Yeah, I would have been interested in the diff too.
That said, the article does mention replacing basically all the hardware and still encountering the issue. FWIW, my personal experience with Apple software so far is that the usage expected for Average Joe is well tested and polished. But stepping outside of that, it's "Here be dragons" territory very quickly.
It doesn't seem to be just Steam. From what I see (from Switzerland), other online stores relying on PayPal seem to be impacted too. Though if the store let me try to use PayPal anyway, I can just switch the currency of the purchase to USD instead of using the currency of the credit card (CHF in my case), thus having my issuing bank do the currency conversion. It seems to work fine so far.
The timing of this problem is weird. Hard not to see a link with the recent troubles with Visa and Mastercard, even if Valve claims that it's not the case.
I wonder if this is actually more related to some EU lawmakers probing a few big online platforms for the abusive conversion rates they impose. Amazon is guilty of this, all the budget airlines are guilty of this, and so is PayPal.
They “offer” to charge your card in its native currency to avoid exchange rate fees, but they do so with an abusive exchange rate. They also always go out of their way to show the inverse exchange rate that nobody uses, and is hard to evaluate.
I just checked on Amazon, and they now display the “usual” exchange rate (still with an insane rate). So it definitely looks like something is getting tightened in the industry.
Indeed. As far as I'm concerned, the touchpads have been the killer feature of the Steam Deck. Emulating a mouse using a stick or the gyros doesn't click for me. The touchpads are just so much better when you need both speed and precision, be it for games (specially shooters and strategy games), or desktop mode (for navigation and web browsing). Plus, it works pretty well for typing text with the virtual keyboard.
I don't understand why none of the other manufacturers implemented those. I wish the Steam Deck had just a little bit of extra power, but I'm not willing to part with those pads. I'm eagerly waiting for the Steam Deck 2.
I suspect you have an issue in the way you select the top 2 when they are several elements with the same value.
I tried an implementation with the values being integers between 1 and 100, and I found stats close enough to yours (~51% for 10 elements, ~64% for 100 elements).
When using floating point or enforcing distinct integer values, I get 50%.
My probs & stats classes are far away, but I guess it makes sense that the more elements you have, the higher the probability of collisions. And then, if you naively just take the first 2 elements and the female candidate is one of those, the higher the probability that it's because her value is the highest and distinct. Is that a sampling bias, or a selection bias ? I don't remember...
You're correct! When using floats (aka having much less chance for collisions than hundred numbers with hundred participants) it's practically unbiased. Thanks for exploring this with me, a fun little exercise.
It will never cease to shock me how enslaving men for military purpose is still considered an acceptable thing to do in developed countries. Always with the same excuse "It's necessary for the common good". More like "I won't be part of the conscripts going to the battlefield, but will benefit from it, so I'm ok with it".
Even pro-equality and "My body, my choice" people seem content to just pay lip service on the matter, if even that.
Equality, rights, and all of that tend to go away when Russia invades and occupies you. If you want to preserve that, along with your homes and the people you love, your options are to fight or flee. Life is imperfect, so the ways we have to address the problems life throws at us are imperfect.
It's the difference between having an ideology in Silicon Valley, and family in Sumy.
Having an alter-ego is one thing, but I strongly suspect that he had at least one sock puppet here during the drama with HN [0]
* a brand new account suddenly appears, defending Marcan's behavior (the only comment/post ever of this account) with a very similar writing style
* Marcan immediately "notices" the new comment while doing "random search" (how ? he claims he doesn't browse HN, and even posted a screenshot of news.ycombinator.com being routed to 0.0.0.0 to block his own access to it the day before)
* Marcan highlights the comment in question on his media account [1], praising them "at least [this commenter] gets it"
Only circumstantial stuff, but sure smells very fishy to me.
I feel that a lot of men voted for Trump, not because they liked him, but because they felt rejected by the Left as a whole.
If you go on left-leaning media, you can find comments that would be considered gross hate speech if it targeted any other group, by the hundreds. And yet, people very rarely call them out on that, if ever. There seems to be an omerta on misandry (and anti-white racism to some extent) amongst the Democrats. More than that, a lot of them seem to even revel in it, proud of it.
Not surprising that some men end up with a mindset "I don't care if the Right wins, I need the Left to lose".
The bottom line being that America really needs a middle/center party, but I fear it might be too late.
I’ve seen quite a few of those kind of comments here as well. Sexism and racism is just that—even when directed at white men.
I recently came across an “ethical software” movement, concerned about privacy. Right up my alley. Was ready to join up and use their logo, etc. Watched their ted talk for inspiration. I shit you not, he said it was not (just?) for white guys. With a bit of sneer. Found the text on the site as well, not merely an off-hand remark. As if human rights give one shit about that. The whole point, missed.
Closed the tabs and haven’t looked back. Insulting your audience doesn’t garner votes, what a surprise.
Interpreting that to mean that the person said 'it's not for white guys' and parent thinks they meant 'not "just" for white guys'. But the damage had been done regardless of original intent behind the words.
In an exclusionary phrase, yes. All in the intention. They might as well have hung up a "no coloreds" sign.
You seem to have a habit of slicing out a few words to neutralize them and use that to justify exclusion. I get it, you think we should be "tough" and accept casual racism, sexism, ageism when fashionable.
Nope. I never accepted that shit before—ain't gonna start now.
> The bottom line being that America really needs a middle/center party
What does that even mean? What would a middle/center party do, exactly?
I'm getting older (maybe ancient in the tech world), and just during my lifetime I've seen the terms "left", "right", "liberal", "conservative" morph multiple times into things that, if not hopelessly vague, are unrecognizable from previous definitions.
Maybe the particular issues need to be specified. Economic issues are very different from social and cultural issues. And then there's also foreign affairs, if anyone cares about that.
The politicans who are considered "centrists" nowadays, for example Joe Manchin, just seem to me to be sellouts with no principles who go to the highest bidder. Am I wrong about that? I honestly respect a consistent ideologue more than that. In any case, what message do the so-called centrists have for young men?
From what I've seen in the exit polls, if they're to be trusted, economics was the most important issue for voters. Those who felt worse off now voted for Trump, and those who felt better off or the same voted for Harris. For the first time I can remember, the Democrat won the upper income voters, while the Republican won the middle class voters, which is a reversal from 2020.
I remember that Harris's opportunity agenda for black men was like... cryptocurrency and legalizing weed? WTF was the campaign thinking (other than taking donations from crypto advocates)?
I can't speak for the OP, but in my country we have several parties, so I can express my political opinions in a more complex way than the left-right linear spectrum. The parties don't position themselves by just being "more left" and "more right", but tend to cater to a specific audience. For example, we have many LGBT issues, and I can vote for a party that spends a significant part of their political power on improving the situation. If I wanted to focus on economy, there's a party who I'm mostly aligned with, but unfortunately I don't like their conservative and even far-right tendencies, so I prefer another, more populist and pro-social but still solid party. There are some parties which are completely not for me, but which cater to, for example, farmers and have a significant following in rural population (they're slightly conservative, but pro-social and have nothing to do with far right, just to give you an idea of the differences). And yes, we have the mandatory populist party.
I don't have a party that I agree with 100%, but I can decide what is most important for me and vote for a party that wants it. And most importantly, if I don't like my choice, I can vote for another party next year without making a 180.
Agreed. I like the idea of political pluralism much more than the idea of a so-called "centrist" party.
We do have other parties in the US, such as the Libertarian and Green parties, but our system makes it very difficult for them. They have to fight like crazy for ballot access, they're locked out of news coverage, they don't receive public funding, and they are reviled as "spoilers" by the two major parties.
>What does that even mean? What would a middle/center party do, exactly?
Forget the wording 'centrist', parent is trying to describe the need for a party that seeks allies from all angles rather than trying to produce outrage towards specific groups of people in a lazy effort to foment in-party support and credit.
In recent years, I guess due to success of certain parties, everyone has decided that it is in fashion to have a group to demonize - to hate. This (necessarily) creates a group of disenfranchised people that have an axe to grind.
It used to be that political parties demonized far entities that were as far outside the voting American public as was feasible; now it's fashionable to attack people that constitute American voters. Now we have hordes of people that were demonized by one side or the other, and a lot of them want to vote one way or the other out of pure spite rather than political interest.
> Forget the wording 'centrist', parent is trying to describe the need for a party that seeks allies from all angles rather than trying to produce outrage towards specific groups of people in a lazy effort to foment in-party support and credit.
Well politics is about making choices where consensus is unattainable. By nature of not being consensual, there will be some angles from which these choices are undesirable. So attracting allies "from all angles" is essentially the same as saying "whoever is not my ally comes from no (reasonable) angle", which is precisely what the democrats are being described as doing in the article. They are the utmost "centrist" party in a way.
The answer to the demonization issue is not to pretend everybody must be your ally, it is to acknowledge that one can reasonably disagree with you, and be willing to engage with your political opponents rather than treat them as enemies, to reach an agreement acceptable to most (though not all).
> Forget the wording 'centrist', parent is trying to describe the need for a party that seeks allies from all angles rather than trying to produce outrage towards specific groups of people in a lazy effort to foment in-party support and credit.
Fair enough. I'm all for breaking up the duopoly.
However, the strategy of scapegoating and creating enemies is hardly a new phenomenon. It's as old as politics itself. More recently, I'm old enough to remember Reagan railing against "welfare queens". In 1968, George Wallace ran for President, and won 5 states, on a platform of racial segregation. There was also the McCarthy era, of course, where there were supposedly enemies, Communists everywhere in the US. And George W. Bush weaponized patriotism after 9/11, painting anyone opposed to US imperialism as supporting the terrorists. (This same happens today to anyone opposed to US imperialism. They're called antisemites and supporters of Hamas.)
In the end, though, polls usually show that people vote based on their pocketbooks. Economic issues are almost always most important and salient, despite all of the other political commotion.
I ran a social co-working space in 2016 in Austin, TX, it was pretty progressive, tech oriented, and socially liberal generally but we had a mix of political viewpoints and focused on GSD, we hosted Obama's young african leaders when they came to town and did a lot politically but not in a polarizing way, a few fresh college/masters grads came in that tried to blame all men, said men should keep their mouth shut. It was very frustrating, a bunch of those dudes went from voting against Trump in 2016 to voting for him by 2020 and now again in 2024.
2016 was like a giant premature celebration that included some pretty frustrating bigotry toward men, that due to proximity, was disproportionatly experienced by the very men who were the closest allies.
None of this bad behavior changed my views one bit because I hold my position based on data, I was dissapointed and did what I could to mitigate the damage but it was awful, throwing away allies in a fragile big tent party just for purity tests and for personal catharsis.
Each person is responsible for their own beliefs but the majority of people will not stay where they don't feel welcome.
Personally our two party system really cooks us, if we had plurality systems we'd probably have ended up with the equivalent of a Christian Social party that would have caucused with the left.
STAR voting would be nice and would help remove this implicit moral compromise people feel in voting, I think the more we can alter our system to enable people to feel like they aren't choosing between the lesser of two evils, the less we'll see people saying fuck it, I'll vote for my evil guy and excuse his behavior because I am choosing between evil and satan. I think people underestimate the damage that explicit moral compromise has had in voting, developmentally some people will always be black and white thinkers.
The Trump vote was never about principle, but the perceived (correctly or not) practical. Most would happily allow hate speech as long as it's not directed at them ("It's just a joke, bro."). The moment it is directed at them (or is perceived to have been): burn everything down.
There's a difference between telling a dead baby joke to a couple that just had a miscarriage, and telling it to a group of edgy teenagers (perhaps by the couple themselves). That is to say, the problem is "punching down." What's important to understand here is that well-paid politicians and consultants telling people who are struggling that they're the problem - even if it flips historical dynamics of marginalization like gender and race - might be just that.
That doesn't mean that entitlement isn't a factor. It doesn't mean that it's actually harder to be a straight cis white man, in general. It doesn't mean that the normalization of prejudiced and hurtful speech wasn't basically invented and templated by white dudes. It just means that it's entirely predictable that people who are feeling bad aren't going to vote for someone who isn't spending enough time talking about the things they think are the reason that they're feeling bad. Said candidate doesn't even have to agree with such voters; they just have to engage with the issues honestly.
I would guess Intel is counting on the fact that most people are not knowledgeable enough to pinpoint a defective CPU being the issue when the computer starts crashing.
Heck, even as a SWE building my own computers for almost 20 years, I still have no idea how to properly diagnose a hardware issue when it arises. Beyond checking for explicit errors in journals/logs, and the usual memtest/BIOS update/reinstall the OS from scratch, I resort to replacing each component one by one until the issue disappears. But it's time consuming, and sometimes quite costly. I suspect most people simply replace the entire thing if it's not a prebuilt PC still under warranty.
In my experience, AMD still has some massive stability issues with the VBIOS of their GPUs. But it's not a component that the users can officially update on their own (whichever version the graphic card comes with when you receive it, is what you are stuck with), and most users are not even aware of its existence (even on Windows, the official driver doesn't provide any way to update it, or even check its version). Resulting in two seemingly similar cards, with the same drivers and firmware, behaving wildly differently in some case depending on the production batches the card was part of. Ask me how I know.
Using war to divert unwanted attention away from domestic issues is a proven approach.
reply