MudMan

I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?

It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

Hi, yes, I’m here. The user. Of both, in fact.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon have their quirks and their different cultures. The feature sets of their protocols may also be different, but they sure aren’t relevant to the experience at all, because federation is not a user-facing feature for the vast majority of the social media experience.

Stop cheerleading for social networks. Social networks are not your friends, including Mastodon or the rest of the “fediverse”.

For straight revenue, yeah, that’d be right. Technically everything else is a rounding error. But if Epic was one of those single game unicorns like Riot or Rovio this would not make much sense. The synergies of Unreal with both the movie and theme park buisness for Disney seem like a better fit. I mean, assuming the move makes actual sense, Disney is out there talking about game collaborations and it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve spent money randomly and poorly in the gaming business. I just think the investment would make sense even if Fortnite wasn’t in the mix.

And either way it’s being blown out of proportion by the news because they haven’t even bought the company. 1.5B is what? 10% as much as Tencent owns?

Right, but that’s my point, compute is compute is compute. There are tensor acceleration cores in commercially available hardware dating back five years. They capped things above a specific performance threshold, is my understanding, but that just means you need more of the less powerful hardware, so all you’ve done is make things more expensive/less energy-efficient, but not block any specific application. Not in cheap, portable chips, not in huge industrial data center processors.

So not particularly useful to stop cyberwarfare, not particularly useful to stop military applications. The only use I see is making commercial applications less competitive. Specifically on the training side of things.

None of that makes any sense. “Western chips” all come from Taiwan in the first place. “Western designed chips” are also in laptops and mobile phones, including tons of Chinese devices, and that’s assuming you mean to include South Korea as “Western”, which is a bit of a stretch. Those are fundamentally interchangeable with military hardware. Nobody is putting 4090s and A100s in ICBMs.

Make it make sense. What specific hardware is this stopping from getting to China and for what application?

I am very confused about this ongoing thing regarding “stifling China’s access to AI models”. Does the US government think GPUs are magic? All you need to make a ML model is some tensor math and a web crawler, maybe some human processing on the later bits. You’re not gonna stop China from making them. You’re not gonna stop college kids with gaming rigs making them.

I’m guessing the endgame here is to make it slightly more expensive to do this in China to get American companies to have slightly better versions in the market and prevent a TikTok situation, rather than any legitimate strategic goal. Right? I mean, besides commercial protectionism I don’t see how this type of language makes sense.

I… yeah, what? Disney is what does it? You were cool with Tencent, Sony, Lego, the massive fine for mishandling underage information? Disney. That’s your line.

Alright.

Hah. The framing from normie news is so weird. It’s “bizarrely Disney is investing on Fortnite”, instead of “Disney buys a stake on the people making Unreal, which at this point is like half of their and everybody else’s VFX pipeline”.

I wonder if the gaming news guys will have a better picture or the “Disney Fornite whaaaa?!” angle is what people will take away from this across the board.

It’s not lip service if I can send messages and other people can receive them.

Again, the status quo is you can’t do that. Hell, in the spectrum of being dragged into reasonableness by the EU kicking and screaming, Meta is orders of magnitude below Apple here.

I mean, we can debate the finer points of the implementation once it’s live, but for now this is nothing but positive movement. If people got over rejecting cookies they can get over dismissing warnings regarding interoperability, and if they don’t, the same regulators have a history of re-spanking unruly malicious compliers.

Ah, welcome time traveller. Can you take me back to 2008 with you? It was so much nicer there.

Seriously, every multiplayer game I’ve played the last few years has cross-platform play, both them and Sony have been making PC ports for ages and the reason I own a Series X is that it’s quietly the best set-top media player out there, price-to-performance, and a cheap, convenient platform to play games on a TV.

I mean, if this is a prelude to them no longer making hardware I’d be bummed out, but not for those reasons.

No, listen, get with the program. You’re supposed to be very, very mad that a brand is losing its exclusives. You’re also supposed to be very, very mad if any PC storefronts ever fund a game to sell as an exclusive, unless they’re Steam. You’re also never supposed to acknowledge the contradiction.

You’re being a gamer wrong.

Really? I hadn’t heard about that extremely prominent aspect of the game’s development and marketing for thirty years. You don’t happen to have any shocking news about the origins of Super Mario Bros. 2 by any chance, do you?

Alright, alright, I’ll tone down the snark, it’s just… yeah, that reads a certain way.

But also yeah, he kinda killed it. The Q2 soundtrack in particular has been in my music players longer than some European countries have existed.

But what would be the point?

I swear, people have all these weird conspiracy theories around supposed “EEE” tactics, but Whatsapp already dominates the instant messaging space. It’s pretty much a monopoly. The simplest solution to continue to dominate basically the entire market is do nothing.

Somebody explain to me how literally having the entire market to themselves in exclusive is somehow worse than any interoperability at all. You can’t tank the use rate lower than zero.

Yeah, but you do realize all that you’re describing is still more open than “this is a closed app that interops with nobody and also is permanently tied to your phone number”, right?

I mean, I don’t like the guys and I avoid their services whenever possible, but… man, as an unwilling Whatsapp user the ability to migrate without having to convince all my social circles to do anything but check a checkbox sounds like a huge step forward. I literally surfaced the idea of migrating to the WhatsApp group I thought would be most willing today and got nothing but crickets.

I don’t think Q2 had nearly as many issues with color as a whole through the game. I mean, it wasn’t the most colourful game either on any given screenshot, but it had more biomes and locations. At the very least they learned how to make outdoors look like outdoors, with the bright red skies contrasting with the grey interiors. Later on they even throw a bunch of green lights around when they’re feeling frisky.

You’re not wrong that Id only stopped making brown games in Quake 3, which if anything is a bit too garish sometimes. I also don’t disagree about your description of early shooters, all I’m saying is that people had been getting good at using that cardboard cutout tech and people had gotten good at parsing it. Moving to full 3D required a few steps backwards to then push the tech back past that point, and Quake 1 was a big muddy mess of a game. If you were able to read brutalist eldrich temples as opposed to sand-colored legos that’s fair, but even with all the flashy new tech it never read like that to me at the time.

Man, that’s more like it, I was starting to get weirded out by how little pushback I was getting. And the two of you pushing back are being super civil, even. I guess this conversation has lost a lot of its edge now the games are 30 years old and we’re no longer in school.

Anyway, it does feel like you’re cherrypicking a little bit there. I mean, sure, there’s plenty of grey textures in Dule Nukem, but even if you turn around from that spot you mention the entrance to the cinema is full of reds and yellows, the cop pigs are wearing bright blue and once you get inside the theatre it’s all red curtains and colourful posters. There is surprisingly little in terms of good screenshots or video of software Quake as it was for a legit comparison, and even when I took one it got mushed and compressed to crap, but hey, that version is an extra on the GOG version of Quake, go check it out, it’s an eye openener.

I don’t disagree that Quake was done the “hard way”, and the lighting effects and 3d models were technically impressive at the time, what I’m saying here is the picture they put together with it was not as appealing.

It doesn’t, honestly, but man, at the time a CRT sure did wonders to blend the pre-rendered backgrounds and a lot of the places where stuff came up short. It really did look great.

Large scale terrain deformation and morphing in real time, procedural fire and magma, gravity physics for objects on slopes and, again, animated, reflective 3D water. All running on software with support for a high resolution mode.

The year before the PlayStation 1 launched.

It is a miracle of dark magic and computer science and I don’t understand how it can possibly exist. That game is the reason every time Peter Molyneux came up with some random, obviously impossible garbage everybody went “alright, but maybe?”

I think long term, absolutely. At the time, though, very few people were playing online, and a lot of the praise heaped on Quake was for the single player game and the visuals, which I never got.

I mean, I was on a Pentium 133, so I could play it pretty much as intended, I just thought it looked ugly. At that point in software mode I didn’t find it looked any better than Magic Carpet, which had stuff like animated waves and water reflections, and you could make a 3D volcano come out of the ground in real time. It’s pretty nuts how far the 3D characters took it.

Side note: Magic Carpet is a technological marvel and we don’t talk about it enough. Peak non-accelerated 3D environments ever, right there.