I’m not saying AI will go away, or not continue to improve - but we are very much at the tail end of the current mania phase, and we will see some market pullback as AI startups begin to go out of business when all of those lofty promises of AI fail to materialise.

Diminishing returns on ever increasing investment, circular investments based on speculative returns, these are all signs of the tail-end of a stock market bubble.

The best way to think of them is as cousins; they are similar - but not exactly the same.

They focus more on higher VRAM and CUDA cores compared to GPUs, while forgoing 3d acceleration capabilities.

But they both come out of the same factories; so when the demand for AI cards is as high as it is now - and Nvidia can sell as many as it produces with a higher margin than GPUs, there is little incentive for them to produce more GPUs and sell them at a competitive price.

So when the AI bubble bursts, demand for AI cards will crater - and there will be no financial incentive to mass produce them in such high quantities. This frees up production capacity at the TSMC factories, incentivising production of lower margin products like GPUs.

Economics is largely a game of supply & demand; when supply outstrips demand, prices fall as sellers search for buyers. When demand outstrips supply prices go up as buyers search for sellers.

Absolutely; but you just know that Publishers will just push to outsource development to 3rd party “contractors” so that they won’t be eligible, or some other such bullshit.

In a lot of places, rotisserie chicken are a loss-leader - they are sold below cost in order to entice more shoppers in the hopes that they will buy enough other things to more than make up for it.

Costco does this, not only on their hotdogs but also on their chickens also.

A lot of other times, raw commodity materials are more valuable than finished goods because of the implied value; ie there is an opportunity cost associated with transforming it into a finished good.

Assuming the AI bubble bursts before then, we might actually see somewhat reasonable pricing for next-gen consoles.

A major reason why prices have remained so inflated for so long post-COVID is because data centres have been sucking up every bit of silicon that TSMC has been able to pump out for both Nvidia and AMD.

But that would be honestly a very small upside, compared to what would likely be the Mother of All Stockmarket Crashes. The market cap of the Top 10 AI-related stocks is greater than the current US national debt, they aren’t in a position to be able to reasonably bail out those companies when it all eventually goes to shit, like they do in 2008.

It’s more about the console’s lifecycle, rather than it remaining the ‘current generation’. They’re implying that they will continue to ‘support’ the PS5 for another 5 years, whatever they determine that to mean (likely just keeping the online store open, maybe also multiplayer servers, and whatever PlayStation Plus features ).

Oh, absolutely - but a lot of perpetual/evolving media has similar issues where previous canon ends up being recontextualised, reframed or outright retconned in order to better fit the overarching story currently being told.

Sometimes it’s for the better, others for the worse (cough, Shadowlands, cough).

Still, it doesn’t stop it from being an otherwise great example of world building - evident in part by just how many people actually care about the lore!

They popped up on my YouTube shorts feed a few weeks ago; as best as I can tell they’re a fan-made set of booster cards, with the purpose of parodying/piggybacking on the current booster cracking (gambling) craze - right down to the fact that it has its own set of rare ‘chase’ cards.

I just find the low-effort art style and names charming, without ever feeling the need to participate.

Content is 100% valid.

Just wanted to jump in and say that this map looks like it was drawn by the same guy that made Pokenots:

World of Warcraft; Azeroth (the planet) lore is quite detailed and fleshed out - building upon the foundations of the original RTS trilogy.

It’s a bit of a shame a lot of it gets swept under the rug every major expansion and patch cycle, so it’s hard for new(er) players to catch up.

Beyond Android phones, it should also be good for the emulation scene on macOS.

Interestingly enough, I was casually window browsing TVs and was surprised to find that LG killed off their OLED 8K TVs a couple years ago!

Until/if we get to a point where more people want/can fit 110in+ TVs into their living rooms - 8K will likely remain a niche for the wealthy to show off, more than anything.

There is like a good chunk of an entire decade’s worth of games that can’t be played on PC legitimately due to either expired licenses for music (e.g. EA Trax) or lack of support for older, disc-based DRM (SecuROM etc.).

That’s before factoring older titles that no longer work due to arbitrary changes to DirectX and the Windows kernel, which break backwards compatibility.

I don’t want to contribute to the mountains of AI slip on the internet, so instead I’ll just prompt the reader’s brain to imagine a picture of Bugs Bunny in Arabian robes, eating a carrot nonchalantly, with the caption “eh, wahabi ‘doc?”

Wait until they’re 2+ and randomly adding things to the cart in the hopes you won’t notice!

If you still enjoy using the self-checkouts for bigger shops then - you might just be a masochist! 🤣

With a toddler in tow, ain’t no way in hell I want to scan and bag a week’s worth of groceries all by myself.

For small shops of a couple items? I’ll absolutely going to go through the self-scans as they’re fast and convenient. But when spending the equivalent of ~$150USD across dozens of items - nah, fuck that noise. Especially when having to deal with any interventions because the machine vision gets confused by what’s happening on camera, or the weight sensor doesn’t correctly detect an item added.

Give me a cashier to scan and pack any day of the week.

TIL rechargeable CR2032s exist, and also that their output voltage is higher than standard ones and apparently may run the risk of damaging circuits?

We don’t even need to imagine, necessarily! The quality of games released towards the tail-end of its life cycle speaks volumes: Uncharted 2&3, The Last of Us, God of War 3, Metal Gear Solid 4 etc.

I don’t think there was anything actually wrong with the architecture per se, but rather just the lack of proper documentation and tools set potential developers back significantly.

It was definitely hubris on Sony’s part, thinking that they could do whatever they wanted given the prior success of both the PlayStation and PS2 consoles prior.

Those PS3 launch stumbles definitely were a wake-up call, however I do believe that because it was largely the US/Western arm of SCEI that lead the ‘rescue’ - they ended up wrestling control away from the JP arm, ultimately causing the PS4/5 to end up so risk adverse and largely unremarkable as a result.

Literal dictionary definition of a BIOS:

Note the part regarding enabling a computer to start the OS. But regardless, this point is largely moot as we are just arguing semantics.

No the PS4 doesn’t run a PC-style AMI/Phoenix BIOS, but instead a secure chain of Boot ROM to bootloaders - however, so do Macs, which are PCs.

Dumps of these console boot ROMs and loaders - at least in emulation circles - tend to be colloquially referred to as a BIOS, as it constitutes a System that handles Basic Input and Output.

It even putting this one point aside, it runs an AMD-designed x86-64 APU, that was available to purchase for PCs (AM1 socket) albeit with a reduced power GPU.

It runs GDDR5 unified memory like a modern iMac, or Steam Deck.

It natively runs a UNIX-derived OS, again like an iMac, or Linux on the Steam Deck.

Let’s just face facts, the PS4 & 5 are just iMacs in drag 😉