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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • There are lots of reasons why governments might desire to get rid of physical currency.

    1. Crime - Physical money is the option of choice for criminals as it allows them to make off-record transactions so their activities are hard to trace

    2. Tax - When otherwise legal business is conducted in cash, it’s possible for business income or employee pay to be undeclared or underreported, meaning the government is losing out on tax revenue. This is huge, and the gov really wants their slice of that cash.

    3. Manufacturing and distribution - A minor point, but it is expensive to make physical currency, as well as to keep improving it to prevent forgeries and such. Getting rid of physical currency removes this problem.

    I’m sure there are other reasons but those are what came to mind.

    Despite these factors, any move to a fully cashless society is controversial, because not everyone is in a position where being fully digital is feasible. It has the worst effects on those who are already marginalised and disadvantaged in society, like the homeless, who may not even be able to open a bank account.

    So I think it will be quite a long time until it might happen.








  • Oh cool. That’s good to know. I was mistaken.

    Strange the article didn’t menton it, but searching further it seems like you’re right.

    I guess they are going out of their way to “big up” the Quest release in the press coverage because that is a separate platform / storefront and so can garner extra sales, while PC and PCVR are the same sale.

    Genuinely mislead me to think the PC version wouldn’t have VR, though!



  • As a developer who has worked on similar systems, I can see why it likely ended up that way. Not justifying it, only understanding it.

    In the case of banks, it’s likely that;

    • They needed to make 2FA mandatory for all customers, rather than opt-in. This means they needed an MFA method which a person of any technical competency can use. SMS is the “lowest common denominator” here, so they chose it.

    • The cost of sending SMS messages is high, but banks are (unsurprisingly) rich and can afford it

    It would be great if banks offered better MFA methods, but development time in old-school banks is often ridiculously long as it is a very risk-averse industry that is also slowed down a lot by bureaucracy. It’s likely they would choose something else on the roadmap, and stick with SMS as simply “good enough”


  • That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.

    What’s not fine is how they approached that problem.

    In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.

    Example:

    "We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.

    If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."

    Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor’s name is mentioned?






  • tiramichu@lemm.eetoGaming@lemmy.mlTaboo Question
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    2 months ago

    This is something I know about.

    The new ARM-based macs are actually very powerful, but as another commenter mentioned, the ARM architecture would normally be a bad fit for gaming as not much runs on it.

    That said, there are ways around it.

    I’m personally gaming on an M2 Macbook Pro, and am able to play almost my full Steam library of Windows games using a tool called Whisky

    Whisky uses Wine (a longstanding Windows emulator commonly used on Linux) along with other toolkits to translate DirectX graphics instructions into Mac-native ‘Metal’ graphics instructions. There is a performance hit in doing this, but the end result is actually pretty good.

    The result you get will depend on your hardware. I’m personally running a high-end M2 Max configuration and get 50 FPS on high settings in Deep Rock Galactic (a first-person shoooter game) but lower configurations would be okay for casual gaming.

    There is another product that does the same thing as Whisky called Crossover. It is paid (unlike Whisky which is free) but is otherwise similar. You can watch this YouTube video on Crossover to get some idea on how it works, how to set it up, and the performance you might expect.

    As for Minecraft, I personally play that too, and it actually runs natively on the new Apple Silicon macs anyway and doesn’t need anything special :)