Tanoc

The rot started with Flash in 2009. Then it hit Illustrator and Dreamweaver. By 2014 everything was an unstable mess. It coincided with their buyouts of a bunch of competitors including Day, Demdex, and Nitobi. They hit "big enough" size and stopped caring.

It can't be a city car because many U.S. cities have surface streets with speeds of 40MPH. It can't even get me to my nearby grocery store because the road the grocery store parking lot opens onto is 45MPH. Many U.S. cities were cut up between the 1950s and the 1970s to allow through traffic by relocating state route highways and interstate highways into the cities. This had the knock-on effect of raising the speed limits of surface streets that connected to or surrounded those highways. The only places you'd be able to drive this thing without being a nuisance, a traffic hazard, or a focus for police attention would be the tiny portions of the cities that existed before the 1950s and were left untouched in the decades since. That pretty much rules out the midwest, the west coast, and anything on the east coast south of Virginia.

The issue is both. They're inefficient in that they hire too many people to work on things people don't want. They collate all of their workforce and capital into projects that will perform poorly, rather than splitting that up between different projects that will individually vary but have a much healthier release and lifetime. The thing that people very high up in the organization lose a view on is that while there are operating costs to running multiple individual small projects, overall they balance themselves out because the risk isn't concentrated and each budget is an entity unto itself that doesn't affect the others. A supermassive failure like Concord however takes everyone's budgets and puts it into one giant project that has to succeed well beyond reasonable or even sustainable returns because now you have the costs of the core developers, the half dozen assistant studios, and the dozens to hundreds of asset producers on contract. And because of that you have to target as many demographics as possible, which for marketers means shaving off as many of the pieces that are necessary for complex mechanisms functioning within their niche but are incongruous with the other complex mechanisms that have been deemed as appealing. In other words, they're gambling their entire income on the equivalent of a spaceship boat plane car that can't land on water, can't re-enter the atmosphere, can't drive on the roads because it's too big, and is awful to fly because it's all of those other things.

There's been a plague recently of people taking videogame songs from classic games and rapping over them, putting them on Soundcloud or other services, and then automating the copyright process. So people who are playing through Donkey Kong Country or Dynamite Heddy are getting videos copyright claimed by someone who likely wasn't even born when the games came out and has no legal right to.

A problem in isolation this is not, however. Large portions of Windows now have this same bloat in terms of executable filesize, runtime needed for basic functions, and RAM usage. Windows Media Player by itself might not be an issue, but it's part of a trend that now affects Explorer, Desktop Window Manager, and a bunch of other core components to the operating system.

They don't "prefer" anything. They just take what's given to them because they don't know that there are other methods. Companies purposely keep them uninformed to reduce hassle when dealing with customers and to make them more likely to follow the route that the company prefers.

Kratos in God Of War Chains Of Olympus through to God Of War III (if we're speaking Chronologically) didn't enjoy conflict. He was originally a soldier fighting the Persians that was then cursed to be a representation of war. He had a family that Ares took them away, and so he willingly took on the curse in order to kill every god and free humanity from their helplessness under the gods. A huge thread of the sequel series is him realizing that the Pantheon were not the only gods, and that killing them all isn't as powerful as enabling humanity to defy them. And he sees his own son as the bridge that will link the humans to their own innate potential. Kratos has been entrenched in blood and warfare since he was a teenager, and has come to see conflict to be a result of those unwilling to separate their needs and wants.

Exactly. That's treating a symptom, which creates more and more extreme symptoms. After a while though it's far more costly and complex to keep treating the wide variety of symptoms than it ever would've been to treat the cause, but because so much infrastructure has been built around treating those symptoms it's too difficult to dedicate resources to treating the cause.

When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from the unreasonable responses, but you can sell protection against them as well. A large portion of the economy actually revolves around this as a consequence of the shift towards service rather than production.

It appears to be not so much about the datacenters themselves as it is limiting the growth capabilities for the LLMs. From their understanding fewer datacenters means more congestion which means less possibility LLMs can be shoved into more places where the public thinks they are intrusive. Which seems to be everywhere.

Dude I'm likely on so many lists already it doesn't even matter. Considering the government of my nation is currently levying new threats against the citizenry just about every day it's not even that much to talk about.

I'm just hoping that enough people can be convinced that systems of governance are not immune ethereal constructs run like videogame logic where you cannot do anything not explicitly written down. Too many people think that enforcement of anything works like a zap from God instead of being a mechanism that needs enforcers to pull it off.

Considering that Ferrari has been making very ugly cars since about 2004 thanks to their penchant for overexaggerating every single design feature, it's somewhat surprising that they managed to keep it up despite hiring an outsider. Even moreso that they somehow managed to do that by swinging in the complete opposite direction and simplifying everything as much as they could. The Roma and Amalfi show the design language they're currently using after abandoning the caricature that started with the F430, and yet they chose this instead.

Governments, regardless of what threat they wield against those they supposedly govern, are limited by the fact that they are organizations run by humans. For now. God forbid we ever reach the point where there are no humans... Anyways, because of that they require humans to ensure enforcement. A major reason why Yoti is able to do what it's doing is because there are no humans enforcing privacy and data protection laws against them. This means the reverse can also be true, where enough people motivated to do so can simply not enforce whatever requirement there is for Yoti's services to be used. Because the social contract's been not only breached but shredded and spread to the wind this is very likely to occur. In my viewpoint unfortunately the most likely reason is because they'll go with somebody else other than Yoti that provides more favourable terms, but that's an aside to the likely situation I outlined.

One of the dangers is in the ability to cross-nationally attack someone. As digital infrastructure continues to encompass more and more facets of necessary interactions with the government and governments force more and more points of interaction someone from a foreign nation could destroy the life of someone who is interfering with their aims. Say someone has published an article that reveals the terrible behaviour of a given company. Someone hired by the company can use a variety of data points to not only track down who that person is, but where they live and even which room in their house they spend the most time in. With that kind of information it would be easy to financially, reputationally, or mortally wound someone. With the worryingly swift growth rate of corruption this could apply at any level for any reason. And unlike for example the difficulty of getting into a car crash or robbing a cash register, digital infrastructure makes all of this remarkably easy and for some parts even free. With modern LLM agents it could be entirely automated so that no human is ever involved, and because there's so few current guardrails and such a vehement protestation against any being implemented the agent could wipe it's connection to it's handler so that nobody ever faces any consequences.

The thing is, this kind of stuff already happens all the time. The number of spam calls people suffer through are a direct result of companies digging through the contacts list after being granted that permission (though often without being granted that permission), then selling that data to brokers. Data breaches that wipe people's credit or force a credit freeze because they bought something ten years ago are another common one. Or think about package stalking, where people get access to someone's purchase history and the tracking number to a purchase so that they can steal it in transit or once it arrives. There's a number of beatings and murders that have happened because of police officers being able to access surveillance tools to track former romantic partners or spouses. All of these are different parts of the lack of privacy, and they're all getting worse because the tools that are used to surveil are becoming more widespread and more accessible.

Privacy is a protection against the intelligent attacks of other humans. It is not a frill that can be taken away without ridiculous and trailing harm.

I've been telling people for years now not to engage with systems such as these. Some say I'm just being paranoid. But a growing number concerningly reply with either "So? What are they gonna do with it?" or "They already have it, it doesn't matter." Normal people either don't know the dangers present or they don't understand that stopping the flow hurts the machine. And they want neither to know or understand. Apathy or the desire for convenience cannot adequately explain why.

Because in reality they don't actually bring in any revenue for the first few years thanks to all the subsidies and tax breaks they demand upfront before construction. At best it would be state and federal taxes used for operations that any operating business brings like federal payroll, but there wouldn't be any property taxes for at least five to ten years and the federal corporate income tax would likely be from the state the company is based in rather than the state the datacenter is based in. The municipality, be that the county or city the datacenter's in, gets screwed.

Meanwhile just to run a trucking depot you'd have the heavy vehicle tax, international fuel agreement tax, registration tax, sales taxes for the trucks and trailers, property taxes, and whatever incidental taxes required by the state you're operating in. The property tax, IFAT, and local payroll taxes meanwhile all go to the municipality and don't skip straight up to the state or national level. This is with no expectation of any of this being waived or delayed because the trucking industry doesn't have the surface visible financial performance of the industries municipalities are more lenient towards.

One could feasibly make their debate topic that the U.S. is not actually a functioning country but instead has morphed into an extensive financialization scheme, and they could win that debate.

Datacenters are financially a net negative for whichever municipality they end up in. They're operated mostly remotely with little staff and they have no tangible production, meaning any wealth they generate ends up vast distances away. Meanwhile the municipality ends up with increased costs because of the inefficiencies of bruteforcing computation, and because of the subsidies and tax breaks that the companies not only expect but demand for construction, there's no revenue being generated even for the local government.

That alone is enough of an argument against them.

As far as I know it's mostly rich hobbyists or people purchasing for decoration that buy Fenders just because of name recognition. Almost everyone else gets guitars from small custom shops because they're cheaper, better built, and you're not stuck with a single bridge style and two choices of pickups. That's if they don't just buy off the rack stuff from ESP or Ibanez, who have absolutely devoured Fender's market share in the under $2,000 category. Which incidentally is the largest consumer base. The only thing Fender sells consistently is the Telecaster and the Jaguar, both of which people prefer off the shelf versions of rather than getting from the custom shop because you can't really mess with the design of either without drastically altering the sound.

If you want an example of when this kind of lawsuit backfires and causes reputational loss like you say, look at Gibson. A few years ago they sued Music Man, First Act, Jackson, Dean, and a few others over the "flying V" design that came out in 1958 and had already been genericized by the early '80s. They won on trademark grounds against Dean and the resulting fear over the other open lawsuits caused a few Flying V and Explorer lookalikes to go out of production. Since then anyone who remembers the ordeal has warned people away from ever purchasing their guitars. Gibson were in terrible but improving condition in 2024 having just left bankruptcy in 2019 and the fallout from the lawsuit being revived last year has massively hurt their sales and left them right on the track to death again.

Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in the 1890s likely would've had education be entirely optional. He lived through the change from school being a privilege to being required and watched as it grew from six to eight to twelve years. The film itself is literally about the dichotomy between a post-agrarian tribe and nuclear age civilians and how less than a century separated most of the world from being one before they became the other. He wasn't reaching back to some pre-modern past, he was commenting on the rapid expansive changes he had seen during his own lifetime.

Almost nothing this scale can be built without subsidies because in the U.S. no company is willing to actually buy anything on their own. Wal-Mart forces local municipalities to pay for the buildings to be built through subsidies and taxation delays. Amazon does the same with their warehouses, distribution centers, and Whole Foods. NFL and NBA stadiums as well. Either the locals pay for the "privilege" of having their money vacuumed out of the area or these places don't get built. And as many city and county level politicians are very poorly versed in terms of macroeconomics they fail to understand that the addition of those two hundred jobs will cost the area two to three times as much as the employees will make because they can't collect taxes from an entity that is increasing wear on the roads, increasing load on the electrical and water infrastructure, and creating new external costs in the form of garbage disposal or light and noise pollution.

These datacenters are like that, but taken even further because they're attached to an industry used to ridiculous tax breaks or lack of taxation in the first place, constant investor capital, and continuous rapid growth. Software production and digital infrastructure have grown up in a wildly different environment from traditional retail and shipping logistics, but they're taking the most successful (and harmful) expansion tactics from retail and shipping.

Unless you can kill subsidies outright for anything connected to a national or international entity and provide enough specifics to prevent them from hiding behind shell companies then it's a losing battle to say "don't subsidize them." They'll either force you to pay for them or they'll move somewhere that will, and those with a poor understanding of the situation will complain for years that everyone lost out on a "big opportunity" by refusing to pay for their own predation. That complaining can echo into local politics for years afterwards and affect the outcome of various policies, either by denials out of spite or misplaced regret over the previous big project, or by politicians being voted out because of their opposition to a Wal-Mart or such being built via extensive subsidies and an agreement to collect no taxes for ten years.

With electrically actuated brakes the default power off state is fully engaged. Meaning if the power dies the brakes lock up. That causes it's own issues, obviously, but a sudden deceleration is better than no deceleration at most road speeds.

edit: as formerlyproven below states, the ones currently for sale also have a hydraulic backup.

Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more.

This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.

There is a difference between AWD and 4WD, because 4WD trucks are RWD until you manually change the mode. AWD is all on all the time and is FWD biased, usually something like 70:30 F:R. For most of their lives, even when towing, 4WD trucks are used as RWD only. As for specialized off-road vehicles that wasn't what we were talking about, but yes those people split hairs down to the micron for what constitutes what.

It's not just social media. At least once every two weeks I get FanDuel sending me garbage in the mail in the form of a giant closed envelope with their stupid purple branding all over it.

As I found out, they're so determined for it to reach you that they even plastic coat the envelope and the paper inside. Can't even get the minuscule joy of burning them.

The majority in that statistic are selectable 4WD, which isn't the same as AWD. Pushing the two groups together skews the numbers a bit. Most trucks since the 1970s have been 4WD, ever since companies like Muncie and Borg-Warner started selling axles to Ford and their cohorts. AWD trucks are a relatively new phenomenon, with the first one I can think of being the limited production GMC Syclone in 1989, and it being a truck was an emissions loophole. I think the 2005 Honda Ridgeline was the first real mass produced AWD truck, or perhaps the Subaru Baja from 2003 if you consider that a truck rather than an open deck car. Right now I think only the Ridgeline, Hyundai Santa Cruz, and Ford Maverick are sold as AWD, whereas every other truck is selectable 4WD.

Some cars are going with entirely electrically actuated brakes, either inboard on on-hub, compared to the E-Tron which uses traditional hydraulically actuated brakes. One uses an electric motor to wind something to tighten the spring clip by pulling it that then pushes the pads to the rotor and the other uses pressure to overcome the spring by pushing the spring to compress it and push the pads to the rotor. I'm guessing Audi didn't go with entirely electric brakes because they have a reputation for being harsh and difficult to modulate with the pedal, and Audi is supposed to be both a luxury and sport brand where pedal feel is important.

Exactly, they aren't good at creating new material. But many discussions in comment section are simply regurgitations of existing material, which they are good at rearranging. New novel discussions in places like this are actually a very rare thing, as many comment sections are simply people who already know informing those who don't. I'm doing that right now, funnily enough.

Texture resolution and shadow resolution do a lot to make a game look better. The big difference between the PlayStation 2 and 3 was the massive jump in texture resolution, shadow resolution and model polygon count. Play Gran Turismo 5 and go look at one of the cars imported from Gran Turismo 4 for a good example. However the PlayStation 2 was capable of some very high polygon count models, as evidenced by Lulu's cutscene model from Final Fantasy X that rivals most PlayStation 3 player models in detail. Those resolution upgrades, the number of objects and not just polygons displayable on screen, and the increase in distance required for low-poly LOD models all made that giant leap possible and very visible. Since then it's mostly been adding camera effects such as depth of field and ambient occlusion that are much less noticeable. Though for those with keen eyes, only in the current generation are there textures without noticeable anti-aliasing effects which came as a result of being able to split the UVs thanks to a higher resolution making small UV faces possible.

Look at Nissan. Their CVTs are known to have an effective life of about 60,000 miles. Anything beyond that is betting against the reaper. Because of the way the transmission is mated to the engine (in order to reduce the overall size) most times the cost to replace it costs more than the car is worth. Many times insurance will total a seven or eight year old Rogue or Altima if the CVT needs replaced. This is because Nissans depreciate in value so quickly, and it's somewhat of an ouroboros in that they depreciate in value so quickly because of the short lifetimes of the CVTs.

Meanwhile Mitsubishi has been suffering issues with their AWD systems failing, and because the Eclipse Cross and Outlander Sport are sold primarily as AWD that affects a majority of their sales.

Ford's had the issue with the dual-clutch automatics failing on the Focus, Fiesta, and Escape.

Dodge has... Well, really only the Durango currently that's reliable. The Charger PHEV is having all sorts off issues, from the battery packs overheating to random software glitches to the engine refusing to disengage from the electric portion of the drivetrain. The Hornet's been getting the shit kicked out of it by Kelley Blue Book and Consumer Reports because the transmissions are ripping themselves apart and the BCMs are bricking themselves.

Jeep's had issues with the Cherokee, Wrangler, Gladiator, and Compass because of the Pentastar engine nuking itself before 100,000 miles either by losing too much oil or the water jackets cracking. Meanwhile the differentials in the Wrangler and Gladiator have had problems that Stellantis denies.

Back before about... I'd say 2016? 2017? You had a lot less issues with new cars. Most issues were simple recalls like transmissions slipping out of gear or premature wear on the cams, not something that would entirely junk the car.