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thomasz

2,066 karma · joined February 5, 2010

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thomasz··on Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists
It's not _universal_. A truly UBI would be handing out a fixed basic income to everyone, irrespective of individual wealth, income or needs.
thomasz··on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
You jest, but it took forever to add somewhat intuitive layout mechanism to css which allowed you to do what could be done easily with html tables. Vertically centering a div inside another was really hard, and very few people understood the techniques you would use, instead of blindly copying them.

It was beyond irony that the recommended solution was to tell the browser to render your divs as a table.

thomasz··on How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs
But price elasticity isn't infinite. A large part of the middle class would be priced out of most modern amenities if these would be produced domestically. Import substitution is one of these things that sounds nice in theory but tend to be highly damaging in practice.
thomasz··on A recent chess controversy
Right, it's collusion.
thomasz··on AI is killing the web – can anything save it?
Ironically, they insisted at a very narrow definition of the question and answer format and consequently failed at creating a good wiki. There is no way to approach broader topics. It’s always „how do I do x“, and the accepted answer since 2013 is a jquery plugin which is missing a maintainer since 2015.
thomasz··on US Cloud soon illegal in EU? US punches first hole in EU-US Data Deal
Import substitution is one of these ideas that sounds great but seldom works out as intended. Bureaucracies instead of markets now pick winners, and their picks tend to be significantly worse. I really hope they are smart about it and treat this as a measured retaliation against easily substitutable products like twitter, Facebook and gmail, maybe cloud hosting and Amazon marketplace. There is zero chance of any initiative to produce a competitive office suite or operating system, but there will be undoubtedly real pressure to burn billions of taxpayer euros to try exactly that.
thomasz··on US Cloud soon illegal in EU? US punches first hole in EU-US Data Deal
No, Europe will not go back to the Stone Age. US services will be substituted for somewhat shittier European services. That’s how it goes. On average, everyone will be worse of. The European customer loses, US tech loses, European tech wins.

I’m somewhat surprised about this kind of gleeful condescension in this particular forum, of all places.

thomasz··on Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay
You certainly did not see an activist hauled off by the police for giving a seminar about censorship the other day.
thomasz··on How to learn chess as an adult (2021)
Have you tried mixing up games with daily moves with rapid and blitz? Mixing “do it right” with “do it fast” training is more effective than doing only one of both.
thomasz··on I Love Ruby
Completely different. Ruby‘s yield calls a block, which is basically an anonymous method with some special syntax tacked on.
thomasz··on Building a bare-metal bootable game for Raspberry Pi in C#
Huh. That’s interesting.

I can see something like this be useful in certain circumstances. But I would intuitively assume that gen0 collection is probably a better compromise.

thomasz··on Police raid mosque in Moscow, forcibly take worshippers to enlistment office
They would start with undesirables like political opponents and minorities first.
thomasz··on Peter Molyneux wants Project MOAT to represent his life's work
Yes. But strangely, he always promised wide simulations of worlds with fascinating emergent behavior. But even his truly great games were never like that. But it took journalism roughly 25 years to notice.
thomasz··on Peter Molyneux wants Project MOAT to represent his life's work
Even his greatest successes were never the breathtaking, revolutionary advances he promised. Populous, Syndicate, Themen Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper were nothing but a fairly simple game play idea, executed well.

But for some reason, games journalism always repeated his wild and completely impossible ideas for the next product like a gospel. That is the core of the problem, and not a thirteen year old boy trapped in the bod of a grown man talking about the game he’s going to create once he has read through c++ for dummies.

thomasz··on Peter Molyneux wants Project MOAT to represent his life's work
I never understood the extreme hate. "Pain"? We’re talking about video games, for Christ’s sake.
thomasz··on Write code like you just learned how to program (2010)
Why can’t everyone be as productive as Steve? When I assign something to him, it’s done in a week! When I want you to add a tiny feature, it takes three!
thomasz··on The Fall of Stack Overflow
That would remove a good percentage of correct answers. The obvious solution is to fix their weird and completely dysfunctional moderation.
thomasz··on The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X
Nah, that’s demonstratively wrong dogmatism. Obviously it’s not a good idea to take three times your national GDP in debt to build three oversized airports next to each other because your family owns your nations construction business. But letting education and infrastructure collapse and watch a whole generation grow old without any chance meaningful workforce participation and without a chance at having a family is pretty devastating too.
thomasz··on The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X
PPP is meant to account for things like a haircut in San Francisco creating way more economic output than a haircut in rural China, and therefore inflating the numbers. It doesn’t completely solve the problem of comparing the economic output of a 747 to the economic output of a haircut in rural China.

If you are used to the lifestyle of the western upper middle class and consume the associated products, the effects of the PPP adjustment will not be that meaningful to you. The same isn’t true for people who have to use most of their income to buy basic necessities like shelter, food, transportation and so forth.

thomasz··on The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X
Unfortunately, we are not allowed to print the world reserve currency like there is no tomorrow, and we do not possess the qualities of the US that make them the natural haven for capital in times of global turbulence.

That being said, the policy of austerity implemented during the Euro crisis was pretty catastrophic and arrested growth prospects for a whole generation.

thomasz··on The US economy and the EU were the same size in 2008, the US is now nearly 2X
Despite all its shortcomings, the USSR did pretty well in areas they really cared about, like tank production. And it’s very difficult to compare the value of a t80 with the value of a m1, especially when there was little trade between both blocks. The USSR sold energy to Western Europe in order to get dollars which were then used to buy grain from the US. And that was just about it.

Your problem isn’t with PPP but with the Soviet societal tendency to falsify reports on absolutely every level and with the inherent incomparability between planned and market economies.

thomasz··on I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
That’s not really what I meant. Ads rarely get through my Adblock anyways. No, the problem with the dead internet isn’t that powerful entities flooded it with artificially generated bullshit, the problem is that the hyper commercialization incentivized real, living people to behave like inauthentic robots, mindlessly maximizing everything they do to drive engagement metrics.
thomasz··on I am drowning in mutes: The current Threads experience
The hyper commercialization of the internet has turned people into spam bots. That’s why todays internet, with billions of users feels less populated than what we had in the early to mid 2000s.
thomasz··on Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
Mental illness is a huge risk factor for becoming homeless, which in turn will escalate any mental health issue to a massive degree. Better access to treatment and better safeguards against homelessness for the affected do actually help a lot. OTOH, migration of the affected towards areas with comparatively good services can create perverse incentives for other areas to just dump their homeless and mentally ill. And then feel smug about solving the problem for themselves.
thomasz··on That Time I Posted Myself Out Of a Job
Well, I’m sure OP got her job back as soon as it was revealed that the person she was accusing as a war criminal with blood on his hands was indeed an asshole.
thomasz··on libjpeg-turbo 3.0 has been released, and why there may never be a 3.1
I don’t think that there are companies out there making billions while relying on your brother in laws work without paying him a dime.
thomasz··on Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
More control, more data, better tracking.
thomasz··on Apollo will close down on June 30th
Reddit largely leeches anyways. I’m not exactly sure why (I suspect the sorting algorithm and the quick turnover of content), but its community is shockingly unproductive in terms of content creation. The only thing it does somewhat well is aggregation. So no, I don’t think they have much to fear in that regard.

They are risking the relationship to their army of unpaid cops though. These people are absolutely crucial for maintaining the gentrification of that space. Without them, all the hard work to slowly change the tone towards an ad-friendly and ideologically compliant tune is going to be lost. It is not unlikely, but by no means guaranteed that they can recruit another batch of people wohnst willing to do this for free after ruining the relationship with those who got invested during a time when the company was masquerading itself as a community.

thomasz··on Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens
It’s your job to tell them if the requirements cannot be met and that something’s gotta give. It’s his job to decide what, and it looks like he’s choosing latency When push comes to shove.
thomasz··on Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
First of all, let me tell you that scratch is a wonderful project. I have only one, but pretty important criticism: The tutorials that are packages with the installer use screenshots that are not translated and thus are pretty much worthless unless your kids speak English. I was pretty hyped on scratch, but this pretty much prevents self directed learning from happening.
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