I rarely have to adjust any options for a game to play correctly any more. Usually the internal benchmark does an acceptable job of choosing settings. Of late even pretty rinky-dink games have even been correctly figuring out that I want vsync (I have a 60 fps display, of course I do) which is nice, but they also seem to correctly pick the performance settings. I imagine that this is something that Unity and UE have finally figured out for them.

This has a really obvious answer which has been thoroughly explored here but I would like to explore why that answer is bad even though it's true, and pointing out it's true is not bad.

First some postulates:
Government should not be allowed to contract anyone to manage our data.
Government should not hire contractors to work on systems which will be used to manage our data.
Government should never be sending our data out to anyone else or allowing it to be stored on systems not under their control.

Obviously I realize that this is status quo stuff, it's more common than not in fact. Only legacy and defense systems are still held and run by feds and states, everything else is generally outsourced to a contractor (Accenture, Deloitte...) and is also probably running in the cloud — specifically on AWS, Azure, or Oracle.

But these things should never happen specifically because they are each individually poisonous to privacy, let alone all three together. All of this software should be developed in-house like it used to be. Government outsources software development and management so that it can do things it's not allowed to do otherwise, not because it's the only way to do it. It allows them, perhaps most importantly, to hand our data to others. Huge amounts of our PII is being processed not just on cloud instances provided by these players, but actually through their services (e.g. Amazon Transcribe) which are AI-based* and also mean that they actually process all of the data on our behalf and are in a unique and ideal position to harvest it.

* Amazon Transcribe used to support phonetic substitutions but now it doesn't, which I take to mean that they've just handed the whole job purely to a LLM which does it in one stage... you hope.

Don't we all! Hard drives, RAM, *and* GPUs, I'm in the market for it all.

I also want to buy silver-tin alloy for casting, and hey, what do you know, silver and tin are also both at astronomical prices due to in no small part the AI boom.

At one point you have to just stop waiting. Prices could start falling tomorrow, but then again, that could have been said at any point for the past several years.

Kodi was originally XBMP (... player) before it was XBMC :)

Even an old PC can run far more games than any console can. It may not run the latest AAA game, but there's plenty of older ones which are just as AAA

They don't have the revenue to survive much longer,

They were profitable in Q2. You can't extrapolate that endlessly, but they're not a cash incinerator anymore. And they have $15-20B on-hand pre-IPO. They're fine.

Anthropic is more or less breakeven *despite* being engaged in a massive 10x YoY scaleup for approaching 4 years running. Companies undergoing even "normal" scaleup rates are almost never profitable, let alone 10x/yr. Any slowdown in scaleup, or any shift in market pressures from intense jockeying for position to starting to pay back investors, and this drives them into deep profitability

The threat to Anthropic has nothing to do with whether its current business is sustainable or deeply profitable at its core. It is. Its threat is one I've been highlighting for years and now we're really starting to see: once something is "good enough", people start to question why they should be paying more for better. We now have the rise of a bunch of crazy cheap, yet quite coding-competent models like GLM 5.3 Flash, Qwen 3 Flash, MiMo 2.6 Pro, MiMo 2.6 Flash, Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor, etc. The latter two are almost too cheap to meter. Now, you still need an orchestrator, for planning, supervision, management, etc; it can either be a human or a higher-end model. But you don't need to pay for, say, Opus to get good coding done these days. Anthropic, like OpenAI, is built on charging a sizable premium over inference costs because they have the best and people will pay for it. And sure, in non-verifiable fields (say, medicine), maybe people keep paying for the best, whatever it may happen to be. But the more of the "bulk" coding and the like moves off these premium models and into dirt-cheap models, that seems to represent a real threat to their business model.

Anthropic's response thusfar seems to be "join them". Claude 5.5 Haiku is a good model "flash" model, and they've set quite affordable pricing for it, definitely fitting into the above category. But that doesn't really solve the problem. Their best hope is that Jevon's Paradox kicks up: that now that big projects are so cheap to implement, people keep taking on even bigger projects, scaling their income from cheap flash models like Haiku, orchestrators like Sonnet and Opus, and non-verifiable tasks where people will generally always want to pay for the best. But will that compensate? Hard to tell. This is the threat to Anthropic.

For the ultra-wealthy, chaos is great. They will ride it out with their stockpiled supplies and remote resorts and child rape islands, and if necessary, their bunkers. As we lose our shit they will buy it up and we will own even closer to nothing. They don't actually believe that the USA can fall, which is stupid but predictable, and it probably won't any time soon.

In fact we do buy it from Canada, we buy way more than we just got from Russia all the time. This is just a way acceptable to his base for him to transfer money to Putin to use to attack Ukraine. It's not unhinged, except in the way that all evil is unhinged. It's Trump doing what Putin tells him, because Putin owns him.

Deutsche Bank was being extorted by Trump even once it became obvious that he wasn't going to be paying back his debts, because if it came out how fucking stupid they are (that they got suckered by a phone call by obviously-Trump pretending to be someone else who worked for Trump's father, who defrauded them into loaning him money with the lie that he was already in charge of the family fortune when he wasn't) that would make them look like the clown fucks they are. But then that came out and they dropped him, and he had to start banking with Russia. Both of his sons opened their stupid fucking faces and let us know that was the case on TV, on separate occasions. The rest follows naturally -without any need for appeals to the long-running conspiracy theory about "Agent Krasnov". I don't know or even actually care whether that's true when what we can see is so obviously damning.

ISTR there's a classic sci-fi short story or maybe even book about this, but maybe I just imagined it. Where the artifacts of our fallen civilization are lost because they were fragile glass things, and there was something about ancestor cannibalism being to transfer nanites...

Anyone who wants to know can look right now and find out that yes, the Flock cameras are always watching. But since they don't belong to the government, that's legal. You might argue that it shouldn't be, that if they're just turning around and handing the data to the police on any request (that is, without a warrant) then they are effectively functioning as a part of the police department. And in that case I would agree, but so far courts have permitted that to continue.

Yeah, but again, so far if a private company is doing it and then giving the data to the cops, it's not government surveillance. An even worse example of such a partnership is that the US Postal Service hands all of the mailpiece scanning data to the FBI. The feds are logging 100% of our snail mail metadata, and tracking who is sending what (type of mail) to who. All backbones are monitored and a percentage of traffic can be sampled in realtime, Never forget QWest. Need I go on? The government is spying on us in every way, both directly and indirectly. Most people are fully head-up-ass about it so they don't have to think about it.

Huh, does stuff like this work in vim? /prompt write me an implementation of the Navier-Stokes equations for a zero-turbulence boundary condition in python, with a sleek modern GUI and test geometry

Unrelated aside, but back in the day when there was just vi, there was always a debate as to whether it's pronounced "vee" or "vie". Eventually my friends and I agreed on a way to settle the debate: we'd have a text-to-speech program read it out for us, and treat whatever it said as canon.

It said: "six".

Also, when your Steam Machine is too long in the tooth to be credible for new AAA games, you can still use it to play other kinds of games, it will keep getting updates through the community even when Valve is done supporting it, you can blow away the OS on it and load something else without anyone trying to stop you, etc etc. You can also play far more games on it than you can play on any given console. It's just a far superior value unless you absolutely have to play some console exclusive.

You could point to lots of things and say they are the problem.

I'm going to go ahead and say one of the problems is lack of vertical integration. Everyone seems to want to let other corporations effectively be in charge of their business. Sony's big enough to have their own fabs, or at least take a major stake, but hasn't. And inb4 anyone says that isn't sensible, Sony themselves disagree and are starting to change this, so perhaps they have figured this out themselves. It's not just the simple direct immediate economic benefits, it's also provision of the benefits of longer-term stability.

Once upon a time, a game console was a special piece of relatively inexpensive purpose-built hardware. Relative to the cost, they had impressive graphics capabilities linked to their design being specifically for gaming, prioritizing single-process performance and graphics memory bandwidth for results which PCs struggled to match.

Today, home PCs have massive bandwidth, and a game console is just a cost reduced PC with a crippled OS and unified memory. So why would you want one over a real PC with a non-crippled OS if the same games are available on the PC? And most of them are. It's not all of them, but if you need a PC anyway (and many people still do) then is it really worth it to buy a whole other PC you can only play games on, and which you will basically just have to throw away when you're done because they are so locked down?

When lots of people have significant disposable income, sure. That's not now...

The problem is policing.

One approach to addressing police accessing information they shouldn't in the name of investigation of crimes is to require any information collection outside of a hot pursuit to require a warrant. If there is a legitimate investigation that should be easy, right?

That was a subtle Scotsman.