Well, game journalists need to sell gaming hardware and AAA games. Those guys have the ad money.

Just play what you like.

Perhaps, but I don’t read anything on Substack unless I’m subscribed. Reputation is the entire point on Substack, without it, the content will get no traffic.

AI with dedicated nuclear power? I can’t imagine anything that could possiblye go wrong in this scenario.

Outer Worlds has no space-based content. Yes, you have a spaceship, but it’s essentially a fast-travel device. One of the locations is a space station, but it’s no different than a large building (e.g. it’s not shaped like a torus or anything interesting like that).

Outer Worlds is a really fun take on the Firefly space western concept, though, as long as you understand all of your activities will take place on worlds/moons with basically the same gravity & atmosphere.

Remember when Substack, the home of many excellent journalists, started to defend fascist and white supremacist content on their platform?

Oh, wait, that’s happening right now.

Plenty of decent country before the 1990s. Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Ray Charles, the Statler Brothers, Mel Tillis, Roy Clark, John Denver, Willie Nelson. Later country artists with pop sensibilities like Kenny Rogers, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Reba McIntire.

I’d argue that Roy Clark ranks as one of the most talented American guitarists/banjoists of the 20th century, easily in the same class as Jimi Hendrix or Prince.

Today, look for specific types of country music (e.g. Bluegrass) to find more authentic stuff, or just bite the bullet and listen to stuff with different genre labels like “Americana” and “Folk”. A lot of good modern country music ends up in those genre classifications because the marketers can’t figure out how to fit it into the stadium country ecosystem.

If I remember correctly, at the time Valve justified the 30% by pointing out that Apple was charging the same for music and video content. And Valve immediately started building value-added services like forums, updaters, multiplayer support, achievements, etc. to justify the price.

If you compare what Valve was doing to the physical media distribution methods of the period, it was a MASSIVE improvement. Back then, you could sell 10000 units to Ingram Micro or PC Mall, or whatever, and you only got paid if they sold. And any unsold inventory would be destroyed and the reseller would never pay for it. And if you actually wanted anything other than a single-line entry in their catalogs, you paid a promotional fee. Those video games featured with a standup display or a poster in the window at the computer store? None of that was free; the developer was nickeled and dimed for every moment their game was featured in any premium store space.

Huh. So, I actually own Lugaru, which I purchased through Humble Bundle in May 2010.

It… was not a good game. Basically anthropomorphic rabbits beating the crap out of each other, which SOUNDS good, but was not executed well.

It’s not “inexplicable”.

DIMM mounting brackets introduce significant limitations to maximum bandwidth. SOC RAM offers huge benefits in bandwidth improvement and latency reduction. Memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is 400GB/second, compared to a max of 64GB/sec for DDR5 DIMMs.

It may not be optimizing for the compute problem that you have, and that’s fine. But it’s definitely optimizing for compute problems that Apple believes to be high priority for its customers.

Eh, I was there. The games were OK.

The biggest change is that we put up with a lot more repetitive gameplay back then, just because that’s how games were and there wasn’t enough horsepower to make complex stuff.

Today, you blow through a level of a modern first person game, or whatever, and see only a tiny fraction of what the game makers created for you. I played Titanfall 2 for the first time recently, and after playing the same level a few times, I noticed that a room that appears only briefly as you take an elevator past it has an extension cord coiled up on the floor. You can only see it if you look down as the elevator goes up, so you can see the floor of the room.

Old games didn’t have the room for those kinds of indulgences.

October Passed Me By

Well dang it this is how it ends.

Before reading the article, I just assumed that N. Korea had hacked a game with loot boxes.

And it won’t need to exist locally on the phone anyway. Higher bandwidth cell and wifi signals mean more and more exotic AI processing can be offloaded onto cloud resources.

It’s great when you have an app that works well when not connected to a network, of course. But most phone buyers don’t really care.

ChatGPT, program a Metroidvania 2d retro 16 bit graphics video game featuring a naked Emilia Clarke.

Do people still use emacs to code, for example?

Umm. Yes.

Capcom has absolute authority to price its games however they see fit.

If they make choices that put them out of business, that’s on them.

RiffTrax Friends, The Gizmoplex, and Twitch Turbo give me everything I need.

it’s basically impossible to tell where parts of the model came from

AIs are deterministic.

1. Train the AI on data without the copyrighted work.

2. Train the same AI on data with the copyrighted work.

3. Ask the two instances the same question.

4. The difference is the contribution of the copyrighted work.

There may be larger questions of precisely how an AI produces one answer when trained with a copyrighted work, and another answer when not trained with the copyrighted work. But we know why the answers are different, and we can show precisely what contribution the copyrighted work makes to the response to any prompt, just by running the AI twice.

What even is his complaint?

That he doesn’t a fraction of the talent required to make a game this good.

I can feel the saliva-moistened Cheeto crumbs being sprayed into my face.