> The calculus is very very very boring and simple. Game devs will support every single platform on the planet in which the cost to support that platform - both directly and long-term maintenance - is less than the increased revenue that platform provides.
Companies end up not doing profitable things all the time, for many reasons. One rational reason is that while action 1 might be profitable, action 2 is even more profitable. So the fact that Linux is not supported does not show that it would not be profitable, but rather that there are other things the companies can use labour for which they think is even more profitable. If they could freely clone their employees (and "unclone" them afterwards) all profitable things would get done.
(This is just nitpicking about your economic argument, I have no reason to think your conclusion is wrong).
You are correct. You're talking about "opportunity cost"
I kinda touched on it with "and long-term maintenance". For video game ports you can bypass the direct opportunity cost by doing a rev-share deal with one of a million port houses. They'll do 100% of the work to port to a new platform, and then you split revenue. It's not totally free because of course there's overhead. And if you want to do patches, DLC, sequels, etc etc there's the maintenance cost.
Which is to say yes you're basically correct and I agree with you.
Why? Draw the line backwards, and in a couple of decades you are down at 0 IQ. That's clearly absurd, you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950.
For any given IQ test, the norming sample is taken once. So if everyone gets twice as smart as before, everyone's IQ, as measured by any existing IQ test, would go up.
Look up the Flynn effect ... it refers to an actual change in performance.
That the scores on a given IQ test are occasionally renormalized so that the mean is 100 has no bearing on whether "IQ is a statistical distribution", whether intelligence or whatever the heck IQ measures can be measured absolutely, or on the validity and meaning of the previous statements by Epa095, sokoloff, and irdc and why they are or are not true.
If everyone suddenly gets twice as smart as before, all of their IQs will shoot up until the scoring of every IQ test is renormalized to a mean of 100.
I find it interesting that you are basically saying the same thing, even if the reply you are confused by simply made some assumptions you were not able to make and was a bit less precise.
It’s interesting how people will say things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way” even though it’s not, making it and them in turn the ones “wrong and confused in every possible way”.
Maybe if we are a bit more generous with others we won’t be compelled to be so pretentious and denigrating by saying things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way”, about something someone said and believes.
Does the original reply actually make sense in context? I can't see how.
It's a response to someone saying "you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950", and it says "And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence."
This seems like a non sequitur to me. Am I missing something? (Bear in mind that the 'line' under discussion is an increase in unstandardised scores.)
On a given set of 1000 questions, over time the trend has been to answer slightly more of them correct every year, progressively raising unstandardized scores, over the set of all IQ testees, since IQ testing was formalized in the 1950s.
Extrapolation is the most questionable statistical tool, and while extrapolation ad absurdum is a way to show a formal predicate logic argument to be incorrect or underspecified, it is an almost fully general attack against real datasets, which basically always have some trend line that ultimately passes sensible thresholds like zero bounds. Showing this, however you form the trend line, is not saying a whole lot.
Extrapolation prior to 1950 is not a very useful tool to evaluate intelligence trends, and this is entirely separate from the periodic recalibration of IQ tests to keep the average at 100 (however many correct answers out of 1000 this corresponds to).
This is another non sequitur ... it doesn't address retsibsi's point or their question. It has nothing to do with cluckindan's comment, which is what this subthread was about.
It's because there are multiple levels of misconceptions as well as "violent agreements".
retsibsi is correct. You can't draw (meaningful) conclusions about IQ before 1950, because extrapolating from the data after 1950 is dumber the farther back you reach, just for reasons related to the concept of extrapolation.
This has nothing to do with the fact that IQ is a statistical distribution that we keep re-norming, which "should always average 100"; The Flynn Effect is not in serious dispute, it's just an effect that pertains to nonstandardized results.
That story is data governance. Corporate already have a data-agreement with MS, storing all their data there. Github copilot is covered by that, while a individual agreement with e.g. anthropic needs lawers involved.
It’s precisely this, and, to be fair, it’s a rational approach given a Data Security Exhibit starts at 6 weeks and can hit 6 months to complete. That being said, I work with regulated data, so YMMV.
Microsoft is simply the default answer for most large corporations. Getting access to some Microsoft subscription is very easy, because of the existing framework agreements, Microsoft providing any and all compliance slopuments needed and already being pre-cleared for corporate data etc. Meanwhile trying to use another provider (e.g. Anthropic) would be a one year endeavor, minimum.
Plus if you're in government you have procurement to deal with. You already have an Enterprise deal with Microsoft so you don't have to go through any of that rigmarole.
"Many people have asked us why we didn’t build a four-wheeled cart that wouldn’t need to be balanced. However, four wheels would double the rolling resistance and thus the effort required to push the cart. Furthermore, a four-wheeled cart is less maneuverable and more difficult to drive on uneven terrain. You also need to get two extra wheels, and you need to build a steering mechanism.
"
I would have asked them why they didn't make a 3 wheeled version. Keep the two big wheels on the side, add a smaller freely rotating one in the front, like a lot of strollers have. They could make it just a tiny bit too low, so it's easy to roll it with both 2 or 3 wheels.
I have a 4-wheeled wheelbarrow/cart/whatever. I think Scotts made it, but I could be wrong (it's green with orange lettering); I got it at some big-box years ago. It's wildly easier to move than my regular wheelbarrow, precisely because you expend no effort balancing it, and it's equally easy to use pulling as pushing (even with kinda crappy small, hard wheels). It is definitely not as maneuverable as the traditional, but it's easier on (most, not all) 'uneven terrain' (again, I don't have to balance it) and it doesn't have any 'steering' other than pushing the handles so it points the direction I want to go (I do know there are more elaborate versions that have a steerable set of wheels; I got the cheap version).
I guess tl;dr: I dunno what these guys are going on about and wonder if they've ever actually tried a 4 wheel cart.
It is my impression that when drinking age restrictions are introduced, drinking among the (now) underage population goes down. Not disappear, but goes down.
My personal experience is also that 17 year olds in countries where the legal drinking age is 16 drink more than 17 year olds where the drinking age is 18, but I don't have numbers on it.
Renewables is the only realistic path to energy independence. Today's global situation should show the absolute necessity of that, even if you dont give a sh*t about the environment.
Had we done more 10 years ago we would have been better of. The second best time to start is now.
(We used to build it at a fraction of the cost and less than half of the time that we do with our modern fuckups and fuel can come from just about anywhere if need be. It might be a lot more expensive than the stuff kazachstan and still be a fraction of the cost.)
I think ideally we would've done both to press the cost of nuclear down and given the fact that the renewables rollout turned out to be a lot lot more expensive than proponents claimed it would be whilst still tying us up into gass to cover winter.
When reading an article written by Bjorn Lomborg, you should also do the effort to read the cited sources. This is not an ad hominem attack, just an observation. Do it and you will see.
It does not. That is not economically mined. Last big hard coal producer in EU - Poland, has extraction cost x2 or x3 of the mountain top removal mining in US. This sector is shrinking rapidly. Poland coal production came back to ~1915 levels (taking into account current PL territory). This sector would be closed already if not for massive subsidies.
Last year, China's coal use decreased, while China installed 300x more renewables than nuclear. Coal and nuclear aren't cost competitive with renewables, either in a free market or a technocratic top-down economy. Coal and gas still maintain a valid niche of firming intermittency. But that niche is temporary and shrinking.
The free market installs a tiny amount of coal, and a lot of renewable energy. Whether you believe this means "coal is/isn't cost competitive with renewables in a free market" is a debate about word definitions that I'm not terribly interested in.
China, like Brussels, is trying to reduce coal for similar reasons. They don't like the air pollution health hazard (fully believable), and they say they don't like global warming (somewhat believable).
How is the ToS relevant when the company is already bankrupt (IANAL)? Slack can cancel the customer-relationship with the bankrupt company, but that's it, no?
The world is large. There is still infinite room left on earth closer than space.
The reason the DC want to be placed in proximity to people is to get access to the infrastructure, electricity grid and roads. I think the next natural step is to just put the DC further away from existing infrastructure and pay for the connect, not move to space.
The concern isn't at all about physical space, DCs are compact, it's about limitations of the infrastructure you're talking about. Turbines currently have a multi-year backlog. The interconnection queue for new generation is an even longer backlog in many grid regions. And there's a general populist backlash against them.
Funny story is that a very important reason why Norway ended up with the oil policies it did is a Iraq-born immigrant named Farouk Al-Kasim.
He was a geologist with a Norwegian wife, moving to Norwegy since their kid had cerebral palsy. In a testament to how desperate Norway was for competence in petroleum, he could pretty much just walk in to the ministry of industry and get a job, and ended up writing the nation’s blueprint for how it would organise its fledgling oil industry. Without him things could have gone very very different, and he has been awarded Royal Norwegian Order of Saint Olav Knight 1st Class for his importance.
Companies end up not doing profitable things all the time, for many reasons. One rational reason is that while action 1 might be profitable, action 2 is even more profitable. So the fact that Linux is not supported does not show that it would not be profitable, but rather that there are other things the companies can use labour for which they think is even more profitable. If they could freely clone their employees (and "unclone" them afterwards) all profitable things would get done.
(This is just nitpicking about your economic argument, I have no reason to think your conclusion is wrong).
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