Those attempting to make the argument that the presence of inherently "unrealistic" features in games like Battlefield (e.g player respawns) contradicts the criticism of the design choices in Battlefield 5 as "unrealistic" are either missing the point, or being deliberately facetious.
The reason I used quotation marks in the sentence above, is that, when gamers talk of "realism", they often use it as a catch-all phrase to describe a variety of distinct things, including physical realism and contextual authenticity.
Physical realism relates mainly to the underlying mechanics of gameplay; things like gravitationally dependent bullet trajectories, destructible environments, calibre/material dependent bullet penetration, weight dependent stamina of characters etc. Gamers often appreciate these effects for two reasons; it adds more complexity to the game and therefore a greater degree of strategy, as well as aiding suspension of disbelief, making the experience more engrossing.
Contextual authenticity , on the other hand, rarely relates to the actual mechanics of the game, but instead deals with things such as the narrative and presentation. These aspects rarely affect the gameplay and tend not to offer any greater complexity, but further aid suspension of disbelief and go someway to making the experience feel distinct; the kind of way that Call of Duty: World at War was different to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, resulting in sales of 15.02m vs 17.28m, bucking the trend of sequels improving sales figures, despite having almost exactly the same underlying game mechanics.
Why is contextual authenticity important to people? I don't know, why do people like to go to the cinema or imax for films, to listen to high definition audio through $1000 speakers?
At the end of the day, the players were asking for both that physical realism and contextual realism and Dice decided they were happy to sacrifice the latter on the altar of Social Justice. The fact that they claimed the game was "realistic" and in fact "authentic", I think, made it much worse, as it came across as them deliberately setting out to make a political message out of the game, which, at the end of the day, is completely inappropriate and ultimately short-sighted, which is why they're deservedly in the mess that they're in now.
Not sure if I'm alone here, but I was taught to only use numeric characters when listing a quantity or measurement, e.g 5 eggs, 20,000ft etc.
In this case, writing "1 inbox" is poor practice (in my humble opinion) and ought to be replaced with "a single inbox", which properly communicates the intended meaning.
Just think, if they hadn't published this paper, we might not have known, to a high degree of accuracy, the exact number of photons emitted over the lifetime of the universe.
I can't decide whether this trumps Ugg's famous theorem that striking pieces of flint together summons the fire element from the Fire God in the Sky.
"Mr. Dorsey told one person that he had overruled a decision by his staff to kick Mr. Jones off, according to a person familiar with the discussion."
Ah, here we see another common tactic of the outrage industry: if we can't get X organisation to do what we want, then we'll just make up a rumour implicating one of the senior members, in order to personally pressure them into giving in.
...why the hell were the Fire Service using an insufficient data plan that would leave them liable to run out of data in an emergency and why did they not have a backup connection available for that circumstance, which they were clearly aware of (given that there was an expected mechanism in place to remove it in an emergency)?
And what's more, how does that even work? Surely, by nature of their work, it's always used in emergencies - them being, you know, the emergency services - so they should never run out of data? Unless of course, it wasn't just being used in emergencies...
Jokes aside, while the capabilities enabled by the new RTCore and neural net in the new RTX cards should definitely be welcomed, I'm not sure whether we should be worried about the implications this might have on the increasing trend of proprietary, closed source middleware in games and other graphics software.
Watching the conference, the most telling moment was probably when they demonstrated the lighting effects in Battlefield 5 when using RTCore and alternatively just the game engine's built-in lighting effects. The difference really was night and day and one can imagine some studios looking at this and considering whether they even need bother going to the hassle of developing their own implementations for lighting when they can achieve much better results just using Nvidia middleware instead.
Whilst proprietary, vendor specific graphics plugins are nothing new from Nvidia (Gameworks), two things that are different this time are:
In the past, Gameworks has mostly been restricted to enhancing certain visual aspects, e.g Hairworks, or increasing performance, e.g Tesselation. What seemed to be demonstrated in both the BF5 and Tomb Raider presentations was an end-to-end lighting system that did everything - entirely substituting the game developers efforts.
The use of dedicated hardware sub-systems such as the RTCore and neural network changes the nature of the offering of Nvidia middleware to developers substantially; where before it was limited largely to closed-source software implementations of non-critical graphics effects, which (big) developers could likely implement themselves, what we seem to have now is an entire end-to-end system - relying explicitly on hardware sub-systems which are not available on other platforms - which developers would be unlikely able to implement themselves without extensive understanding of the sub-systems themselves.
Admittedly, I'm making a number of assumptions here e.g that Nvidia won't share information about the RTCore, but given some of their quite shady practices in the past, it's something to consider.
What people are pushing for is along the Nordic (sic) model of democratic socialism,
What's that then? Because last time I checked, the Scandinavian (presumably what you meant) economies look absolutely nothing like this:
Everyone is part owner of all resources, and means of production, and everyone's needs are met.
If you think the economy of Sweden - far and away the most socially liberal of the Scandinavian countries - follows a Socialist model, then you're living in a different world from the rest of us. Because here, pretty much 99% of the world's economies are operating under Capitalist principles (including China), with the only real differentiation being the size of government regulation of private industry. Social welfare schemes - which the Swedes consider to be very important - don't have anything to do with Socialism; there's nothing in Capitalism that precludes the existence of charities or similar bodies.
...who are actually interested in hearing the other side of the argument. Fortunately, British politics isn't quite as exciting as the OP sets out. Some relevant info on:
For those less inclined towards actually verifying facts, the TLDR:
Of the elected politicians in the UK, 73% voted to Remain, despite only 48% of the general population of the UK voting the same way, with the figure for the unelected upper house likely much higher
In London, where the vast majority of the important public bodies are, on average, 60% of people voted to Remain. In some places it was as high as 70%. Note, this includes all of the major broadcasters and media, government bodies, regulators, big business etc.
Since the referendum, the vast majority of British people have respected the outcome, as shown in most polls and it's only a hard core of Eurofanatics, in the right positions, that have pretended to accept the result, while conspiring to prevent the mandate being fulfilled i.e returning control of laws, borders and money and - quelle surprise - are now actively trying to invalidate it altogether.
Funnily enough to, that didn't stop him owning hundreds of slaves and using them to work his plantations.
Nice attempt at pro-US historical revisionism, but the US was in no way innocent in the history of slavery; the facts remain that the US was the ultimate destination for the vast majority of slaves and while English slave traders supplied them up till the turn of the 19th century -when the Abolition Act was passed - slavery was never legal in English common law and British people did not keep slaves, unlike their American counterparts, who legally owned slaves up until 1865.
I don't think we're anywhere near close enough to understanding the underlying principles behind societal or altruistic behaviour, for you to make simplistic, blanket statements about its net, as well as intended, outcomes.
There's evidence to suggest that behaviour that we might normally consider as altruistic is, in fact, ultimately selfish, when you look at organisms from the slightly more sophisticated point of view as a carrier of genes, rather than just a selfish individual: https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcent...
Certainly, when we look at recent social history, we can see that there's many examples where individuals who have purported to act in altruistic, or otherwise unselfish ways, for the benefit of others, have, in the long run, gone on to disproportionately benefit themselves, to the extreme detriment of everyone else i.e every successful Communist leader in the last century.
Interestingly, this kind of deceptive exploitation that relies on the better character (or naivety) of others might be a behaviour that develops in a subset of psychopathic individuals who, rather than simply callously acting in their own self-interest to the detriment of others, actually genuinely believe that they know what is best for other people, better than them themselves. In this way, they 'unknowingly' deceive others into thinking they are altruistic, whilst ultimately only acting selfishly, to the detriment of others, as all psychopaths do. When you look at successful Communist leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc. it's almost certain that they must have been psychopaths in order to lack the empathy that enabled them to do what they did. In this sense, the success of the Communist regimes may, ironically, have been the result of evolutionary competition itself, where having a certain expression of psychopathic traits resulted in an enormous evolutionary advantage.
Debate implies strong AI that can reason about itself, which we do not have. But TFS seems to be describing validation through a competitive pair of AIs, which does not seem novel
Where have you seen previous examples of this?
The validation is an important point - the whole point in fact. When you've got data sets with millions of samples, many containing information in a form that's abstruse or even impossible for humans to understand, how do you validate whether the system actually produced the optimal solution, or the logic behind that choice?
That's a really difficult problem, which I don't think enough people are exploring given how quickly these systems are being deployed into very real scenarios.
Capitalists didn't invent the concept of competition - they just realised it naturally (pun intended) brought about optimal outcomes.
You can rail all you want against competition, but you should pause to remember that you're a direct result and net beneficiary of it. Competition is simply a fact of life: if you don't compete, you lose.
It has little to do with altruism. But a government that fails to provide what its constituents want will not govern for long.
The Roman empire lasted a pretty long time and given how it ended, I'll warrant it failed to provide what its constituents wanted.
If you meant governments in the more recent sense, well, in the last 100 years we've had the Nazi and Communist regimes (and all the fun that those enterprises entailed), which lasted a lot longer than many of their constituents - the latter of which, also, are still murdering and suppressing people in certain parts of the world. So forgive me if I don't buy that line.
Many places in Europe have shown that it can work. Provided you keep the rest of the world out, that is...
Care to name these many places and their public services? Please don't mention the NHS, as I'm from the UK and have experienced it first-hand: service varies from place to place, going from excellent in somewhere like London, to essentially mass medical-negligence in places like mid-Staffs. The only reason it hasn't been scrapped for publicly supported health insurance (like our more sensible European neighbours) is because it's been turned into a kind of national religion, with all the negative connotations that entails.
You fail to address the fundamental point though: efficiency comes from competition, something that can never exist without some form of profit motive. The two go hand in hand and if you cut out one, you lose the other.
Alternatively (and, incidentally, in the real world), the public sector has no incentive to provide better, or more efficient services, as the removal of a profit motive necessitates the removal of competition - the only known and established mechanism of creating efficiency (we know it works, because it's been operating in nature for hundreds of millions of years - see "process of natural selection").
Yes, you can claim some kind of altruistic, higher moral calling to do right by one's fellow man/woman, but history is pretty clear that this thinking has never actually manifested itself in reality, but instead almost universally featured as a pretence for certain individuals to bring about widespread misery and suffering.
Slashdot Mirror
Those attempting to make the argument that the presence of inherently "unrealistic" features in games like Battlefield (e.g player respawns) contradicts the criticism of the design choices in Battlefield 5 as "unrealistic" are either missing the point, or being deliberately facetious.
The reason I used quotation marks in the sentence above, is that, when gamers talk of "realism", they often use it as a catch-all phrase to describe a variety of distinct things, including physical realism and contextual authenticity.
Physical realism relates mainly to the underlying mechanics of gameplay; things like gravitationally dependent bullet trajectories, destructible environments, calibre/material dependent bullet penetration, weight dependent stamina of characters etc. Gamers often appreciate these effects for two reasons; it adds more complexity to the game and therefore a greater degree of strategy, as well as aiding suspension of disbelief, making the experience more engrossing.
Contextual authenticity , on the other hand, rarely relates to the actual mechanics of the game, but instead deals with things such as the narrative and presentation. These aspects rarely affect the gameplay and tend not to offer any greater complexity, but further aid suspension of disbelief and go someway to making the experience feel distinct; the kind of way that Call of Duty: World at War was different to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, resulting in sales of 15.02m vs 17.28m, bucking the trend of sequels improving sales figures, despite having almost exactly the same underlying game mechanics.
Why is contextual authenticity important to people? I don't know, why do people like to go to the cinema or imax for films, to listen to high definition audio through $1000 speakers?
At the end of the day, the players were asking for both that physical realism and contextual realism and Dice decided they were happy to sacrifice the latter on the altar of Social Justice. The fact that they claimed the game was "realistic" and in fact "authentic", I think, made it much worse, as it came across as them deliberately setting out to make a political message out of the game, which, at the end of the day, is completely inappropriate and ultimately short-sighted, which is why they're deservedly in the mess that they're in now.
Not sure if I'm alone here, but I was taught to only use numeric characters when listing a quantity or measurement, e.g 5 eggs, 20,000ft etc.
In this case, writing "1 inbox" is poor practice (in my humble opinion) and ought to be replaced with "a single inbox", which properly communicates the intended meaning.
Just think, if they hadn't published this paper, we might not have known, to a high degree of accuracy, the exact number of photons emitted over the lifetime of the universe.
I can't decide whether this trumps Ugg's famous theorem that striking pieces of flint together summons the fire element from the Fire God in the Sky.
The US had a different batch of vaccines, dipshit, with no adjuvant added. From that lil' old group the CDC, asshole:
Link
I agree, we wouldn't want those batshit people to find stuff like this:
Link
"Mr. Dorsey told one person that he had overruled a decision by his staff to kick Mr. Jones off, according to a person familiar with the discussion."
Ah, here we see another common tactic of the outrage industry: if we can't get X organisation to do what we want, then we'll just make up a rumour implicating one of the senior members, in order to personally pressure them into giving in.
...why the hell were the Fire Service using an insufficient data plan that would leave them liable to run out of data in an emergency and why did they not have a backup connection available for that circumstance, which they were clearly aware of (given that there was an expected mechanism in place to remove it in an emergency)?
And what's more, how does that even work? Surely, by nature of their work, it's always used in emergencies - them being, you know, the emergency services - so they should never run out of data? Unless of course, it wasn't just being used in emergencies...
...just not on AMD peasant rigs."
Jokes aside, while the capabilities enabled by the new RTCore and neural net in the new RTX cards should definitely be welcomed, I'm not sure whether we should be worried about the implications this might have on the increasing trend of proprietary, closed source middleware in games and other graphics software.
Watching the conference, the most telling moment was probably when they demonstrated the lighting effects in Battlefield 5 when using RTCore and alternatively just the game engine's built-in lighting effects. The difference really was night and day and one can imagine some studios looking at this and considering whether they even need bother going to the hassle of developing their own implementations for lighting when they can achieve much better results just using Nvidia middleware instead.
Whilst proprietary, vendor specific graphics plugins are nothing new from Nvidia (Gameworks), two things that are different this time are:
Admittedly, I'm making a number of assumptions here e.g that Nvidia won't share information about the RTCore, but given some of their quite shady practices in the past, it's something to consider.
What people are pushing for is along the Nordic (sic) model of democratic socialism,
What's that then? Because last time I checked, the Scandinavian (presumably what you meant) economies look absolutely nothing like this:
Everyone is part owner of all resources, and means of production, and everyone's needs are met.
If you think the economy of Sweden - far and away the most socially liberal of the Scandinavian countries - follows a Socialist model, then you're living in a different world from the rest of us. Because here, pretty much 99% of the world's economies are operating under Capitalist principles (including China), with the only real differentiation being the size of government regulation of private industry. Social welfare schemes - which the Swedes consider to be very important - don't have anything to do with Socialism; there's nothing in Capitalism that precludes the existence of charities or similar bodies.
...who are actually interested in hearing the other side of the argument. Fortunately, British politics isn't quite as exciting as the OP sets out. Some relevant info on:
The pro-Remain journalist spearheading the investigation into the Leave campaign The pro-Remain MP in charge of the DCMS committee Evidence of the Remain campaign doing exactly what the Leave campaign have been accused of, only to a much greater extent The government body in charge of regulating elections and referenda The guy in charge of the Leave campaign
For those less inclined towards actually verifying facts, the TLDR:
Funnily enough to, that didn't stop him owning hundreds of slaves and using them to work his plantations. Nice attempt at pro-US historical revisionism, but the US was in no way innocent in the history of slavery; the facts remain that the US was the ultimate destination for the vast majority of slaves and while English slave traders supplied them up till the turn of the 19th century -when the Abolition Act was passed - slavery was never legal in English common law and British people did not keep slaves, unlike their American counterparts, who legally owned slaves up until 1865.
The majority of the UK Conservative Party despairs of Theresa May and her statist politics, so your claim wrt UK politics is disingenuous at best.
I don't think we're anywhere near close enough to understanding the underlying principles behind societal or altruistic behaviour, for you to make simplistic, blanket statements about its net, as well as intended, outcomes.
There's evidence to suggest that behaviour that we might normally consider as altruistic is, in fact, ultimately selfish, when you look at organisms from the slightly more sophisticated point of view as a carrier of genes, rather than just a selfish individual: https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcent...
Certainly, when we look at recent social history, we can see that there's many examples where individuals who have purported to act in altruistic, or otherwise unselfish ways, for the benefit of others, have, in the long run, gone on to disproportionately benefit themselves, to the extreme detriment of everyone else i.e every successful Communist leader in the last century.
Interestingly, this kind of deceptive exploitation that relies on the better character (or naivety) of others might be a behaviour that develops in a subset of psychopathic individuals who, rather than simply callously acting in their own self-interest to the detriment of others, actually genuinely believe that they know what is best for other people, better than them themselves. In this way, they 'unknowingly' deceive others into thinking they are altruistic, whilst ultimately only acting selfishly, to the detriment of others, as all psychopaths do. When you look at successful Communist leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc. it's almost certain that they must have been psychopaths in order to lack the empathy that enabled them to do what they did. In this sense, the success of the Communist regimes may, ironically, have been the result of evolutionary competition itself, where having a certain expression of psychopathic traits resulted in an enormous evolutionary advantage.
Debate implies strong AI that can reason about itself, which we do not have. But TFS seems to be describing validation through a competitive pair of AIs, which does not seem novel
Where have you seen previous examples of this?
The validation is an important point - the whole point in fact. When you've got data sets with millions of samples, many containing information in a form that's abstruse or even impossible for humans to understand, how do you validate whether the system actually produced the optimal solution, or the logic behind that choice?
That's a really difficult problem, which I don't think enough people are exploring given how quickly these systems are being deployed into very real scenarios.
Capitalists didn't invent the concept of competition - they just realised it naturally (pun intended) brought about optimal outcomes. You can rail all you want against competition, but you should pause to remember that you're a direct result and net beneficiary of it. Competition is simply a fact of life: if you don't compete, you lose.
3000 RPM is 50 RPS So you're saying that helicopter blades only spin round 5 times a second?
It has little to do with altruism. But a government that fails to provide what its constituents want will not govern for long.
The Roman empire lasted a pretty long time and given how it ended, I'll warrant it failed to provide what its constituents wanted.
If you meant governments in the more recent sense, well, in the last 100 years we've had the Nazi and Communist regimes (and all the fun that those enterprises entailed), which lasted a lot longer than many of their constituents - the latter of which, also, are still murdering and suppressing people in certain parts of the world. So forgive me if I don't buy that line.
Many places in Europe have shown that it can work. Provided you keep the rest of the world out, that is...
Care to name these many places and their public services? Please don't mention the NHS, as I'm from the UK and have experienced it first-hand: service varies from place to place, going from excellent in somewhere like London, to essentially mass medical-negligence in places like mid-Staffs. The only reason it hasn't been scrapped for publicly supported health insurance (like our more sensible European neighbours) is because it's been turned into a kind of national religion, with all the negative connotations that entails.
You fail to address the fundamental point though: efficiency comes from competition, something that can never exist without some form of profit motive. The two go hand in hand and if you cut out one, you lose the other.
Alternatively (and, incidentally, in the real world), the public sector has no incentive to provide better, or more efficient services, as the removal of a profit motive necessitates the removal of competition - the only known and established mechanism of creating efficiency (we know it works, because it's been operating in nature for hundreds of millions of years - see "process of natural selection"). Yes, you can claim some kind of altruistic, higher moral calling to do right by one's fellow man/woman, but history is pretty clear that this thinking has never actually manifested itself in reality, but instead almost universally featured as a pretence for certain individuals to bring about widespread misery and suffering.