I also had this on tape! It was where I learned about the concept biscuits and gravy. Except for I didn't actually learn what they were for another 10 years.
It made sense to young me that when Simon opened the sewer it would smell like digestive biscuits smothered in Bisto.
A weird one that I've not seen mentioned: the intro to Battlefield 1. It is really well crafted and was emotional in a way I've never felt from a war FPS.
The multiple unavoidable deaths and brief epitaph shown on screen, before hot swapping to the next soldier felt poignant. Really hit me with the pointlessness and futility of WWI, the plight of the common soldier and the sheer scale of death.
I see a lot of covid misinformation going on around this story which is extremely worrying. Just because the human race not currently at risk of imminent extinction from it doesn't mean it's not still a serious illness. Some people get long term complications from it. Some people are extra vulnerable to it. Some people are still dying from it.
"Just get the vaccine" is the worst kind of uninformed handwaving response to the concerns and worries of other humans, it's upsetting it is becoming the norm.
The thing I find hilarious is that a few weeks ago, when there was talk of the UK doing the same sort of thing, everyone was pointing to this legislation as an example of how it has worked elsewhere.
It didn't even last a year! All it's done is slightly annoyed a handful of teenagers for a few months.
That's fair enough and all good points. Before this thread I didn't know about Volvo's parent company being Chinese and thought Polestar was simply a Swedish company owned by another Swedish company. Very disappoint to learn.
I feel like you'd be hard pressed to find a major corporation these days either not being owned by a foreign parent company/investor, or manufacturing their products in another country, or both. It's kind of understandable when the raw materials are abundant in the country of manufacture, but it becomes a problem when there are questionable labour practices there, as you say.
I'm not really sure how PhysX was a gimmick. It had a weird implementation due to hardware restrictions initially, but is still used today on your bog standard GPS.
It's actually a great example of a tech that had this weird transition period at first, when the hardware wasn't advanced enough to support it by default, and is now just a standard tool to make games look great on average hardware.
Optimization is not an on/off switch. All companies are optimising their implementation to the best of their ability/budget. As coders get more familiar with the tech and it becomes more commonplace, as well as work being done by graphics card companies on their drivers, it will reduce the computational requirements over time. There's a hell of a lot of work that goes into graphical processing on hardware, software, engine and game levels to make things look better for less computations, it's not just "tell GPU to do simulate every particle from the sun".
That's exactly my point. Raytracing is being shoehorned into things without them being optimised specifically for it at the moment. That doesn't mean we should stop developing the tech entirely because people are implementing it poorly most of the time.
I want to watch it every Christmas but my wife objects.