I doubt they enjoy having their balls in TSMC’s vice.

Intel is the only option remotely available to leverage against them.

• Starting from zero will cost bajillions and take decades to get competitive
• Samsung’s probably not divisible in a way that makes their fabs buyable
• They can’t buy into any of the 7nm/5nm level players in the PRC and fund their modernization due to sanctions
• Does anyone else have sub-10nm at anything buy lab scales?

As a (non-game) developer, AI isn’t even that great at reducing my burden.

The organization is enthusiastic about AI, so we set up the Gitlab Copilot plugin for our development tools.

Even as “spicy autocomplete” only about one time in 4 or so it makes a useful suggestion.

There’s so much hallucination, trying to guess the next thing I want and usually deciding on something that came out of its shiny metal ass. It actually undermines the tool’s non-AI features, which pre-index the code to reliably complete fields and function names that actually exist.

Yeah, I’d suspect Rifas before dust when I hear “exploded on first power up”

I think you’re thinking of the Socket A Athlon/Duron/Sempron. A lot of coolers used shitty mounting designs so it was possible to get it off alignment or over-pressure it and crack the die, and no heatspreader + poor thermal controls allowed for a meltdown if the mountng was bad.

The K6-2 was pretty solid aside from not quite holding performance crowns.

Imposed multipkayer content can be toxic.

I played Revelation Online for a while and one feature of it was that you needed to play some 5/10 man raids for desirable upgrades. These were timegated to once a week, so if you weren’t there at 00:00 server time on Sunday, everyone else had already done the run and the place was dead.Hard to stsy committed when you couldn’t progress effectively.

I’m surprised nobody makes an affordable PCI or maybe even USB GPIO box.

To me, the RasPi served two purposes:

• if you wanted GPIOs and the associated ecosystem of hats/shields/capes/straightjackets but a less barebones experience than a bare metal MCU
• RiscOS, because an Archimedes is far rarer than even an Amiga or ST in the Rogue Colonies

I wonder if part of the emotional risk is due to the general social stigma attached to porn. It becomes something that has to be explained and justified.

If done to grand excess, deepfakes could crash the market on that, so to speak. Yeah, everyone saw your face on an AI-generated video. They also saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg, their Aunt Matilda, and for good measure, Barry Bonds, and that was just a typical Thursday.

The shock value is burnt through, and “I got deepfaked” ends with a social stigma on the level of “I got in a shouting match with a cashier” or “I stumbled into work an hour late recently.”

I have a similar one, different seller and possibly submodel, but also a refurb HGST 12T enterprise drive. It sounds like I left a soda on my desk most of the time, subtly popping and ticking.

Why can’t it be sold or released as a “private servers only client”

I don’t get why day-1 private servers aren’t a thing. If nothing else, it allows them to cast off some problematic customers: the guys in Outer Slobavia with 1750 ping can set up a private server and have a better experience, the chuds can set up their own servers where the gameplay is just exchanging slurs without burdening the official GMs.

I suspect it’s about economics; someone will setup a PS with the microtransactions turned off, or not enforcing license keys/accounts, and people will crowd it.

Have you tried GW2?

It’s the “beige diesel station wagon” of MMOs. It does everything people explicity ask for: tame monetization, distinct playstyles, a world that’s worth playing outside the most recent level-cap zones, broad cosmetic options-- but it’s still seen as an afterthought.

Paimon has that obnoxious Elmo complex. Sing-songy PLUS can’t speak in the first person.

I tend to wonder if subscriptions force a FOMO cycle. To keep you playing and paying, they have to bullet-train players to max level and keep you in a carousel of the latest content at all times. That leaves the rest of the game a hollow shell.

I’ve been getting back into Guild Wars 2 recently, and one of the draws is the tolerable monetization: a new expansion every few years, that you can buy on your own schedule (i. e. when they go on sale), and the level cap is effectively frozen, so you can go idle between releases without a meaningful loss of place. The game has to service even the non-expansion users, and the game design explicitly benefits this: the difficulty and rewards scale so that almost all areas of the game are still worth exploring once you’ve hit level cap, and they can put activities across the map rather than cramming it all in the latest zone.

Every PC used to have human blood in it.

Cheap cases used to have terrible rough edges and you were guaranteed a gash when building.

Now, the choice is, do you wipe it clean or do some reject Fullmetal Alchemist summoning circle stuff with it?

If done right, it could be a positive curator. Rules like “any drivers you get off of Windows update met certain tests, are not padded with unrelated crapware, etc.”

But I suspect that won’t fly. My main experience with WU drivers is a tendency to replace new drivers with old, broken ones. And I doubt printer makers-- the guys who made a 600MB driver to do the same tasks that a LaserJet 4 did with a 30k driver 30 years ago-- would play ball.

I guess I’m the only one who LIKES the latching plug.

The less economic and tech dependencies China has on the West, the more free they are to act on their own accord.

The US is concerned about Taiwan-- they wrote a blank cheque of support because it was a DeMoCrAcY back when China was a far weaker economy and military, and it will now be very difficult and expensive to stop reunification. Using TSMC as a shield is no doubt part of policy-- “invade and we blow the tech world back to 2010” is a viable threat until other countries get 7/5/3nm.

But their fear is more general; they are losing their economic and geopolitical dominance, and one of their big bulwarks-- advanced tech-- is giving way. They’re trying to hype up the fear and concern. Expect a lot more sabre rattling by the West.

Heretic.

I bought a used hard drive at a yard sale in like 1996 or 1997, that contained Doom II and Heretic. The 386/40 that was my personal box wouldn’t tun the latter, and I wasn’t going to set it up on the family’s rapidly disintegrating Packard Bell Pentium-100.

I’ve been working on an 8088-class project PC and equipped it with:

• 128k of flash ROM
• Custom firmware to use 90k of it as a bootable “floppy”.

This made it possible to boot straight to DOS games.

I tried Sword and Fairy 7 at half-off ($18 with DLC) figuring “could this be an interesting snippet of a branch of gaming that didn’t quite resonate with the West” – we all know the JRPGs, German Industrial Sim Games, and Korean Grindfest MMOs so I wanted to see what 1.4 billion people were playing.

Two or so hours in, the game itself has some frustrating control aspects (if you enter an “indoors” scene you slow your walk to a crawl, and the maps are often surprisingly narrow), but the combat is very fluid and the graphics quite pretty.

However, it seems like compatibility is a mess. You can’t tell it “fullscreen at a different resolution than desktop”, and at 4K with all the pretty stuff on, it does pretty intensely tax a 6900XT (I saw the hotspot temperature top 100C). So I tried it under Linux and it seemed to run cooler (since I use 1440p there as “real” desktop resolution instead of 150% scaling) but there’s some weird glitch on the cutscenes where it shows a literal TV-style test pattern instead of a cutscene.