For reference, it’s a whole genre. Not to be confused with appliances that have speakers and bzzt or beep or play jingles or whatever, or for that matter also musical tesla coils, those are much more like speakers.

It’s been a part of computer culture since pretty much forever, now kinda dying out because nothing is mechanical any more.

deleted by creator

Looks like a skill issue on your part.

A CD doesn’t really mean anything, the license and the physical medium generally aren’t tied. If you break the medium but have a backup you’re not pirating anything. I’d say the primary difference to a CD isn’t more or less secure but physical or not.

Downloading the game also requires an online connection. You’d only need one when you’re buying or selling the license NFT or moving it from one download platform to another, and of course to download the game. Whether you need an online connection to play depends on the game, not the NFT.

Oh, speaking of: Are you an EU citizen? Have you already signed this?

NFTs would make sense for things like tradable software licenses. E.g steam is going to be forced to allow users to sell their games soonish (they’re appealing the ruling and it’s only a matter of time until they lose) and you wouldn’t want such a license to be tied to a particular marketplace, so NFTs make sense: The game publisher mints it, it’s tradable freely, sites like steam and gog can look at them and say “yep this hasn’t been tampered with and was minted by the publisher”, and serve you the game files. Presumably they’d want you to occasionally buy something on their platform to let you use their servers to download games they didn’t sell you, or you could pay a small sum for the service.

The NFT itself, of course, doesn’t enforce anything. It’s just a non-fungible token representing usage rights in the game. Like a cd key but more secure, for the publisher (key can’t be duplicated / used multiple times, I mean a platform that would allow that could just as well go all the way and be a torrent release group) and the buyer (can check validity of key before spending money) and seller (buyer can’t claim bullshit like “key didn’t work”).

What you probably would not do is put that stuff on already-existing blockchains because why should the industry pay ludicrous transaction fees when you can roll your own.

The only reason I can think of to get that data is to circumvent archive.org’s limitations on renting out stuff so your bots can slurp books without getting throttled.

That is, my best guess is that this was pirates seeing if they can’t add to libgen.

Or it’s a “prove you can do stuff” kind of deal.

An NPU is a cut-down GPU to allow running ML workloads on restrained power budgets.

Quite literally. Keep the memory architecture, keep the massive banks of ALUs, remove the little intelligence GPU cores have in their control units and you have an NPU. Oh, one more thing: Make sure those ALUs support ludicrously low precision arithmetic. GPUs can do the same without any real downside, though, the reason GPUs floored out at fp16 is because there were no workloads benefitting from lower precision.

It makes sense on mobile devices and phones have been shipping them for ages to do their AI image processing, listening for voice commands etc, it makes sense for at least some data centres because specialising your hardware to save electricity is worth it, it doesn’t make sense anywhere in between. Just get a proper GPU and you can do AI and play Crysis.

Useful becomes useless quite quickly. Yes, we have useful predictions for the weather tomorrow. A week from now? Not really. Two weeks? Could just as well get your prediction from tea leaves.

And that’s just statistical reliability. Weather predictions are actually allowed to be wrong, when the prediction for tomorrow is off then people shrug their shoulders. Not really what Descartes meant when describing his daemon.

Even if you had perfect knowledge of the current state of the universe, knew all the laws, you still couldn’t predict shit. The reason is chaos, more precisely: There are no closed-form solutions to chaotic systems. To simulate them you have to go through all the time steps (assuming, without loss of generality¹, discrete time), simulate every single of them one after the other, arguably creating a universe while doing so. And you have to do that with the computational resources of the universe you’re trying to simulate. Good luck. Chaos also means that approximate solutions won’t help because sensitivity to small perturbations: There’s no upper bound to how far your approximation will be off.

¹ I can wave my hands faster than you. I dare you. I double-dare you.

I don’t know where you got North Carolina from, I was speaking in general. Also the place has plenty of coastline. Also you don’t need to live near the coast to live in a flood area, plenty of rivers that can and do flood. In mountainous regions it’s not about building on the right side of the dike, but not at the bottom of the valley, and in the places in between it’s about… well, it’s usually not really about not building in one particular place, but making sure that there’s areas that you can flood to protect areas you want to keep dry. Much cheaper to pay off a farmer for a lost harvest and cleanup than half a million people for losing their homes.

That’s not bonkers that’s sanity. If you want to build your house in front of a dike don’t expect to get insurance. The trick is to build in a place where there’s a risk, not certainty, of damage.

It’s absolutely bonkers. I don’t get how Americans can build houses in leopard enclosures and then act all surprised when, inevitably, their faces get eaten. I know you’re a settler country with little connection to the land but it’s been long enough to know which parts get flooded and which don’t, now hasn’t it. Around here you don’t even get building permits for lots of stuff in places even if you were willing to take on all financial risk yourself because it’d put unconscionable load on disaster relief, and thereby society at large.

So, there’s two ways to go from where you are: a) Double-down on being Yanks and say “fuck you got mine sucks to be you”, abolish disaster relief and let those rugged individuals fend for themselves, or b) fucking build where it fucking makes sense. It’s not like you’re Singapore or something, you’ve got more than enough land.

I mean yes it’s electromagnetic radiation.

If a chain, cable, or wire comes loose on a car then the panels are the least of anyone’s worries. Also expect emergency brakes to kick in automatically. This is a train, not a bicycle.

Mozilla has been diversifying for ages, it’s what stuff like buying pocket was all about. They should be making around 100m off the side hustles by now, plenty to keep the lights on, but still a small sum compared to the 500m they get from selling the default search engine spot.

Also, just as a reminder: Mozilla doesn’t exist to make money for Firefox, Firefox exists to make money for Mozilla’s general internet charity work.

Nope they’re boys with pubes. Pubes don’t make you a man, strength of character does.

Should you really be working when you’re claiming retirement checks from your union?

As a carpenter? Yes and no. It shouldn’t compete with what union people are by and large doing for their steady bread and butter but completely outlawing earning any money is cruel to the type of busy-bees that many tradespeople are. Hand-craft chessboards or something, anything where skill and mastery is eclipsing the industrial aspect. Also teaching, training, and consulting. Retirement should be a role-change (if desired), not a kick to the curb. Also, accommodate for half-retirement: Half the cheque, half the jobs kind of situation.

It’s not a blob the client is definitely open source, not sure about the server software but you’re not running that. It’s an extension like any other, just that it comes bundled with the default install and doesn’t use the usual extension enable/disable UI: Go to about:config, set extensions.pocket.enabled to false. It’s going to stay that way, this isn’t microsoft which likes to “fix” your settings.

There’s a subscription if you want and they’re also earning some money off referrals. In 2022 they made ~80m dollars off all those side hustles, should probably be 100m by now. Selling the default search engine spot is still the biggest number, about 500m. And they have a piggy bank of over a billion.

During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would’ve been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn’t possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.

Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That’s its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can’t make money with it.

Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it’d continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn’t be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don’t forget t-shirts and mugs).

I guess overall the gripe I have with the “Mozilla should invest more in Firefox” chorus is that it implies “Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is”. People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it’s running on donations etc.

Servo isn’t dead it’s just on slow burn. Also, under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation Europe. As far as Mozilla is concerned it has served its purpose: Prototype stuff that then got included in Firefox to get rid of a quite large amount of technical debt.

The long and short of it is: Firefox is supposed to make money for Mozilla’s charitable causes. It’s not an end in itself, but a means to an end.