“You are impinging on my freedom to force you to participate in activities you have expressly indicated it is against your will to engage in! You bully! I am such a victim!”

https://xcancel.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070?s=20

This is endemic of the entire current administration. It is as disappointing as it is unsurprising.

You could create some great masterpiece at 18 and live off of it until you are 62 and starting to take social security payments.

The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months.

What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year.

So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation.

Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.

“Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue.

And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.

Is the content of the comment counter-productive? Downvote it.

I could see cases where large walls of text that are generally useless should be downvoted or even removed. AI or not. But, the first example

> faced with 74 pages of text outside my domain expertise, I asked Gemini for a summary. Assuming you've read the original, does this summary track well?

to be frank, is a service to all HN readers. Yes it is possible that a few of us would benefit from sitting down with a nice cup of coffee, putting on some ambient music and taking in 74 pages of... whatever this is. But, faced with far more interesting and useful content than I could possibly consume all day every day, having a summary to inform my time investment is of great value to me. Even If It Is Imperfect

There is a future where a city's burrito taxis are replaced with drones rolling on the sidewalk or flying to the rooftops. And, the large majority of the remaining city drivers are replaced by robotaxis with multi-sensor 360 tracking. Where there are nearly zero parked cars. So, the parking spaces have been replaced with bike lanes of bikers and scooters with every robotaxi on the street planning around their motion.

Far less fuel consumption. Far less street crowding. Far fewer accidents.

And, of course everyone hates the idea.

In fact they already have. There are 10s of thousands of forks of Bitcoin. Only a handful ever got significant attention. And, the original is still much larger than all of the forks combined.

1. You need it for use as a collateral asset for smart contracts. There are no crypto cops or crypto courts. Only collateral gives contracts teeth. There are many options here. Just like there are many options for collateral assets in traditional finance. But, BTC is the top dog for the role and the first choice of individuals and institutions trying to lay down the foundations of decentralized finance.

2. You are speculating that the growth of BTC's growth in value as a collateral asset will outpace the growth of other assets. This as played out well over the past decade.

But, at an emotional level, Bitcoin is considered a high-risk asset. So, whenever fear gets heavy in the fear/greed equation, Bitcoin is one of the first places people pull money out of as they flee to safety. It's also the "High Risk-High Return" spot for folks to plunk their "spare change" when they are feeling safe. So, in practice short term moves in Bitcoin are highly correlated to short term moves in equities.

Meanwhile, if you actually run the numbers, Bitcoin has out performed the SP500 (or even the SP10) by a large multiple over the past decade while having a volatility usually around the median of the SP500-top-10 that everyone is currently betting heavily into. People just have a hard time getting out of linear thinking and so they look at the big dips as short-term linear disasters while on a long-term, logarithmic view they have been rather boring. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fd...

It is my understanding that this is literally the origin of tipping.

After the abolition of slavery, there were many black people newly looking for work. And, there were employers looking for workers, but unwilling to pay money to black people.

So, someone got the idea to promote that tipping was something fancy European aristocrats did. And, you can be fancy like they were by tipping my workers (that I refuse to pay).

Tipping was previously seen as un-Americanly classist. And, most states tried to ban it when it started to pick up steam. But, it was too late. So many employers were enjoying unpaid labor that the bans were repealed.

Later, when Minimum Wage was established, workers who lived on tips alone were almost all black. So, unsurprisingly, tipped workers were excluded from the wage regulation. And, today they are only acknowledged as fractional minimum laborers.

Meanwhile your idle desktop PC and monitor are pulling 20-100W each.

People tend to forget that doing the work the old fashioned way uses energy too. Presumably for a longer time for equivalent results.

https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/research-and-insights/...

https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/06/bitcoin-has-been-a...

That’s quite a mischaracterization. We can at least agree that Bitcoin’s supply is set up to increase at a pre-set rate over time. The math problems are the means to enforce that rate. Not the controlling factor.

I’m not a vendor or even a chef. But, anything is negotiable.

It’s not an either/or. While we figure out the practical solutions to corruption in impoverished nations, we can /also/ do other work to improve the situation in Earth. And, in doing so, we will make solving the impoverished/corruption problem easier to fix.

What I noticed what that there was a main story for the hour long program. But, it was pretty dull. Meanwhile, the host kept randomly going off into short non-sequitur diatribes. All of the non-sequiturs were depressing. They were about random stuff that made you feel just awful. Then he'd pop back to dull main story like nothing happened.

I realized the non-sequiturs were all designed to make you feel hate, fear and disgust towards liberals. The main story was just filler. The real product was a steady stream of emotional hits of hate, fear and disgust. Over and over forever. Just like puffing on her cigarettes.

That was decades ago. The hate, fear and disgust pipeline has refined a lot since then.

Decades later, the news got my father so deeply filled with hate, fear and disgust that he would randomly launch into hateful diatribes about the libs unprompted. It got bad enough that the kids had to tell Mom we weren't visiting until he got it under control. He wasn't like that at all until he retired and had more time to watch TV.

Back in the days of king and country, people went through all that, went home, and some lived normal lives. A whole lot hid in that trauma from the neighbors and instead took it out on their families because it wasn't acceptable to let it out to anyone else. Everything was "great". That's how it's remembered decades later. That’s how we got a lot of boomers raised by dads who never got therapy.

Recently, in the days of plague, while millions actually suffered and died, a person in a million cried out online about masks. That's 350 a day in the US alone. And, everyone around the world got to watch. How it's remembered today is every one of us saw at least one of them break down and it still sticks with us all.

> This used to be called a whinge. It wasn't celebrated

And, this piece certainly is not a celebration.

The difference between a whinge and a trauma dump is significant here. You should whinge with your buddies occasionally. Not so much you become annoying. Trauma should only be dumped on people who are professionally prepared to help you through it. But, a whole lot of people don’t find prepared help for a whole lot of reasons. Instead they dump it on unprepared strangers. Frequently. Randomly. Commonly. Thus, the term.

> "explosive word vomit" is, as yet, the most accurate three-word description of it I have seen so far.

A trauma dump is usually explosive word vomit. Random chain of thought. But, consider the possibility that this piece was crafted carefully. I know it’s easy to dismiss out of hand. But, try. Why is each sentence there?

> That doesn’t make it a poem!

I’ll grant there is not a lot of structure to be found here. It’s free verse without the line breaks. Not really prose. It’s not telling a story. There’s a beginning. There’s a state of frustration, compassion, boredom, despair, and a loop back to the beginning. Over and over. For decades and counting. That’s the structure. It’s no iambic pentameter. But, it’s something.

But, impressive vocabulary and flowery visuals? Really? I’m going to assume you are flexible there and don’t require a high school English class interpretation of poetry. As called out in the article.

"Laundry to do..." is a trauma dump for pretty much everyone in this third decade of 24/7 local/global disaster reporting. It's the opposite of a unique perspective. But, it's nice to see the common vent presented in a thoughtful way instead of the daily routine of "Everyone holding it in and a few people explosively word-vomiting frustration."

And, I don't need rigid structure, impressive vocab or flowery images to appreciate a message. I'm good with it just putting me in a moment. Feeling it. Taking a breath and exhaling "yessssss......"

The dollar down vs itself by 20ish percent.

The median home price is up 30ish percent.

Oil is up 45ish percent.

Gold and the SP500 are each up 80ish percent.

Bitcoin is up 1000ish percent.

If you snooze through the day-by-day, season-by-season noise, the volatility of Bitcoin is a fun and relaxing rocket to ride. You just have to ignore all discussion focused on time frames of less than four years.