He / They
This is for people who want (and can afford) at least 4K with ray-tracing in the latest games and all of this at triple-digit frame rates
Sure, but are there really enough people who fit into that category to justify these cards? Based on the 4080 series sales, it seems not, but they’re still coming out with even beefier, more expensive cards anyways.
I know this is going way off-topic
In a similar vein, I grew up around IT because my mom worked on mainframes. I remember lots of nights of sitting under her desk at 3am because she got called in as Production Support when jobs would ABEND. When I was in high school, wanting to learn more about mainframes I set up Hercules, a mainframe System3xx emulator (looks like it supports z/OS now as well), and managed to find boot media for System370 and MVS. The desktop computer I was running the emulator on (a Gateway, showing my age), was more powerful than the original mainframe hardware.
I’m running a 2080 in my desktop, and I haven’t run into a game yet that I need a better card to run (at least, not with my 1080p monitors, which I prefer over higher-res ones). I also got a Framework 16, with the discrete Radeon 7700S GPU, and everything on it runs butter-smooth.
Point is, I can’t see justifying something that is $1600 just so I can run Starsector at the same 60 FPS I already get. It would take some truly groundbreaking game to come along to force me to consider upgrading to these ridiculous cards, and I don’t see that happening given the current consoles out there.
One thing I’d push back on in the article is:
That cost-per-user doesn’t decrease as you add more customers. You need more servers. More GPUs.
This is assuming constant use, which is not the case. If I have a server handling LLM prompt requests, and for illustrative purposes each request uses 100% of the single discrete GPU in it, and I only have 1 customer, but that one customer only uses it 5% of the day (which would actually be pretty high in real terms), I can still add additional customers without needing to buy additional servers. The question is whether the given revenue of a single server outweighs its cost to run.
And when it comes to training, that is an upfront cost, that you could (if you get a model to where you want it) stop having to pay whenever you want. I’m pretty surprised they haven’t been really leaning into training models for medical diagnoses, because once you have a model that can e.g. spot a type of tumor with n% accuracy beyond a human, you don’t really have to refine it further if you don’t want to (after all, it’s not like the humans can choose to do it better themselves at that point, like they can with writing prompts).
Netanyahu just full-on pushing Israel into a regional war to stay in power. Sadly, the US is probably going to help him.
Can’t wait to see the Israel apologists start arguing that Israel flattening city blocks in other countries is justified, but other countries attacking Israel in response at all, is evil and unjust. Looks like at least one is already here…
Armed with more of his infamous maps of the Middle East, the right-wing leader went on to claim that “Israel seeks peace,” while also pledging to wage war on Hamas-governed Gaza until “total victory” and telling “the tyrants of Tehran” that “if you strike us, we will strike you.”
Shockingly, they are real.
When it’s being employed properly, it’s absolutely an important tool, but the way they’re presented to most users, such as on-device biometric data stores (e.g. Apple’s secure enclave, or a TPM verification), aren’t the proper implementations. Nor is using biometrics as your primary auth method.
It’s supposed to be “something you have and something you know and something you are”, not “have or know or are”.
NIST standards for biometrics require the biometric data be stored on a secure remote server, and that the scanner device check against that during auth. Putting the biometric data on the device means that you’re losing a big part of your non-repudiation.
And it’s even worse when you’re using a secondary factor (biometric) as your primary or only factor (e.g. a phone unlock), that grants access to your other factors like password store and OTP tokens.
Biometrics are never supposed to be a single-factor auth method when used properly, but that’s how most people use them now, and it degrades their security.
If your phone requires a passcode, a TOTP grant, and a biometric scan, by all means, please do employ biometrics, but if it’s going to be your only factor, DO NOT.
Or, for simplicity to the average forum reader:
Never use biometrics. It’s just not worth the tradeoffs.
There are tons of games that are playable on smartwatches. Apart from that, there are a lot of single watch-games from the past. McDonalds and BurgerKing have also had a lot of watches with games or toys, as well.
Tamagotchi watches came back in 2021, which is one great option.
There are a ton of retro LCD video game watches out there, but they can be pretty pricey.
This reminds me of similar questions around both Atomic Heart and Hogwarts: Legacy, and I think there are a couple differences in both cases.
In the case of Atomic Heart, part of the controversy was related to the sexualized robots that bear a traditional Ukranian hairstyle, and how subservient they are towards the player, as well as the way the USSR was depicted in general in the game. Taken together, a lot of people saw that as reflective of the current and common attitude of Ukraine being a subject state of Russia. So the monetary support for the devs were potentially directly benefiting people with questionable views.
In the case of Hogwarts: Legacy, the connection to a bad actor is even more clear cut, wrt JKR. Abstaining from purchasing it was roundly discussed as a boycott of her and her views, even if she had minimal connection to the game itself (we know she did financially benefit from it, as she stated it herself on Xitter).
I think this is one too many steps removed for me to condemn it in the same vein. Yes, Russia will benefit in tax revenue from it, but the studio isn’t state-owned or something; it’s no different than buying something made (in whole or part) in China giving tax money to the CCP to further Uighur genocide in Xinjiang, or tax money in the US going towards genocide in Gaza via military aid.
I’m not saying you’re a hypocrite if you choose to not buy this but still pay US taxes, because ultimately the consequences that you face for those 2 actions is very different. I might say it’s hypocritical to buy Chinese goods though, given they are still trading with Russia and supplying them materials.
Personally, I’m not going to treat all people as proxies for their government; that’s too close to collective punishment.
I never said afford to protect it, just to comply with the requirements for doing the checks and storing it. Passing SOC2 or PCI-DSS (if you’re doing verification via payment card) or whatever certification they decide to create to attest to this stuff, doesn’t make you more secure in reality, but if you can’t afford to do those attestations in the first place, you’re out of the game.
This is just another way to ban “harmful” content.
That is true, but it’s not the whole picture. KOSA applies a Duty of Care requirement for all sites, whether they intend to have adult (or “harmful”) content or not.
So your local daycare’s website that has a comment section could be (under the Senate version that has no business size limits) taken to court if someone posts something “harmful”. That’s not something they or other small sites can afford, so those sites will either remove all UGC or shutter, rather than face that legal liability.
The real goal of KOSA (and the reason it’s being backed by Xitter, Snap, and Microsoft) is to kill off smaller platforms entirely, to force everyone into their ecosystems. And they’re willing to go along with the right-wing censorship nuts to do it. This is a move by big-tech in partnership with the Right, because totalitarianism is a political monopoly, and companies love monopolies.
Booby traps are a war crime, because they do not discriminate between civilians and combatants, even if you place them in a location that is only likely to be accessed by combatants. And public markets and banks and homes aren’t that.
A booby trap is defined by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the body charged with oversight and implementation of the Geneva Conventions and related treaties on the law of armed conflict, as a “harmless portable object” – but redesigned to contain explosive material. They are a prohibited means of warfare and are equally prohibited by law enforcement authorities.
I’ve never said Hezbollah is good. I know they teach their children to hate Jews. I just also know what is taught in Israel.
This is a tough and complex issue, because tech companies using algorithmic curation and control mechanisms to influence kids and adults is a real, truly dangerous issue. But it’s getting torn at from all sides to force their own agendas.
Allowing large corporations to control and influence our social interactions is a hugely dangerous precedent. Apple and Google and huge telcos may be involved in delivering your text messages, but they don’t curate or moderate them, nor do they send you texts from other people based on how they want you to feel about an issue, or to sell you products. On social media, companies do.
But you’ve got right-wingers clamoring to strip companies from liability protections from user-generated content, which does not address the issue, and is all about allowing the government to dictate what content is acceptable from a political standpoint (because LGBTQ+ content is harmful /s and they want companies to censor it).
And you’ve got neolibs and some extremely misguided progressives pushing for sites that allow UGC (which is by definition all social media) to have to check ages of their users by implementing ID checks (which also of course treats any adults without an accepted form of ID as children), which just massively benefits large companies who can afford the security infra to do those checks and store that data, and kills small and medium platforms, all while creating name-and-face tracking of peoples’ online activities, and legally mandating we turn over more personal data to corporations…
…and still doesn’t address the issue of corporations exerting influence algorithmically.
tl;dr the US is a corporatist hellscape where 90% of politicians serve corporations either willfully, or are trivially manipulated to.
PS: KOSA just advanced out of committee.
If you think you can negotiate anything even remotely resembling peace with an organization that has vowed to not just eradicate Israel, but every Jew in the world, then you’re hopelessly misguided.
You can’t use the boogeyman of genocide to justify war crimes.
Netanyahu saying “it’s us or them” is the exact same rhetoric as Hezbollah, but I don’t hear you arguing it’s fine for the “them” in that statement to do war crimes in response. I wonder why the double-standard?
Except they filed a patent for exactly that recently, so I’m guessing it is for the capture mechanics. It shouldn’t pass muster in that case, but Japanese courts be wild (and very pro-Nintendo).
I kick-started the Ouya, years and years back. Played a few games on it, but it was just too underpowered.
The GCW Zero was another similar story; just an underpowered handheld console.
I really like the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. It’s a non-major console that is 1000% worth the money.
Silent Hill 2
Halo: Combat Evolved (the Flood levels are horror masterpieces)
A day after Blinken called the pagers a dangerous escalation, Israel was like, “just wait bro, I’ve got even more terrorism to do!”
So far, 12 people have been confirmed killed by the pager explosions. 2 of them were children. So in their “highly targeted attack”, Israel still managed a ridiculous 1-to-5, child-to-adult kill ratio. Most moral army!/s
I think the first game did a better job of making the player feel like they were starting at 0, and working upwards from there, which is my preferred RPG progression.
In 2 I sort of felt like I was already a badass from the start. Might have just been my perception, but I remember in 1 finding the harpies scary and challenging when you’re escorting the ophidian head on the cart to the capital. In 2, you run into a bunch of harpies right after the first camp, and they were just like nothing.
One of the worst and most predictable outcomes of Marxist-Leninism is the meshing together of the post-revolution counter-counterrevolutionary force, with the single-party state.
Marx never intended for there to be a central government wielding authority to combat counter-revolutionary backlash, this was supposed to be a continuation of the proletariat revolutionary movement, that served both to prevent society from sinking back into top-down control during peacetime complacency, and to keep the productive, positive, unifying spirit generated in a freedom-seeking revolutionary movement from dying out once the revolution was complete, and seeing the proletariat become divided.
When Lenin (and drawing on Lenin, Mao) murdered the whole “stateless” part of Communism, that counter-revolutionary force became a tool for justifying suppression of the proletariat by the State, because the state was (not actually, of course) the revolutionary force. This also insulates the state against ever dissolving into the actualized stateless society that MLs still claim to totally be moving towards, because anyone seeking to dissolve the state to that end is, in the state’s eyes, indistinguishable from other counter-revolutionary forces seeking to dissolve the state to return to Capitalism/ Feudalism/ Monarchy/ etc.
*After all, how can the single-party State know if the proletariat are actually good Communists, or whether they’re actually counter-revolutionaries? Only by maintaining constant surveillance and vigilance (and continuing the State)!