For a while, video game sales were shooting up, during COVID-19. Lot of people inside with nothing to do.

My guess is that the people acquiring studios expected the increase in sales to outlast the pandemic, that it was a permanent change. That increase did not, in fact, persist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_the_video_game_industry

The video game industry was substantially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, as most industries were. The restrictions to social events and movement globally led to a sudden interest in gaming worldwide. This was credited with bolstering the success of many games, particularly games that launched in the March 2020 window, when gatherings were first restricted in many countries. A “gold rush” of video game acquisitions and investment ensued, marked by multi-billion dollar studio deals such as Microsoft’s $75bn acquisition of Activision. However, this would prove unsustainable as the rapid pandemic-era growth was temporary. Major layoffs occurred when restrictions began to ease in 2022, and it was clear that the rapid industry expansion would not be sustained.[1]

The NPD Group reported that video game sales in North America in March 2020 were up 34% from those in March 2019, and video game hardware up by 63% – which included more than twice the number of units of the Nintendo Switch console. Net spending across the first quarter of 2020 in the United States reached US$10.9 billion, up 9% in 2020 compared to 2019 according to NPD. An increase at this point, near the planned end of the eighth generation of video game consoles, was unusual and was attributed to the pandemic.[128][129] By July 2020, NPD Group reported that the total sales of video game hardware and software within the United States in the first six months of 2020 reached US$6.6 billion, the highest since 2010.[130]

Post-COVID

Towards the end of 2023 and continuing into 2024, the video game industry saw a large number of layoffs, with over 10,000 jobs lost in 2023 and at least 8,000 in 2024 by February 2024. While other factors contributed to the layoffs, such as previous acquisitions and mergers that came after 2021, the return to normalcy after COVID changed the profitability of video games, lowering market forecasts, which the inflated industry could not sustain.[300]

1. I’d hope that one’s production server is backed up.

2. $ alias rm="echo Lucky boy"; clear

   “Okay, ready to play.”

I was looking for small systems a while back, and the situation is surprisingly disappointing there. It should be technically possible to get portable and window heat/AC units (not split-mini, as one needs a duct for ventilation) that can maintain CO₂ and humidity levels. For putting a floor on humidity, one would need a water intake, and for doing energy-efficient ventilation, one would want a counterflow heat exchanger. As far as I can tell, small all-in-one systems like this just don’t exist.

You can get ERV or HRV ventilators with flex duct attachments, which do the heat exchange bit. They don’t cost that much, though given that it’s basically two fans and a heat exchanger, I was still kinda surprised how expensive they are. I mean, an air conditioner is a lot more complicated. I suppose that there just isn’t enough demand to produce the kind of sales volume required.

looks for an example

https://www.amazon.com/Aprilaire-V22BEC-Recovery-Ventilator-Easy-Install/dp/B0CXQ8RPTR

You could drive one of those off an indoors CO₂ sensor and that’d give energy-efficient ventilation with CO₂ control.

Yeah, I had a year of school in a very elderly school building with limited ventilation. When it was raining and all the windows were shut, I remember it being really hard to stay awake and focused. Didn’t learn until many years later to recognize that and that those are the symptoms of excessively high carbon dioxide levels (at the time, I thought maybe it was “low oxygen”, that everyone’s breathing had used up the oxygen, since I knew that fresh air would wake me up).

I’ve been in some office buildings with poor ventilation that do the same thing, though not as severely as that school.

IIRC, lime or something like that can be used as a carbon scrubber, but it’s not something that you’d want to do constantly and everywhere. Looked this up some time back.

searches

Soda lime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime

Soda lime is a mixture of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and calcium oxide (CaO). It is used in granular form within recirculating breathing environments like general anesthesia and its breathing circuit, submarines, rebreathers, and hyperbaric chambers and underwater habitats. Its purpose is to eliminate carbon dioxide (CO2) from breathing gases, preventing carbon dioxide retention and, eventually, carbon dioxide poisoning.[1][2]

Probably, if you want to regulate CO₂ levels in HVAC systems, best to ventilate to the outside and then run the exchanged air through a counterflow heat exchanger to preserve indoor temperature as much as possible.

If you’re playing a non-Esper mutant and get the physical mutation Regeneration to level 5 prior to Golgotha, you can more-or-less ignore disease.

https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/Regeneration

I normally go for Regeneration just because (a) it’s so much of a pain in the butt to deal with fungal infections, and just at level 1, the mutation makes it mathematically extremely unlikely for incubation to complete and (b) gamma moths can inflict mutating and at level 5 or above, Regeneration has a reasonable chance of curing it before it completes incubation. Level 9 and it becomes very unlikely, though that’s a lot of points to spend.

Level 5 Regeneration has a 2% chance of curing a major debuff per turn. Mutating has a short incubation period, 100 turns. So your chance of incubation succeeding at level 5 is 0.98¹⁰⁰, or about 13.3%.

At Level 9, it has a 4% chance per turn. So the chance of completion of incubation of mutating goes down to ~1.7%. And there’s a small chance that mutating will have a beneficial effect even if it completes.

There are a few other ways of dealing with mutating, like becoming friendly with the insects faction to keep gamma moths onside or building a character that can stay out-of-phase, and I imagine a character with a high DV might also work.

rarest and most expensive one

Wine isn’t the rarest and most expensive liquid. It is more expensive than water, four times by volume. You can easily get it at the Six Day Stilt.

Cloning draught is the most expensive liquid, 1250 times the value of water by volume. Once you have one dram of it and a gyrocopter backpack (which can contain 128 drams of it), a late game strategy — tedious though effective — is to farm metamorphic polygel. Various merchants, especially Tillifergaewicz at Yd Freehold, have a (small) chance to stock polygel. Polygel can be used to duplicate any item in the game. Cloning draught can duplicate any character in the game, including Tillifergaewicz, effectively increasing the chance of polygel being available when you visit Yd Freehold after a restock. Once you have a metamorphic polygel, you can duplicate a container and all of the liquid it contains, such as a gyrocopter backpack and all of the liquid in it. If you have two containers partially full of liquid, you can pour all of one container into another (well, except for neutron flux, which requires special handling). It takes 7 doublings to turn one dram of cloning draught into 128, enough to completely fill a gyrocopter backpack.

Once a polygel farm is up, you have effectively infinite money, an infinite supply of any item that you can obtain one of in the game, and an infinite supply of any character in the game.

Yeah, this really shocked me too.

Basically, we knew that high carbon dioxide levels would have negative effects, but we used to think that much higher levels were required to have an impact, like 5,000 ppm or higher.

Then in recent years, some people started doing experimentation and found that mental capabilities were significantly worse at 1000 ppm.

Just sleeping with my bedroom door closed — in a not especially airtight house — I get well over that.

Also worth pointing out that pre-industrial outdoor carbon dioxide concentrations were about 280 ppm. We’ve brought it up to about 420 ppm now. Makes it harder to ventilate to get rid of the carbon dioxide indoors than was once the case, because there’s also more of it outdoors now.

I’d imagine that goats can walk on solar panels too.

…roughly four months ahead of schedule.

One of the new memory fabs under construction.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

This has new 2x8GB 3200 DDR4 DIMMs being a bit over $200 at the moment.

A year back, it was $50, but not now.

Recent leaks suggest that Sony will either have to sell its upcoming PlayStation 6 console at a minimum of $960 or push the launch date back into 2028 or even beyond that.

I seriously think that they should push it back to 2028.

I think that Valve’s making a mistake by not pushing back the Steam Machine to 2028 too, though at least for Valve, a hardware platform flopping isn’t a big deal, since they don’t rely on it alone to make sales.

Or maybe I’ll be wrong, and gamers will be significantly less price sensitive than they have been in the past. But my guess is that they aren’t gonna be jumping on consoles with a pricetag that’s that high. As I said before, the only console to be successful in the past that cost nearly that much in inflation-adjusted terms was the Atari 2600. Everything else failed.

I just recently sold one of my houses for 900k. Which I bought for 300k 25yrs ago. And it even was due for major renovations. Well, could have. Actually sold to them for 500. Didn’t wanna be an idiot but also didn’t want to rip them off. I did nothing of value to justify that gain. And they were very happy. Still unfair…

300,000 euros in 2001 is, inflation-adjusted, 512,000 euros in 2026. If you sold at 500k euros, you sold for slightly less than you bought it for in real terms.

I mean, they’re all WireGuard. ProtonVPN is WireGuard. Mulvad VPN – what I assume you’re referencing — is WireGuard.

If you don’t like a given WireGuard VPN provider, then just switch to some other VPN provider that supports WireGuard and use that service instead.

Maybe someone will make a way to use DDR3 in a DDR4 system. :-) Make the impossible possible.

This country

The city in question is in Canada, if you’re thinking that it’s the US (as you appear to be in the US).

people are just shitty

Well, some people. Not like the whole of humanity lined up there to trash it.

I shouldn’t have thrown out all that DDR3 memory that I did.

They don’t say the scenario where that’s happening, though. Unless your editor supports large file editing, a mode where it doesn’t load the whole file into memory, unless it has filesize restrictions that make it just fail, if you throw a large enough file at it, it’s invariably going to use a bunch of memory.

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=out.bin bs=1M count=500
500+0 records in
500+0 records out
524288000 bytes (524 MB, 500 MiB) copied, 0.100949 s, 5.2 GB/s
$ vim out.bin

On my system, after it (slowly) finishes opening that file, vim’s using 511MB RSS. I know that vim has some sort of large file editing support, though not how to use it.

On emacs, large file editing support is from the vlf package.

$ emacs
M-x vlf RET
out.bin RET

Emacs is using 75.3 MB RSS after opening that.

Well, China would rather have AI in China than in the US. I don’t think that that part is what’s dumb about this.

I think that if I were the current American far-right, I’d stop dragging the pope into this stuff. Like, there is an anti-Catholic strain in the far-right that’s been around for a long time, but as I’ve commented before, if you start getting those anti-Catholic Protestants riled up, you’re also probably going to antagonize the Catholics, and a Catholic-Protestant schism in the US would be really bad for the Republican Party, since they’re trying to keep social conservatives as a bloc in their coalition.

I guess it’s more-understandable with Thiel than when Trump was having a spat with the pope, since Thiel isn’t as directly a political operator, but still.

If the pope says something that you don’t like, and you’re a prominent right-wing figure in the US, even if you really have it in for Catholics, you’re probably better-off biting your tongue and just addressing the thing they said, not turning it into a conflict with the person. Like, if I were Thiel, I’d have said “AI is really important to make the US competitive on the international stage” or something. Whatever, but avoid referencing the pope in particular.

I mean, there are a bunch of people who are involved in the oil and gas (and coal, but those guys are are a corpse) industry who are terrified of things going away. If coal goes, so does, say, Gillette, Wyoming. That’s part of where Trump got support from.

But it’s not gonna change the general trajectory all that much on carbon. They might kick the can down the road a little more, but it’s gonna die sooner or later.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita