• 2 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • Without any crime to suspect you of, they might detain you and question you. It’s not uncommon for people to turn themselves in for crimes, and there are legitimate reasons to do so especially with a lawyer, namely to get out on bail easier, avoid having the police raid your home or place of work, and perhaps used to sway the prosecution for a more favorable sentencing, but if the police have no clue what to even charge you for and they can’t figure one out, they’ll just be confused and frustrated, which is a dangerous combination for police


  • Western doctrine is also largely based on the US’ needs. Artillery just isn’t practical for the US, who needs to be prepared to fight all over the world oceans away from home. Artillery is much more stationary compared to air power due to the size of the guns and the difficulty moving them, while the US can easily fly planes anywhere we need them. As such, Western doctrine became heavily reliant on having air supremacy and massive amounts of air support and our equipment was designed for that battlefield. Ukraine just doesn’t have nearly the same arial capabilities as NATO, relying much more on artillery which NATO weapons and doctrine weren’t designed around, and they’re having to figure out how to make them work without air power






  • Reddit’s decision about 3rd party apps and API changes actually made business sense. Not only was their content being pilfered on Reddit’s expense, but a decent portion of their user base were using 3rd party apps that didn’t collect as much data nor serve Reddit ads like the official app. At the expense of losing a decent portion of their community, moderators, and any goodwill their userbase had towards them, Reddit now has all their mobile users on a single, add ridden app that they own and can collect as much data as they want going forward as well as ensures that they get paid for AI API usage



  • Countries have the right to expel foreign diplomats and embassies as long as they don’t arrest them or go through their stuff when they leave. The newly couped Niger junta requested the French ambassador leave and revoked his visa, but the French are still refusing to leave, claiming that because they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the new junta, they don’t have to follow the junta’s orders to leave. Regardless of your opinion of the new junta, in how does a former colonial power be in the right when they are blatantly ignoring the legal rights and sovereignty of their independent former colony’s government that is doing things by the book? They stopped sending the ambassador food and are confining him to his embassy until he leaves, especially given the current junta that is extremely gentle treatment


  • Unironically this is the one area where Epic Games is absolutely in the right. They have a 12% royalty on games sold on their platform and a 5% royalty on sales over $1 million for games made with Unreal Engine, with the UE royalty being waived entirely if it’s sold on the Epic Games store. They get a reasonable cut for maintaining one of the most powerful game engines and charge nearly a third of what Valve does for their storefront. If the Epic Store wasn’t so dog shit, they’d be an actual competitor to Valve


  • I’m honestly surprised Valve hasn’t made an open source de-Valved SteamOS similar to what Google does with Chromium for these other devices. Valve likely isn’t making much from hardware sales alone, with most of the value for them coming from the Steam store being a mobile gaming storefront as well as moving users away from Windows where Microsoft is looking to compete with them. Getting competitors to run Linux distros with a user interface designed for mobile consoles would boost the amount of Linux gamers which would make Valve less dependent on their competitor Microsoft, make developers more keen to support Linux, and spurn further development for Linux gaming tools. These other manufacturers will without a doubt support Steam as a storefront since Steam is such a dominant force in the PC gaming market so users of these other devices would still be in Valve’s ecosystem