Apple M1 vs M1 Ultrapromax.

On the other hand, if you've been eating sugar and drinking battery acid all along and your teeth haven't fallen out yet, please let me know what kind of toothpaste you've been using.

Okay, what are the magical qualities of "the war you mean WWII" that make its participants, who have special significance to you the British, repel the unruly youth of the United States? Or, is it possible you're just a grouch, the latest in a line stretching back to at least Socrates, complaining about "kids these days?"

Which war? There's a couple dozen at any given moment. I fought in some, have a bunch of friends who fought in a couple entirely different ones, too. I probably won't die for another 40-50 years, so rest easy I guess? What's the special quality of "the war" that makes its participants repel tigers I mean keep idiots like this alleged student from mucking things up?

Buy your date an iPhone.