I wish I could parse news coming out of China and tell which parts are jingoistic propaganda and which are actual news. They’ve leaned heavily on the narrative of Taiwan being a part of China and any invasion being necessary to bring them back into the fold, which is… honestly kind of terrifying. Invading for nationalistic reasons means it could happen even if it makes no sense and harms both parties more than either gains. See Ukraine for how that could shake out, except Taiwan is better defended and their allies have even more reasons to support them.

As for the chip side of things, it’s an open secret that Taiwan has their fabrication plants rigged to blow so the mainland can’t get their hands on them. A modern fab requires several years, multiple billions of dollars, and some extremely niche, cutting edge technologies and construction processes to build, and any damage renders them useless. There’s no credible way China obtains the fabs intact short of a coup or immediate surrender, or infiltration and sabotage on a level that they’d be making spy movies about it for decades to come.

Invading would cripple global chip production (TSMC produces roughly half the global supply, and more importantly the vast majority of high-end, nanometer-scale chips used by computers), crater Taiwan’s economy (along with everyone else’s, as microchips are the lifeblood of the Information Age), alienate the world (possibly leading to a major conflict), and accomplish nothing beyond a feather in the CCCP’s hat.

China has been building their own fabrication plants but they are still decades behind in the precision race, and I doubt they can meet even their own needs yet. Even if they press-ganged Taiwanese experts to restart their industry it’d take decades to bear fruit, if ever. Invading Taiwan would harm then just as much as it would the rest of the world.

And the worst part is an invasion seems to be a credible prediction.

They thought “data lake” was a physical description.

Starfield was like a child’s half-inflated balloon: let go with high hopes only to immediately disappoint, then swiftly forgotten once it drifted out of sight. Bethesda wanted to reach the stars, yet only managed to drop trash in someone’s garden.

Chinese authorities [accused] the DPP of selling out to the West in exchange for support for independence.

And yet my first thought was that this was a move by the US to obtain Taiwan’s best-in-world fabrication technology in case China goes through with an invasion in the next few years. So really China should be happy about this!

And we talk to Americans on the internet, we know that Americans don’t respect their allies. The soldiers of allied countries that sacrificed everything in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn’t even register with most Americans. There is too little sense of honour in the American population. Americans only care about money now, and that’s not a motivation that can be trusted by anyone.

I agree that how the US treated its allies is abominable (our abandonment of local guides and translators, who were promised a place in America for risking the lives of themselves and their families, to be murdered by the Taliban/ISIS should be persecuted as a crime - not to mention the minorities left to die to appease larger powers, such as the Kurds, Armenians, and now Ukrainians). However, most Americans don’t know about any of this.

Most Americans are living in a bubble that hides or vastly distorts anything outside of it. Our media is hyper-focused on a narrow band of issues that gets guaranteed views (mostly culture wars that said media invented or spread in the first place) and only pays lip service to anything outside of that. For many, “news” means pithy one-liners and relentless attacks on the other side. They’re told some minor issue is the single most important thing right now and are so whipped up they don’t look outside to see the world is burning. The right-wing media is an endless parade of hate, while the left complains about said right while offering no solutions. Neutral media is a joke, and foreign news has no foothold outside individual posts being shared if they agree with a person’s existing position. Major news gets cycled out after mere days and is quickly buried by the next meaningless story. It’s a constant cavalcade of worthless noise that obscures any actual reporting.

If America could somehow shrug off the 24-jour news hype cycle and see what’s actually happening in the world, I think you’d find there’s a great deal of empathy in the populace - it’d be hard to stir up an audience if they didn’t care about something. Sadly, I can’t see such a thing ever happening - the biggest shakeup in news this decade was Fox being called “woke” and what was once tabloid trash becoming accepted sources amongst the right, even getting dedicated reporting positions in the government while traditional media was kicked out. So if anything it’s only going to get worse, with the addiction to drama and outrage leading half the country even further into isolation and delusion.

There’s an old adage about computer programs endlessly expanding to gobble up every resource as computers improve. Nowhere is it more obvious than in gaming. Textures you’ll never use, translations included in the default download for no good reason, the same files duplicated many times over because it gives a slight improvement to load times on consoles, delta patches using up an entire CPU core and taking longer than simply redownloading the whole game, ten minutes spent compiling thousands of bespoke shaders on startup…

Ugh, shader compilation is the worst since it can ruin an entire planned gaming session. As annoying and performance-crippling as it is in its early stages, I can’t wait for ray tracing to become the default (ironic since it’s Wirth’s Law’s current reigning champion). Modern computer graphics are built on hacks upon hacks upon hacks. Ray tracing, by virtue of acting how light actually acts, cuts the Gordian Knot and vastly simplifies things. Hopefully it’ll help do away with the multitude of shaders used to imitate perfect lighting through imperfect means and we can just simply run our games again.

Or decades of behavior before that. Fun fact, he was denied a permit to open a casino in Australia due to his clear ties to Russian organized crime* - in 1987.

* For those unfamiliar, Russian organized crime is deeply entrenched with the actual Russian government - hence the term “Mafia State”.

I remember stories from Trump’s first term about how his handlers had to babysit him and do things like hide his rough drafts of orders planning to go to war (he’d calm down and forget about them by the next day). It reminds me of the (hopefully apocryphal) story of how Nixon had to be lead to bed when he got roaring drunk and started threatening to nuke North Korea.

The staffers also preserved the documents he (illegally) shredded as a matter of habit, so scholars will hopefully be able to piece together what was going on in that hot mess someday.

None of those handlers are there this term. Trump spent the four years since his first term campaigning and gathering a crew of sycophantic parasites to do his bidding, and we have no view into what’s going on behind closed doors. The “checks and balances” every American was taught about as a child seem to be doing nothing, with him flagrantly ignoring them without reprisal.

I hope the US gets out of this as an intact democracy and without alienating every single ally in existence. People here don’t seem to realize how bad an antagonistic America would be - they have the military and logistics to take on half the world without nukes, and Trump has been very open (almost giddy) about his willingness to use those.

And a civil war would be worse since the government is wholly controlled by what most would should consider the bad guys and the military is trained to follow the chain of command, and Trump is openly purging top officials and replacing them with loyalists.

Ugh, sorry for the rant. The last decade has been exhausting.

Existing contracts, a lack of infrastructure, and the cost of shipping and insurance would be my guess. Or simply just the economies of scale making it impossible for anyone other than a major retailer to do it.

Retailers can afford to lose a card or two to damage out of each large order (and usually make it back through upselling warranties that customers rarely use); the many individual packages with direct selling would make it far more likely some of them would end up damaged during shipping at AMD’s expense, and would be more expensive to ship than large bulk orders to boot. It’s far more economical to bulk ship to a distributor and let them do all the work.

Besides, would you trust GPU vendors with your deliveries? The “bad drivers” jokes write themselves!

I’d also give GameStop as an example. Even years after digital media took over, they still had significant influence over publishers, up to dictating advertising and release schedules. Partly due to contracts preventing publishers from pulling away, but largely because a lot of people only buy in stores - most significantly, gift-givers and others who don’t know anything about what they’re buying and need an employee to guide them. Holidays alone kept GameStop in the black for years after Steam/Live/PSN dominated the marketplace.

With graphics cards, I’d be willing to bet most people buying them know very little about their choices and need someone to guide them. Enthusiasts are the minority.

I was ambivalent until the article mentioned Amy Hennig. There’s a chance this might actually be good!

I’m still salty that they canceled that Star Wars heist game she worked on.

Someone should do a roundup of what all the old Bullfrog/Lionhead devs are up to these days.

I know a bunch of them teamed up to make Kynseed, an okay attempt to make a game that delivers on Fable’s original promise of the world growing up/around your character, and which had the misfortune to compete against the sudden resurgence of life/farming sims due to Stardew Valley’s then-recent success.

And Peter Molyneux is… around, doing Peter Molyneux things (as he is wont to do).

This seems pretty normal to me. Isn’t needing to remove copyrighted files when asked by the holder how it already worked?

It’s better than content hosts being held liable by default. Public file sharing would be a non-starter without a safe harbor provision (where the host is only liable if they don’t remove items they’re made aware of).

I hope the Steam Deck-specific content depot gets used more often.

I also wonder if the Steam CLI can download from it on other platforms. I’m running a 4060 on my desktop, so being able to trim out all the texture bloat I can’t even run would be a godsend.

We call this the Haber Flip.