I'd expect that everything they see gets used for for training purposes (and data mining in general) regardless of if it's flagged or not. It'd take a whistleblower for you to ever find out either way.
All they'll need is hundreds of billions of dollars, more RAM and GPUs than are currently available, and a huge number of environment destroying data centers. We're sure to be spoiled for choice!
Publishers are to blame for much of the situation, but so are professors. I've seen them do things like require overpriced books they authored or charge insane prices for nothing but photocopies held together with binding combs
> A rationale for the price rarely affects my choice.
This would make you the exception.
Companies are constantly increasing prices to see how much they can charge consumers before they feel cheated and stop buying and/or enough customers get priced out to hurt profits.
Consumers tend to feel ripped off if they think a price increase was due to greed but are way more forgiving if they think the price increase was needed because of something outside of a company's control. That's why companies are quick to tell consumers that rising prices are due to things like fuel prices, bird flu, or supply chain problems.
Of course, that tactic isn't as effective as it used to be since consumers have seen companies using those excuses and feed them lines like "We're all in this together!" while those same companies report skyrocketing profits and they've watched as prices remained high or even increased even after the blamed fuel prices dropped and supply chain issues resolved.
You're treating what the consumer believes and what is the case as if they were synonymous. How able is a consumer on the street to judge whether a price increase is legitimate or arbitrary? "Feeling ripped off" sounds more like a post hoc rationalization that's applied when a price is pushed just past the threshold.
"Feeling ripped off" is the immediate reaction to sticker shock. It takes active messaging from companies to get ahead of that reaction and plant in the mind of the consumer a justification that they'll think is fair. Companies have gotten very good about pushing their narrative to the public via social media, news, and even retail signage. Some companies have just outright lied about the reasons behind their price hikes or about how much they were actually impacted by real events, so what consumers are tricked into believing isn't always the truth.
Consumers typically have an idea of what something is worth though, usually based on previous prices. This isn't a problem when prices increase slowly because for every old person who thinks "What a scam! This used to cost 65 cents and now they want $1!" there is a child who never knew any better and for them the cost was always around $1. When prices increase too much or too quickly however that's when people get upset and assume greed unless they are primed to accept it with some excuse. This is especially true when consumers are struggling with high prices while hearing that the companies raising prices, switching to lower quality ingredients, or charging more while giving less are also making record-breaking profits.
When prices increase too much or too quickly however that's when people get upset and assume greed unless they are primed to accept it with some excuse.
Yeah, and then what do they do? I assume they don't stop buying groceries because they're pissed about the assumed greed. Do you really think people are switching grocery stores because they think Kroger is being greedy, but Safeway is altruistic and just raising their prices because of inflation?
They still need to buy food, but when the price of something goes up too fast they look for cheaper alternatives to what they normally buy or just stop buying certain things entirely. It's rare the cost for the cost of everything to spike all at the same time. It's happened before though when fuel prices were really high, it happened during the early days of the covid pandemic, and it's happening now with inflation being the excuse.
When the cost of everything goes up like it has now people actually do change their habits and shop at different stores looking for better prices (walmart, aldi, costco) when they have the option.
"More than 8 in 10 Americans changed how they buy groceries last year. They hunted for sales, switched to cheaper brands and stopped buying goods they once considered essential." (https://fooddrinklife.com/inflation-grocery-shopping/)
I don't get it. Do Americans not get inflation/COL corrections by default in their salaries? Inflation drives the price of everything up, including salaries. If that doesn't happen then it's not inflation, it's just salary cuts across the board.
> While SHiFT insists that the method of smudging your disc will give you enough time in a lag to beat the SpongeBob game, he adds a clear caveat that it's not worth the risk of permanently damaging your game or original Xbox console
How would reading a scratched/dirty disc permanently damage a console? That seems like a very bad issue for a device expected to read frequently swapped discs.
There's a belief in certain corners of the gaming community (and maybe other communities that deal with optical discs) that if the disc drive's laser has to "try hard" to read a disc it will eventually "burn out". Not sure if this is backed up by any actual data or facts - it sounds plausible to me that a laser might dynamically adjust its power level as needed, and that over time that might be bad for it; but it also sounds a bit like people might be anthropomorphizing the laser or something.
I would be more conserned with the laser motor wearing out. That is what killed my Dreamcast. The laser was fine but the motor to move it just gave up from too much use.
What do you use to lubricate them? I've got a few PS2s that are starting to give occasional disc read errors and a little laser maintenance might be overdue
White lithium grease for the rails (but don't get it on anything plastic), silicone grease for the plastic gears, and sewing machine oil for the motors :)
This article is hard to read, it seems to repeat itself constantly and expands on nothing. The main point is that smudging the disc can help with performing certain glitches while the console is trying to run error correction but you could potentially scratch your disc to an unusable state if you are too liberal with the smudging. I'm pretty sure I've seen this same topic on HN before so this article isn't exactly reporting on anything new.
Well - ketchup on your disc may drip on the the laser diode - don't you think it's hard to defend against? maybe they need lens wipers against ketchup on the disc issue.
On some systems/drives if it detects an error that is big enough it will reset the carriage. You can here it reading and rescrubbing over and over. That can cause the carriage motor to overwork and burn out. Not sure of this system does that or not. But that would be my guess.
Exactly. And in the worst case the disk itself might disintegrate due to rotational forces, transferring some of those forces to random parts of the interior of the disc drive. Physical and higher sustained speeds and increased temperatures due to many read attempts make that more likely (but still very uncommon). This isn't entirely theoretical, I have a dead drive to prove it, although not from speed running.
there are a bunch of videos on youtube explaining it. The belief is the game streams data from the disc. Smudges cause read errors on some laser passes that don't fail to read entirely. The effective throughput goes down. This causes the games overall processing of each iteration to somehow be impacted, leading to the behavior the speedrunners use to save time.
Large websites resorted to PHP and server side includes to get headers and footers. Smaller websites resorted to frames and copy/paste. It wasn't perfect, but it also wasn't horrible or unusable either.
> Frequently we wave our hands and say exactly this, critical thinking. But, not everyone is capable of that, nor is everyone capable to the same degree.
It doesn't help that there have been active efforts for decades to prevent people from learning and developing critical thinking skills.
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. - The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform (saying the quiet part out loud)
> It doesn't help that there have been active efforts for decades to prevent people from learning and developing critical thinking skills.
This very much depends on where you live between state (US), and countries. Where I live, it's the complete reverse, critical thinking is baked into the population, into learning, into nigh everything. Our challenge is the complete lack of privacy, sadly.
It's probably got something to do with the billions/trillions of dollars corporations and industries have to push their chosen narrative onto an uneducated public. They've successfully turned a lot of people into suckers.
reply