𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

Sending a simple transaction like this costs a couple cents though, which they could in theory bill to the developer as well. Setting the threshold at 100 is probably more to accrue additional interest on Steams bank accounts.

Mostly the whole exploitation part, which often goes too far and can be very humiliating or outright dangerous for participants. Some scrapped videos supposedly amounted to torture. Then there’s the rigged giveaways and the fact that the dude just unnerves a lot of people because he, as this post demonstrates, doesn’t smile with his eyes.

There were also allegations that one of his colleagues was a sex offender but as far as I know everyone including the purported victim ended up denying it, so I don’t know how much people care about that still.

The building you just linked was built by a cooperative association as well, many of whom now live in that building.

Starlink doesn’t cover the globe, it’s available in the Americas, Europe and Oceania. It’s not available in most of Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Russia, Indochina. E.g. the majority of the world cannot access Starlink.

I don’t give a shit that Starlink is owned by Musk. Starlink as a company seems fine (it’s not X or anything), but I strongly dislike that their product messes with astronomy in such a major way that astronomists complain about it every chance they get.

You know that some of us are 10miles from town and considered rural? And the big Telecoms refuse to run broadband for us?

Sounds like your fight is with “big telecom” and with your local government for not putting up a good enough quote to run fiber. This isn’t an issue for large portions of the world, including rural areas, where they’ve figured out how to get them to lay fiber.

Internet access for a long time has been pushed as a priority and should be treated as a utility and that everyone should have access to it.

Access is not the same as high-speed access. Almost all of the world has some level of access, even in rural areas, through sattelites that are not in LEO. Enough to (slowly) browse, not enough to stream in HD. I don’t believe sacrificing considerable astronomical discoveries and progress is remotely worth it when feasible alternatives are available and have been used in large areas of the world already.

You realise that this has held true for literally everywhere, and that it’s only a matter of time until they’re connected too? Between 2017 and 2023 an additional 20% of the world received internet access, a trend that doesn’t appear to be slowing down just yet. By 2030 approximately 80% of the world will have internet access, and somewhere between 2040-2050 we’ll consider the entire world to be connected.

I still see absolutely no reason to screw LEO and fill it with sattelites, just so that someone in bumfuck nowhere can Netflix or something. Internet access may be important for a western lifestyle, but the 90s barely anyone had internet and they lived perfectly fine without it. Even before Starlink sattelite internet existed (and still does), it’s just slower.

Most developing countries have pretty decent internet access already. Maybe not in the more remote areas, but again, access to the internet is not a requirement to live. Internet has barely existed for 30 years, I don’t think screwing up LEO in an attempt to bring faster internet to people who didn’t have it anyway is remotely reasonable.

Not living in an expensive city doesn’t equate to living in extremely remote areas. If you choose to live in an area with very few services, then don’t expect the rest of the world to bend over backwards to provide those for you at their expense. The sheer entitlement is hilarious.

Besides, there’s still internet, just not fast broadband.

Ehrm, no to both questions? You live in rural fucking Canada. Connectivity will be shit, that’s a given. If you choose a job that relies on that, you should move to where you can actually work.

Fast internet is a privilege, not something people “deserve”. Fucking up LEO so people can stream or Netflix or whatever is absolutely not worth it, and imo the practice should be banned. Starlink has been disastrous for astronomy already. Put fiber in if it’s so important, expensive but hey, people “deserve” it right?

Someone already figured out how to “unlock” the full thing.

Larian are now the proud owners of the “Daddy Halsin” mod. Truly an asset to their IP!

Android can be degoogled, e.g. GrapheneOS. If you’re focused on privacy then that’s the way to go.

Although Google is worse than Apple when it comes to privacy, Apple is still pretty bad.

697? Geez that’s… Not great.

Sure, but even Epic exclusives aren’t any cheaper than the games on Steam. These savings directly go to the game developer/publisher, not the consumer. This means there’s no incentive for the consumer to switch to Epic other than exclusive games, which is a pretty poor reason to switch away from a well-established platform.

It’s slightly cheaper for developers to put their games on there. But that sucks as a business model, because game prices aren’t any lower so for the end user it doesn’t matter. And on features, Epic just loses every matchup against Steam.

Seconded, Divinity is great!

Wasn’t CS/TF2 far more influential in the lootbox department?

You’re mixing the definitions of sideloading media and sideloading apps. Sideloading media follows your definition, e.g. transfer via another local device. Sideloading apps refers to the installing of apps outside of the (pre-)installed app store, e.g. by installing an APK directly.

The tiny fraction of output on overcast days is negligible.

Well, on overcast days most solar panels these days still produce up to 25% of their normal output. Nothing to sniff at I’d think. Perhaps not enough, but certainly not nothing.

I doubt that we can bridge it with power from intercontinental transmission lines, given how the politics look like today and how much they need to change first + then actually starting to plan and build it… In 50 year perhaps.

I think you may be a tad pessimistic here. Consider Europe, even during a Dunkelflaute not the entire continent is without renewables, only a region of it. If northern Europe has one, southern Europe is very, very unlikely to have one as well for example. And inter-continental power lines aren’t as rare as you might think! I believe the UK is currently building one to Morocco, and there’s plans to build one via Greece and Cyprus to the Middle-East.

Batteries are not relevant now and won’t be in the foreseeable future due to monetary, resource and manufacturing bottlenecks. Storage of electricity to later use it as electricity is simply not feasible right now, apart from the minutes you get from existing hydro storage.

I don’t fully agree here. Certainly on a more household level battery storage is already perfectly feasible and being installed a lot these days. The growth of this sector is also staggeringly high. Year-on-year the sector nearly doubles, as costs are coming down quite quickly and the economic picture starts to maie more and more sense. We don’t produce enough now, but in 10 years that picture might be radically different.

Right “now”, so in the next decade, if we push modern nuclear instead of fossiles (which we need to keep building due to said fluctuations) we will get far less CO2 quickly.

Experience learns that new nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, from planning to end of construction. If the focus is on nuclear, any CO2 savings will likely come too late. And then there’s still the economic problem of nuclear being far too expensive compared to solar/wind. Barely any investor is willing to touch it unless the government super-heavily subsidises it, resulting in expensive power and higher taxes (e.g. what happened in France). And then there’s the issue that we don’t have enough expertise and rare materials to build enough reactors to cover enough of the world’s production. We have a hard enough time building just a couple reactors, let alone thousands. And having poorer 3rd world countries finance their own reactors also seems unlikely.

I believe I saw research that suggested the fastest route to net zero, whilst still being affordable and feasible without emitting too much CO2 in the meantime was a very heavy push for renewables, investments into energy infrastructure (which are mostly required regardless of the route taken) and research into battery tech so that in 25-30 years we may have enough storage to ditch the last fossil fuel plants. In the meantime keeping gas power plants open seemed the least polluting backup method in case of power generation dips, plus potentially shutting off heavy industry during those periods to save power (fairly cheap, requires little investment to do). Nuclear doesn’t have to disappear, but the cost-benefit analysis just didn’t tilt in its favour. But it might make sense on a more local level perhaps, that’s always an issue with those super macro-economic studies.

I was hoping to find it but I’m having a hard time doing so. If I find it I’ll link it to you, it was an interesting read.

Why would you even say something so stupid? I highly doubt that you are interested in a discussion.

Please keep it civil. You provided very little context in your original argument, which made it very hard to give you a meaningful response.

Your link regarding Dunkelflaute helps to provide context, thanks for that. I had not heard of this phenomenon before. The research paper in the citations does mention that while it occurs somewhat regularly for an area e.g. the size of a country, it rarely happens simultaneously for say the EU-11 mentioned (most of northern Europe). The page also mentions importing power during these periods from other regions would mostly resolve this problem. Seems important to take into account, but not an impossible problem to deal with, especially given that it already happens and we already use inter-grid connections to handle it? What’s your perspective on this?

People spend their whole career figuring this out, it is obviously not as simple as you make it out to be.

I certainly don’t mean to pretend this is a simple problem by any means. Conceptually, sure, it’s “simple”, but bringing it to practice is much harder. It’s also why I’m perhaps more pessimistic about the timeframe in which we can execute these plans, particularly also because we need to scale up battery production by a factor of at least 10. It’s why I think we also need to invest in research regarding higher-capacity batteries made from easier to procure materials. Certainly a difficult endeavor by the way, but absolutely necessary. We’ve made promising progress on that front at least, but we’ve got a long way to go still.

In my opinion, focusing on renewables + storage has the highest long-term chance of success combined with manageable costs. If you’re willing to up the chance of success offset by incurring higher costs, adding nuclear to the mix is perfectly acceptable to me. But even longer-term (especially post net-zero) I think it’s almost inevitable that fission reactors will end up not economically competing with alternatives.

Hey thanks! I certainly don’t claim to know everything here, but I mostly dislike how the discourse regarding clean energy, nuclear etc… has… devolved so much. You always hear the same fairly boring catchphrases, arguments and rebuttals, but there’s genuine issues and questions that need all of us to come together and find the answers to. It’s developed its own little “politics” almost.

I hope we can breathe some new life into the discussions, as it’s a super-interesting problem to think about and I certainly hope we as a species find a solution.