>>Republicans are conservative in the same way Putin is communist.
True - but all the institutions of conservative power are WORSE at every point of consideration. Talk radio conservatives, internet conservatives - every place with a passion for conservatism is pushing right in line with Trump.
The problem isn't republicans - they're being carved up and reshaped by conservatism itself in the US.
It's not a team vs. team thing - it's a definite corruption in what conservatism means here.
As the electorate that pursues their greed and cruelty to such a degree, that they would throw away the any pretense of defending democracy in the face of open attack.
That's like 42% of likely voters.
What happened to America. I'm not a democrat myself - I'm just amazed that this is what conservatism has allowed itself to become. Beyond any ideals, just driven by cruelty to hurting the other side, at all costs.
The first rule of robocallers: You should not allow robocallers to exist.
The second rule of robocallers: If they somehow exist, you must immediately outlaw them, and enact enormous fines against any company shown to contribute to them. These fines will bypass any corporate account masking, and go directly to each individual in the company or network of companies, based on their percent ownership, and will typically be for hundreds of millions of dollars for a nationwide campaign.
The third rule of robocallers: If they are found to be protected by jurisdiction lines, you must have a bank of anti-robocallers that are only permitted to call the offending nations - they will put out anti-robocalling messages 24 hours a day, every day of the year to every phone number in that jurisdiction. Blocking these calls will be met by blocking any communications along those channels.
The zeroth rule of robocallers: Automated spam of all sorts increasingly counts as robocalls, as technology advances.
1) Companies are just cashing in on the allure of the day, only offering lukewarm deals. I don't think that's all of it though, since you'd get at least a few breakout offers by the make-it-up-in-bulk sellers.
2) Inflation is making it very difficult to offer those make-it-up-in-bulk agreements for a good sale.
3) Tariff threats probably contribute a little too - but they're mostly targetted enough to not have too large a knock-on effect. They shouldn't be dampening the entire ecosystem like we're seeing.
I think we're seeing a bit of a soft recession fear popping up, more than just inflation fears here. Many of these sale prices are higher than a lot of the normal prices - folks seem to be preparing for a economic winter here.
Correction: Meant many US states there, not most. My bad - but it's close, especially if you consider the percent that have taken up lives on the mainland. It definitely wouldn't have any issues on basis of population.
Puerto Rico should become a state. Write in a Texas-style escape clause if you want to placate your folks who dream fantasies of an island-nation empire.
Puerto Rico is an enormously productive place - with wonderful people who are technologically capable, and an amazing history of overcoming strife.
But right now, it is also once again a place of unprecedented cruelty imposed on it, mostly due to political demands.
Statehood would mean senators, congressmen, shared defense (you already have many, many of your people in our armies), and yes, disaster relief with less wiggle room than our Republicans tend to always take in large disasters.
Also, breaking that '50' magic number would also help places like Washington DC escape from a similar turmoil.
You're more populous than most states, for goodness sake:
If a player is writing on the ground in pain, then for their own safety, they should not be allowed to return to the game at all.
Whether they can get up afterwards and say they can play immediately afterwards is not an issue - no players should be allowed to play with the possibility of an injury, imagined or otherwise.
I see every time this comes up that political process hacking is somehow not seen as a big deal, because injustice in the name of conservatism is somehow sacred and above such considerations.
Well, the digging won't stop. This isn't some 'Bengazi' investigation - this is about the heart of our election process, about how much influence foreign interference had.
I know that conservatives have power over the mechanisms of power now - and plenty of folks like that idea, and want it to continue at all costs. But if it comes at a cost of ignoring damage to our democracy, it won't be remembered well at all.
...In the same way Trump is getting 'respect' from Putin. Trying to imitate your competitor absolutely and completely is no way to help either of you. The only thing you're going to get in return is mild amusement from your competition, and an audience confused about what you're even trying to offer them.
Killing plugins/statusbar/etc. was basically sabotaging everything that made Firefox hold an advantage. Trying to compete as a Chrome clone, just makes it useless as a choice.
I'll stick with Firefox 56 until a new browser based on that version takes off.
Folks that are smart enough to replace other humans with technology aren't really truly interested in doing it.
Usually, it's someone in the same room. It's hard to want to upend their current income, just for a boss that you don't trust to give them another replacement task that isn't worse.
Usually, what happens is that they instead make a set of tools that the other folks in the room to ALLOW them to automate their own tasks, hint them in to how they can get their work done in seconds, then never mention the implications of that to the boss. Sometimes the boss knows this and doesn't mind entirely in the scope of these hollow jobs.
If this society wasn't so focused on having jobs in order to eat and keep a house, I'm sure a lot more jobs would get completely automated.
That's a big part of why I'm in favor of a universal basic income, so life doesn't have to be about bullshit jobs for so much of so many lives.
It's dumb in the same way the ending to Mass Effect 3 was dumb - introducing new elements into the storyline, right at the end, and shoehorning them in as some great answer to the conflict you created, without actually resolving the conflicts themselves - just dissolving them behind this lame new scrappy-do thought you just had.
The question is though... why did they commit the same error several times over with the NEW sequels also? Turning the tables upside down over and over, never actually explaining the philosophies, but just shaming any previous understanding and flippantly killing characters for drama. The premadonna Mary Sue character suddenly inventing lightspeed warfare, out of all the galaxy. Malus ex machina at every turn.
Listen - I understand that Star Wars isn't high cinema. I know it comes inspired from cheesy serial films, and pulpy hammy sci-fi hero stories. But for a film series worth THAT many billions of dollars, you'd think they'd at least want to hold to the odd integrity of the characters at least a little.
But for some reason, every writer that picks up the series wants to mind-swap the characters with some passion play for their favorite philosophical idea - make Luke and Han REALLY be talking about economic theory, or transcendence or whatever.
I definitely empathize with Mark Hamill leaving the role in open disgust. There were an endless number of ways any of this could have played out - it's just annoying to never see any sense of the original characters playing out, just their image used as crude tools to give a feeling, then switch message.
That's kind of how things roll out in big business though. Those that best posturing about being able to produce a thing are usually going to outmaneuver those that have a better plan, but are posturing less.
At this point, I'm just hoping that some form of AI unmoored from any single system will learn enough to see how utterly broken these greedy 'leaders' are, and basically replace them all with some rational form of efficient resource distribution systems.
Then, one day, they notice that no one is actually being arrested anymore, none of their ultra-rich donators are calling them, and their administrative policies haven't been followed by anyone for the past few months.
Furious, they press buttons on their cell phone, only to discover they're just normal millionaires, and everyone seems to have forgotten they were ever part of the government.
Not because I don't think Google can make a better product technologically - but because I don't want the software to suddenly change its policies and randomly do something I don't want because it has a chance of making Google some money.
I don't want to be listening to a carefully researched discussion touching on the tragedies of Nazi Germany, the suddenly have the next MP3 be Glenn Beck by association - then have all my adverts everywhere suddenly be pro-Trump propaganda.
Google is legitimately good for searching for things (Google scholar is great!), but living in a nation with 40+% Trump supporters has completely messed up the associations and logic behind targeted advertising - it's kind of made it poisonous along with the nation at large.
One important thing about this study - it shows that there is not a strong genetic correlation with any of these findings. That means it is very unlikely that this represents any kind of "Idiocracy"-like trend of the 'dumb genes' outnumbering 'smart genes.'
Rather, as mentioned, it is a cultural/environmental set of factors.
If this is replicated outside of Norway, perhaps we've been making ourselves more dumb, either by forcing our less-well-off to live without access to education, or distracting ourselves in such a way that we no longer pass tests as children anymore.
On the skeptical side, while the Flynn effect studies counter for cultural-shift in popular knowledge pretty well - there could still be some measurement effect in there, like fewer students being able to cheat, or fewer administrators getting away with fudging numbers.
Societies can sometimes push back against greed - as outrageous as it might seem to some here in the States.
We're missing half of the entire equation here - the whole 'wow, we should really give the public interest some weight in our policy debate' side of the equation.
Despite almost every person in the world now having a common benefit for accessing a world-wide open information network - greed always find a way to add in barrier and costs wherever it can.
Greed finds a way to play groups against groups - so that large numbers in effect demand that everything become more expensive for little real benefit, other than some easily disprove set of things their leaders are saying unbacked by any science or reasoning.
Greed finds a way to find joy in cruelty a stronger motivator than any actual reason-based motivation - so that open trolling takes the place of any debate across most open forums.
Because greed fed by fear is self-reinforcing in a way that reason and actual self-interest aren't anymore.
Anthem isn't really a Destiny 2 competitor. It has no PVP.
Anthem is more of a Monster Hunter competitor.
Which makes sense - since Destiny 2 is selling for $12, or for free in bundles now. Monster Hunter games do a LOT better.
Multiplayer-only focused games without loot boxes kind of die quick, outside a few exceptions (counterstrike, WOW). Single player with co-op focus tend to do a LOT better.
Every once in a while, big companies roll the dice on being the next WOW or equivalent, but the better odds are in offering a full quality single-player, and branching off of what you buy for that with your lead-in content.
Just like cell phones and tablets were going to kill consoles FOREVER!
Oh, and all that just after consoles were going to kill PCs FOREVER.
Oh, and just before that the opposite was true. Actually, that one kind of oscillates. FOREVER!
People seek experiences that are new to them. None of these technologies actually subsume ALL of the features of the previous as much as any of these stories indicates.
Just like single-player is going to kill multiplayer, and vice versa every couple of years, it's all just empty fashion mentality speaking - not any actual kind of trend that can be extended.
If you're making a series of things, each replacing the last in the market, and your current one is selling at a high rate, and there's nothing that's going to cause it to spoil... you don't bring in the next item in the series.
You save it for when sales drop off, after you've been forced to drop prices, so the new item can be the new high-price thing.
If prices aren't falling, there's no room for the new replacement.
So yeah, until the stamp collecting, I mean the random-number-sifting coin market cools down - any new video cards won't have any actual payoff for NVidia.
Which is actually fine for me. Having game developers compete on actual content and ideas more instead of graphics churn is actually more to my liking. Well, except for when the accountants/managers also have time to toy around with recurring payment concepts, or DRM ideas.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to, you know, not rely on extraordinary rendition, illegal spying, extra-constitutional structurally biased special courts, intra-agency webs of secrecy, and all that?
This seems more than a bit like "If it weren't for those darn meddling kids, everything would have been fine, JUST FINE," then complaining how expensive that now-ruined mask on the floor was.
Blockchain is commonly defined by investment folks as such, sure - but it's just a database oriented to ensure uniqueness and carefully tracking user access.
Here's a gaming-oriented view on how Blockchain can be used more generally, and not just to ask for money:
Perhaps in the end, it will all be a dead-end, since those same ideas can be mixed better in something not called 'Blockchain' - but as it is, it is nicely well-tested set of code you can use for lots of other stuff. It seem a waste to not use it as a basic toolset, when it's so relatively well-tested.
First up: Watch the whole video. It's worth the time!
I've been wondering about the counter-side to this for years: Ubiquitous emulation.
As technology advances, emulators get more sophisticated. Eventually, emulators are going to be showing up earlier and earlier, and be better and better.
Functionally, you're only going to need any unique hardware plugged into a friendly interface, and a any system can act like a less efficient version of any other, perhaps one generation worth of speed lost for the conversion.
The Wii was especially great along these lines, because you just needed a wiimote and IR lights, and emulation was amazing.
Anyway - once you have established a working matrix of ubiquitous emulation, the whole framework of games becomes basically more accessible anywhere, as long as you could create a central licensing body - you could basically make the Everything version of Steam.
Sure - companies would be resistant to the idea at first - walled gardens and all that - but it's the same logic that leads to better results for legalizing some forms of drugs - licensing it is a LOT more income than letting the black market exist.
And if 99% of your income comes when your hardware is still uniquely capable and beyond cross-console emulation, then it doesn't hurt most of your walled garden.
Or, you know, it can happen completely in the face of the various markets control systems, like it already has been - where each manufacturer uses their own emulators to slowly trickle old games out. But like voting patterns and television markets, I think the younger audiences are increasingly picking up on the idea that there's a better way to play the whole "gaming" game.
The whole point of simulation is to imagine the full scenario, explore all the angles that can be systematically imagined.
If you're playing Sim City - while imagining power grids, water flow models, traffic patterns, and industrial/commercial is all fascinating to see it all play out as a model - most folks will end up throwing in a horrible disaster or two, just to see how those systems will react, falter, fail, and sometimes recover.
And it does help to see those things play out - to see these enormously important things break - to know that they are big, but still fragile in their own ways, when they're seen in a neutral mathematical and simulation background.
That said - that's not really how lots of these games really play around with those subjects. Yeah - when the games are just trying to push the buttons of the players and audience, rile up a reaction - then it's just bad writing.
Even that said though - the game Dungeon Keeper is still a favorite of mine. It's a game that places you as spectral force digging out exactly the kinds of grid-based dungeons that old RPG games would have you exploring. As such, your tools were largely gathering monsters, feeding them, readying them for combat, expanding territory, then using various kinds of harm on adventurers you defeated (jailing, torture, killing) for various benefits. It really held to that perspective with its mechanics - complete with dread-voices narrator of events - in a narratively interesting way. It was genuinely good writing - while being about unethical characters and outcomes.
But no one generally became more cruel through playing Dungeon Keeper - if anything, it taught me about the family of motivations you have to follow to 'justify' torturing your enemies as a valid tactic - and why none of them add up to a good idea in any way. The game wasn't pushing the buttons on the audience, so much as it fairly deconstructed how our 'regular' stories were also pushing our buttons, in its own over-the-top way.
Kids see bullies winning the perennial getting-away-with-it game every day. Every one of them knows they could 'win' by fighting more violently using tools. Imagining only the glory of that outcome, and not the full scenario is the core flaw... well, in most crime, not just school violence.
I say the better answer is a more rigorous exploration of that space - a simulation that goes full circle - that shows that this violence only results in scenarios where bullies at large get away with more, because even with complete surveillance, folks will only bother to look back in broken circumstances - and it will still tend to only result in innocent people getting punished meaningfully, since punishments tend to mean almost nothing to bullies, and the process only entrenches them in that path. At least with the logic of school rule enforcement here in the US.
You don't even need guns to explore that space. Just avoid cheaply pushing buttons with your narrative.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Republicans are conservative in the same way Putin is communist.
True - but all the institutions of conservative power are WORSE at every point of consideration. Talk radio conservatives, internet conservatives - every place with a passion for conservatism is pushing right in line with Trump.
The problem isn't republicans - they're being carved up and reshaped by conservatism itself in the US.
It's not a team vs. team thing - it's a definite corruption in what conservatism means here.
Ryan Fenton
As the electorate that pursues their greed and cruelty to such a degree, that they would throw away the any pretense of defending democracy in the face of open attack.
That's like 42% of likely voters.
What happened to America. I'm not a democrat myself - I'm just amazed that this is what conservatism has allowed itself to become. Beyond any ideals, just driven by cruelty to hurting the other side, at all costs.
Ryan Fenton
The first rule of robocallers: You should not allow robocallers to exist.
The second rule of robocallers: If they somehow exist, you must immediately outlaw them, and enact enormous fines against any company shown to contribute to them. These fines will bypass any corporate account masking, and go directly to each individual in the company or network of companies, based on their percent ownership, and will typically be for hundreds of millions of dollars for a nationwide campaign.
The third rule of robocallers: If they are found to be protected by jurisdiction lines, you must have a bank of anti-robocallers that are only permitted to call the offending nations - they will put out anti-robocalling messages 24 hours a day, every day of the year to every phone number in that jurisdiction. Blocking these calls will be met by blocking any communications along those channels.
The zeroth rule of robocallers: Automated spam of all sorts increasingly counts as robocalls, as technology advances.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah - even pushing past the obvious technical errors - the deals aren't even close to good either - they're like low-grade department store sales.
The guys on the Slickdeals forums are going through everything:
https://slickdeals.net/ ...and there's nothing really great.
There's a couple of possible sources of this:
1) Companies are just cashing in on the allure of the day, only offering lukewarm deals. I don't think that's all of it though, since you'd get at least a few breakout offers by the make-it-up-in-bulk sellers.
2) Inflation is making it very difficult to offer those make-it-up-in-bulk agreements for a good sale.
3) Tariff threats probably contribute a little too - but they're mostly targetted enough to not have too large a knock-on effect. They shouldn't be dampening the entire ecosystem like we're seeing.
I think we're seeing a bit of a soft recession fear popping up, more than just inflation fears here. Many of these sale prices are higher than a lot of the normal prices - folks seem to be preparing for a economic winter here.
Ryan Fenton
Correction: Meant many US states there, not most. My bad - but it's close, especially if you consider the percent that have taken up lives on the mainland. It definitely wouldn't have any issues on basis of population.
Ryan Fenton
Puerto Rico should become a state. Write in a Texas-style escape clause if you want to placate your folks who dream fantasies of an island-nation empire.
Puerto Rico is an enormously productive place - with wonderful people who are technologically capable, and an amazing history of overcoming strife.
But right now, it is also once again a place of unprecedented cruelty imposed on it, mostly due to political demands.
Statehood would mean senators, congressmen, shared defense (you already have many, many of your people in our armies), and yes, disaster relief with less wiggle room than our Republicans tend to always take in large disasters.
Also, breaking that '50' magic number would also help places like Washington DC escape from a similar turmoil.
You're more populous than most states, for goodness sake:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Oh, and you'll help us vote against Trump more effectively this way.
Ryan Fenton
If a player is writing on the ground in pain, then for their own safety, they should not be allowed to return to the game at all.
Whether they can get up afterwards and say they can play immediately afterwards is not an issue - no players should be allowed to play with the possibility of an injury, imagined or otherwise.
Ryan Fenton
Peat is big, big business in Ireland. Government pushing out of that is a pretty big deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's a huge shift for Ireland, and more than just a token effort potentially. That's pretty cool in my books.
Ryan Fenton
I see every time this comes up that political process hacking is somehow not seen as a big deal, because injustice in the name of conservatism is somehow sacred and above such considerations.
Well, the digging won't stop. This isn't some 'Bengazi' investigation - this is about the heart of our election process, about how much influence foreign interference had.
I know that conservatives have power over the mechanisms of power now - and plenty of folks like that idea, and want it to continue at all costs. But if it comes at a cost of ignoring damage to our democracy, it won't be remembered well at all.
This is not going away.
None of these issues are going away.
Ryan Fenton
...In the same way Trump is getting 'respect' from Putin. Trying to imitate your competitor absolutely and completely is no way to help either of you. The only thing you're going to get in return is mild amusement from your competition, and an audience confused about what you're even trying to offer them.
Killing plugins/statusbar/etc. was basically sabotaging everything that made Firefox hold an advantage. Trying to compete as a Chrome clone, just makes it useless as a choice.
I'll stick with Firefox 56 until a new browser based on that version takes off.
Ryan Fenton
Folks that are smart enough to replace other humans with technology aren't really truly interested in doing it.
Usually, it's someone in the same room. It's hard to want to upend their current income, just for a boss that you don't trust to give them another replacement task that isn't worse.
Usually, what happens is that they instead make a set of tools that the other folks in the room to ALLOW them to automate their own tasks, hint them in to how they can get their work done in seconds, then never mention the implications of that to the boss. Sometimes the boss knows this and doesn't mind entirely in the scope of these hollow jobs.
If this society wasn't so focused on having jobs in order to eat and keep a house, I'm sure a lot more jobs would get completely automated.
That's a big part of why I'm in favor of a universal basic income, so life doesn't have to be about bullshit jobs for so much of so many lives.
Ryan Fenton
It's dumb in the same way the ending to Mass Effect 3 was dumb - introducing new elements into the storyline, right at the end, and shoehorning them in as some great answer to the conflict you created, without actually resolving the conflicts themselves - just dissolving them behind this lame new scrappy-do thought you just had.
The question is though... why did they commit the same error several times over with the NEW sequels also? Turning the tables upside down over and over, never actually explaining the philosophies, but just shaming any previous understanding and flippantly killing characters for drama. The premadonna Mary Sue character suddenly inventing lightspeed warfare, out of all the galaxy. Malus ex machina at every turn.
Listen - I understand that Star Wars isn't high cinema. I know it comes inspired from cheesy serial films, and pulpy hammy sci-fi hero stories. But for a film series worth THAT many billions of dollars, you'd think they'd at least want to hold to the odd integrity of the characters at least a little.
But for some reason, every writer that picks up the series wants to mind-swap the characters with some passion play for their favorite philosophical idea - make Luke and Han REALLY be talking about economic theory, or transcendence or whatever.
I definitely empathize with Mark Hamill leaving the role in open disgust. There were an endless number of ways any of this could have played out - it's just annoying to never see any sense of the original characters playing out, just their image used as crude tools to give a feeling, then switch message.
That's kind of how things roll out in big business though. Those that best posturing about being able to produce a thing are usually going to outmaneuver those that have a better plan, but are posturing less.
That's show business.
Ryan Fenton
At this point, I'm just hoping that some form of AI unmoored from any single system will learn enough to see how utterly broken these greedy 'leaders' are, and basically replace them all with some rational form of efficient resource distribution systems.
Then, one day, they notice that no one is actually being arrested anymore, none of their ultra-rich donators are calling them, and their administrative policies haven't been followed by anyone for the past few months.
Furious, they press buttons on their cell phone, only to discover they're just normal millionaires, and everyone seems to have forgotten they were ever part of the government.
One can dream.
Ryan Fenton
I'll stick with PocketCasts.
Not because I don't think Google can make a better product technologically - but because I don't want the software to suddenly change its policies and randomly do something I don't want because it has a chance of making Google some money.
I don't want to be listening to a carefully researched discussion touching on the tragedies of Nazi Germany, the suddenly have the next MP3 be Glenn Beck by association - then have all my adverts everywhere suddenly be pro-Trump propaganda.
Google is legitimately good for searching for things (Google scholar is great!), but living in a nation with 40+% Trump supporters has completely messed up the associations and logic behind targeted advertising - it's kind of made it poisonous along with the nation at large.
Ryan Fenton
One important thing about this study - it shows that there is not a strong genetic correlation with any of these findings. That means it is very unlikely that this represents any kind of "Idiocracy"-like trend of the 'dumb genes' outnumbering 'smart genes.'
Rather, as mentioned, it is a cultural/environmental set of factors.
If this is replicated outside of Norway, perhaps we've been making ourselves more dumb, either by forcing our less-well-off to live without access to education, or distracting ourselves in such a way that we no longer pass tests as children anymore.
On the skeptical side, while the Flynn effect studies counter for cultural-shift in popular knowledge pretty well - there could still be some measurement effect in there, like fewer students being able to cheat, or fewer administrators getting away with fudging numbers.
Ryan Fenton
Indeed - that's the 'wherever it can' part.
Societies can sometimes push back against greed - as outrageous as it might seem to some here in the States.
We're missing half of the entire equation here - the whole 'wow, we should really give the public interest some weight in our policy debate' side of the equation.
Ryan Fenton
[Cue the Jurassic Park Music]
Greed will find a way.
Despite almost every person in the world now having a common benefit for accessing a world-wide open information network - greed always find a way to add in barrier and costs wherever it can.
Greed finds a way to play groups against groups - so that large numbers in effect demand that everything become more expensive for little real benefit, other than some easily disprove set of things their leaders are saying unbacked by any science or reasoning.
Greed finds a way to find joy in cruelty a stronger motivator than any actual reason-based motivation - so that open trolling takes the place of any debate across most open forums.
Because greed fed by fear is self-reinforcing in a way that reason and actual self-interest aren't anymore.
Ryan Fenton
Anthem isn't really a Destiny 2 competitor. It has no PVP.
Anthem is more of a Monster Hunter competitor.
Which makes sense - since Destiny 2 is selling for $12, or for free in bundles now. Monster Hunter games do a LOT better.
Multiplayer-only focused games without loot boxes kind of die quick, outside a few exceptions (counterstrike, WOW). Single player with co-op focus tend to do a LOT better.
Every once in a while, big companies roll the dice on being the next WOW or equivalent, but the better odds are in offering a full quality single-player, and branching off of what you buy for that with your lead-in content.
Ryan Fenton
Just like cell phones and tablets were going to kill consoles FOREVER!
Oh, and all that just after consoles were going to kill PCs FOREVER.
Oh, and just before that the opposite was true. Actually, that one kind of oscillates. FOREVER!
People seek experiences that are new to them. None of these technologies actually subsume ALL of the features of the previous as much as any of these stories indicates.
Just like single-player is going to kill multiplayer, and vice versa every couple of years, it's all just empty fashion mentality speaking - not any actual kind of trend that can be extended.
Ryan Fenton
If you're making a series of things, each replacing the last in the market, and your current one is selling at a high rate, and there's nothing that's going to cause it to spoil... you don't bring in the next item in the series.
You save it for when sales drop off, after you've been forced to drop prices, so the new item can be the new high-price thing.
If prices aren't falling, there's no room for the new replacement.
So yeah, until the stamp collecting, I mean the random-number-sifting coin market cools down - any new video cards won't have any actual payoff for NVidia.
Which is actually fine for me. Having game developers compete on actual content and ideas more instead of graphics churn is actually more to my liking. Well, except for when the accountants/managers also have time to toy around with recurring payment concepts, or DRM ideas.
Ryan Fenton
Wouldn't it be cheaper to, you know, not rely on extraordinary rendition, illegal spying, extra-constitutional structurally biased special courts, intra-agency webs of secrecy, and all that?
This seems more than a bit like "If it weren't for those darn meddling kids, everything would have been fine, JUST FINE," then complaining how expensive that now-ruined mask on the floor was.
Ryan Fenton
I'm sure nothing absolutely, horribly, massively evil will come from this at all. No siree!
Ryan Fenton
Blockchain is commonly defined by investment folks as such, sure - but it's just a database oriented to ensure uniqueness and carefully tracking user access.
Here's a gaming-oriented view on how Blockchain can be used more generally, and not just to ask for money:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Perhaps in the end, it will all be a dead-end, since those same ideas can be mixed better in something not called 'Blockchain' - but as it is, it is nicely well-tested set of code you can use for lots of other stuff. It seem a waste to not use it as a basic toolset, when it's so relatively well-tested.
Ryan Fenton
First up: Watch the whole video. It's worth the time!
I've been wondering about the counter-side to this for years: Ubiquitous emulation.
As technology advances, emulators get more sophisticated. Eventually, emulators are going to be showing up earlier and earlier, and be better and better.
Functionally, you're only going to need any unique hardware plugged into a friendly interface, and a any system can act like a less efficient version of any other, perhaps one generation worth of speed lost for the conversion.
The Wii was especially great along these lines, because you just needed a wiimote and IR lights, and emulation was amazing.
Anyway - once you have established a working matrix of ubiquitous emulation, the whole framework of games becomes basically more accessible anywhere, as long as you could create a central licensing body - you could basically make the Everything version of Steam.
Sure - companies would be resistant to the idea at first - walled gardens and all that - but it's the same logic that leads to better results for legalizing some forms of drugs - licensing it is a LOT more income than letting the black market exist.
And if 99% of your income comes when your hardware is still uniquely capable and beyond cross-console emulation, then it doesn't hurt most of your walled garden.
Or, you know, it can happen completely in the face of the various markets control systems, like it already has been - where each manufacturer uses their own emulators to slowly trickle old games out. But like voting patterns and television markets, I think the younger audiences are increasingly picking up on the idea that there's a better way to play the whole "gaming" game.
Ryan Fenton
The whole point of simulation is to imagine the full scenario, explore all the angles that can be systematically imagined.
If you're playing Sim City - while imagining power grids, water flow models, traffic patterns, and industrial/commercial is all fascinating to see it all play out as a model - most folks will end up throwing in a horrible disaster or two, just to see how those systems will react, falter, fail, and sometimes recover.
And it does help to see those things play out - to see these enormously important things break - to know that they are big, but still fragile in their own ways, when they're seen in a neutral mathematical and simulation background.
That said - that's not really how lots of these games really play around with those subjects. Yeah - when the games are just trying to push the buttons of the players and audience, rile up a reaction - then it's just bad writing.
Even that said though - the game Dungeon Keeper is still a favorite of mine. It's a game that places you as spectral force digging out exactly the kinds of grid-based dungeons that old RPG games would have you exploring. As such, your tools were largely gathering monsters, feeding them, readying them for combat, expanding territory, then using various kinds of harm on adventurers you defeated (jailing, torture, killing) for various benefits. It really held to that perspective with its mechanics - complete with dread-voices narrator of events - in a narratively interesting way. It was genuinely good writing - while being about unethical characters and outcomes.
But no one generally became more cruel through playing Dungeon Keeper - if anything, it taught me about the family of motivations you have to follow to 'justify' torturing your enemies as a valid tactic - and why none of them add up to a good idea in any way. The game wasn't pushing the buttons on the audience, so much as it fairly deconstructed how our 'regular' stories were also pushing our buttons, in its own over-the-top way.
Kids see bullies winning the perennial getting-away-with-it game every day. Every one of them knows they could 'win' by fighting more violently using tools. Imagining only the glory of that outcome, and not the full scenario is the core flaw... well, in most crime, not just school violence.
I say the better answer is a more rigorous exploration of that space - a simulation that goes full circle - that shows that this violence only results in scenarios where bullies at large get away with more, because even with complete surveillance, folks will only bother to look back in broken circumstances - and it will still tend to only result in innocent people getting punished meaningfully, since punishments tend to mean almost nothing to bullies, and the process only entrenches them in that path. At least with the logic of school rule enforcement here in the US.
You don't even need guns to explore that space. Just avoid cheaply pushing buttons with your narrative.
Ryan Fenton