"App distribution costs" is laughable as an incentive. Any business that makes an app where you can and will spend dollars would gladly let you download it directly from their website in exchange for not giving up 30% of the in-app payments. App distribution costs nothing.
These apps are streaming massive amounts of data from epic's servers constantly. The incremental cost of downloading the actual app code is the tiniest of considerations. The app is a couple static files that would be served from a CDN. Now compare this minuscule cost to giving away 30% of their in app purchases. There is simply no comparison.
And it is also rarely if ever measured in petabytes. Commercially percentile based (in terms of speed) billing is the norm, but that only applies to businesses that act as downstream customers of ISPs
Apple has global IX presences and generally maintains open peering policies, which means it only costs a few bucks monthly to maintain any given PNI (e.g. 10Gbit), and they are also available on those open routing server ports. IX presence is dirt cheap.
As far as I am aware what gets downloaded from the app store is little more than the launcher, which then downloads the actual game files from epics server.
Why shouldn't Apple compete on pricing against others then? Drop the arbitrary %, charge for actual usage. If they're so good and cheap then everyone will stay with Apple distribution.
Allowing the filesystem to track creation time means you have to worry about how you move the data around and whether the tools you're using preserve it properly. A folder named 20250221-nyc-trip is a coarse but very durable way to store that.
This brings a meta quest 3s to its knees. It's almost so bad you can't quit it, and the video lags 15 seconds, which is very disorienting to be immersed in (it can make you fall down). Shame, since it looks gorgeous.
The Quest's Snapdragon GPU, like most mobile GPUs, uses a tiled rendering [1] architecture.
The basic technique for rendering gaussian splats is kryptonite for this architecture, essentially implementing every worse practice for rendering on a mobile GPU:
* Tons of overdraw (overlapping splats)
* Tons of alpha blending
* Millions of splats in the distance generate a lot of tiny triangles resolving to a single pixel
* Long thin splats in the foreground generate triangles that cover multiple tiles
These are all the ingredients you need to bring a mobile GPU to its knees! Any desktop GPU (including most laptops) will be far less sensitive to these issues, even if it's not very powerful. It's a fundamental issue of architecture rather than one of raw FLOPs.
The quest is underpowered (it's basically a midrange Android phone you wear.) More efficient coding or a simpler model would help. Inside the Scaniverse does something similar with a high framerate but the models are simple and don't look very good.
I had to power cycle mine to get out, but boy was the view great despite the motion sickness.
For the record, I'm not affiliated with Subvert and in reading the docs I find their arguments about the "problem" with Bandcamp extremely weak/hypothetical and stated over and over again without any evidence. I am skeptical that they understand the economics of running a music retail site and think they might find that the cut Bandcamp takes is actually pretty fair for the value bands get. And I also don't really get how they plan to make this "collective ownership" actually work for real, but I also got really exhausted reading the doc and gave up, so maybe it's buried in there. The real reason I posted it here was hoping the HN hive mind would dissect and critique the actual plan for me. :)
The problem with Bandcamp is neither hypothetical or weak. The problem is that its been sold twice, and is now owned by a company who attempted to fire anyone who tried to unionise, which is a red flag. Will bandcamp be sold again? Yes, very very likely. So that is exactly the problem.
First of all, "attempted to fire anyone who tried to unionise" is entirely made up. They laid off fully half the company; it wasn't targeted at all. Second, the "very likely" part about it being sold is hypothetical, and the follow-on effect of that being bad for artists is doubly hypothetical. As of right now, the service is exactly as it was back when it was "the anti-spotify" that everyone was in love with. It was owned by someone trying to make money before and it's owned by someone trying to make money now. If this is the dread enshittification, please enshittify all over me. Or admit that this isn't enshittification, it's just a fear of what might happen.
To add to this: one of the basic arguments about enshittification is that it happens as a result of services starting out by operating at a loss, which leads them to eventually need to shift the value proposition towards actually making the platform sustainable. Bandcamp built their service sustainably, achieving profitability back in 2012, so there is a lot less incentive to enshittify, which is borne out by the fact that the overall value prop hasn't changed in all that time.
What I don't understand is the attitude that tariffs will not increase prices to end consumers by approximately the amount of the tariff. Trump is pretending he thinks "tariffs" equals "other countries giving us money", but obviously the money is actually going to be coming out of the pockets of American consumers. I don't have a high opinion of Trump but I also can't believe he's that stupid. What's the "pro" argument here?
Edit: I also note that the tariff levels he's talking about are absolutely beyond sanity. I saw an interview where he said "100%, 200%, even 2000%" when throwing out numbers for EV tariffs on China. I have to assume this is hyperbolic but he's talking about it as if he's serious. The only ways I can see supporting these wild numbers are either 1) assuming he's joking, or 2) being truly financially illiterate.
It feels rather like Brexit. Economists: “If you do this, the obvious things will happen.” Brexiteers: “Project fear! Sunlit uplands!” [… the obvious things happen] Brexiteers: “How could Europe do this to us?!”
If he gets in and actually brings in these tariffs (there’s a non-zero chance he’s just talking about it to appeal to idiots), then he will blame everyone but himself when the obvious happens, and the idiots will believe it. So there will be no _personal_ consequences to him, therefore it is fine.
I think the "pro" argument is that, if you make imports too expensive, we will have to revert to domestic manufacturing. Even if that leads to higher prices, it also leads to more domestic jobs and more domestic companies. That might be a net win, even with the higher prices.
The "con" reply to the "pro" argument is that, even if that's all true, the prices still go up, and that's probably a losing political argument if people actually understood what it was going to mean.
No, he really is that stupid. See the recent interview with Bloomberg's editor, who actually pushed him on the idea of tariffs, and he just threw a tantrum rather than admit he didn't actually understand how tariffs work.
There is no end game other than trump knows the people who support him don't understand how tariffs work, so they believe that he is supporting an America first policy.
yes, baby boomers lived well, but that was a different world and a different economy. and that analogy fits really well because i think that's where trumps appeal lies, "let's get back to how the boomer generation lived (Make America Great Again)" but the reality of the present is that the nation and the world have moved on from there. to go back would require a feat of economics that i'm not sure is survivable.
i dont believe it’s a deliberate stance. I think there’s a human tendency to do the best you can in the moment that you have, and then reflect on that with some fondness.
And before labor unions were suppressed ... and before executives started consuming almost all the increases in productivity ... and before the education system produced a mindless generation that can't think for themselves.
In other words, the Boomers lived well until the Boomers screwed it all up. Now they're whining about the mess they made for the rest of us to deal with.
> During his current campaign, the GOP candidate and 45th president has promised to impose massive tariffs of 10 to 20% on goods from all countries plus a special 60% rate for those from China
If you work for one of the many, many American companies that makes stuff solely from inputs from America, which themselves are American all the way down, then sure, might be good (provided you only buy American stuff). If you work for an American company which needs to buy stuff (surely there are very few of those), then, well, not so great.
And tariffs tend to breed retaliatory tariffs.
Realistically the only way heavy protectionism can work (for some value of ‘work’; the quality of goods in such countries tends to be very low due to lack of competition) is if you’re verging on an autarky. This is, well, something that is generally imposed on countries, not something that they opt for themselves because it sounds nice.
"Numerous economic analyses have shown that these measures raise domestic steel prices and harm steel-consuming U.S. manufacturers, including by disadvantaging them against foreign competitors with access to lower-cost (less-tariffed) steel inputs."
I suppose there's something to the argument that steel is a security priority and protecting it is worth some cost, but there is definitely a cost.
I'm not an economist but I think that's true if there is enough domestic competition for foreign products. If a majority of things the average consumer in the US buys are foreign made then the tariffs would hurt more than help, at least that's what makes sense to me.
According to Trump, "... the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff".
His second most beautiful word must be "stupid" --- because it describes his followers who obviously don't understand that "tariff" is really a tax on them.
>The only ways I can see supporting these wild numbers are either 1) assuming he's joking, or 2) being truly financially illiterate.
He's a master at getting publicity by saying outrageous stuff. Which then gets mostly forgotten about. Remember 'build that wall'? I'm not sure you'd call it a joke but it got lots of publicity and didn't happen. This is probably similar.
"I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that."
Ie. he asked if there was something that could be injected that would kill the virus.
I'm not a Trump fan but many people on the left seem to think saying he said stupid stuff he didn't say is a sure fire way to stop him being elected but you know people see through it.
the "pro" argument is that it reinforces him as the most patriotic leader available, primarily with nationalists. i agree with you that he's not that stupid, but i believe that he's counting on his audience to either be that economically illiterate, or to be so rabidly supportive of him that they'll go along with it.
to wit, a few conversations with some red hats that i've had:
"tariffs will put america first and make us be more dependent on american-made goods and services"
"but, at least in the near-term, tariffs will also create shortages AND further price increases, which is a major sticking point for you with 'bidenomics'"
"no they wont"
"i'm happy to see that trump is putting america first and seeking to level the economic playing field with other nations. globalization has been a setback"
... (establish that they're talking about tariffs)
"until the us can get up to speed with the raw materials and manufacturing of things that we've traditionally imported from these companies, there will likely be shortages and price increases"
"that is a small price to pay. sometimes you have to make sacrifices to do what is right."
i'll reserve judgment on these conversations outside of the assessment that trump is hoping that the majority of his supporters fall into a category such as one of the two above.
Yes, this is a great leap forward in my opinion. I had to do a project at a previous job where I wrote an agent that ran on x86, MIPS and ARM, and doing it in Go was a no-brainer. The other teams who had a bunch of C code that was a nightmare to cross-compile were so jealous they eventually moved a lot of things to Go.
I've been doing this for 35 years and cross compiling anything nontrivial was always a toolchain nightmare. Discovering a world where all I had to do was set GOARCH=mips64 (and possibly GOOS=darwin if I wanted mac binaries) before invoking the compiler is so magical I was extremely skeptical when I first read about it.
It's still pretty slow, but overall correct. There's tricks, like reader connections and a single writer connection to reduce contention. There was a blog post on here detailing some speedups in general.
A fair enough assessment, it be that way, however I will note that a large reason that C exists in the first place was to have a machine independent language to write programs in.
> however I will note that a large reason that C exists in the first place was to have a machine independent language to write programs in.
That's fair, but what we call a monstrosity by modern standards is much simpler than porting the assembly
There were cross plaform languages before C, but they never really took off for system development the wat C did (OSs, for example were commonly written in pure assembly)
A side effect of C not having a price tag associated with it, anyone with UNIX source tapes got a C compiler for free, until commercial UNIX became a thing, and splitted into user/developer SKUs, and thus GCC largely ignored until then became a thing worth supporting.
mips64!? That's a blast from the past. It must be some kind of legacy hw that's getting current software updates in some kind of really niche use case. Or academia. :)
Like previous you, I have to admit I'm skeptical but would be happy to be wrong.
> mips64 .. must be some kind of legacy hw that's getting current software updates
Hundreds of thousands of linux-based smartnic cards, actually. Fun stuff. Those particular ones were EOLd and have been replaced with ARM but the MIPS based ones will live on in the datacenters until they die, I'm sure.
> Like previous you, I have to admit I'm skeptical but would be happy to be wrong
Seriously, you are going to be delighted to be wrong. On your linux machine, go write a go program and write "GOOS=darwin GOARCH=arm64 go build ..." and you will have yourself an ARM mac binary. Or for going the other way, use GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64. It really is that simple.
Ah I found this https://ctrl-c.us/posts/test-goarch I guess it's qemu-user-binfmt registering the alternate bin formats to automatically run under QEMU, that's pretty neat
The Go build system runs under your current architecture, cross-compiling tests to your target architecture.
Then, the Go test runner also runs under your current architecture, orchestrating running your cross compiled test binaries.
Since you registered to run cross-compiled binaries under QEMU, those test binaries magically run through QEMU.
The Go test runner collects test results, and reports back to you.
The first run might be slowish, as the Go compiler needs to cross compile the standard library and all your dependencies to your target platform. But once that's done and cached, and if your tests are fast, the edit-test cycle becomes pretty quick.
"EdgeOS" is based on Linux, and people run vanilla Linux distributions on those boxes, as well as OpenBSD and NetBSD.
I wonder how long Marvell will continue selling those Octeon MIPS64 chips, though. Marvell (then Cavium) switched to ARM nearly a decade ago (2016) for newer chips in the Octeon series. I think Loongson sells more modern MIPS64 (or at least MIPS64-like) chips, but they don't seem to be commercially available outside China.
