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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2021

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  • Off topic. But I can’t help but rate the trash cans.

    • 1995: Excellent can. Obviously not that many pixels to work with but it is clear, legible and clean.
    • 1998: I mean its fine, but a bit of a downgrade. Why so much black? Especially that top rim that apparently was painted black. The shading on the arrows also just hurts legibility, why do 2D arrows have shading anyways?
    • 2000: Nope. The only good thing about it is that it is throwing away Windows. The shading is to simple arrows are strange colours and lacks a sense of depth.
    • 2001: I don’t love the theme but the execution is great. It looks clean shiny and bright. The only real weird thing is the bag inside, it is a bit strangely round despite seemingly not going over the edge.
    • 2006: This is a nice refinement of the last one. Cleaner look, skip the bag, more realistic trash. This is the second best executed after 1995.
    • 2015: This one is bland and lacks contrast and detail. The arrows are also oddly stubby for some reason. It’s not bad, but also not good.









  • with no changes to the salary they received during the production stage

    But this just isn’t how it works. These people aren’t paid minimum wage. This will definitely be played in salary negotiation as part of the compensation and will almost certainly result in less base salary.

    So now the studio is shifting some risk onto the workers.


  • I don’t know if I really buy “not doing much of the work”. Middle management maybe but to own and run a company is serious work. Especially starting a company is huge risk. So if you take the risk you get a lot of the reward.

    IMHO ways to help even this out are:

    1. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Keep that progressive tax curve going (and not regressing). I think these people do deserve to be rewarded, but up to a point. Honestly I think the tax rate should approach 100% as you approach the very highest percentile of income.
    2. Universal basic income. Make it so that people don’t need to work. They get to choose to work when the compensation is worth it to them. This makes explotation much harder and makes it much easier for people to negotiate fair compensation (whether that is salary, profit sharing, a mix or something else).

    I would also like to see some way to change the natural goal of a company from “make as much money as possible” to “bring as much value to people as possible”, but I think these two things would be a good start.


  • I would be a bit careful with this.

    1. It is incredibly hard to define each worker’s contribution to any particular profit.
    2. It means that the worker’s compensation depends on the overall success of the product which may have little to do with their work (for example bad management tanking a project or it getting cancelled before release).
    3. Accounting can move profits around in a lot of cases. Look at how every movie makes no money.

    In many ways having it be a transaction (work x hours get paid x dollars) is nice. I means that the employee knows exactly what they are getting upfront.


  • I think this is a little confused. Unless your WiFi is open someone seeing your network can’t find out what the WAN IP is.

    And getting your ip can connect the people directly to your box

    “Connect” is a strong word here. Yeah, they can send traffic at it. But that shouldn’t do anything.

    A trace route command to this IP could return intermediate equipment of your isp, helping to pinpoint your town or even your street.

    This is the most reasonable concern. Depending on your ISP and location the IP itself or packet tracing you can get a pretty good idea of the user’s location.


  • In China there is no such thing as a throwaway number (at least outside of black markets). All numbers require ID to acquire.

    For the US it would be a bit different. VOIP numbers do exist but they are often also blocked by services (this isn’t black and white but there are services that will quite accurately map numbers into ranges like home/cell/business/VoIP).

    But of course the assumption would be that if they start requiring phone numbers for WiFi access the logical next step would be to make all numbers traceable to humans.






  • While I agree, I think that getting more games on Linux is far more useful. When Linux is almost 3% very few studios will care much. If they can do a small bit of testing on Proton and maybe work around a bug or two they are far more likely to do that then make and test a native build. If this then gets Linux usage to 5, 10 or 20% that will drive more native builds.

    So I agree that it somewhat reduces the incentive to release a native build. But I think that is outweighed by the benefits of making the Linux gaming experience better today which will have a greater impact on availability of native builds in the future.