Microsoft is bigger.

Nintendo's market cap is about $56.7 billion.

Microsoft's market cap is $2.44 trillion, with $111 billion worth of cash (not equity, cash) in the bank.

Microsoft is 43 times bigger than Nintendo. They can pay for Nintendo with only cash, if they desire.

These trillion-dollar players are an order of magnitude larger than anyone around them. They can do what they want, same as how Apple ($2.8 trillion) can easily buy Disney ($150.5 billion) if they wished.

This isn't an exact science, but you can use market cap to ballpark these things and get an idea of how much an acquisition would cost. For example, Twitter had a market cap of $31 billion in August 2022, and Elon bought it a few months later for $44 billion. That's a 1.4x increase, so applying the same math buying all of Disney would "only" cost about $214 billion - which both Apple and Microsoft (and Google) could do. Nintendo would cost about $80 billion, which Microsoft could do without even taking out a loan.

The issue isn't necessarily the price; it's the regulators.

Ugh, CAD. I thought that webcomic died a decade ago.

I'm surprised you can write a 14-year-old's name on your crotch and send her a dick pic on your own forum, yet years later people still find your comics and share them.

Do you agree that retrievers are bred to retrieve things?

Do you agree that herding dogs are bred to herd things?

Do you agree that pointer dogs are bred to find things?

Surely you've been around these kinds of dogs before. It's not something that they learn; they are specifically bred to do a job and they will do that job even without training. You've seen or heard of how a sheepdog will herd small children, I'm sure. It's why the breed exists; they are specifically bred to do a certain thing and genetically their instinct is to do the thing that they were bred for over the course of thousands of years. You can remove them from their mom and not give them any training and they will naturally do the thing that they were bred to do. You don't have to train a golden to bring you back a ball.

So is it a surprise that a dog bred to kill things will want to kill things?

That's not simply because of "a poor owner", although the fact that people refuse to train their killer dogs to not be killers is part of it. It's because their dogs are genetically predisposed to kill, just like a pointer dog is genetically predisposed to find things.

It is absolutely a bad breed. Killer dogs should be banned worldwide. Every single pitbull, rottweiler, etc. should be spayed/neutered and the breed should end. They're too dangerous and dumb owners have proven that you can't rely on humans to keep them under control.

It's not the dogs' fault, mind - it's their instinct. But that doesn't mean that future generations should have to deal with it.

Unity is a game engine that is frequently used by mobile app developers and indie gamedevs. It's lightweight and easier to learn than its main competitor, the Unreal Engine.

Sometime within the last year, Unity adjusted their terms of service. It used to state that you were only governed by the TOS for the version of the Unity Editor you used. If you disagreed with a new TOS, you could use the older terms as long as you didn't update the Unity Editor. This clause was silently removed a while ago, without replacement. Nobody noticed.

This week, Unity announced they are changing how they charge for the use of their engine. It used to be you had to subscribe to Unity's developer accounts monthly if you were selling your games - this is how Unity made money. Unity has changed it so that you still have to do this, but they are getting rid of the cheapest plan (now the cheapest plan is $250/month) and Unity is now charging $0.20 every time your game gets installed. This is applied retroactively, to every game that has ever been made in Unity.

So if someone buys your game, installs it, then reformats their hard drive and installs your game a second time. You now need to pay Unity $0.40.

If you are selling your game for $1, then you effectively pay $0.30 in platform fees and $0.40 to Unity, meaning you only made $0.30 yourself. There were open questions about how this would work with GamePass, Humble Bundle, etc. - Unity has said they'll just charge Microsoft (or whoever is the distributor) instead, without giving any details as to how this works.

This also means if you sold your game in 2012, you are now paying Unity $0.20 any time someone decides to reinstall your old game - even though at the time you were bound by a different EULA, which Unity now says is invalid and they can retroactively change the terms of.

People are saying this isn't legal, but indie devs don't have the money to throw at lawyers. Bigger corpo places do, but they also likely have a special contract.

People are understandably upset by this, as they are now going to be on the hook for money they don't necessarily have. This is a threat to their livelihoods and many games are just going to remove their games from sale rather than risk losing being on the hook for a bunch of money. This means you won't be able to buy a lot of indie games in the future.

FWIW, CashApp Taxes (formerly Credit Karma Taxes) is free for state and federal.

The heyday of /b/ (with the caveat that /b/ was never good) was 16 years ago now.

If we assume Hexbear is made up of Gen Z who are in their early 20s, they would've been ~4 years old. Hell, even the oldest Gen Z would've been ~10. Not exactly the prime age for /b/.

My guess is that Hexbear is a mix of Gen Z who never experienced the peak days of 4chan (and thus never got the edginess out of their system), plus Gen Alpha who are young and stupid.

A lot of Hexbear has their heart in the right place. It's just their minds are fucking crazy. Like, you can't support fascism and genocide just because "America bad".

Yes, America bad.

Yes, America institutionally bad.

Yes, America not fixable for at least a decade (or longer).

But that doesn't mean it's time to blindly support China and Russia. Especially when both countries are blatantly anti-LGBTQ. China shut down an LGBTQ center amidst a larger crackdown on LGBT rights; Russia is... Russia.

China doesn't care. They'll betray anyone in an instant, because they're fascists masquerading as the "party of the people".

The fact that there are so many pro-China supporters on Lemmy that want this shit makes me sad. Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad (same people), Hexbear...

4chan is a place where anonymous people can post whatever they want with no account.

As they say on their own website - "only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."

...I am beginning to realize that 2007 was 16 years ago. There's a whole generation of people who were born after 4chan had its heyday. People who don't even know what 4chan is.

So, uh, no. That's not him. 4chan just does that stuff.

I read this in his voice.

Hey, that happened to me, too!

I got scheduled for a mandatory meeting with 1 hour notice. During lunch.

I asked my boss what it was. He didn't know either. I joked that it was us being shut down.

Sure enough, 1 hour later we were both writing LinkedIn recommendations and helping each other find jobs after it was announced that our whole studio was being shut down by corporate and myself plus all my coworkers were all now jobless.

So the problem is that white noise doesn't compress very easily.

Compression algorithms are generally designed to reduce noise; if you have something that's extremely noisy it's really hard to compress because that's not what the algorithms were designed to do.

This means that these podcasts take up more space, which means they use more bandwidth than an equivalent non-white-noise solution.

A middle ground would be banning these "podcasts" and then having a white noise generator built into the app. The white noise generator would run locally on your device (very easy to make white noise) and wouldn't cost any bandwidth at all.

Google does the same.

I don't use Chrome. Every single time I go to any Google service, it tells me I need to be using Chrome. It doesn't take "no" for an answer; it's a constant nag.

Google Docs especially gets mad and doesn't even let you paste without formatting.