MudMan

I guess people jumping to unfounded conspiratorial conclussions while accusing the plebs of being the cause of all ills doesn’t sit well with me these days.

I wonder why that’d be.

It really, really doesn’t.

Man, I am as frustrated with Nvidia as anybody, but that type of vaguely-informed ranting really makes me go on the defensive.

For one thing, the dumb gatekeeping at the end is absurd. I’ve been building PCs since the early 90s, there are more informed users now than there have ever been, by far. And those that aren’t regurgitate whatever they hear on Youtube from tech influencers anyway. Fortnite casuals aren’t what’s keeping you from owning a 5090, friend.

Speaking of uninformed users regurgitating half-understood Youtube talking points, Nvidia certainly wasn’t going to ship 5090s with a single damaged ROP unit as 5080s, those two cards are built on entirely different dies. It’s very likely that they’ll have some 5080SuperTi thing coming out eventually perhaps built on cut down GB202 instead of the GB203 in the base model, but it’d certainly not be cutting down an ROP and leaving everything else the same. That’s not even the 5090D spec. Plus Nvidia confirms other cards in the 50 series are also affected.

More importantly, neither of us knows how these made it to market. There’s certainly at the very least some lax QA, and I’m sure there was pressure to get as many of the very limited 5090s to retail as possible, but crappy as the 50 series is in many areas I genuinely doubt Nvidia would be so dumb as to deliberately putting chips with this very specific, very consistent fault in the pipes hoping nobody would notice a performance drop and peek at GPU-Z even once. That’s not how this works. I’d love to know what actually happened to cause this, though.

So yes, the 40 and 50 series are named one step too high on the stack. Yes, the pricing increases have been wild, and it’s frustrating that demand is high enough to support it and regulators aren’t stepping in to moderate the MSRP mishandling. Yes, Nvidia mismanaged the 50 series launch in multiple ways, from bad connector design to rushing the 5090 to misleading marketing on frame generation and probably underbaked drivers. That doesn’t mean every issue is the same issue, and it certainly doesn’t mean that a lack of “knowledgeable users” is to blame.

For those not clicking through and reading all the way to the bottom:

More cards are apparently affected, they say Nvidia acknowledged the issue, is telling them that users can get a replacement from the manufacturer and that they’ve addressed the root cause for future units.

Some frequently repeated false premises, particularly on what AI is and does, but mostly correct conclusions on the effects of regulating it through copyright expansion, IMO.

Hah. I’ve stepped away from Samsung, but you have to give them Dex. That looks less ridiculous in one of theirs.

Yeah. I genuinely don’t know how universal that type of usage is, but I don’t even consider anything else at this point.

Well, an actual full size keyboard. But, you know, for a phone.

Hah, yeah, I had a work one in latter days, too, and there was definitely a sense of weird self-importance associated with it you don’t get from touchscreens.

I don’t know if people reviling virtual keyboards would get much from it, though. Honestly, typing on it was just as annoying. I am probably faster and more accurate using swipe inputs than I was on that thing.

First off, I didn’t know the guy’s name is “Kovid”. It must have been a very weird five years for him.

Second, this is an amazing piece of text and I will show it to people to explain why having engineers make design decisions is often a terrible idea.

I genuinely believe there is a strong correlation between FOSS projects getting structured and well funded enough to hire designers and their chance of taking over as the default choice against commercial projects. If UX designers were as interested in volunteer work as engineers the software landscape would be completely different.

The Cortana version of it specifically, it seems?

People tend to overreact to Microsoft announcements (see last week’s panic about an out-of-context policy change for OEMs misreported as a lack of support for older Intel chips), but in fairness MS doesn’t make it easy with the obtuse way they communicate in a whole bunch of areas.

I have a sizable collection of legitimately procured ebooks, it’s not that rare if you prioritize it.

But I agree, it’s not about hardware. There are plenty of super premium eink displays these days. I don’t even want integration with a eink reader at all. I’m happy reading off an OLED screen in a tablet. All I need is convenient library, management and display software that will handle both text and comic book formats.

Everybody seems to be trying to mimic the Kindle ecosystem with all its quirks and hardware dependencies when what I really want is book Plex.

Well, “logical” is a bit of a stretch. After my second or third round of trying to use it for all my DRM-free ebooks I was quickly reminded that a) it insists on copying all your books into a separate folder for some reason, and b) its reading UX is atrocious. The thing is unreadable on my tablet by default and it won’t even try with comics, instead just prompting you for an actually usable app to do the reading part.

I am sure it was made to deal with a legitimate use case, but man, is it not my use case. Which, to reiterate, is I own a bunch of ebooks and comics and want to read them sometimes.

I hear their selfhosted web app may be better at this, and I’ve also taken a peek at kavita, I’ve just been too annoyed by having to go point a docker container at my library when the books are just sitting there and I can just open them. It really feels like it should be more straightforward and convenient than that.

Maaaan, I wish ereader open source software was better. This is one of the areas where I feel the gulf between corporate garbage and free alternatives most. It’s just a hassle to manage, feature-poor, has terrible UI or all of the above.

That’s a hugely disingenuous counterargument. It doesn’t so much move the goalposts as sets them on fire over a pile of explosives and puts them somewhere in low orbit.

To that question the genuine answer is “what the OP is proposing is not a boycott”, then.

None of these “don’t support them with your money” online liberal fantasies are boycotts by the standards you’re setting. If anything, going back to those examples to get a grasp on what an actual boycott looks like in the context of larger action only exposes to what degree this nonsense isn’t that.

Had to look up Delano, but I’m not surprised to find that it was apparently not a boycott, but a larger organized, ongoing labor conflict. I knew about Montgomery (which in itself is a crazy sign of cultural imperialism, because I have no business knowing that), and the same applies.

You can set up a genuine boycott of something as part of a larger set of organized actions, particularly in a local conflict. You can’t rely on consumers worldwide spontaneously abandoning a global oligopoly as a way to enact any meaningful change. At most you’ll get a PR response. At most.

All the examples you provide already have alternate hosting methods they publicise aggressively. LTT has Floatplane, which they own, DF offers Patrons higher bitrate alternative to their videos for download, GN pushes people to their website (although that’s different and not really monetized) and a whole bunch of other creators banded together and made Nebula as an alternative to Youtube.

My understanding is that the vast majority of those alternatives from successful, established creators are residual, secondary monetization windows when compared to Youtube advertising and sponsorships driven pretty much entirely by Youtube views.

I do agree that Youtube is a huge aberration. Every other dominant streaming site is built on owned or licensed content, not UGC, and they’re largely supported by subscription revenue first, advertising second. Definitely not by third party sponsorships baked right into the UGC. It is what it is, though, and if it got shut down tomorrow I genuinely don’t know that independently generated content would survive in any form at all. Maybe someone would ramp up capacity to try to replace them, but most likely you’d see social media posts becoming the real replacement.

Much as my feelings for Youtube are mixed, I don’t know if I can think of a realistic alternative that isn’t worse.

I read it. I disagree with your interpretation.

It’s a DMCA issue in that the current set of regulations puts the onus on the poster and the effective enforcement on the platform.

Sure, Youtube is way less zealous in protecting the rights of the genuine content creators than those of even illegitimate claimants… but that’s by design. If they make a mistake and enforce too strictly they will not likely get sued at all, and if they do the damages will be low. If they do the opposite on a large scale the threat, at the time the DMCA was being hashed out, was becoming directly liable for any and all copyrighted content they host by accident.

The regulation isn’t fit for purpose and never has been. Google’s extreme lack of diligence in protecting the public domain (and whatever copyright exceptions are applicable) is a result of this. I don’t like Google or their practices in general. They definitely don’t spend enough on direct support, be it on copyright or on security issues. In this case, being honest with you, I’d err on the same side they do, even if there is a secondary issue with how little funding they put on required support and assessment of edge cases beyond their algorithmic solutions.

Not so much a Youtube issue as a modern copyright issue.

But I’m curious, is that recommendation meant for users or creators? And don’t say “both”, I know it’s a chicken and egg thing, I’m asking what you think comes first.

No, it can’t. It’s an ultraliberal fiction about a self-correcting market we know for a fact doesn’t play out in reality.

This would require wealth to be roughly evenly divided, it would require enough supply to always have a supplier available who brands on whatever issue the consumer is trying to push on every market and it would require the consumer to research every issue and track it throughout the corporate ownership chain effectively.

It just doesn’t work like that. The way it works is I don’t like to pay Microsoft OR Google for their crappy office suites, but the open source alternatives are bad and the people I work with require using those for compatibility reasons, so I pay both.

What I can do, though, is set up a social democratic state where I don’t have to make an ethical or political statement with my choice of office software, I have a government in place that will fine the crap out of them for their infractions.

And if that’s not working, my action can be placed on pressuring the government, for which I have way fewer constraints and way more agency.

If it makes you feel funny to pay for a thing absolutely pay for something else. That’s all well and good. But don’t fool yourself and others by pretending it’s an effective form of political action or a moral responsibility. It’s neither.

Clearly not special for Germany, since the entire article is… entirely about Spain, actually.

The option highlighted here is very interesting, but as a test of reacting to headlines vs clicking through it’s an amazing case study. The German thing is a quote from a Spanish seller of this tech explaining why he’s confident it will take off.