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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • My main problem is that, even if the technology were to work exactly as advertised, for the first time, PC gaming is moving to an era where our games no longer look the same.

    We’ve all seen how every previous version of DLSS worked. The promise of lowering system requirements of high resolutions caught enough attention to draw a crowd, game devs used it to increase the system requirements for lower resolutions instead, AMD and Intel had to develop their own different implementation to stay competitive, and lots of mainstream gaming now requires DLSS and the like on all but the most expensive cards (sometimes even then).

    The tech will get better. It always does. Whether that improvement will come fast or slow doesn’t really matter. I think most points of controversy will fade as we’re starting to see this applied to new games. After all, if a game were to be developed knowing that it would be using DLSS 5, the argument that artistic intent will be violated will hold less strength. If DLSS 5 were to ruin the artistic intent of a ground-up DLSS 5-developed game, it wouldn’t be shipped. Future titles being “DLSS 5±mindful” and future improvements to the AI used should get the technology working ever closer to the vision that is being advertised today.

    But when that starts to happen, the story will play out exactly the same as it always has for DLSS. It creates results that are “good enough”, so game devs move their development resources elsewhere. Then some management layer catches onto this tech, and finds out that they can just take these resources and move them right into their personal paycheck. End result is games that look generations old and barely run unless you use DLSS 5. By then FSR and XeSS will have to follow suit; if they don’t, AMD and Intel will have the cards that are not only comparatively featureless and weaker, but also produce uglier visuals. But because these generative AI models will never be the exact same between these manufacturers, the output will also never be the same.

    And then we move to the weird reality where games look different on different cards, and driver (or, in the case of consoles, system) updates could fundamentally change what games look like, independent of developer input (turns out that artistic integrity can still end up in jeopardy, huh). And unlike with the current AI upscalers we have, where there is a ground truth for the result and we can always obtain it with better hardware, DLSS 5-developed games will always have to rely on it for their “fancy effects” (read: looking like something other than a GameCube game in 2030).

    That’s my problem with DLSS 5



  • Any tax imposed will always be split between seller and buyer in the market. If the buyer needs to pay a higher price they will buy less, but due to the increase being spent solely on the tax none of it ends up at the seller and they also earn less.

    The degree to which each party “pays” for the tax depends on things like their ability to pivot to alternatives. Turns out that if you impose blanket tariffs on every single thing ever made anywhere on Earth all at once, and you have nowhere near the capabilities to produce all of that domestically in the short term, that you end up having to suck it up if you plan on buying anything (using parts) from abroad.

    And I doubt such bold ideas as “let’s upend entire global supply chains that have been built over decades on the vague notion that somehow the entire world collectively has been able to inflict harm upon the United States unnoticed and unpunished and I, the acting president of Venezuela, am the first American to ever notice this” uttered by someone who the rest of the world expects to be replaced by someone less… “imaginative” as this guy in less than 4 years (Lord what a long sentence) are enticing entrepreneurs to invest in moving every supply chain for every product on Earth to be entirely produced in the US.

    As long as the rest of the world keeps producing as they are, you’re dependent on American firms popping up to do it instead. But any businessowner of the scale required to be up for the task knows that proper international trade creates maximum wealth (which is extra nice for them because America is not traditionally known for redistributing this newfound wealth) and would prefer that. And if anyone willing to start one anyway despite all that also believes that this will all be over in 3 years, they’ll never bother to engage in any process longer than that to start a business. And even despite all that, there’s no guarantee that any American good will be of equal or better quality or price than a foreign good just because it was made fully in America. Especially if the idea is that this will be the case for everything on Earth. It’s fully possible that you’ll “hurt” the foreign companies (they’ll just sell amongst themselves, it’s the entire rest of the world, they’ll figure something out) and end up in a situation where Americans have inferior goods at higher prices.

    TL;DR: Tariffs do not necessarily lead to consumers paying for most or all of the tariff. Blanket tariffs just because are profoundly stupid and lead to consumers shouldering the burden.

    (I don’t know why I was moved to write such a long comment for such a minor technical difference)



  • It will be December 31. They’ll put up a gigantically sized image on their website of the logo of the game. I’m talking, like, a gigapixel.

    “After long development time, we have finally managed to release ‘Metroid Prime™ 4: Beyond’. The Metroid Prime™ 4: Beyond video game for the Nintendo Switch system, Metroid Prime™ 4: Beyond - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition video game for the Nintendo Switch 2 system and Metroid Prime™ 4: Beyond - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition upgrade pack for the Nintendo Switch 2 system have been delayed to a later date.”






  • Just today I witnessed someone working from home who had to move to a new system at work. Part of the instructions involved deactivating their 2FA app, which was apparently still needed for a later step in the process. They were supposed to use a backup phone number in the account to receive a text code to sign in, but, of course, there’s no backup phone number in their account.

    If only their job used this scheme instead. sigh







  • Someone I know recently showed me that extension. I replied to them with “why bother with a browser extension, just paste the DOI into Anna’s Archive and it’ll show up 99% of the time” and showed it to them on their computer. It then showed a message along the lines of “you can access this file, but not here. Go to this site instead”.

    They were signed into their university account. As you use that extension yourself, do you know if that’s normal behavior? I’m afraid the extension flagged this person at the campus IT department or something like that


  • Learn of YouTube, go to youtube.com and there’s content.

    Learn of Mastodon, ask “where’s that?” and be told to go to joinmastodon.org. When I did this, you had to pick an instance. mastodon.social was full, you had to find something else. So you look at every instance there is in the list, and try to filter for moderation rules as you’re told this is best practice. Don’t worry, all of Mastodon can see everything posted by everyone on every instance! Picking an instance is really choosing where your values are best aligned, nothing more. So you spend the effort, make an account, get asked a reason why you’re signing up (though I might be mistaking this memory for when I signed up to Lemmy), have to wait for approval, get an account, and sign into the official app…

    … and there’s no content. The only way I ever managed to get content was to learn of Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon and manually look them up. So I ended up following a whopping 3 accounts, one of which being some EU governmental account, another essentially being the XDA RSS feed. Needless to say, I didn’t stick around.

    I don’t know if things have improved since then, or how Bluesky does things. But I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.