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  • Hah, what profits?? Chinese auto makers have been massively subsidized by the Chinese government for the last several years. Any profits on their balance sheets have been propped up by those subsidies. The Chinese government has already indicated that those subsidies will be ending, because they've created a supply glut that China cannot absorb domestically and cannot offload internationally. No country on the planet is going to allow the wholesale dumping of heavily subsidized Chinese autos into their domestic market since it would damage or destroy any local auto manufacturing industry.

    Carney's decision to allow a nominal amount of Chinese EVs is smart because it's a net win for Canada no matter what happens. It gets Canadian soybeans shipping to China again, while the number of EVs being allowed is too small to have an outsized effect on the Canadian auto industry. That's just the basic first-order stuff, there are huge potential upsides down the road. This acts as a trial balloon to see whether the Canadian market has an appetite for Chinese made autos. I suspect yes at first just based on price, but those prices will rise as Chinese subsidies draw down. If Canadians show a willingness to buy Chinese made autos, Canada can float expanding the import limit in exchange for some percentage of local manufacture.

    The US auto industry is pulling back from Canada, so Canada is making deals with South Korean auto makers. We've seen what happened when Canada put too many eggs in the proverbial US basket. Replacing those US auto makers with a variety of foreign makers (Germany, South Korea, maybe China down the road) is just pragmatic risk mitigation. It gives us a better local manufacturing base while ensuring we're not overly beholden to a single foreign trading partner.

  • It's an initial proof-of-concept. It'll be developed into more complex games eventually, that's not really an issue for it

    Except it is an issue, just one being masked by the mountains of cash these companies are burning to provide AI. To increase the depth and complexity and actually store state would require orders of magnitude more energy, compute, memory and storage. The AI bubble is causing very single one of those to become more expensive. At some point the market will call bullshit on these companies ("show us profit, or at least exponential revenue growth, or line go down"), at which point these companies will attempt to download the costs onto their users. When people see the bill and realize what these services actually cost, the whole thing is gonna collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

  • On a related note, the short combatant wins in a headbutt fight. In a clinch, short can easily smash some sensitive part of tall's face (mouth, nose). If the tall tries to headbutt back then short can just tuck their chin so tall ends up smashing their own face into short's forehead.

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  • This, and also maybe oil.

  • So the developers of PC games like Claire Obscure: Expedition 33, which doesn't have a Switch version of any kinda, spent time, effort and money to optimize specifically for the Steam Deck... because of the Switch's market share? Cmon now bud, that's a straight up ridiculous take.

  • There aren't really prosecutorial appeals for grand jury "no true bill" decisions, so this won't be going to the supremes at this stage. However, there's also nothing to prevent the prosecutors from trying again in front of a new grand jury. In practice this is pretty uncommon, likely because the judges presiding over grand juries take a dim view of lawyers who waste the court's time (much like any other judge).

    A common reason to seek a new indictment would be if new evidence has come to light, and thus there are new facts for a new grand jury to weigh. I wouldn't be surprised if these prosecutors try again, even though it's a stupid move. Motiviations like "maintain credibility with my peers" and "don't be an incompetent nincompoop" are clearly foreign to Trump's DoJ.

    On a related note, double jeopard prevents someone from being tried twice for the same crime, but an indictment isn't a trial. A trial does not start until after a grand jury returns an indictment, so double jeopardy doesn't apply here.

  • There is an option to pay for Extended Security Update (ESU) support for Windows 10. It'll give you access to critical security and Windows Defender antivirus updates, but no fixes or updates to features. There are three ways to pay:

    • "Free" if you're syncing data to their cloud (pay by letting them datamine your data and settings)
    • With Microsoft Reward points, which I believe are primarily earned by using Bing (pay by letting them datamine your searches)
    • For $30 a year, at least for the first year, though I've read the price goes up each year as they want to drive everyone to Win11.

    The program would conceivably allow you to kick the can down the road, possibly as far as Oct. 2028. Personally, I opted instead to switch to Linux months ago instead, and don't regret my choice.

  • Personhood for some, tiny American flags for others!

  • It's too early to lay blame. Every commercial aircraft has very clear maintenance schedules, including procedures that would have included a through inspection of the part that appears to have failed on this plane (aft lug to which the engine pylon was attached). The NTSB prelim report does not call out any failure to adhere to the maintenance schedule.

    The NTSB investigation has found signs of metal fatigue in the part that failed, but the defect was located such that it wouldn't have been visible on an external inspection. The next inspection procedure that could have caught the issue wasn't due to be performed until another 8000 or so cycles (takeoffs and landings) on that particular airframe. This looks like it's shaping up to be an engineering failure, where the manufacturer of the aircraft has significantly overestimated the durability of this particular part.

  • Well, today I learned!

  • DVD

    I know Dick predates the media format by several decades, but seeing these initials was jarring. My brain kept insisting this sentence was trying to say something about an interview with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen on Digital Video Disc...

  • The vast majority of this increase is from people playing on Steam Decks

    I believe this is incorrect. The Steam survey break down GPUs by description and the Deck's GPU appears in the results as "AMD Vangogh", which only accounts for 0.39% of respondents. That implies that the vast majority of survey respondents using Linux are actually on PC, not the Deck.

  • Some of my all-time favorites! I imagine there were precursors in terms of game design, but these were the first games I ever played where the enemy AI seemed actually intelligent. Like, guards would notice if you made noise, or if a torch had been extinguished. If they found the body of another guard they'd start searching for you. Pretty standard stuff these days, but that was a very fresh concept at release.

    The studio behind Thief (Looking Glass) collaborated with Irrational Games on System Shock 2. Thief 1/2 and SS2 both used the Dark Engine, which leads me to my favourite piece of game dev lore/trivia. Because Thief was developed first, the game engine had code for sword parries. During SS2's development they had persistent issues with that parry code activating when it shouldn't. Testers would be trying to bean a psychic monkey with a pipe wrench and the monkey would parry with an invisible sword.

  • South African laws require alcohol products to display one of seven warnings. This is one of them. Source.

  • If folks thought Rupert Murdoch was bad, let me tell you, Larry Ellison is far worse. And I say this as one of his customers! There's an old joke among Oracle DBAs:

    What does Oracle stand for?

    One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

  • Most of the mobile games I play have been mentioned by others, but I'll give a shout to one I haven't seen in the thread: Dungeons of Dreadrock. A fun puzzle game with a good amount of content. Free with ads, or ad-free with a onetime purchase; no MTX. Doesn't offer the same replayability as something like Shattered Pixel Dungeon, but I was happy with what I got.

  • Both. Cincordia and McGill are English universities, U de M is French, all are reporting a sharp drop in international student applications.

  • besides games

    Yeah, same here. I haven't pirated games since I was a broke university student. There's simply no need to when digital storefronts make it easy to get the games I want in the format I want. Some even offer DRM-free offline backups, or in the case of Steam the games stay in my library even if the publisher decides to remove the title from the Steam storefront.

    TV and movies are completely different from this, and so much worse. So many different streaming services, some with intrusive ads, and every one wanting their own monthly subscription. I shouldn't need to search "where is X streaming." Ever. Titles disappear from these services all the time. Even if you "buy" a digital movie or show, the rights holder can yank it back from you because... reasons?

    TV and movie distribution is such a garbage deal for consumers that open source developers have created a complete software stack (the servarr stack) to automate the process of finding and downloading media. Once you get it set up, it's about million times more convenient than corporate streaming services.

    TL;DR: Getting digital games is easy and feels like a fair deal for the average consumer. Getting movies and TV shows is a pain in the ass and feels like an absolute shit deal for the consumer. I'll continue to pirate movies and TV shows because as Gabe Newell famously argued, piracy indicates a service problem.

  • I hate my gas stove

    Could you share some details on what you hate about it? I'm super curious. I like everything about my gas range, except for cleaning it.