I agree. We are seeing the weaponization of the internet like nothing before. It's becoming more dangerous than nuclear weapons at this point. When people can't come to a consensus on basic reality and are primed to respond with hate and violence when their reality is challenged.

The world is moving quickly into a darker future.

Yeah.. and most people understand why nuclear weapons are dangerous. Meanwhile the internet silently takes over our attention span and values.

I always feel like Erlang and more generally BEAM is the language for a lot of today’s problems but will never see any kind of traction because of “worse is better”.

Hopefully Apple will go back to being a integrated hardware and software company.

It makes absolute sense to me for a future MacBook Pro to have a great AMD/Intel CPU and one of their high performance A13X chips with neural accelerators to accelerating specifics tasks to improve performance and battery life.

I'm thinking audio/video encoding in FCPX, neural AI assisted tracking, color matching, face detection, ProRes acceleration, H264/H265 acceleration.

Would make the price tag of a new MacBook pro much more palatable for FCPX/Logic X users anyway.

YouTubers already don’t make a lot of money off Adsense. The shift is already happening with companies working with individual youtubers. An integrated ad from someone you like/trust/have a relationship with is orders of magnitude more effective than a typical YouTube ad.

Expect to YouTube to try and get a piece of this pie as well when there is a “integrated” ads apocalypse when YouTube changes its terms of service.

It’s expensive to store, process, and deliver all this video.

YouTube has been making money off advertisement to kids for years. Now that is being regulated.

I'm shocked YouTube hasn't cloned Patreon for video creators. YouTube needs a tip jar if the content creators are resorting to Patreon, and that was back when the getting was good.

The channel membership thing is YouTube's Patreon clone. But I don't know how far they've rolled it out yet, and it doesn't seem as flexible or popular with creators as Patreon. And the fact that it is tied to Youtube, and thus the same channel shutdown etc mechanisms, will be a big minus for many.

Case in point, after writing this I looked into it a bit more and it does a bunch of things I thought it didn't. Waaay to hidden and unattractive UI IMHO.

> YouTubers already don’t make a lot of money off Adsense

As a YouTuber myself (not big), and with a few friends who have over 1M subs, and plenty in the 100k-500k range, I can tell you that's not true.

Referral/ discount codes seem a lot more effective at finding out if a specific advertisement is working and is paying off so advertisers can better purchase and configure ads. To some degree also the word sponsor has a lot better connotation than advertiser even though they are functionally almost the same thing.

Advertising to kids. Is there any good data on this? I've been wondering if it was truly an effective revenue stream beyond all the anecdotal evidence I hear quite often.

You're maybe right on the directional shift, but the adsense revenue is still an order of magnitude higher.

I layed of 7 employees (mandated closure of non-essential business) and we called them each individually over FaceTime to do it.

That's noble, but seven doesn't really scale to "hundreds" especially if you are wanting the news to break more or less uniformly across the group you are laying off.

Father was furloughed along with 900 others.

Every manager called every single worker personally to relay the news, for a general well-being check in, and to answer any questions about UI benefit filing. Each manager has also personally checked in once a week to see how things are going, and to provide updates, and said they will continue to do so for the next 5 weeks they plan to be closed.

... and that's a non-union, publicly traded company.

If a company only has one manager for "hundreds" of employees, this has to be very low on the scale of the ways the company is doing badly for its workers.

Maybe this virus will kill enough baby boomers to balance the social security solvency and transfer wealth up a few generations.

I’d you don’t agree with me, than what makes what I said any different than the Topic of this thread.

This event will be a good mine in refining and implementing models for pollution control and reduction.

Never have we had events as large as this to observe.

Google is easy to get rid of. It requires willpower.

1. Don’t use or get off gmail (fastmail is good but not free).

2. Limit your use of google search. If you need to try to mask your identity as best you can.

3. Don’t buy google hardware. Because you and your data are the product for google. The hardware is a Trojan horse.

Apple is better? it's either Android or Apple then, isn't it?

i guess he means -- either use an Android (google) phone, or use an Apple iOS phone. but is apple better than google in this sense (data collection)?

yes, my point is. i don't know if using apple products and getting into that ecosystem is much better than google's ecosystem

Consoles are now branded PCs with DRM lock-in. Makes way more sense to buy a PC.

I had a PS2, an Xbox 360 and now a PS4. Total hardware cost of playing the latest games with zero performance issues, hardware worries or upgrades in the last 20 years is around the price of a single gaming PC, which lasts what, 4-5 years tops?

It's just not the same market.

> the latest games with zero performance issues

I don't know what you're playing, but it's a joke to imply that games on consoles run without performance issues.

I was switching between gaming PC and console for the last 15 years and to be honest I had much more trouble with PC games. Just after I buy a PC everything runs very smoothly, but the performance declines very fast with new games. It's always an internal struggle between "I want it to look better" and "I cannot play on this framerate anymore". Console games for the most part run on the same level. It's not great, but in this case I'm grateful that someone took the choice from me. Obviously there are games that are just slower than the average, but everyone knows very fast about them. I would not buy a 3/10 game and I would not buy a game that has performance problems. With PC it's always a bit of a gambit.

I'll be honest and say that I don't play games that much anymore so any game I tried ran smoothly. Is QA failing or are Sony and Microsoft allowing shoddy games on their plaforms?

Anyway, just graphics cards, CPU upgrades, noise and ventilation... It's expensive and it's a mess for anyone except hardcore gamers and people who need a desktop PC that costs $2000 anyway.

For most folks a one time cost of $600 settles their gaming needs for years.

A Nvidia 2080Ti costs $1,199.99. A Xbox One X costs $499.

And this one of the main reasons why consoles will continue to thrive. Because not everyone can afford to drop 3k on a gaming PC. Or 2k. Or even 1k.

I like to play games on my couch, without having to hassle with settings or upgrades. I also like having a media center attached to my tv.

Yes, one can hook up a PC to a tv. No, that is not without hassle and upgrades. I want a box to play games and watch shows and movies.

Windows is indeed utterly overcomplicated and thus fragile for gaming use, indeed. I think the same applies to Linux distros, but there's ValveOS that has been an attempt to bring the console seamless experience to PC hardware. If only we'd have more game devs and Nvidia's attention on Linux.

> I want a box to play games and watch shows and movies.

The Nvidia Shield does exactly this. It has Android TV on it and can stream games either from your own PC or from Geforce Now.

I play fighting games and the PS4 versions are generally better than the PC ones. PC is usually a port made by another company (e.g., MK11, and Samsho is promising PC version since forever but nothing yet).

Plus, I don't get to worry about updating drivers, checking system requirements, disabling cortana or all that other stuff. I can just sit and play. Maybe I have to plug the pad on the USB port to recharge it.

You could have said the same about PS1 or N64 (with s/PCs/workstations/) spec-wise. But the market for fixed function consoles is separate from GP computers if you're not a hardware collector interested in specs only. Cf Palm Pilot vs Game Boy.

I still don't want to deal with maintaining a PC and managing Windows. Console are still way more convenient and so easy to own. You buy one and you are set for almost half a decade if not more. No need to constantly keep updating components, deal with drivers and software in general. I can just pick up the gamepad, press on button and dive right in.

I guess in that sense console ARE PCs, just very specialized ones meant to only play games and some other entertainment apps which to me still makes a lot of sense. I like that thing in my living room instead of a big box that needs constant attention on my desk.

Or even better, you don't deal with any hardware at all and buy into the Cloud gaming future :)

It's really sad that Stadia has flopped so far and that xCloud isn't any closer to being a thing. Nvidia's solution looks better, though still requires a Windows/Mac computer.

Maybe the Stadia announcement next week will have some interesting stuff, I'm excited to not have to worry about devices anymore and simply buy games I like.

I'm all in for it but it unfortunately is not ready yet. The day I'll be able to play multiplayer FPS games with <90ms ping running in the cloud, I'll ditch the console.

It's kind of true, just like buying a Mac these days is getting worse specs for more money and more lock-in than a buying a PC.

But some people just like the convenience of a simple, good-enough plug and play solution.

No it doesn't

> And games are seldom console exclusives anymore. When they are, they're not for long.

That may be true for the Xbox but certainly not for PS4 or Nintendo games.

Why expensive? seems like a Xbox One S is a few hundred bucks 299 I see on the site. The One X seems 100 more.

Could you buy or even build a comparable gaming PC for that much? Not really to up with all the hardware stuff... so curious. Guess you’d need to pick a case, motherboard and then find similar specs if comparing and compatible hardware combination.

Then I thought consoles were some what subsidized since they also get a cut of game sales. Plus targeting the same hardware sounds like a way to be consistent.

>Why expensive? seems like a Xbox One S is a few hundred bucks 299 I see on the site. The One X seems 100 more.

Do look up release prices. These consoles are old now.

And keep in mind they're not proper computers: They can only run a selection of programs, which are mostly games. Usefulness-wise, they aren't even comparable.

Yeah. I know a new one is out now but still selling the older models... but I kinda like Microsoft's approach. since even the original Xbox One can still run new releases from my understanding. Instead of each new console requiring all new games and OS.

This is a similar argument between say your own server farm and AWS. Consoles are guaranteed to work correctly and always have 100% compatibility. You don't tinker or deal with any headaches, you just play. For many people, that is worth the extra cost.

What’s the cost of just flinging it out into space towards the sun?

To throw some numbers at it:

The sun's escape velocity is about 42 km/s. Earth's orbital velocity is about 30km/s.

To go straight from Earth to the sun, you'd need to shed almost all that speed, meaning you'd need to accelerate by nearly 30km/s. To leave the solar system, you'd only need to accelerate by about 12km/s.

That said, as someone else pointed out, there's an interesting irony: Since objects closer to the sun orbit faster than ones that are far away, the cost to go to the sun is generally higher the closer you are. (The exception is if you're already more-or-less on a collision course.) So, if you've got the time, it's cheaper to go away first. You can think of it as sort of a way of using the sun's gravity to do most the work of slowing you down.

If we replace "toward the sun" with "away from earth", you'd have to get to a bit over 11km/s relative to earth. From geostationary orbit (3ish km/s), that's kind of expensive. Again with the counter-intuitive, it's actually cheaper to get away from Earth from low earth orbit, where you'd be starting from a speed of more like 7km/s.

This all starts feeling really intuitive after a couple hours of playing Kerbal Space Program. :)

That's kinda not how orbits work. First, to get to the sun, you have to escape Earth's gravity, which takes a lot of power. Once you've done so, the sun is actually one of the hardest places to go. It's easier to leave the solar system altogether than to drop into the sun.

Depends on how long you're willing to wait. In rough rounded numbers:

Earth's velocity around the sun is 30km/s.

To directly slow down enough to hit the sun, you need to remove 20km/s.

To leave the solar system you need an extra 10km/s.

But if you almost leave the solar system, and wait for the very peak of your orbit, then you'll be going so slowly that you can turn it into a pure dive into the center of the sun with almost zero thrust. So this plan needs slightly less thrust than escaping entirely. It will just take decades to centuries.

> hardest

The best way to end up as a sun meteor is to boost the orbit to Jupiter and let a flyby of Jupiter kill the remaining horizontal velocity.

The cost is, pun intended, astronomical.

We have launched satellites towards the sun, to visit Venus and such, but they take months to get there, and there is still a lot further to go if you want to get to the sun.

More than the 79kg of fuel it has on board.

A lot. The gravity well is deep and steep and wide. And satellites are placed as far down it as possible.

It's easier to make it chase Voyager.