“One of the exciting aspects of console hardware design is that we have freedom with regards to what we put in the console," Cerny begins. "Or to put that differently, we’re not trying to build a low-cost PC, and we aren’t bound by any particular standards. So if we have a brainstorm that audio can become much more immersive and dimensional if there’s a dedicated unit that’s capable of complex math, then we can do that. Or if the future feels like high-speed SSDs rather than HDDs, we can put an end-to-end system in the console – everything from the flash dies to the software interfaces that the game creators use – and get 100% adoption.
looks dubious
The problem with this is that that’s been true for about as long as video game consoles have been around. And…I don’t think that, aside from game controllers – which are now pretty common on the PC – consoles have seen some huge specialization.
I’ve pointed out before that while the strength of PCs is their expandability – you can pay a little more money, get a little smoother or more-detailed graphics or shorter loading times or whatever – the strength of consoles is that they’re locked down. Fewer compatibility issues, it’s harder to cheat, and there’s a level playing field for competitive games. That’s maybe a hardware benefit. But…I don’t think that that’s quite what he’s talking about.
I think that consoles benefit in some ways from having a single company that controls a given console and a single upgrade that happens at the same time. That makes it easier to roll out new hardware without compatibility issues making it too hard to require it. But, again…that just facilitates rolling out new hardware. There’s still a question of what new hardware is actually getting out there.
The problem is that there’s just too much overlap between what makes a good gaming PC and what makes a good video game console.
He points to an amusing video by Linus Tech Tips, which attempted to ‘kill’ the PlayStation 5 by building a $500 gaming PC that outperformed the console.
“They had to get a used motherboard,” he says. "That was the only way that they could build a PlayStation 5 equivalent for a PlayStation 5 price. And if you’re using used parts… well you can get a used PlayStation 5 for eBay for $300-something.
I mean…okay. But…if the basic argument here is that you’re not building low-cost PCs, this doesn’t really support that.
I also think that some of the things that used to play to console strengths are going away. A PC is (generally) designed for single-user use. Yeah, you can rig it up with more, but there’s no standard for multiple people, for example, using keyboards and mice to play one game. The display is (generally) smaller. Whereas consoles were (generally) set up with larger displays and multiple controllers. Games with multiple players were more of a thing at one point.
But today, with VoIP and pretty universal fast Internet access, playing remotely against people with other machines is more-practical on the PC (as well as on the console). That kind of reduces the importance of a case where the console was able to be optimized for a particular use case; multiple concurrent local users.
I mean, I’m willing to believe that someone could come up with some new use case where consoles are just way better suited, where the hardware has no great applications on the PC. Maybe…oh, I don’t know. Volumetric displays become the norm for TVs, but aren’t physically practical for laptops, so they don’t become the norm for computers. But, he’s talking a lot about potential, not actual cases where this has happened.
Do you remember when you could put your Mac to sleep, and when you woke it up a few days later, the battery would barely have dropped? Not now, because your computer never really sleeps anymore.
I assume that the Mac has some kind of hibernation function, and that that will reduce the battery drop to effectively zero.
So, I don’t use Twitter. But as I can tell, here are some of the the sources of friction:
The rebranding to X threw out brand value.
Policy shifts didn’t make some people – who wanted the other policies, which I understand to generally be more-content-restrictive – happy.
Twitter laid off a bunch of expensive human moderators who were censoring content.
So, speaking personally, I’m pretty hard in favor of speech being permissive. I don’t want someone preventing me from seeing someone’s speech. I want to make those decisions myself.
However, there are people who don’t agree; they’d prefer to have their environment have content moderation.
What the changes did was basically force people into a more-permissive environment, which some did not like.
With the benefit of hindsight, what I think Twitter should have done is the following:
Keep Twitter active.
Start charging for or otherwise monetizing Twitter sufficiently to cover human moderator costs.
Start up X.com. Provide a seamless migration path to X.
Gateway all Twitter content to X.com. Don’t do the reverse (or maybe do so on a limited basis, like having particularly popular content flow back, but filtered or human-curated). Maybe have some mechanism for Twitter users to request that X feeds be gatewayed back to Twitter.
That solves a number of problems:
People who want a place that have censored content have that option. The default is for the environment to remain the same.
People who don’t want heavy moderation can have that, and aren’t having to pay for someone else’s moderation.
If a country wants to ban X (like, most of the regulatory yelling I hear about X seems to be coming from the EU) they can do that. People in the EU can still use Twitter.
It’d even be possible to make other content-filtering variants attached to X, because I guarantee that some countries have different ideas of what they think should be permitted in public discourse.
The brand value doesn’t go away; I’ve seen many people point out that Twitter is a very-recognizable brand.
I suggested that something vaguely similar might be a good idea, back when the EU started passing some of their content restrictions. Didn’t involve the X.com stuff, though; that came later.
Like, the problem here is basically that there are different social norms and regulatory regimes around the world. Trying to create one global identical set of policies is invariably going to make some users and some countries annoyed. But…that’s not really necessary to have at least some level of global intercommunication.
Artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT could soon run out of what keeps making them smarter — the tens of trillions of words people have written and shared online.
I mean, one way to improve an AI is by increasing the size of the training corpus. That’s…not the only way. I think that “just throw more data at it” is probably good low-hanging fruit as long as that data’s there and not hard to get ahold of. But you can filter out bad data in your existing training set, or build more-elaborate systems that make more-effective use of the data there.
As you increase your training set size, you’re also increasing the cost of running training, which isn’t necessarily desirable.
I am confident that there is probably more-than-enough text and (and images, and audio, and video) in the world to train something that operates at the level of a human. I know that because humans do it.
For the case of farms, I suspect that it’d be better to use a different system to position a tractor. Like, set up poles with lights on them and have a 360 degree camera atop the tractor roof or something. If you undo the location of the light poles and the bearings to at least two, you have position.
Maybe make them use RGB light and have distinctive color-changing patterns so that they can be distinguished between.
We’re gonna need something like that anyway, for high-precision tasks like having self-driving trucks align themselves to loading bays.
I mean, Russia doesn’t have a whole lot by way of alternative markets for pipeline natural gas, due to the invasion.
And Russia didn’t negotiate the deal prior to kicking off the war, when they had more leverage.
They kind of set themselves up for not getting very favorable terms.
EDIT: Not to mention drawing down the storage of their last customer and then cutting them off as leverage. That’s gonna impact the expected risks attached to Russian gas.
I don’t understand the High Card thing. Like, sure, it makes it easier to get a valid hand…but isn’t it also hard to get enough cards in play to make that hand high-scoring?
Electrology is the practice of electrical hair removal to permanently remove human hair from the body.
Most practitioners will advise that complete removal of male pattern facial hair takes between 1 and 4 years, with an average treatment length of 2 years in case of one session per week, one hour per session.
people in the South Korean capital to refrain from touching balloons
carrying toilet paper,
Yeah… I mean, probably a good idea in general, but particularly in North Korea’s case.
I understand that North Korea can’t afford chemical fertilizer, so they use human waste, which has resulted in problems with parasites that are transmitted through fecal matter making their way through the population.
A North Korean soldier who was shot while fleeing across the border has an extremely high level of parasites in his intestines, his doctors say.
The defector crossed the demilitarised zone on Monday, but was shot several times by North Korean border guards.
Doctors say the patient is stable - but “an enormous number” of worms in his body are contaminating his wounds and making his situation worse.
His condition is thought to give a rare insight into life in North Korea.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician,” South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists, explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient’s intestines was 27cm (11in) long.
“I don’t know what is happening in North Korea, but I found many parasites when examining other defectors,” Professor Seong Min of Dankook University Medical School was quoted by the Korea Biomedical Review as saying.
Parasites which enter the body via contaminated food are often worms.
The soldier’s food may have been contaminated because the North still uses human faeces as fertiliser, known as “night soil”.
Lee Min-bok, a North Korean agriculture expert, told Reuters: “Chemical fertiliser was supplied by the state until the 1970s. By the 1990s, the state could not supply it any more, so farmers started to use a lot of night soil instead.”
If these faeces are untreated and fertilise vegetables that are later eaten uncooked, the parasites get into the mouth and the intestines of the person.
Yeah, you can see in the image where one of those was a hit below the waterline there in the Salton Sink:
The lowest point of the sink is 269 ft (82 m) below sea level
I’m afraid that this is probably it for the United States.
It was a brave experiment in democracy and republicanism that was influential on much of the world, though; its cultural and technological contributions will be missed.
On the silver lining side, it looks like the long-sought-after more-direct Northwest Passage between Europe and East Asia will be practical.
For centuries, European explorers, beginning with Christopher Columbus in 1492, sought a navigable passage as a possible trade route to Asia, but were blocked by North, Central, and South America, by ice, or by rough waters (e.g. Tierra del Fuego).
No doubt this will have significant effects on the transit-related economy in Panama.
There are a lot of open-source game projects that have started over the years. Some have turned into fully-completed games, but they are very few. And those generally are not asset-heavy, which I suspect a League of Legends-style game will be.
This could make it, but I wouldn’t be placing money on it.
I think if I were gonna try and do that, I’d aim for making the game playable with what amounts to just about placeholder assets.
The engine side is the easier part. You’ve got a number of people who have done engine reimplementations of a number of commercial games that can play the original game using the original game’s assets. But getting a game with original assets is hard.
I mean, it doesn’t look that great, but honestly, the bigger issue is that they’re trying to shoot down The Witcher III.
Like, okay. Everyone would like to make The Witcher III, and if game studios could consistently churn them out, they would. That’s not an implementation problem, but a project proposal issue.
I think it’d be easier to find some kind of existing successful game made in Russia and then go create new content for that with whatever political message the Kremlin wants to push, and provide free copies of that.
The first shaver I got was an electric, rotary one. Was okay, pulled a bit.
Later in life, I swtched to electric ones with a foil. Better about pulling, more-durable. I believe those are older. No idea why they moved away from those to rotaries.
Later in life, I switched to those cartridge razors, decided I preferred those. Smoother shave. No idea why they moved away from those.
Later in life, I just switched to a standard safety razor, uses standard old double-sided safety razor blades. No reason to pay for the cartridges, pulls less, seems that the blades last longer.
Every time I’ve moved to an older system, I’ve been happier with it than with the later system.
I don’t plan to ever move to a straight razor, but I gotta say that it’s one of the very few areas that I feel like newer has pretty consistently been worse. I kind of wish that I’d just started out with a double-sided safety razor from the get-go.
EDIT: I will add that I don’t really care that much about blades or specific razor or soap or aftershave. I’ve tried a number, been happy with everything I’ve used. However, I was not happy with a plastic-bristle shaving brush I got – the soap just slides off it easily, makes a mess. A boar brush I got doesn’t do that. Might be that they’ve figured out how to make plastic-bristle shaving brushes with a more-textured bristle surface or something, but I’d default to getting one made out of some type of actual hair.