Jrockwar @ Jrockwar @feddit.uk

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2 yr. ago

I agree with you, prices will still be market driven. However I was replying to a comment about a hypothetical scenario, which I think is useful to explore however unlikely it might be.

Thinking of the hypothetical scenario where in a short timeframe energy would become near unlimited and almost free:

On the positive side: with no energy limitations, Direct Air Capture technology could be scaled massively. That's one really promising technology that can take carbon off the air and use it for other things (like sustainable air fuels) or removing it altogether.

Also this would accelerate the transition to electric cars and well, electric everything: why pay for fuel for your car, your stove or boiler, when they can be almost free? That has a potential for good effects on the environment too.

On the negative side: this opens the door for more, cheap transport. If people don't have to pay for fuel, they'd be more willing to take the car everywhere. This would mean more roads, more infrastructure, more destruction of ecosystems, less space for pedestrians... A trend that is already too difficult to reverse in a world of expensive fuels.

In terms of economics, I could see this accelerating the gap between countries. Those who could benefit from semi-free energy first would have an immense competitive advantage and also lower their manufacturing costs, leaving worse-off countries in a position where they can't compete because of technology nor because of cheap labour.

Unfortunately in the 2020s you don't even own the games you have the physical media for.

Edit: as a more serious answer, Linux might be a better bet than Windows for playing windows games (ironically), either through Proton or Wine.

I think it's the second. Even on No Man's Sky, with the bazillion worlds, they all exist "as they are" and are consistent from the beginning. If you revisit a planet, it's exactly as it was.

Now with what I know about this technology, I suspect the way this happens is every planet had a seed (a number) that you can pass to the "random planet generator" it will generate exactly the same thing over and over. Then basically when you load a new planet it goes "right, with this seed, what would we have in these coordinates?" And the answer is persistent.

However having seen how that looks in NMS, I feel they'd have had to add a bit of extra spice to be able to sell a single world. In my mind that involves manually crafted areas almost necessarily, as well as checking most of the planet manually to oversee the procedural generator and massage anything that doesn't pass a level of quality. If I were to make this game myself, I would use procedural generation for the different areas and not for the whole planet, so that I can give certain sections of the map a "reroll" if I don't like them.

I don't think you can handcraft a whole world with any reasonable team/timeframe for video game development. Looking at the (very short) video I suspect there will be handcrafted areas like cities, and they've put more emphasis on that than in NMS because the size is more manageable. But 80 or 90% needs to be procgen to make it something that can be delivered in years and not decades. Although being a single world, maybe that let them have more visibility of what was being generated (vs checking millions of planets) and then tweak manually large parts of it.

Brother still can't do inkjet right? I read somewhere there's a big patent that lets only a select few companies be able to sell inkjet printers.

I used to have a laser printer, and they're great for documents, but now what I print most are photos, and for that pigment-based inks rock.

I have an Epson printer but even if they're nowhere near as bad as HP, Epson also has some weird shit from time to time.

I've gone as far as to "downgrade" my desktop computer to a combination of MacBook Pro + Steam Deck. The MacBook is heaps faster for any workload other than gaming, so now my most powerful computer fits in my backpack. The Steam deck is such a joy to play with, and thanks to the microSD slot I don't have to worry about disk space requirements anymore. Yes, it's not as fast in terms of raw performance, but I don't care. I can play now on my bed, sofa, or garden. If it doesn't run on the deck, I don't care for it. I already have way too many games I haven't finished.

Do you need to install the ubisoft app? That's a tough one...

It looks very much like it!

Yeah is this linked with dall-e?

I absolutely didn't say you're an idiot.

However, I do find it mildly annoying when people copypaste ChatGPT/LLM comments with no context or introduction, as if they had written that themselves. I don't necessarily fancy spending my time arguing with a chatbot.

While I think capitalism is shit, I do believe in supply and demand. I was recently getting zero bites on my desktop computer, then lowered the listing price by 50% in the auction and sold it in a week at 80% of the original listing price.

It turns out the price I thought was fair, didn't meet the market and there were exactly zero people interested in buying it at that price. That's what's happening to you sadly.

Think of it this way: at your current price you get no bites. If you were to sell it at $50 people would buy it immediately. Now you have to find a happy medium both you and buyers are happy with.

Did you ask ChatGPT to explain how a ship stays afloat?

That's almost 22 billion more profit than Twitter.

I'm trying to defend here a product I don't really believe in, so bear with me.

The portal lets you play PS5 games, in PS5-ish quality (-ish because it's obviously not the same as a 4k TV). The best the switch can do is 7-year-old No Man's Sky, with no multiplayer. Recent Pokémon and Zelda (first party Nintendo games) can't even reach a constant 30 FPS in the whole of the game.

I don't think graphics are THAT important, but I know there are people who think that. And in that case, the PS5+Portal is going to beat a standalone steam deck or a switch. If you have a beefy PC maybe a steam deck can stream in better quality, but if you're in the PS5 ecosystem it's the best quality handheld gaming you can achieve.

Would I buy it? Absolutely not. 80% of the fun with my steam deck is taking it places. The airport, the plane, a hotel on a business trip, my partner's place, the dentist waiting room, the bus/train... All that's missing with the Portal, but that doesn't mean I can't see a (niche) market for it.

I firmly believe the solution is autonomous shuttles, not cars. Imagine having bus routes that can dynamically change and adapt to demand. Say we replace every bus with 2 smaller shuttles: during normal service the route could have the same capacity, but if there is an extraordinary event (sports event for example) you could divert them from the low-demand areas to the extraordinary-demand zone.

During lower demand times, you can also have more routes at no extra cost. If you're clever and make an app to call the shuttle (think Uber but through pre-established routes) the demand can be determined in real time to ensure you don't have empty shuttles.

And because they're bigger than passenger cars you're still increasing the ratio of passengers per vehicle, unlike robotaxis which merely replace private cars, with mostly 1- or 2-passenger trips.

Yet they keep posting more and more profits. Subscriber count has only increased despite the content being lower quality and prices being higher. The fact that we don't like them increasing the prices doesn't mean it isn't working for them.

I'm not arguing it will work forever, but for now, it's been a viable strategy.

Yeah no way that anyone who is actually center would be happy with transphobe ads. That's only the techno-right Elon Musk praisers that believe that because they accept technology, they're not far right even if they are unaccepting of large swathes of society. Center implies accepting points of view in both sides, which is not compatible with intolerant stances.

I agree, but they'd get a large number of users to subscribe.

And then maybe they wouldn't complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.

A few years ago, people wouldn't have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly... So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.

Genuine question: and are these slated to have full-fledged Linux compatibility? Because I've had to give up on Windows on Arm because of silliness like Google refusing to make Google Drive, or apps like Affinity/Blender/Fusion360 not having hardware acceleration thanks to Qualcomm's subpar drivers.