username90

But the introduction of that LFG tool (more specifically the raid finder) also coincides with the start of wow bleeding subscribers, and they haven't recovered since and instead just kept bleeding.

I don't think there is any evidence that there would be less players in wow if they never introduced that feature, on the contrary there are plenty of things pointing in the opposite direction.

No, most people don't have access to casinos. Likely they would spend it on other luxury goods like bar visits, clothes they don't need or more games. Its just a way for games to extract more money from the market without providing any more value than before.

The thing with games is that the box price is extremely under what consumers value them, so selling consumers small bits of the game as micro transactions is the way games extract their actual market value. It doesn't deliver more value than before, but the current monetization better represents the value it delivers to consumers.

Coding is the hard part if you are bad at coding but good at maths and algorithms. Writing accurate code for solving a hard problem in under 30 minutes requires you to be really good at coding.

Yes, but I'd argue that the path you took was a very suboptimal path to reach the same understanding since you almost surely didn't reach it. So now you'd have to redo almost everything in order to reach the same goal making it a very huge waste of time. Of course I cannot be sure of that, but I have seen so many people who learned the way you did and they had really poor understanding. In my experience only the people who try to challenge themselves actually gets there.

Passing math classes requires almost no understanding at all btw, even getting good grades in them doesn't.

They have mapped out the synapse structure, there is no evidence that synapse structure is enough to actually run the brain. If you can run that brain and show it is an accurate representation of a flea brain then you'd have something, but until then I'll believe that the neurons do way more than ML researchers hope they do.

They already have paid channel membership and member only videos.

Linus Torvalds is evidence that a good PM/IT manager is worth a lot.

There aren't a lot of people that can make or lead a team to make world class products, but the number of marketing mangers who are exceptional enough to have significant impact on your company aren't that many either.

> P2W Cashshop

That is branded as a convenience feature though, it is very convenient to buy a maxlevel character or buy gold.

You don't need sensors, you just need a virtual room.

> We totally do emulate organisms on that scale. The

There is no evidence those emulations actually emulates those organisms. They just built a neural net in the same structure and assumes the cells doesn't matter. But cells are really smart and can navigate environments on their own, they are intelligent beings in their own right, and building a flea using a thousand of those is very plausible compared to doing it using neural net of similar size.

And yes, in order to prove that we actually emulated those you need to show that it does the same things in the same scenarios. You don't even need to do everything, just a simple thing like being able to move around, gather material and build a home in a physics engine would be huge.

That is how people learn how to pass tests instead of learning the material. Passing tests is important in college, but if you want to learn on your own it doesn't matter.

The main thing people lost here is hope. Before they were angry with Blizzard products but hope remained that the next game, the next expansion or the next patch would fix things. But now hope is lost, the community views this event as the final confirmation that Blizzard is run by really shitty people and their releases will just continue to get worse instead of shaping up.

> For WoW, as an example, it's inarguable that it's the biggest MMO of all time with a super active playerbase, even now.

That isn't clear at all that, right now is very different from a month ago. Final fantasy 14 could possibly be larger and if it isn't will very likely dethrone wow as the biggest mmorpg in the near future.

The crazy shit people believe from corporate media isn't called crazy since so many believe them. And the reason so many believe them is because all corporate media spreads it.

Also I am significantly more afraid of crazy shit that people don't call crazy than crazy shit everyone calls crazy.

Censorship based on how much money different groups spend and gets outraged is not very democratic compared to censorship based on democratic votes. And censorship based on democratic votes is seen as bad, what big corps do now is even worse.

Start that argument once we can model insect brains. Mouse brains aren't even on the horizon of what we can do.

General intelligence requires it to solve real problems in the real world. It isn't about emulating humans, but emulating anything resembling an intelligent being we are aware of. It would be totally exceptional if we could properly emulate the intelligence of a fly or an ant, but we can't even do that. "Emulate a human brain" you say, but we can't even emulate brains a million times smaller than that.

The discussion is about issues in the bay area. They contribute a huge amount to the tax base there, so saying they don't pay taxes isn't fruitful to this discussion. If those taxes isn't enough to handle issues in the bay area then bay area taxes should be increased, simple as that. And if that makes tech companies leave the area then those tech companies couldn't afford to operate there, and if they can't afford it then nobody can and everyone would have to leave the area.

Edit: The main point is that nobody can say that San Francisco has less money with those tech companies operating there than they would if those tech companies left. They are among the richest places on earth and should easily be afford any measures that can be afforded anywhere.

It is across the entire world, it wouldn't be used in the bay area. They already pay taxes properly for all the workers and buildings they have in the bay area, if that isn't enough then they ought to raise those taxes since they should cover the cost of operating there.

Numbers implies you can do mathematical operations on them that makes sense.

So how would you quantify "good" or "bad"? You can't unless you also answer what "good" + "bad" should be. In psychology they just assume that mapping those onto 1 and 5 makes sense, so "good" + "bad" = 5 + 1 = 6, but that doesn't make sense since it would imply that "good" is the same as "bad" + "bad" + "bad" + "bad" + "bad". You get similar but different issues if you start including negative numbers, or if you just use relative measures and don't have a proper zero, no matter what you do numbers doesn't properly represent feelings as we know them.

They never promised that the output would be error free, having output with errors is still useful for many applications. And the issues you are talking about got fixed as soon as it was discovered and since then Google has made sure to always diversify their datasets by race. Nowadays that is common knowledge that you need to do it, but back then it wasn't obvious that a model wouldn't generalize across human races and it is much thanks to that mistake that everyone now knows it is an issue.

Human thinking includes building new models/filters for understanding the world, not just applying old ones. And that isn't used for learning, we do it all the time when solving any kind of challenging problem or even for simple problems like trying to recognize a face. Computer models might never compete with human performance unless they can learn how to solve a problem as it is solving it, because that is what humans do.

They aren't very similar errors, ML solutions are equally accurate as humans in at a glance performance but longer and humans clearly wins. I'd say that the system is similar to humans in some ways, but humans have a system above that which is used to check if the results makes sense or not, that above system is completely lacking from modern ML theory and it doesn't seem to work like our neural net models at all (the brain isn't a neural net).

10 billion a year in global tax avoidance for those tech companies combined doesn't sound like a lot considering their revenue is around 600 billion a year.

Also consider that all the workers are also tax payers and they want the company to continue existing, their taxes would also go towards protecting the bay. Their tax dollars wouldn't exist in California if those tech companies weren't there.

I don't think it has to serve a purpose other than power projection for the rich owners. I'd say that owning all media is the best bang for your buck if you want to to convert money to power.

They don't even compete to solve the problem, they compete for funding. People who are better at politics gets more funding, so adding more people could even be net negative with them draining up all the funding from those who do the actual research.

Iphone users aren't allowed to install Chrome. They want chrome, but all they get is a shitty chrome skin on Safari. It does trick a lot of people into thinking that they actually have chrome though.

But removing javascript from browsers will just make more walled gardens. Browsers are not walled gardens, unless your OS prevents you from installing other browsers (see iphones...).

It doesn't matter what you say you support if the consequences of what you do hurts that goal.

If it wasn't deliberate they would let you install Chrome instead of forcing you to use Safari with a chrome skin. And why do they have Safari with a chrome skin? Because then most gullible users thinks they can actually use chrome and that chrome and safari are mostly the same, when they are actually really different and they therefore don't understand what they are missing. Even here on HN where people should know better you sometimes see users say "if you don't like safari you can just install chrome!".

> I wish it was, perhaps may be by numbers i.e. websites vs native software but if we take mobile ecosystem, native applications rule and many of the web pages are just landing pages for those mobile apps.

Largely because iphone doesn't let you install a proper browser that doesn't lack most features from the past decade, and iphone users is where the money is at so that is what companies targets.

That measure is wrong, it was designed to make USA look better. Read this part about the measure, it misses government subsidised healthcare etc:

> Household final consumption expenditure (HFCE) is not an exhaustive measure of the goods and services consumed by households. The general government and non-profit institutions serving households (NPISH) often provide goods and services to households for their individual consumption free of charge or at reduced prices. Examples are health services provided by governments or reimbursed by a social security fund, education services, the part of service provided by public museums, concert halls, operas, swimming pools that is not financed by entrance fees, aid for social housing etc. By adding the general government's and NPISHs' individual consumption expenditure to household final consumption expenditure one receives the actual final consumption of households.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_final_consumption_ex...

Edit: Also another way to interpret that value is that is how much households has to spend to uphold decent way of life in that country. So it is really expensive to live in America so people have to work hard to survive. Of course you can't say for sure what is true, but if an American has to spend 50% more to live the same quality of life as a German person then of course he will be less willing to take vacation instead of the money.