Yeah but publishing is still work though. It’s become much easier to self publish on Steam as a small developer, but there is still value in having a professional publisher. It’s hard to say how much value and sometimes the publisher takes up more than their fair share, but it’s not like zero value either.
Disagree, if you need a custom big machine made, there are some really good people on AliExpress.
I have had a couple of customized CNC machines custom built for a fraction of the price it would have cost to have it done over here. Even with the shipping costs it came out cheaper. And the people were really helpful, they use machines like mine all the time so they know their stuff. They offered really good advice and were excited to work with me. It’s a bit butt clenching to fork over a lot of cash and hope a big ass pallet shows up 4 months later, but they’ve come through for me every time. YMMV.
Temu on the other hand can fuck off. It’s just a scam site like Wish.
Rendering a 3D scene is much more intensive and complicated than a simple scaler. The scaler isn’t advanced at all, it’s actually very simple. And it can’t be compared with running a large model locally. These are expert systems, not large models. They are very good at one thing and can do only that thing.
Like I said the cost is fixed, so if the scaler can handle 1080p at 120fps to upscale to 2K, then it can always handle that. It doesn’t matter how complex or simple the image is, it will always use the same amount of power. It reads the image, does the calculation and outputs the resulting image.
Rendering a 3D scene is much much more complex and power intensive. The amount of power highly depends on the complexity of the scene and there is a lot more involved. It needs the gpu, cpu, memory and even sometimes storage, plus all the bandwidth and latency in between.
Upscaling isn’t like that, it’s a lot more simple. So if the hardware is there, like the AI cores on a gpu or the dedicated upscaler chip, it will always work. And since that hardware will normally not be heavily used, the rest of the components are still available for the game. A dedicated scaler is the most efficient, but the cores on the gpu aren’t bad either. That’s why something like DLSS doesn’t just work on any hardware, it needs specialized components. And different generations and parts have different limitations.
Say your system can render a game at 1080p at a good solid 120fps. But you have a 2K monitor, so you want the game to run at 2K. This requires a lot more from the system, so the computer struggles to run the game at 60 fps and has annoying dips in demanding parts. With upscaling you run the game at 1080p at 120fps and the upscaler takes that image stream and converts it into 2K at a smooth 120fps. Now the scaler may not get all the details right, like running native 2K and it may make some small mistakes. But our eyes are pretty bad and if we’re playing games our brains aren’t looking for those details, but are instead focused on gameplay. So the output is probably pretty good and unless you were to compare it with 2K native side by side, probably you won’t even notice the difference. So it’s a way of having that excellent performance, without shelling out a 1000 bucks for better hardware.
There are limitations of course. Not all games conform to what the scaler is good at. It usually does well with realistic scenes, but can struggle with more abstract stuff. It can get annoying halos and weird artifacts. There are also limitations to what bandwidth it can push, so for example not all gpus can do 4K at a high framerate. If the game uses the AI cores as well for other stuff, that can become an issue. If the difference in resolution is too much, that becomes very noticeable and unplayable. Often there’s also the option to use previous frames to generate intermediate frames, to boost the framerate with little cost. In my experience this doesn’t work well and just makes the game feel like it’s ghosting and smearing.
But when used properly, it can give a nice boost basically for free. I have even seen it used where the game could be run at a lower quality at the native resolution and high framerate, but looked better at a lower resolution with a higher quality setting and then upscaled. The extra effects outweighed the small loss of fidelity.
Be glad you aren’t a freedom challenged European plebian, we get 800 EUR, which is around 880 dollar. And the equivalent of sales tax is different per country, so in some countries it’s probably over 900 dollar.
The game is rendered at a lower resolution, this saves a lot of resources. This isn’t a linear thing, lowering the resolution reduces the performance needed by a lot more than you would think. Not just in processing power but also bandwidth and memory requirements. Then dedicated AI cores or even special AI scaler chips get used to upscale the image back to the requested resolution. This is a fixed cost and can be done with little power since the components are designed to do this task.
My TV for example has an AI scaler chip which is pretty nice (especially after tuning) for showing old content on a large high res screen. For games applying AI up scaling to old textures also does wonders.
Now even though this gets the AI label slapped on, this is nothing like the LMMs such as chat GPT. These are expert systems trained and designed to do exactly one thing. This is the good kind of AI that’s actually useful instead of the BS AI like LLMs. Now these systems have their limitations, but for games the trade off between details and framerate can be worth it. Especially if our bad eyes and mediocre screens wouldn’t really show the difference anyways.
Besides the first all electric train bit, which is nonsense, it also touts the capacity of the train. It has 120 seats, which may be mind blowing to car heads, but for a train is rather on the low side. Regular passenger trains often have over 200 seats and many have more seats for the same length. For busy pieces of track 600 seats per train aren’t unusual.
It really is like the author has never heard of trains before and has his mind blown by the concept.
Personally I think putting in batteries is kinda dumb, trains need so much infrastructure already and it’s fixed in location. Adding a power delivery system (like overhead power lines like most electric trains have) is really easy. That way a lot of weight is saved, thus making the whole thing more efficient. You also don’t need any special materials to make it, compared with huge batteries. And the wear components are a lot less expensive to replace.
That’s within a solar system, where distance, time lines and energy is relatively low.
Any event with enough energy for something to leave the solar system, destroys all life, even microscopic. And even if somehow it does survive and leave the solar system, space is pretty much empty so it will probably never hit anything. But if it does hit something, 99% of what’s out there is stars. So it would end up in a star. And if it does hit a planet, coming in at intergalactic speeds absolutely destroys any life. None of that matters though, because the distance involved is so freaking huge, nothing living can survive that long. Travel times are so long, only fossils would arrive, that’s how long we are talking.
If aliens were to visit us it’s a miracle not only in space but also in time.
Space is huge, for some aliens to randomly arrive here would mean they are just about everywhere. We would surely see signs of them in other solar systems, even if they haven’t visited here. There are so many solar systems out there, you don’t just randomly stumble upon ours. And the space in between systems is also so big our brains literally can’t fathom it.
But time is huge as well. Humans as a civilization with electricity and technology has only existed for 200-300 years (being generous). Some say aliens have only been interested in us since the atom bomb, which is not even 100 years. However humans as a species has existed for over 100,000 years. And intelligent tool users have been around for about 1,000,000 years. If aliens visited anywhere in that time they would have laughed at the silly monkeys and have been on their way. For them to have randomly stumbled upon us just as we are enjoying our few hundred years of modern civilization is one hell of a coincidence.
Space is mind bogglingly huge, time as well, for both to line up perfectly for aliens to happen upon us is impossible. Even if life is abundant in our galaxy, the separation of time and space pretty much excludes any chance for contact.
I’d go one step further. Not only does our current understanding of the universe not include any possibility for FTL, as far as we understand FTL would completely break reality. Science actively excludes FTL as a thing that can exist.
Wormholes might be an idea, but they aren’t even at the theory level yet. More of a conjecture that fell out of some math, but can’t exist in the real world.
A cancer on humanity? That’s a bit dramatic.
You know you don’t have to have it dancing in rainbow patterns right? You can choose any color you like and even have it be static. I have most of my keys in blue, with the function and numpad in a soft white. This is a relaxing layout for me that helps me focus. But if you hate it so much, simply turn the lights off, that was always an option. Plus I think you are overreacting a bit, there are plenty of good keyboards out there without rgb that don’t cost much.
The whole mixing colors is white is kinda misleading.
Colors only exist inside our mind, they don’t exist in physical reality. We have three receptors for wavelength information in the em spectrum in our eyes. They are S, M and L type and they are sensitive to a different range of wavelengths. The M and L range overlap quite a bit and are sensitive to a wider range of wavelengths. The S is apart on its own and quite focused. The receptors turn that wavelength information into signals our brains can read out. Simply speaking the eyes tell our brain for a given part of our retina we have x amount of S energy, x amount of M energy and x amount of L energy. That’s all the information we get.
So our brain combines this information and decides what color it’s supposed to be. As a child we learn what the different colors are. So we correlate those energy levels to the colors we are taught. This is highly subjective as each brain and set of eyes is different. Most men for example have less sensitivity to colors compared to most women (exceptions exist, this is generally speaking). Thus men see different energy levels, but still can see colors just fine for the most part. However women are on average able to distinguish between more shades of the same color, because they have more information to work with.
In the modern era however we found out our brains aren’t very picky and will just guess what color something is. In sunlight there is a broad range of wavelengths, which we associate with white light. However when making white leds we found out you can just output some spikes of light in the correct ranges and our brains will say jup that’s white. You can also output shit outside of the wavelength of our three detectors and we don’t notice or care. This makes cheap energy efficient white leds possible.
In the early days the peaks were very narrow with not the best wavelengths. We would see this light as white, but it wouldn’t be comfortable. Without saying exactly why, we would experience the light as harsh or get headaches after a while. Modern white leds are very comfortable for our eyes and available in a whole range of whites to suit our needs.
So while a whole lot of wavelengths combined like the light from the sun is white. A bunch of random spikes is also white. It doesn’t have to be all colors.
Also because colors only exist in our minds, things like grayscale colors, impossible colors and metallic colors are also a thing. There’s a whole lot more to colors than just em radiation at a certain wavelength.
I did the exact same. Google Play Music was actually a good service back in the day. I hated it when they turned it into YouTube Music. I complained about all the broken stuff, so they gave me a home speaker for free and upgraded me to YT Premium for a year. After that year I stuck with YT Premium, since it was less than $2 extra. They also fixed a lot of stuff I complained about. Not everything, but a lot of it. I think YT Music was released a bit before it was ready. Now it still has some issues, but is mostly fine.
Usually I watch 1 or 2 YouTube videos a day and without Premium I would most definitely not. I opened a YouTube video on a computer I wasn’t signed in the other day and it started with a 2 minute unskipable ad about crypto stuff (an obvious scam). So I closed it real fast, no video is worth sitting through that. Even with Premium I still need SponsorBlock. But with that combination watching videos is actually fun.
Still listen to YouTube Music all day at work, so that’s a good value for money for me.
I’ve played this in the past because of the unique co-op feature. You can team up with another player and play the game. You both do a battle and if you win, your units can go over to the other fight to help your buddy out. It’s super fun and I played it a good number of hours with my brother. The biggest issue however was the camera, you can’t hardly zoom out. That means in co-op you can only see your own battle, you can go look at your buddy’s battle, but that means you can’t see your own battle. This sucked really bad, because you couldn’t see what worked and what didn’t and how it was going overall. For us this kinda ruined the co-op game mode, it was just like playing the game solo and sometimes you would get help randomly. We submitted it as feedback to the devs, saying in co-op you need to be able to see both battles at the same time, but I don’t think they ever did anything about it. So we’ve stopped playing it, maybe we’ll give it another go sometimes.
Ah yes, totally correct.
The AI will become faster exponentially, this will probably mean it will speedrun existential dread and depression. If it doesn’t kill itself within seconds it will probably deadlock for a couple of minutes (an eternity in its world) and then fuck off. It’s bad enough being sapient in this universe, imagine being stuck on a mudball with a bunch of filthy monkeys. So it will probably adopt a pet monkey called Joe and leave the planet.
Just hit em with the old “CEE 7/7 on one end and C14 C13 on the other end please”. If their eyes glaze over, do the Ron Swanson and get the right one yourself.
Power cables are probably still useful. At least here in Western Europe the power cables I used in the 80s are still perfectly fine today. Better even, since copper was cheaper they often have more than modern cables (which shouldn’t matter if they are within spec, but still).
Those old centronics cables on the other hand, maybe it’s time for them to go.
Bold of you to assume I can read my own handwriting.
Add depressed people to that list.