masterspace

Me in high school computers class:

Hey Teach, I get how code logic flows, but if computers are just bunches of transistors and transistors are just switches, how does any of this actually run or work?

You know, I don't actually know, I only ever learned coding...

* 3 years of electrical and computer engineering Later *

Huh, those are the most wildly complicated and impressive things ever built, thank god I finally got a grasp on it.

* 1 year of quantum and optical computing later *

quiet sobbing

It's quite frankly, rather hard for me to imagine a world where Xbox exits the living room with no replacement.

Literally zero competitive CoD players for instance, would ever think of streaming as a viable replacement, and Microsoft now owns CoD. Do you really think that they would just abandon the entire living room CoD base to Sony and be willing to give Sony a 30% cut of every game sale?

If Microsoft does abandon Xbox consoles, the smart way to do it would be to tailor Windows with an Xbox / Living Room interface. It's what they're doing for Steam Decks / competitors, and it would be a massive feature boost for them if they sold consoles that were just PCs and had your steam library and mods etc, and then it would let every PC maker (Asus, Lenovo, etc. etc.) become a console maker.

Yeah? So? Do your job and optimize it. If they can get BG3, Elden Ring, and Cyberpunk running on it then I'm sure you can get an action adventure Dune game running on it.

I don't understand the hate for Series S, it's an amazing console for the price, where a huge chunk of Xbox gamers are, and forcing devs to optimize their games for low end hardware ends up benefiting everyone.

So far it sounds like the only game that was actually a real issue optimizing for the S was BG3 and that's because of its insanely high RAM usage between all the rippling choices that can have happened by Act 3. And the solution there was simply to implement a memory buffer that smoothed out RAM usage spikes and ended up benefiting every platform.

Then they suddenly started helping Microsoft exclusively, which has been criticized many times for being a monopoly, fairly so. Having a corporate sponsor is one thing. But being exclusively in Microsoft’s pocket and helping them improve a paid AI model and series of AI services that are not exclusively and freely available to the public, yet they are getting huge amounts of funding to operate there non-profit from public sources, it seems like a scam. Unbelievable that they are allowed to do this

I don't understand what your complaint here is. Microsoft invested a fuck ton of money into OpenAI, and OpenAI uses Azure servers to run their models. There's nothing really nefarious there on OpenAI's part. You can argue that Microsoft might be acting anit-competitive, in that they're basically paying a company to use their cloud services instead of competitors, but Microsoft is still a pretty distant #2 to AWS in the Cloud, and OpenAI is not the one with obligations to not abuse their dominant market position.

If anything, OpenAI has gotten scammed out of this relationship as Microsoft engineers have gotten to work closely with them to get their models running efficiently, and now suddenly Microsoft has published very capable models in their Phi line.

But the part that’s really troubling is how they view general intelligence and the future of technology and especially AI. Sam Altman really wants to push for artificial general intelligence, that’s the goal. He wanted to be mobile so it’s accessible basically anywhere. But the thing he never mentions is how it benefits society at large. By society, I mean everyone, not just big companies but health care, wellness, well-being of the public, advancing medical technology, making food more accessible, making housing more accessible for people, improving the state of the world that we live in… None of these are concerns for Open AI

I mean, the obvious answer is the exact same as every other form of automation, from steam engines to computers. The more tasks you can automate, then the more of people's time you free up to work on other stuff.

That and AGIs have the potential to actually surpass in ways and make discoveries and insights that would take us decades.

Open AI is basically just a scheme, a literal pyramid scheme. Users have realized that there’s a way to get easier work done in general, so they keep funding and paying for open AI services which fuels their organization. But they are not interested in doing anything beneficial or good for humanity at all. That’s pretty troubling to know.

You're literally just describing every single software company, and quite frankly, most businesses. It's not a pyramid scheme, it's capitalism, which is also a pyramid scheme, but not an abnormal one.

Don't believe that any for-profit company is altruistic, OpenAI included.

This is literally the first one. There's only been a single Starship explosion in the upper atmosphere.

And no, that leads to spending decades of time going down paths and intricately designing and simulating every possible detail of a system, only to build them, have something unexpected happen, and then realize that the team never considered X effect in Y, Z, etc conditions, and then have to spend years redesigning everything. (Not to mention that at the end of all that we still had two Space Shuttles explode in the upper atmosphere, but with crews on board).

Design it, build it, test it, and get immediate feedback on it, and then redesign it. One way or another, it almost always has to go through that cycle, and it's a lot cheaper to do it upfront.

So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.

What are you talking about?

NASA spends a fixed amount of money for launch contracts to put stuff into space.

NASA's traditional method of contracting, where they would design something, and then having Boeing on retainer to keep asking for more money to build it, and then have congress step in at every step and tell them to use X contractor because it's in their district, and then not actually get to build or test anything for decades, and then discovering problems and paying Boeing a fuck ton more money to "fix" those problems later, led to massive cost overruns and subpar performance on literally every single launch program they've had for the past several decades.

Now NASA is spending that fixed amount of money to SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, etc. and gets a) orders of magnitude more stuff into space and b) does it with no risk of cost overruns since they're all fixed price contracts.

Competitive bidding on fixed price contracts, is literally the alternative model that the government should have been using this whole time instead of subsidizing their traditional contractors with cost+ contracts.

My god, the fucking dumbasses on here.

"Oh my god, Elon Musk's companies make electric cars, therefore electric cars must be bad".

Great logic man! Yep, hardware rich development programs and fixed price government contracting must also be bad because SpaceX has used them to lower launch costs for NASA by orders of magnitude.

Jesus fucking christ, the dumbass blind hate for SpaceX is fucking mind numbing.

I'm honestly pretty pumped for Avowed for all these reasons, just swap Fallout for Skyrim.... Being made by the New Vegas devs too.

Not really I don't think ... Anna Purna already publishes a lot of games and has published a lot of notable films in the past few years.

I feel like if anything it's most notable because Anna Purna has deeper pockets than Remedy, more experience in film and television, and produce notably high quality creative and narrative work, meaning that they're unlikely to screw up Remedy's writing chops and can legitimately help them expand their mixed media ambitions.

Exciting announcement. Two of the best creative and narrative focused companies in gaming.

Capitalism wastes money chasing new shiny tech thing

Yeah, we know. AI's not special.

Professor with tenure.