Crucial and Samsung have good reputations.

“Very well regarded in the piracy community” isn’t a phrase I thought I’d see today 🤣

Running files you downloaded from a Russian website, what could possibly go wrong

It also would have been perfectly fine to name the company in the headline. There is plenty of room for it. But that’s Business Insider for you.

However, I have a strong suspicion that video game subscription services will end up following a similar trajectory to TV/movie streaming services at some point… Gamepass doesn’t really have any major competitors, and has been priced very aggressively in order to build market share, and it reminds me a lot of Netflix in its early digital stages.

Netflix pricing has always had a lot of pressure on it because the company has no product diversity. All Netflix offers is Netflix, so all of its revenue comes from there. Meanwhile, MS has Office as the world’s default productivity suite, and it rakes in billions from corporate Windows licensing and cloud services. As of about a year ago, gaming was actually less than 10% of their annual revenue. So they can support narrow margins on Game Pass pretty much indefinitely. And they are motivated to do so as the heavy underdog to Sony, whose consoles consistently outsell theirs by a ratio of about 2:1.

The issue with the donation has multiple stages. Stage 1 was the donation itself. Stage 2 was the intellectually insulting way that Brendan Eich defended his actions. Stage 3 is the negative impact that Proposition 8 had on California for many years, during which time millions of dollars in taxpayer money was wasted on legal proceedings to walk back the amendment banning marriage for people who dared to be of the same gender.

And we did actually hear a lot about the people who donated millions to Proposition 8. There was a lot of coverage of the millions that Mormons donated to get this type of marriage banned. It was a political decision that haunted the LDS church for years. Example 1, five years later. Here’s some more coverage from just last year. We’ve been hearing about those people for years. Because California remembers the damage that they wrought.

No one is saying that it should be free. The issue is that $50 for a straight port of a 13 year-old game is ridiculous when Sony’s competitor offers free backwards compatibility—and 4K upscaling. Microsoft absorbed their expenses for that as the cost of doing business, and it would be a blip on Rockstar’s balance sheet as well, since they make a perpetual avalanche of money from GTA Online. There’s really no credible justification for a price this high.

But the name of the website is “Alternative To,” not “Related To.” For example, if I’m looking for an alternative to Photoshop, I don’t want to see recommended video editors or 3D modeling apps. That is wasting my time with auto-generated page filler.

Unless I’m missing something here, this website does not provide a link to the original source and adds little to the discussion. They don’t even refer to them by their full name.

This is the original source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sources-nintendo-switch-2-targets-2024-with-next-gen-console/

This is considered to be very scummy behavior not just in games journalism, but in journalism in general. If you can’t do your own coverage, at least have basic respect for the people who can.

Clearly a coincidence.

Happened quite often in the past…over the course of thousands of years. Man-made global warming is a very different animal.

Blocking ad blockers has to be the real reason behind this convoluted bullshit. Google gets the lion’s share of its revenue from ads. The whole thing is a Trojan horse destined to make things better for them at our expense. The mere proposal is already accelerating my shift away from their products.

Something like 80% of Google’s revenue is from ads, even with that 30% cut they get from everything on their app store. So their core existence deeply conflicts with a free and open web. And it’s particularly unsettling because their web browser dominates the market, so they have the leverage to force us into their vision of the future. And this domination would be very difficult to counter. It’s the default browser on Android phones, and it is constantly flogged on Google.com, which is one of the most popular web portals in the world.

Looks like they’re using a bullshit excuse to funnel people into their mobile app.

”Don’t be daft. We’re in a warming phase.”

Yeah, here’s what you tell them. Temperatures were at baseline when the industrial revolution began. That’s just a handful of generations. We’ve now seen an increase of, what 2 degrees C since then? I don’t know the exact number. The point is, this sort of increase is not present anywhere else in the geological record. It takes thousands of years for average global temperatures to naturally increase to a point like this one. There are literally no hard spikes–until the industrial revolution began. The only credible takeaway is that humans are the problem.

That looks like a solid build. A few things to be aware of, though. Since you’ve chosen a large air cooler, you’ll need low-profile RAM. Corsair, Mushkin and G-Skill are popular choices. You also won’t need extra thermal paste. The tube that comes with the AK620 will be fine.

Also, the 13700K is at the upper limit of CPUs where I would use air cooling, as it can pull up to 250 watts from the board. You may want to consider a 7800X3D because it uses about half the power, without sacrificing gaming performance. And AM5 boards are supposed to be compatible with the future 8000 series chips, or whatever AMD ends up calling those. I say this as the owner of a 13600K whose chip regularly pulls up to 200 watts when gaming.

Lastly, 3D rendering. Depending on how deep you get into that, you may actually need 64GB of RAM – or more. The good news is that you have two more slots on that board, so you can always get more later. And I highly advise that you try to get an identical pair, for maximum compatibility. At the least, make sure that all four sticks are rated for the same voltage when set to their XMP speed. Also be aware that Intel memory controllers tend to be more robust, so if you do need to populate all four slots, the AMD option may not be able to handle the same clock speeds.

There’s always been a sociopolitical rift between artists and the corporations that hire them. The corpos would like nothing more than to send the hippies packing, and the corpos are the side with the money and the lawyers.

It begins with things like book covers and movie posters. And at some point, AI is trained on animation as well as artwork. Individual actors become created by AI, voices included. Feature film CGI sequences get produced by digital brains. It will be rough at first, but less and less intervention will be needed as the training models are refined, until it gets good enough to satisfy the suits and their bean counters.

Popular music as we know it will probably also come under threat. Various types of writing will also be tested. Anything that an AI can be made to sufficiently emulate is going to be tested by someone who wants to make more money – or pocket more of the dividends instead of sharing it with stakeholders with a pulse. “Made by people” becomes a rallying cry for the creators who push back.

If I recall, it was a ghost town because Google was very stingy with its invitations. I don’t know if they were having problems scaling, or if they were trying to generate hype. But progress was so slow that Google Plus was unable to reach critical mass.

Reddit was the front page of my internet for about 15 years. It’s felt like breaking up with an abusive partner. I get by now on a mixture of Lemmy and Discord. I also check out Apple News and Google News, but it seems like the bulk of the content is behind paywalls these days. On the bright side, I’ve found a new hobby as a visual novel developer. There’s suddenly so much more free time to try things like that when I’m not surfing Reddit all the time.

I think Lemmy and other federated social platforms of this type will really take off when the mobile apps start popping up. I just hope that the moderation tools can keep up with the influx, and that people will have the appetite to donate to keep these instances running.

Fallout 76 is a bit different because it’s a live service game, and it runs on an engine that was wildly contorted to make it usable in that form. That’s presumably why it launched without NPCs and with all kinds of jank. Starfield, meanwhile, is Todd Howard’s own passion project that he’s dreamed about making for decades. I still expect a raft of bugs that will only ever be fixed by community modders, and it looks like the engine’s reputation for poor framerates will continue, based on the Xbox 30 fps cap. But I don’t think total cynicism is warranted. Yet.