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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • I have had many mouses. Most of them broke the side buttons. The scroll wheel usually lasts as much as the side buttons. After that. The left/right main buttons fail.

    I have never had a mouse with a broken sensor though. I would look for solutions in the software (calibration and settings). But it’s not impossible that it’s broken.












  • Food delivery apps are not just apps though. In fact, the ones I’ve used are absolutely crap. Most of the value of these companies are in the service, which would change if there is a shared pool of government workers.

    If the complaint are the apps themselves, the government could enforce an API that allows anyone to interact with any app with any service. So if you prefer Uber eat’s service but glovoo’s app, you could order from Uber eats using the glovoo app. Just like the EU wants to enforce multi-app support for messaging systems.

    The claim that a shared pool of workers would be more efficient I’m not so sure. It depends on who runs that pool. Which history has shown that monopolies (government-run or otherwise) tend to get less efficient because of the lack of competition.

    If drivers can choose what order to take at any moment from any service that would basically mean a shared pool. But I believe (I never worked on delivery) that that’s what already happens.


  • The purpose of an economy is to decide what to output, given the unlimited human desires but limited resources.

    If there was a law which gave 100€ to every millionaire, we would be supporting millionaires? Isn’t that good? No it isn’t, just “supporting someone” isn’t good economic policy, it must support outputs that will most benefit the population.

    That’s why for it to be remotely viable it has to be self-sustained. Which means that they would not be able to operate further if there’s not enough demand or the competition from the private sector is more efficient.

    If you want to support delivery drivers you make laws regulating their job. If you want to support restaurants you give them subsidies or change the laws surrounding them.

    Capitalism is good at making efficient use of resources. However it has many failures. The purpose of governments is to fix those failures (for example the exploitation of workers, and monopolies).

    If you just make a government-backed company (that doesn’t need a profit to keep going) compete with private companies that need a profit, it must be because the service benefits the whole population. Examples: healthcare, education, communication, water.

    Not that not all necessary services need to be provided by profitless government corporations. For example, food and electricity is also needed by 100% of the population but they are also resource-intensive. Therefore they’re usually ran by private companies with heavy regulations/subsidies.






  • If it is tied to frame rate, then a set of inputs results in a predictable set of outputs.

    If not tied to frame rate, those same inputs have to be reproduced with the exact same time delay, which is almost impossible to do.

    Sure, sub-millisecond time differences might not always lead to a different output. But it might.

    Now, when is this determinism useful?

    TAS (tool assisted Speedrun). You can’t tell the game: on frame 83740 press the A button. Given a list of inputs with their exact frames will always lead to the same Speedrun.

    Testing. You can use methods just like TAS to test your game.

    Reproducing bugs. If you record the game state and inputs of a player before the game crashes, you can reproduce the bug, which means that it will be a lot easier to find the cause and fix it.

    Replays. Games like LoL, starcraft, clash of clans have a way to see replays of gameplay moments. If you save a video for each one of those, the storage costs will be prohibitively expensive. What they do instead is record every single action and save that. And when replaying, they run a simulation of the game with those recorded inputs. If the replaying is not deterministic, bugs may appear in the replay. For example if an attack that missed by one pixel in the game was inputted a millisecond earlier in the replay, it may hit instead. So it would not be a faithful replay. This is also why you can’t just “jump to minute 12 of the replay”, you can only run the simulation really fast until you get to minute 12.

    I’m not a game developer so I don’t know if it is used for testing or reproducing bugs or replays. But I know it is used in TAS.

    Of course, for this to be possible you also need your RNG function to be deterministic (in TAS). In the rest of scenarios you can just record what results the RNG gave and reproduce them.


  • Many of those are fixed costs. That means that if you use the car more, it becomes more worth it.

    Instead of making cars more expensive, we should make public transport cheaper. And it should also reach outside of cities.

    If you want to go outside of a city for whatever reason (maybe you even live outside a city!) the options for public transport are very few, very expensive, and very time consuming.