They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don’t play.
Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.
Other than that I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.
Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.
I mostly just pay for it because I’ve used it for ages and definitely get more value out of it than the subscription cost. I don’t think I use a single nitro feature.
Got the second years ago when it launched because I was looking for a new rpg to play. Bounced off it immediately because the gameplay was far too passive – I didn’t feel like I was doing anything – and the fucking quote spam POPPY WILL PROTECT MASTERPON is branded on my soul.
One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.
The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.
I think this is from Berserk, but it’s been years and I can’t quite tell.
Yeah, because modern skeletons have the marks of heavy manual labour on them…
Bro have you ever talked to anyone in the trades? They are all limping by 35.
Not everyone gets a do-nothing laptop job.
There will be more options, sure, but the fundamental limits on the performance of a handheld PC haven’t really changed since the steam deck launched 2 years ago.
We need either a big battery breakthrough or a big architecture breakthrough to actually push the space forward.
There are plenty of interesting games to play that don’t need super-powerful hardware, but the Deck doesn’t even handle all of those flawlessly. Case in point the Persona 3 remake that had very noticeable frame rate drops on the Deck.
Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.
I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.
The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.
With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.
These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.
An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.
The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.
The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.
To make a crude concrete example:
Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.
Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.
Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?
One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.
Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.
Check it out to throw in the trash. Jared Diamond’s book is thoroughly condemned in anthropological and archaeological circles.
AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all
No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn’t matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.
Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.
Further, this isn’t a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don’t want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.
Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.
‘Those people’ are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.
They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.
They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.
Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.
Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn’t actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn’t interact with those ads.
paying a peasant to work
Peasants (serfs) were not paid. They were bound to the land they worked, and were given a fraction of the harvest they produced. The rest was property of the Lord who’s title controlled the land.
There was a (very small) artisan class where the concept of payment existed, though often it was payment-in-kind - smith the plow for my oxen and I’ll give you some food after the harvest. Money was rarely encountered for the vast majority of people.
Those without respiratory issues don’t have oxygenation issues while wearing masks.
The same air is going into your lungs, the only difference is your diaphragm has to work harder due to the filtering effect of the mask. If it can’t manage that, then you are likely already on oxygen due to low tidal volume and chronic hypoxia.
You can buy a pulse oximeter from CVS for like $20 and test this yourself if you don’t believe me.
The 433.7 million is after paying taxes on the lump sum.
Nominal Jackpot: 1.2B
Lump sum: ~600 M
Taxes on lump sum: ~167M
Post-tax winnings: 433.7M
That would give politicians another reason to raise the retirement age, in order to stay in power.