It appears that most people don’t care about spending $100 on a video game.

I’m fine with spending $100 on a video game. I mean, said video game needs to provide reasonable value, but the amount of time I play a game varies way more than game price, is the dominant factor.

I didn’t really like what I played of GTA 5 and probably won’t play this one, but for the right game, sure. If I could get a game I like similar to Oxygen Not Included, which I’ve played for many, many hours, I’d do $100 happily.

pre-orders

Now that I will agree with being a problem.

Maybe it’s for older cards?

Actually, Major Major had been promoted by an I.B.M. machine with a sense of humor almost as keen as his father’s.

—Catch-22, Copyright 1961

They’re like birds, right? Don’t they have a cloaca instead?

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Apparently yes, though this author couldn’t resist “butthole”…

https://www.livescience.com/first-dinosaur-butthole-found.html

1st preserved dinosaur butthole is ‘perfect’ and ‘unique,’ paleontologist says

This was a multipurpose hole.

The first dinosaur butthole ever discovered is shedding light where the sun don’t shine. The discovery reveals how dinosaurs used this multipurpose opening — scientifically known as a cloacal vent — for pooping, peeing, breeding and egg laying.

I can’t tell you how to do it under Wayland off the cuff, but you can map a controller’s analog stick to act like a mouse. It’s a little clumsy, but that’ll let you use any mouse-oriented DE.

Some gamepads, like the PS5’s controller and I assume the Steam Controller, have touchpads built into the controller that work as pointing devices.

If you don’t specifically want only a gamepad, I’d probably use a trackball or touchpad and maybe keyboard, as a trackball can be used from a couch, lile a gamepad.

In the global financial crisis, in at least California, which is a non-recourse mortgage state — that is, if someone defaults on a mortgage, the lender can only go after the property — a number of people discovered that if they refinanced, the new mortgage was recourse, and a lender could go after other assets and wages to cover the default. For people who bought into the top of a bubble, then walked away from the house after prices dropped and they were underwater, had negative equity, this was a major issue.

Those rules were later changed, but I would be careful to understand the implications of refinancing a mortgage in your particular jurisdiction, as they may be non-obvious and substantial.

On one hand, I think that it’s fair to point out, and an interesting point.

But…on the other hand, I also think that generally when people say “we did X”, they’re often including people who aren’t their direct ancestors. And the degree to which they do that is context-dependent. Though they probably aren’t going back anything like 20 million years, either, in any kind of common context.

What’s our closest living relative?

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Looks like chimpanzees and bonobos, and our last common ancestor was maybe 5–13 million years back.

I guess we would include 'em in “we” if someone was saying “we left the oceans”. But they aren’t gonna make the in-group for “we won that sports game last night”.

There are a number of games — particularly those since SSD storage became pretty much the norm — that do not load a whole level, but load while playing. Why not just load the game (or the level)? Because it lets devices with less RAM store more stuff than they otherwise would. You have more relaxed caps on things lile texture size.

I’d assume that the engine is still going to try to predict what content is going to be needed prior to it being needed, that it’s got a strategy more sophisticated than just “load resource first time it’s requested”. But SSD storage is going to be more forgiving of a miss than rotational storage.

Bethesda uses the term “cell”. I know that their engine uses a square grid as the loading unit, loads a sort of circle of cells around the cell where the player is.

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It sounds like the Unreal 5 terminology is “sublevel”, for the units loaded.

https://old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1tchk8k/is_level_streaming_even_worth_it_if_your_game/

We might have a habit of being curious and seeing things and patterns that aren’t really there. And it’s frustrating to watch it misfire.

But…maybe it’s worth it to come up with silly ideas on a fair number of occasions if that same tendency sometimes leads us to make valid discoveries that we wouldn’t otherwise have made. Sometimes even people who have wrong ideas run over important things.

There was this guy once who disregarded well-established (and correct) geophysical science with some cockamamie theory that he thought would make him rich. He tried to sell a bunch of people on funding his ideas, who mostly turned him down. Eventually, he managed to get funds and set out to prove his ideas. That experiment would have been suicidal for him — because his ideas were totally wrong, making the experiment lethal — if not for the great good fortune of, during the course of this experiment, making a (very important) real discovery that saved his life. He then tried — not very successfully — to claim that his new discovery actually showed that his ideas were correct.

He was a dreamer, and a bit of a nut, and he was wrong. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he had convinced himself that the circumference of the world was much smaller than was actually the case, and that if there was nothing but ocean to the west of Europe, one could safely reach Asia in a single trip of the sort that ships of the time could make. Instead, he discovered the New World.

There were a lot of other people who went looking down other weird rabbit holes with other weird ideas. They usually didn’t come up with anything worthwhile.

But…that discovery was worth a whole lot of poking around blind alleys.

So, hey, maybe a human tendency towards a bit of being a crank and running down crazy ideas is worthwhile, if it’s the price we pay to occasionally come up with something really amazing down a weird rabbit hole.

That comment is quoting text from an article.

I have not seen that particular cartoon.

However, a common criticism is that there are only a handful of Garfield cartoon “templates” with some bits swapped out, and I have seen plenty of Garfield cartoons in approximately this format: three panels, Garfield is bored, John is emotional, Garfield is bored.

goes back to look at the first year of Garfield

Okay, apparently it predates Garfield, as there was a predecessor strip, Jon:

https://garfield.fandom.com/wiki/Jon,_1976_comic_strips

Jon comic #7, February 19, 1976:

EDIT: Jon #1 looked familiar. It looks like a lot of the first year of Garfield was recycled Jon cartoons too. For example, here’s Jon #1:

And here’s Garfield #1:

So, I get the argument — there’s hardware, why not use it — but it’s got some things that I’m not super-enthralled with, even though the author has clearly put a lot of work into making it work.

• I don’t know how far I’d trust the Linux side of things to automatically come up and stay up. Like, they use a program to trigger Termux at boot and disable battery management to try to avoid having Termux be killed, but the host OS isn’t really designed for this.

• Stuff like the network is outside the control of the GNU environment; Android apps can only do so much. They did mention some of the issues here and looked to work around those limitations.

• I don’t know if Android apps are allowed to reboot the phone; I would guess not. My Termux environment doesn’t have a shutdown or reboot command, which also kinda makes me bet not.

• Android is a lot more amenable to doing things like expecting there to be a user at the screen. Say the phone reboots to do a system upgrade and prompts me for something, which is reasonable to do for a phone but not great for a server. I can’t do much about that remotely.

• I don’t get to update the kernel, and at some point, phone vendors stop shipping updates.

• I don’t have access to all of the hardware.

• Phone hardware does have a battery, which is neat, but it’s also missing hardware that I’d like on a server, like an Ethernet socket and much (or on many phones, any) by way of expandable storage. No external display port (which, given the Android expectations about a user being present, might be something that one might want to have a way to access remotely). Might be possible to add on some of this via USB.

• No convenient way to remotely do a hard reboot, which is something that I’d like on a server. That integrated battery backup also means that you can’t just yank power. I mean, maybe you could rip the power button off and rig up some sort of relay hooked to the contacts or something to hold the power button down using some other system, but…

I think that there might be reasons to do this. Like, 14-year-old-me might have done it because 14-year-old-me has little disposable income, but plenty of time to work on things. If an old phone fell into my lap then, hey, sure. And it’s got interest from an “I’m gonna do this, dammit” standpoint. But in terms of saving money…even with memory prices where they are, low-end, small PCs are not that expensive. Here’s a system with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD for $180. Here’s a refurb — and it is a refurb, but the phone is also used and EOL — for $129 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD. Those have the ports above, can just run straight GNU/Linux, run x86, are more expandable, are designed with less constraints on power and cooling, and meet or exceed the phone specs. Most of the people who are in a position to hack together a custom server on a phone and are comfortable fixing or working around any issues are also the kind of people who probably are in a position to pull a pretty solid income, and where the time tradeoff becomes increasingly unfavorable.

So, from past reading, I believe that a lot of jobs in brick-and-mortar banks — which have historically had a major brick-and-mortar presence — have been on a long decline. That’s a phenomenon that well predates popular LLM use, brought about by Internet, ATMs, and similar, which tended to displace brick-and-mortar stuff.

I physically went by my local bank the other month (for the first time in a long time) and while the building was still there, it was like a tomb. All of the service desks that had once held tellers were empty. There was one person in an office handling the few people coming by in person.

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https://www.alliantcreditunion.org/money-mentor/the-rise-of-online-banking-in-the-us

Every year, more and more Americans are going online to do their banking.

According to Pew Research Center, 46 percent of adults in the United States banked online in 2010. That number grew to 51 percent in 2013, and in 2015, a full 81 percent of adults who manage their household’s finances banked online.

https://www.branchspot.com/bank-branches-closed/

U.S. banks have been closing branches for years — thinning out “banking deserts” where the nearest branch is now miles away. Branchspot tracks 939 closed or relocated branches nationwide, sourced from the FDIC.

You could get a Thermos and brew up a bunch yourself, just take a chilled drink with you.

Gives you a wider selection and doesn’t take long for the Thermos to pay itself back.

I don’t usually take iced tea, but I have been known to take a Thermos of ice water.

I agree that “open source” is often incorrectly used to refer to open-weight models, things that are more analogous to closed-source software where you get the binaries.

That being said, the article does correctly use “open weights”. The submitted title here lacks it, but the current title of the article does appear to have it, so either the article author updated the title or the submitter truncated it.

Most people wouldn’t use their phones for console games if they could, because it’s a different form, with a device that has a different purpose. The way most people play mobile games & console games are very different: sporadic short sessions during the day is different from a 2-3 hour gaming session.

I mean, he’s talking about at the game dev level, so if he’s thinking of mobile, which he did not explicitly say, I assume that he’s not talking about “run existing non-mobile-platform game on server, play on mobile”, but rather “develop new game that runs on server and displays on mobile”. It could reasonably be structured toward bursty mobile play. Just provides more compute power than exists on a phone. The phone basically is doing the equivalent of streaming YouTube and passing inputs up, in such a scenario.

The article author, on the other hand, is clearly thinking about PCs, given that they’re talking about GPU prices.

The “advent of streaming,” Zelnick said, is something that Take-Two believes is “right around the corner, in terms of having something that’s low latency and really works well for consumers. Machines that weren’t game machines before will become game machines.”

I mean, if you’re comparing it to, say, a local PC, it’s higher latency, less configurability, less reliability, and games will probably stop being available at some point. I am also skeptical that we have the bandwidth to move everyone to unicast high-res video streaming at once. You maybe gain on a troubleshooting front and it might be somewhat cheaper on a hardware front due to shared costs and people not using the systems 24/7 (though I suspect that people would want datacenters as near as possible due to latency, so you can’t be sharing hardware with a country who isn’t awake at the same time, say).

If there’s a real case for streaming gaming, I think that it has to be for mobile-only users. Mobile hardware is just too power- and cooling-constrained to be competitive with larger, fixed-in-place systems with wall power, so using a phone as a display for a remote server might make more sense, if it lets users without a PC play games that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to play.

I’m also really skeptical that the current memory crisis is going to be that much of a factor. Yeah, okay, so it costs more to buy a PC in 2026 and 2027…but it also costs more to buy a server to do streaming gaming on. That server might get higher capacity utilization, so it might benefit the streaming providers somewhat relative to everyone having a PC, but I’m pretty skeptical that that’s going to be a sea change.

I think that outside of mobile, if streaming games are going to be the future, that you’d see a major shift to console games doing it first. They have limited expandability, so don’t give up some of the things that you would if moving away from a local PC. Basically, instead of a PS6, say, yould just provide PS6-class games to PS5 users, with the PS5 being a thin client for a game running in a datacenter. But we haven’t seen a major transition of that sort.

There are genres for which the latency isn’t such a big deal. I think that it’ll always be a poor match with twitch games. If you’re playing a point-and-click adventure, though, latency may not matter much.

But my bet is going to be that in 2029, at the end of his three year period, most PC games continue to be local.

I think that if people really feel priced out of newer hardware during the memory shortage, they’re more likely to just keep playing less-hardware-demanding games locally than to transition to streaming games.

more economical to fly roundtrip from the UK to buy an MSRP GPU at Nvidia’s QuakeCon booth than it is to buy one anywhere online

That was for a limited number, for a high-end GPU, and for an Nvidia GPU. Most people are not using 5090s.

EDIT: There are some changes that could be made to game engines, if you’re doing it at the game dev level and developing a new game, to try to mitigate streaming latency, stuff that you can’t do if you’re trying to retrofit streaming to existing games. So, like, existing multiplayer latency-sensitive network games typically make use of client-side prediction. Like, my client will make some guesses about what other players are doing, since it won’t actually know until a packet reaches the server from them and then the server sends a packet to me. It might (reasonably) assume that the player will, say, keep the same buttons that they presently have down. So it makes that assumption and renders the world as if that assumption were true…but it remembers the last time it got a state update from that player, and it retains all the game world state up until that point. If it turns out that one of its predictions was wrong in a way that invalidates its assumptions, then it recomputes game state from that point in time. I see what looks like a short “glitch” maybe, but most of the time, latency appears to be reduced. There are variants on this, but this is roughly how things work.

It should be technically possible — though not normally done today that I’m aware of — for a streaming game server to make server-side predictions about my input and to render the game world and start streaming input to me as if that had been my input. If it gets an update from me and turns out that it was wrong, then it rolls back that world state and recomputes from that point. Similar approach to client-side prediction.

Prediction isn’t magic. It can’t make latency simply go away. You’d tend to see a lot more brief “glitches” this way after you push a button (or, if it’s a mobile phone, probably tap on the screen). But…you could potentially reduce the apparent impact of latency to some degree.

If you add thin client software to the mix that can do things like render simple visual effects and play some preset sounds, where the game instructs the thin client how to respond in advance, then when you push a button, you could potentially have the game software immediately play a “button pressed” sound and then start a visual effect like the screen flashing or something like that, even if it takes more time to get a rendered frame reflecting the input back from the other side. That could potentially improve perceived responsiveness.

So, being specific, what are you claiming? That the rate of change in price over some time period (what time period?) was comparable and accelerating and you believed that it would continue to increase?

Hard drive prices returned to their pre-flood level a decade prior to the AI boom.

Anxiety was on display on Tuesday, when the Nasdaq 100 fell 1.3% amid growing uncertainty about the eventual payoffs from massive artificial-intelligence investments. The S&P 500 declined 0.2%.

“IPOs are inherently more volatile,” Amy Wu Silverman, head of derivatives strategy at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a note to clients. Given the size and scope of SpaceX, “it is likely that the vol spread between Nasdaq and S&P remains wide until we close in on the inclusion of SpaceX into the S&P as well,” she added.

The bank’s equity sales team recommends investors buy puts on the Invesco QQQ Trust Series 1 ETF and the VanEck Semiconductor ETF to express their bearish views on the tech sector.

It’s certainly good for index fund investors (e.g. S&P 500 index funds lile SPY or VOO) whose indices didn’t recently get their index’s rules rewritten for rapid inclusion of some of these IPOs relative to those who did (NASDAQ 100 index funds like QQQ or QQQM, or Russell).