AnyOldName3

The vast majority of NATO that isn’t the US is covered by the EU’s Mutual Defence Clause, so this kind of already exists. It sucks for the NATO members that aren’t in the EU, though, e.g. Greenland.

Much more straightforward in British English where d and t are more distinct

I’m glad to see someone’s made this because it’s been bouncing around in my head for ages but I’ve never got around to putting it together and letting it out.

Some of the charity is self-serving, e.g. eradicating diseases means he’s less likely to catch them (and really any billionaire not funnelling funds to pandemic prevention etc. is being moronic), and founding charter schools on land he owns so over the life of the school they pay more in rent for the lease than they cost to build is just a tax dodge. Most billionaires are just so evil that they won’t spend money on themselves if other people who aren’t paying also benefit, so in comparison, Gates’ better ability to judge what’s in his interests makes him look good.

It’s nitpicking and also not quite right. Stock of a corportation is shares, whether or not they’re publicly traded. It becomes plural when it’s shares of multiple corporation.

However, LLCs aren’t corporations at all (the C is Company), and in the US, stock is specifically of corporations. I’m in the UK, where the equivalent to an LLC’s shares are still considered stock, and I’ve been googling whether private corporations have stock in the US, which they do, so the confusion’s been that the public/private distinction isn’t the important one and I’ve been arguing the definition of a word that’s defined differently in the relevant country.

As I said, he also owns a billion dollars worth of superyatchts for personal use in addition to the one(s) nominally for marine research.

The billion dollars in superyatchts is just the personally-owned luxury kind that billionaries like to hoard, not marine research boats that he has funded. Him giving away some of his money doesn’t mean that he’s not also frivilously spent more money than most people could hope to see in a lifetime.

Fundamentally, I don’t think we’re going to agree here, as I fundamentally believe that there’s an amount of money beyond which there are no ethical grounds for keeping it, and it’s much lower than $11 billion. Newell has kept money above that threshold instead of giving everything he made beyond that threshold away (even illiquid stuff like part of his stake in Valve could, in principle, be given to a charity so the profit from Steam went straight into the charity), and I and plenty of other people would see that as greedy. Others might say that the fact that he’s given anything away that he wasn’t legally required to means that he’s not greedy. These are subjective ethical opinions, so even though they can’t be reconciled, it’s not a big deal. Different people think different things are wrong.

The reason I’ve been replying at all is that some of the things you’ve stated to be facts are untrue, not that I’m trying to convince you that all billionaires are unethical.

Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.

Realising that ratfucking your customers and suppliers at every opportunity makes them less willing to do business with you in the future, and therefore you’ll potentially make more money by not doing that, so then not doing that, is exactly what a greedy person would do if they weren’t also a moron. Gabe Newell is certainly not a moron. Lots of other billionaires are, or have other empathy-limiting conditions that mean they don’t realise people won’t want to do repeat business with them if they got screwed over the last time.

There’s obviously a majority of billionaires that are much less ethical than Newell, but one superyatcht ought to be enough for anyone, and anyone buying a second one instead of putting the money directly to good causes is not benevolent.

It doesn’t have publicly-traded shares because it’s a private company, but it’s still correct to say someone has stock in a private company corporation (which isn’t relevant as Valve is unincorporated) that they own part or all of. Like with physical objects, they don’t stop existing just because they’re not for sale to the public. It’s an easy mistake to make, though, as the vast majority of the time people talk about stocks and shares it’s in the context of buying and selling publicly-traded stock.

A man who owns a billion dollars worth of megayatchts is not doing everything he can to ethically spend/donate his wealth. Yes, lots of his wealth is tied up in Valve stock and he can’t sell that without losing voting rights and making Valve stop being what it is, but he’s rolling in other assets and cash, too

It’s its default use case - adding MBA idiocy to things that were already fine and didn’t need changing.

Most FPS games have holding shift bound to sprinting, which makes movement much louder.

When AMD’s biggest market was Litecoin (and derivatives like Dogecoin) mining and Nvidia’s hardware was pants at mining, they initially couldn’t increase production of the HD 7000 series quickly enough, so the initial glut of money went to scalpers. They responded by making huge volumes for the Rx 200 series, but shortly after it launched, Litecoin mining ASICs became available and GPU mining stopped being viable. That meant that:

• they’d spent lots of money manufacturing lots of GPUs.
• miners were selling used GPUs for a fraction of the retail cost while those cards were still the current generation.
• people didn’t want to buy a new card for several times the price of the same card but used for a few months.
• retailers had to drop prices to keep selling new cards.
• wholesale prices had to drop to keep retailers stocking new cards.
• AMD weren’t making any profit when they sold these cards.
• the RX 300 cards weren’t compelling compared to a massively discounted RX 200 card, so they didn’t sell in huge quantities or with good margins, either.

This wasn’t the only time ATi/AMD took a calculated risk and it backfired horribly, so with their history of bad luck, chasing the AI bubble in any way that involves risk instead of just selling things for money might be a bad idea.

Instead of git history, you get a git fairy tale. Practically, the merge conflicts and their resolutions get spread across one or more commits on the branch that was rebased, and the history makes it look like all the work was done after the upstream commit(s) that there was a conflict with. This can be much tidier, but also loses the context of changes. E.g. you can no longer see that something is done differently to everywhere else that does the same thing not because it needs to do it differently, but because it copied and pasted something from ten lines above and the thing ten lines above received a bug fix on another branch which the feature branch was rebased onto. Based on my experience working on large projects that used both approaches, I’d rather scroll past extra commits and squiggly branch lines than try to reconstruct what someone was thinking when they made a mistake without access to the original commit they made the mistake in. If I had to allow history-rewriting operations in git, the one I’d pick would be rewriting the history of Earth so that when history rewriting operations were implemented in git, they defaulted to adding some metadata to the rewritten commits making the operations reversible so I could decide I wanted the real history back.

In this case, the product was free to OSS developers not because they were the product, but because they’re influencers likely to end up encouraging their users and/or employers to buy the paid version, so it was the marketing that those people could do that was the product.

This change with the data harvesting makes those developers the product, though.

Technically it’s even a ToS violation to install extensions from the VS Code marketplace (or whatever it’s called) if you’re using VS Codium. Many are also available somewhere else like the code forge where they’re developed and are under open source or free software licenses, but quite a few important ones are only available through the one distribution channel you’re not allowed to use, and contain proprietary components that can’t be forked to lift this restriction.

Oops. I’d somehow missed that there was now a third kind of JPEG.

Then they’re an instance admin, not a mod, and you probably didn’t want to be on their instance anyway. Unlike an admin ban on Reddit, it doesn’t stop you using Lemmy/mbin/Piefed as there are other instances.

The compression technique it used was patented, and the licence fee was extortionate. By the time the patent expired, other, royalty-free, techniques were available that outperformed it.

Many of the claims of improved efficiency over natural meat are based on projections and rely on technology that doesn’t exist yet, or they just ignore things like heating (most of the calories mammals eat go to keeping them warm, but incubators for lab meat need heating electrically, so if you leave out the electricity cost, it gives lab meat an unfair advantage.

It might be more efficient eventually - there’s more wiggle room to change things with a machine, but a cow is a cow - but it isn’t yet.