Womble

Assuming you are just a regular person using Windows, you are not their customer, at best you’re a handy side revenue stream and data source. Their actual customers are giant enterprises who are actively trying to fire people and smaller business locked into their ecosystem by needeing to interact with other businesses (who are also locked into their ecosystem).

I’m not even sure that IP being owned by non-natural persons is the problem, for example I could see a coop collectively owning copyrights/patents relevant to their work. The problem is the frankly ridiculous amount of time granted for copyrights and obvious methods being patented.

Change both of those and you keep the benefit of innovative individuals/small groups having legal protection from large corporations muscling in and stealing their work and get rid of most of the damage done by the current system.

Breath of the wild.

Complete disapointment as a Zelda game, it felt just like generic ubi-slop with a coat of nintendo paint, complete with a pointless crafting system and the ridiculous “swords can ony hit a dozen times before breaking”.

You do accept that bad software has been written, yes? and that some of that software is performing important functions? So how is saying “It needs to be written better in the first place” of any use at all when discussing legacy software?

TIL having an opinion on what games are bad is “elitist weird shit”

No you spouted some stuff about “trust me I’ve seen it” (almost certainly relating to using single floats) then an irrelevant tangent about how ten doesnt divde cleanly into three and how thats a problem for floats, when you have exactly the same problem with fixed point/integer division.

Do you have an actual example of where double precission floats would cause an issue? Preferably an example that could be run to demonstrate it.

And so instead of explain why and clarify any misunderstanding you chose to snarkily insult my intelligence, very mature.

I fail to see a difference there, 10.0/3 = 3.33333333333 which you round down to 3.33 (or whatever fraction of a cent you are using) as you say for all accounts then have to deal with the leftovers, if you are using a fixed decimal as the article sugests you get the same issue, if you are using integer fractions of a cent, say milicents you get 1000000/3 = 333333 which gives you the exact same rounding error.

This isnt a problem with the representation of numbers its trying to split a quantity into unequal parts using division. (And it should be noted the double is giving the most accurate representation of 10/3 dollars here, and so would be most accurate if this operation was in the middle of a series of calcuations rather than about to be immediately moving money).

As I said before, doubles probably arent the best way to handle money if you are dealing with high volumes of or complex transactions, but they are not the waiting disaster that single floats are and using a double representation then converting to whole cents when you need to actually move real money (like a sale) is fine.

You are underestimating how precice doubles are. Summing up one million doubles randomly selected from 0 to one trillion only gives a cumulative rounding error of ~60, that coud be one million transactions with 0-one billion dollars with 0.1 cent resolution and ending up off by a total of 6 cents. Actually it would be better than that as you could scale it to something like thousands or millions of dollars to keep you number ranger closer to 1.

Sure if you are doing very high volumes you probably dont want to do it, but for a lot of simple cases doubles are completely fine.

Edit: yeah using the same million random numbers but dividing them all by 1000 before summing (so working in kilodollars rather than dollars) gave perfect accuracy, no rounding errors at all after one million 1e-3 to 1e9 double additions.

Single floats sure, but doubles give plenty of accuracy unless you absolutely need zero error.

For example geting 1000 random 12 digit ints, multiplying them by 1e9 as floats, doing pairwise differences between them and summing the answers and dividing by 1e9 to get back to the ints gives a cumulative error of 1 in 10^16. assuming your original value was in dollars thats roughly 0.001cent in a billion dollar total error. That’s going deliberately out of the way to make transactions as perverse as possible.

The post I was replying to was saying

people will stop using it for all the things they’re currently using it for

They will when AI companies can no longer afford to eat their own costs and start charging users a non-subsidized price.

i.e. people will stop using AI when user have to pay the “real” price (what this is is left unspecified and an exercise to the reader to figure out). My point was that even if the AI price from those provided to infinity AI usage wouldnt drop to zero like they imply.

There are free open models you can go and download right now, that are better than SOTA 12-18 months ago, and that cost you less to run on a gaming PC than playing COD does. Even if openai, anthropic et al disappeared without a trace tomorrow AI wouldnt go away.

Quantum entangled communications that are impossible to evesdrop on exist now, cloud computing is the money machine that allows Amazon to keep expanding, virtualisation is used by effectively every company using computers at scale. (blockchain, I’ll admit, was pretty much all hype and vapourware other than laundering drug money and allowing speculation)

Just because there is marketing hype around a term doesnt mean there isnt anything of value there.

You are misunderstanding their point. “Good reason” doesnt mean ethically good, it means there is a sound logical connection between the action they are taking and the outcome they want to happen. In that case Microsoft does have good reason to push trusted hardware, in the same way as a bank robber has good reason to buy a face mask.

If people use guns to kill themselves, will they stop killing themselves if we take the guns away? Maybe some will, if the alternatives take so much more time, but the impact won’t be massive.

Generally yes, Suicide tends to be a spur of the moment decision to go through with it and having immediate access to a very easy, very lethal method increases the rate significantly. There have been numerous studies that show that putting up barriers at bridges etc that are commonly jumped from dreastically reduces the suicide rate from them without raising it elsewhere e.g.

Given the judege in that case flat out rejected the claim that there was any infringement for works they had legally aquired, yes.

I’m not defending it or attacking it, mearly saying that

They probably did multiple queries per day at the beginning, found out it isn’t worth it and stopped using it …

Isnt supported by the information given. The GP gave a story they made up about how usage would be falling based on nothing at all, I gave two other alternate stories about how it could be either rising in usage or remaining flat to demonstrate that we cannot say anything about rate of change from a single average.

Probably, my point was that you cant say if its increasing, decreasing or staying constant just from the number of times it’s been used. It could be that for most people its completely useless but for a small group its very usefull and they are using it more and more. Or as suggested it could be that everyone tried it a bit at first found it useless and stopped using it. Or that its kinda useful in very specific cases so it gets constantly used a tiny bit.

The “chart” that you posted, it showed barely any increase in the 1800s and massive increases in the last decades.

Its not a chart, to be that it would have to show some sort of relation between things. What it is is a list of things that were invented put onto an exponential curve to try and back up loony singularity naratives.

Trying to claim there was vastly less innovation in the entire 19th century than there was in the past decade is just nonsense.