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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Service charge I would presume is primarily paid out to the non-wait staff at the restaurant. The kitchen in particular.
    Tips go to the wait staff, and they will pay some of that out to other staff (e.g. front staff) depending on how the restaurant works.

    These are going to be separate. The service charge is there so they can increase prices by a tightly controlled amount without needing to fuck up the carefully targeted price points ($8 or $7.99 is a lot better than $9.44). Which is shitty, to be clear: it’s a hidden way to increase prices while still advertising the same price. But it’s not something that replaces or complements the tip, it’s just a shitty price-adjustment.

    A waiter or waitress is still going to be dependent on the actual tip.


  • The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.

    AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
    From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as “Amazon”) gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
    After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.

    I think there’s a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.


  • BRICS isn’t an alliance or a cohesive entity. It’s the equivalent of the G7 for major non-western economies. India and China hate each other. China and Russia only really get along in being anti-US. Brazil and South Africa have no real intersection with the geopolitical goals of the other. BRICS isn’t a geopolitical anything of any meaning.

    I suspect India is doing this for the simple reason that they have zero control over Windows while they would have as much control as they want over internal-Linux use. They’re large enough that they can make it work, assuming they’re willing to dedicate the people and the money to it and put up with the non-insubstantial switching costs. Open question on what their follow through will look like, but it’s entirely within their capability.


  • This is a result of a SCOTUS decision. SCOTUS membership is determined by the president and control of the senate at the time of vacancies. Neither of those are influenced by gerrymandering.

    At the core of it this comes down to 2016 when a larger than typical number of people on the left lied to themselves and said “eh, they’re all teh same” and tossed their vote at a third party or just didn’t vote at all. Following that, SCOTUS went from a 4-4 tie (with 1 vacancy) to 6-3 conservative advantange.

    I wouldn’t blame laziness, but instead a combination of apathy and people who are more interested in ideological purity than in accepting the available-better such that they would rather complain about the unavailable-best.

    RBG refusing to retire in 2012-2014 also shares blame. She could have retired then and the court would be 5-4 instead.


  • Not a final decision. SCOTUS (via Kagan) refused to overturn a stay on a decision while legal proceedings continue. Basically just an order to keep things as-is until the case finishes working its way through the courts.

    Which as I understand it is generally how things work: if there’s no clear likely winner, go with the interim situation that most easily can be rectified if it is later ruled to have been wrong. In this case, if the ruling goes against Apple than they can be ordered to give money to Epic and other app-owners based on the revenue brought in from them to Apple during the appropriate period. The opposite case would require more complex estimates (how much revenue was shifted away from Apple incorrectly, in the case where Apple wins) and further it’d result in unnecessary consumer friction: users would go from A to B then back to A again.





  • What grinds my gears with all the people (whether Denuvo officials or elsewhere) that claim that it has no effect on performance: they only focus on average FPS. Never a consideration for FPS lows or FPS time spent on frames that took more than N milliseconds. Definitely not any look at loading times.

    I’m willing to believe a good implementation of Denuvo has a negligible impact on average FPS. I think every time I saw anyone test loading times though, it had a clear and consistent negative impact. I’ve never seen anyone check FPS lows (or similar) but with the way Denuvo works I expect it’s similar.

    Performance is more than average framerate and they hide behind a veil of pretending that it is the totality of all performance metrics.