IIRC, she is actually pulling out a gun to shoot him, but he is faster.

I mean, they stopped having good stories and worlds 10 years ago.

If the demand is for business use cases… its more so that yes the demand is there, or at least was, but the returns are not.

Every industry projection of productivity gains from implementing LLMs into their businesses was wildly, wildly overestimsating how much it would actually help any given business.

So its basically all a massive leveraged bet on the idea that LLMs will be able to usefully automate tasks that used to be done by people… but for the most part, it can’t.

And that’s partially because the capabilities of LLMs are absurdly overhyped, and partially because most businesses internal software set up is a clusterfuck nightmare of smashed together contractor modules and services that barely works, because management tells developers to just keep putting bandaids on things snd writing spaghetti code, never letting them do a proper refactor/restructure.

Yep.

They need us willing to die and fight over the scraps, not think about why.

I was going to make a Kosher joke, but it felt like it was missing something…

Yeah, you kinda defeated your own argument there, but you do seem to recognize that.

You can instant resume on a Steam Deck, basically.

You can alt tab on a PC, at least with a stable game that is well made and not memory leaking.

Yeah, better RAM / SSDs does mean lower loading times, higher streaming speeds/bus bandwidths, but literally, at what cost?

You could just actually take the time to optimize things, find non insanely computationally expensive ways to do things that are more clever, instead of just saying throw more/faster ram at it.

RAM and SSD costs per gig are going up now.

Moore’s Law is not only dead, it has inverted.

Constantly cheaper memory going forward turned out to not the best assumption to make.

By taking away bread and security from others, with extra steps?

It is our collective propsenity to shrug at the inevitability of the system that makes the system inevitable.

FAB is the merger of the Unreal Asset Store, Quixel, and Sketchfab, which increasingly has more and more Unity assets on it.

Unity is no longer doing HDRP.

Unity is also generally financially floundering.

Tencent owns 40% of Unreal.

Tencent bails out financially floundering gaming companies by purchasing significant controlling stakes in those companies.

… conclusion:

Tencent owns a large share of Unity, we just don’t know about it officially/publically yet.

Large known investors in Unity include:

Vanguard

BlackRock

Sequoia Capital

Silver Lake Technology Management

Wellington Capital Management

… all of these either literally are Private Credit/Equity firms, or they have significant exposure to Private Credit/Equity firms.

At the moment, and over the last 6 months roughly… Private Credit/Equity firms are basically all undergoing the Private Credit/Equity equivalent of a bank run.

They need cash NOW, so they sell to Tencent, Tencent establishes said controlling or at least substantial position, starts giving orders to Unity.

Thus, Tencent owns substantial parts of both Unreal and Unity.

… but thats just a GAME theory!!!

PC games are software.

Unfortunately many PC games are also like this, astoundingly poorly optimized, just assume everyone has a $750 GPU.

Proton can only do so much.

… and Metal basically can’t do that that much.

Look at Metal Gear Solid 5 or TitanFall 2, and tell me realtime video game graphics have dramatically increased in visual fidelity in the last decade.

They haven’t really.

They shifted to a poorly optimized, more expensive paradigm for literally everyone involved; publisher, developer, player.

Everything relating to realtime raytracing and temporal antialiasing is essentially a scam, in the vast majority of actual implementations of it.

Anon, both you and your dad are probably autistic.

XiaoXiao stick fighter games were absolutely awesome.

By ‘real AI’, I presume you mean AGI, a digital intelligence that is actually superior to human intelligence, ie, is more intelligent than the smartest human and has all our collective knowledge and is able to comprehend it and evaluate it more consistently than any of us… and also is thus capable of improving itself and becoming more and more superintelligent.

That is still scifi, that is not real.

What we currently call ‘AI’ is basically an extremely expensive, lackluster pantomime of that, that fools fools into thinking it is the other thing… mostly because it is sycophantic and very confident, ie, it uses well known ‘hacks’ in human psychology, where confidence, breadth of knowledge, usage of technical terms… you know, con man techniques … are confused for actual competence.

If we had a real AGI, it would be be capable of both hacking into all the military information systems of the world, and tricking humans into nuking each other… and it would also be capable of making actual novel improvements in software, hardware, engineering, physics, social engineering, etc, and could decide to be a kind of benevolent dictator of the entire economy, that it would command and control.

We have no capacity to model the morality that would emerge in an actual superintelligence, because we definitionally would not be able to keep up with attempting to understand how it thinks.

Thats where the whole ‘is AI the potential best thing ever or would it become SkyNet’ problem comes from.

… But we are not there yet.

We are at… basically, a very fancy autocomplete algorithm that can analyze huge datasets reasonably well, compared to an average human, but also makes all kinds of mistakes, hallucinates ‘facts’ in order to generate more coherent things to say, and these hallucinations routinely trick non subject matter expert humans into just going along with it, again, like a con artist, like a fast talking ‘influencer’ pitching selling you a course or giving you some kind of ‘advice’.

And currently, what is going on, is that we are pouring I think at this point trillions of dollars into ‘AI’, under the premise that it is AGI, that it will be capable of generating massive returns on investment and productivity increases…

… but the actual results are turning out to be, all averaged for everywhere it has been implemented… somewhere between a net productivity loss, to meagre productivity gains.

What that means is that the AI Mania is the biggest bubble, the most severe malinvestment of economic resources in the history of humanity.

When that pops, we basically formally transition into cyberpunk dystopia, technofeudalism.

AI is a tool, a device, a machine. Thus, it depends on how you use it, what you use it for.

Right now, we have a whole lot of companies saying they are laying off workers because we don’t need them anymore… this is broadly a lie.

People are being laid off because the economy, the real economy, is already contracting, basically due to the collapse of the US as the undisputed world hegemon.

AI, as a broad, socioeconomic force… is mostly a smokescreen, the ultimate promise of bread and circuses, that masks a gigantic wealth transfer and restructing of economic and political power.

AI as a tool can be used for good, in specific use cases.

But it broadly isn’t, because people are fooled by the conversation machine into thinking it can do things that there is no evidence it can do, because people do not understand its limitations and flaws, and then they plug it into their immensely shitty business processes, and just assume it will not break things when it tries to use them.

AI, as it currently exists, is essentially a false or trickster God of Capitalism.

I was fucking about in Flash back when it was Macromedia Flash.

Yeah, a good many of us did not ‘celebrate’ its downfall… maybe we took it for granted, but that’s not the same thing.

Thankfully, NewGrounds is still up and operational.

Some people just have more exciting … gaming lives.

… I will find you.

Moral of the story. If you’re an engineer, never go above and beyond. stop working for fucking corpos, otherwise you don’t get to act surprised when corpos do corpo things.

Its broken as fuck and doesn’t really work.

If you mean trying to run the engine, to do game development, on linux.

Its a half-baked after thought.

O3DE arguably more fully actually ‘works’, on linux now, than UE 5 does.

Given that Unity and Unreal have the same owners, their asset stores have been consolidated, and Unity discontinued its HDRP branch/render pipeline…

Yeah, Unity is now Unreal Engine, Little Bro Edition.

TIL my comment is the top comment.

But the ATProto architecture is still too fundamentally centralized, and thus easily censorable.

Quoting myself from nearly a year ago:

Bluesky is … arguably ‘federated’, but it is centralized, not decentralized.

https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization

Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative … ‘Relay’, that all ‘federated’ users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the ‘AppView’, ie, what all other people/users can actually see.

So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.

It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.

And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.

If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.

The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.

In that model… every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.

Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with… and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.

That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being ‘distributed’.

Now, of course, thats a bit simplified, the AppView is actually more complex than that, the ‘Relay’ is in actuality a bunch of different machines in different physical locations…

… but it still acts as a monolithic layer, a gate keeper, controlled by a board of directors.

Is anybody else running their own Relay yet?

Thats a genuine question, I totally wrote off BlueSky long ago.

If not, this is all still fundamentally the same.

If you just see ActivityPub as ‘normal social media that can talk to other servers’… you don’t get it.

1. There’s no single centralized chokepoint that is under corporate control.

2. Costs of running your own ActPub instance are generally not exhorbitantly expensive, thus the entire paradigm is more ‘small d’ democratic, has a lower barrier to entry and is thus more practically distributable.

He was not wearing body armor.

To cause a straight-on shot from a 30.06 or a 5.56 from 150 yards to deflect, at that extreme of an angle, into his neck, externally, he would have had to be wearing plate armor.

Plate armor carriers are quite bulky and noticable.

They would be obviously visible, under a form fitting T Shirt.

There are tons of pics and video of Kirk that day, bending in different directions… at no point does he appear to be wearing a plate carrier under his shirt.

Kevlar or a more flexible kind of armor would not have deflected such a straight-on shot, it would have ‘caught’ it, or just slowed it down and spread some of the impact energy over the rest of his chest, while ultimately failing to stop the bullet from penetrating into him… at the point of impact, which would have left him with a chest/waist entry wound, which does not match the autopsy at all.

Either a straight-on shot to kevlar or plate would have caused brusing and/or fractures to his chest, whether the scenario is deflection or penetration.

Those were not indicated by the autopsy.

If he had been wearing body armor, been shot from the front, and the bullet then ricocheted into his neck…

The shirt would have a hole or tear or at least abrasion damage of some kind where the initial impact happened.

It does not.

He had a backup lapel mic above his right pectoral, which was magnetically attached under his shirt, which then had a wire going across his chest, to a powerbank/transciever on his left side.

https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/viral-conspiracy-theory-about-charlie-kirks-death-is-false/

The deformation of his shirt was a result of the impact of the round hitting him, causing him to jolt, which knocked off the lapel mic, which tugged on the wire under his shirt.

Kirk wearing the lapel mic at another event:

The visible backup lapel mic above his right pec, immediately prior to being shot: