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When you get your election coverage from Kalshi, this is whose opinion you're consulting in c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world
[–] 49 points 2 days ago (2 children)

First of all, I think this is a bit.

But (and this is my understanding, although I've never tried it) on Kalshi you buy a contract that says "if X happens, this contract can be redeemed for Y money" and then you can, in turn, sell that contract to someone else before it expires/pays out. So you can actually make money by trading the contracts regardless of whether they pay out or not—you buy at some price, and then if the contract price goes up (either because the event seems more likely, or because many people were buying it in the hopes of selling later) you can sell it to someone else at a profit. This is the sense in which it's like a stock market.

So there's like two layers to the joke here, one is intentionally misunderstanding the way Kalshi is like stocks (it's actually more like options, which do expire and become worthless) and the other is that sometimes stocks really do go to zero.

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    • What actually are bullshit jobs for? in c/askchapo@hexbear.net
    [–] 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

    Remember that the people at the top don't have a perfect view of the organization. Nobody can really see up or down more than a level or two unless they go out of their way to do so,* and most people don't have a personal incentive to pursue that kind of visibility. I think there's a strong chance that your job exists because at some point creating it benefited someone above you, by helping to expand or hold on to their influence within the organization. It doesn't matter if you don't actually produce anything, the important part is that they were able to convince their superiors to give them a budget for this department, and the more budget they have the more important they seem, and also the more of it they can get away with siphoning for their personal projects.

    You might say, but doesn't the balance sheet show we lose money? It seems like an obvious cut. But there's someone whose job it is to justify your department's existence, and they have a strong incentive to keep doing that because if they fail they'll lose their job too, so the people who make those kinds of decisions are being told this is a necessary expense. Someday one of them, perhaps due to receiving some incentive for finding cuts, may show up and start asking hard questions about what it is you do here, but until then the farce will continue.

    *I mean obviously they can look at the org chart and the budget, but unless they're fairly close to your operations they don't know that you spend most of your time having meetings about whether to have more meetings; they're going to assume you do something related to the department's nominal purpose.

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    ‘Soft Power in a Cardboard Box’: Pro-Kremlin Activist Calls for Pizza Ban in c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
    [–] 18 points 3 days ago*

    Do people remember the Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial, in which the guy who hates Gorbachev for failing to hold the Soviet Union together is convinced that actually Gorbachev is okay because the fall of the Soviet Union allowed Pizza Hut to enter Russia? "Pizza is soft power" was basically the thesis.

    (And yes, Gorbachev played himself in this ad, which didn't air in Russia.)

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    Telafreako strikes again! in c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world
    Have you ever enjoyed turn-based combat in a game? What game? in c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
    [–] 1 point 5 days ago*

    All the time. Four-guys-in-a-line is one of my favorite genres. Final Fantasy 6 might be my favorite one.

    More recently I quite liked Dungeon Antiqua 1 and 2, which are indie games. 1 is like "What if Final Fantasy 1 was slightly more like Wizardry (and also just one big dungeon)?" and 2 is like "What if Final Fantasy 3 was all dungeons?"

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    How true is this upon your first trip to Japan? in c/memes@lemmy.world
    [–] 7 points 5 days ago

    When I went to Japan a lot of people spoke English. I don't think we had any trouble. Everyone was very helpful. At one point my granddad and I were looking at a map trying to figure out how far we were from our hotel, and a guy came up and asked us in English if we needed help, and when we told him where we were staying he walked with us like 2.5km to make sure we got there! (This was in ye olde days before smartphones, so we were using paper maps.)

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    Anyone else (especially queers) feel betrayed/resentful towards the sex education class in public school? in c/askchapo@hexbear.net
    YouTube is testing hiding the dislike button entirely and users aren’t happy in c/technology@lemmy.zip
    [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago

    Doesn't clicking the dislike button move the video up in the algo anyway? It's "engagement." If you don't like a video the best thing to do is "not interested" it on your recommendation page.

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    EA is shutting down BioWare and the next Mass Effect has been canceled in c/games@lemmy.world
    [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago*

    I didn't finish it (I'm a serial quitter, I almost never finish games) but I enjoyed that Ryder was sort of an anti-Shepard. I played the Shepard trilogy as a Vanguard and even on the highest difficulty Vanguard!Shep is an unstoppable biotic death god, especially in 3 where Charge > Nova > Charge > Nova is possible. On the hardest difficulty in Andromeda, Ryder is a plucky underdog who has to somehow squeak by against enemies who frankly outclass them one-on-one (or at least my Ryder was; perhaps there is a stronger build I could have been using, but this one sold the fantasy).

    Similarly I remember cracking up when Ryder tried to call a crew meeting about something important and immediately lost control of the room.

    I don't remember much about the plot, tbh.

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    • EA is shutting down BioWare and the next Mass Effect has been canceled in c/games@lemmy.world
    We Should All Be Worried That Trump's Hands Are on the Nuclear Trigger | Common Dreams in c/world@quokk.au
    [–] 26 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

    You want the article to not show the image that it's talking about, that illustrates his dangerously cavalier attitude towards nuclear annihilation? I feel like the president posting images of himself with his finger on the button is relevant info.

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    • The other strait of hormuz in c/technology@hexbear.net
    [–] 14 points 3 weeks ago

    I guess there is more money in going after Google/Meta/MS/Amazon than there is in going after the telecom companies that actually own and operate the cables? (FALCON seems to be owned by a company I've never heard of called Global Cloud Xchange, and Gulf Bridge International is also the name of the company that operates that one.)

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    18
    Myth Relay – Goodbye stream for Gawr Gura (www.youtube.com)
     

    The Myth girls are playing some games to send Gura off, starting with Minecraft on Calli's channel. It's her last day, be sure to drop in if you have the chance. After the relay, Gura's last stream will be a 3D Mini Live on her channel.

    I wish I had gotten into Hololive earlier, so that I could have spent more time watching Gura's streams. I can really see why the Chumbuds are so passionate about her. I don't know if her last original song, Ash Again, got posted here, but definitely check it out if you haven't seen it, it's freaking amazing. 💙🔱

    18
    Tell me about what you're doing in OSRS! (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
     

    I just started playing OSRS recently and have been just drifting around from one activity to the next, as I find stuff that catches my fancy. Currently I'm about 20 games into Fishing Trawler and haven't seen a piece of the angler set yet; I ended up liquidating some of my food and crafting materials on the GE to buy more rope. I notice a lot of people prefer to play the lower deck even though swamp paste is so expensive; what's the appeal?

    Previously I spent a while in Camdozaal because I liked that it was a pretty self-contained grinding area; I stayed long enough to unlock all the buffs, and get the barronite mace and the Imcando Hammer. I like the concept of the Vault but it seems like the actual loot is worthless compared to how much time you spend mining to pay for vault runs. The best drops are adamant armor that you could buy on the exchange.

    What's everybody else working on? Grinding skills, making money, minigames, bosses? Having fun?

    579
    There is one uncleared level remaining in Super Mario Maker, with 18 days to go before the servers shut down (www.issmmbeatenyet.com)
    submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/games@lemmy.world
    81 comments fedilink
     

    UPDATE: Ahoyoo has confirmed that Trimming the Herbs was uploaded with TAS tools, meaning that The Last Dance was the final legitimate level all along! Congrats to kazeihinn on the Last First Clear! The journey continues in Super Mario Maker 2...

    ORIGINAL POST:

    Team 0% is attempting to clear every level in Super Mario Maker before the servers shut down on April 8. (New level uploads have been disabled since 2021, so there is no danger of new levels appearing at the last minute.) As of a few days ago, only a single level remains: Trimming the Herbs, uploaded in 2017 by Ahoyoo. (See also Ahoyoo's original upload video.)

    The level is short but extremely precise, requiring Mario to use Bob-ombs to precisely remove Piranha Plants and collect coins while navigating a tight space filled with spikes. There have been over 200,000 attempts so far! If you have a Wii U and feel like you might be a Mario master, this is your opportunity to pick up the final First Clear in Super Mario Maker history.

    2
    Recurring blue screens with various error codes, Win11 (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
     

    The system:

    MSI Raider GE67 HX 12UHS

    Intel Core i9-12900HX

    nVidia GeForce RTX 3080Ti (laptop)

    32GiB RAM

    Win11 Pro 64-bit

    The problem:

    Once in a while (usually 2-3 times per day), the system crashes, usually resulting in a blue screen with one of various error codes. Codes I've seen include:

    HYPERVISOR_ERROR

    CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT

    VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE

    IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

    Sometimes the system hangs but the blue screen never comes, and I have to power it off manually. When this happens, the fans go to full speed and yet the laptop quickly becomes incredibly hot if I don't power it off as soon as possible, suggesting that the CPU or GPU is maxing out for some reason.

    Checking with Event Viewer shows nothing out of the ordinary in the lead up to the crash.

    Things I've ruled out:

    I initially thought it only happened while plugged in, and bought a new power supply. That didn't seem to affect the frequency of the issue, and I also have now seen it happen while on battery. I also initially thought it was more frequent while playing games that use the dedicated graphics card, but I'm not sure that's actually true; I have seen it happen even while just watching Youtube. At one point I felt that it happened more when I moved the laptop or plugged in USB devices, but I think that may be magical thinking; I have never been able to make it happen on purpose by doing those things. It does seem to be true that after it happens, if I let the laptop restart automatically, it often happens again in a short time, but shutting down and then turning it back on gives more time before the next incident.

    Solutions I've tried:

    I tried updating the BIOS and the Intel firmware to the latest available on MSI's website, but that doesn't seem to have helped. I also updated my nVidia drivers.

    A possibly related issue:

    A week or so before this happened for the first time, I updated the BIOS to fix a different issue. What happened then was: I was playing a game on battery unintentionally, and didn't notice until that "low battery - switching to Super Battery" warning appeared and began throttling system performance. I plugged the laptop in, but performance didn't improve. I restarted and performance was terrible across all applications, even Firefox. I checked Resource Manager and noticed that the CPU was being throttled down to around 0.16GHz. Event Viewer was showing warnings about this that said the processor was being limited by system firmware.

    I tried using various Windows and MSI power management settings to resolve the issue, which persisted across restarts, fully charging the battery, etc. In the end, I solved it by updating the BIOS (to a version that is now one version back from the most current one).

    It was a while, maybe a week, after running the update that the crash happened for the first time.

    Current theory:

    Is it possible I screwed up the BIOS update somehow? I noticed that it instructs you to return clock speeds to stock before doing the update. I don't think I've manually adjusted them, but MSI's "MSI Center" software seems to offer automatic adjustment. It was set to "Balanced" when I did the most recent update, but it may have been set to "Auto" when I did the first one, which I guess could be a problem if the CPU was automatically overclocked.

    35
    Security in this game is kind of funny (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
     

    I'm crouched in an empty room, stealing everything. My stealth meter randomly changes to Detected so I stop for a while and wait for it to go back to Hidden. I steal the next item and get a notification that a bounty has been added. I'm still Hidden.

    I finish looting and stand up. Suddenly: "You're under arrest!" A cop charges into the room and starts giving me a spiel. I unload my fully automatic Grendel into their chest at point blank range. Somehow this attracts less attention than quietly picking up comestibles did; no reinforcements arrive, and I remain free to wander around.

    I come back to this room about five minutes later for an unrelated conversation. Everyone politely ignores the dead body.

    I know this is all, like, just Bethesda game things, but for some reason this time it seems funnier than usual.

    Also, minor companion spoilers:

    spoilerIf all the companions get as mad as Andreja did every time petty theft escalates to murder, my ship is going to get real empty real fast.

    94
    Do y'all pretend not to notice when the DM fudges something to keep your character alive? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
     

    Sometimes I can tell when my current DM fudges a roll to miss an attack or reduce damage. He has a tell in the specific way he pauses and breathes before announcing the roll, then tries to hurry to the next turn, which only seems to happen when someone is in a life-or-death scenario, but "luckily" survives.

    Should I let him know he has a tell? Will it be less fun (or more stressful) for him if he knows I know?

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