• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • Depends on viewing conditions. As of yet there isn’t an objectively superior display technology.

    OLEDs have the best contrast in a dark room as black pixels can be fully turned off, but they are generally less bright and use more power than comparable LCD TVs or monitors (especially when you compare models of a similar price range).

    LCD based monitors and TVs can get brighter and can actually achieve a higher contrast in a well lit room as the black pixels on an LCD are less reflective than black pixels on an OLED, and when viewing in daylight the ambient light is more than enough to drown out the backlight bleed.

    There are also other smaller pros and cons. OLED for example has a better pixel response time, while IPS LCDs are more colour accurate. Text rendering and other fine graphics also generally look slightly sharper on an LCD than on an OLED display (when comparing displays of equal resolution / pixel density) due to the subpixel layout.




  • Most electric cars are pretty much computers on wheels, and voltages, currents and temperature are constantly monitored. It totally should be possible to log battery health and diagnostic information and generate a battery health report for when the vehicle is sold. But standards would need to be put in place for that to force manufacturers to implement it and to make sure the results are actually meaningful.

    Unfortunately Tesla’s specifically really don’t feel like they’re designed to last when looking at their materials choices and build quality (either that or my manager just bought a particularly bad sample, I have to admit it’s the only Tesla I ever been inside of) so I don’t think having a good reseller experience or longevity is really a part of their business model.


  • Where I live tips are optional and given as a thanks for good service, and often calculated by rounding up the bill to a whole number instead of calculating a percentage.

    Waiters still make a liveable wage without them here, though it can still happen that on a good night they get more from tips than from their wage.

    I have a family member who works as a waiter, and there they collect the tips together and share them equally amongst the staff working in the restaurant at the end of the shift. So in this restaurant, the cooks do benefit from it as well. Though there is no legal framework for this so not even restaurant does this.


  • The battery is still a big problem when selling on the used market because there’s not really a way to see how much it has been abused, and it’s also not really feasible to replace. If the previous owner abused their battery by constantly fast charging, and always charging it to 100% and driving till the battery is completely empty, then the battery can decrease much faster.

    My manager has recently bought a used Tesla model 3, and the battery had been abused so much that he only has about 150km of actual range on a full battery. With the advertised range being close to 500km and the car being only 5 years old that seems to be a lot more than 2% per year. Even if you assume that the effective range when new was only half of the advertised range, then that battery has lost nearly 40% of its capacity in 5 years.


  • The main reasons why it’s Doom specifically are also because:

    • The game is open-source: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr This makes it much more doable to port it to other platforms (and to strip out anything not absolutely required to get the first level to run when you run into technological limitations) than when you have to rely on unofficial modding tools.

    • It’s nearly 30 years old and designed for computers with only a few megabytes of memory and for processors of well under 100MHz, which are specs which the majority of modern systems have, even embedded systems. It also renders fully on the CPU and doesn’t require specific hardware like a GPU or a specific graphics chip.

    • Being a first person shooter with 3D-ish visuals it looks a lot more impressive than if you show off a simple game like Pong orTetris or something like that. It has the right balance between performance requirements and impressiveness, and it’s also a game that was very popular in its time and it’s instantly recognisable to a lot of people.


  • It’ll include sources if the sentence structure suggests they should be there, but they’ll also just be built by probabilistic insertion of words.

    I’ve seen attempts of people trying to train a LLM on information with sources. The end result was a model that would still hallucinate false information, and follow it up with a convincing looking source that doesn’t actually exist or a link that just leads to a 404 page. The way current LLMs work makes it impossible for them to mention accurate sources by default as they don’t remember full sentences or even any actual information, but just pick up some underlying patterns.

    Currently the best you can do is letting a LLM come up with search engine queries to find relevant and up to date information for a certain question, and then making it formulate an answer based on what it found and including links to the page(s) it used. The main problem here is that LLMs are not great yet at verifying if a source is accurate, and most people will just take anything that mentions a source as a hard fact without even looking at what the source is.


  • There are several those keys can be obtained, and most of them don’t involve fraud:

    • Purchasing keys in a region where they’re cheaper, and reselling them in regions where the game is more expensive

    • Purchasing keys during a sale, and reselling them after the sale

    • Claiming keys from giveaways and selling those when the giveaway is over

    • Buying a bundle (such as Humble Bundle) and selling the keys you aren’t interested in or you already have

    • Buying games with stolen credit card and reselling those keys

    Only the last one is illegal and costs the developers money. Digital storefronts have made it harder to obtain raw, transferrable keys and have introduced region locks to try to combat those top 3 methods, but they all were very common in the past.

    Key resellers like G2A are pretty much just an eBay for keys. It’s not an illegal organisation, they just provide platforms on which people can sell their game keys, but they don’t know (and probably don’t care) how those keys are actually obtained. The majority of keys on those platforms are actually legit (iirc by far the biggest category is games purchased out of region).

    HOWEVER,

    The legally obtained keys sold on the platform are all obtained in such a way that the developers get little to no money from it, so chargeback fees from a few fraudulent purchases easily outweighs the small amount of money they get from the legit keys there. So even though the majority of keys sold on such platforms are not illegal, the few illegal keys that do exist are enough to make the developers still lose money on average with keys sold there.