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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • 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?



  • I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so… meh.

    Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.



  • That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

    From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.


  • 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.



  • 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.










  • 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.



  • 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.