You can see why Amazon’s efforts suck just by using it. That isn’t to say I defend Steam, or Epic, or GOG, or UPlay, or Origin, or Battle.net, or Microsoft Store because they all suck. They suck for existing as separate things that all do the same thing but each eating 500Mb of space on my computer.

The ideal situation would be a federated platform where everyone shares a single sign on, everyone shares the same update, backup & restore mechanisms, everyone can join the same lobbies and matchmaking. But that’s too sensible.

Maybe it will, but for the time being it hasn’t. The experience is so vastly better than Twitter, that it’s a no brainer to jump over. It also helps to have a decent competing platform that people like to suck users and influence away from the platform that Musk turned into a cesspit.

Bluesky is like Twitter but with about 1/10th the idiots, and no mechanism that the idiots can elevate their racist, moronic hot takes above other comments.

I certainly find it funny that Tesla’s waiting list went from five years down to zero. Even Tesla’s biggest fans who actually stumped money on this thing produced video after video griping about its price & brokenness.

But frankly it was kind of obvious from the get-go that it would be an expensive, uninsurable, lemony asshole death mobile. I wonder if the next time Tesla announces something and Musk spews lie after lie about it that people will start to cotton on that nothing he says can be taken at face value.

It’s definitely weird all right. Starts off like you’re riding Elliot’s bike into the sky and ends up like some hallucinatory trip to ET’s home world which is all neon and tie dye with bad animatronics, talking mushrooms and other weirdness.

Despite being trippy it’s actually a very nice ride to go on because the lines tend to be short and it’s blessedly well airconditioned with the line mimicking standing in a pine forest at night. I can’t see the Florida ride lasting much longer because it must be over 30 years old by this point. I think it’s only gone that long because that section of the park has been relatively static in terms of development.

SteamOS is about Valve not paying Microsoft a license fee. It’s not some egalitarian move by them but a cost saving. From a game dev’s perspective it’s additional cost and effort to port a game, or hope it runs under emulation with Proton.

I am surprised they haven’t used it for cloud gaming yet since that’s where the real cost savings kick in but I bet they’re still saving on each Steam Deck they sell without Windows on it.

Democracies have to start making laws that stop assholes like Musk from interfering in their domestic politics - including and up to imposing heavy fines, service shutdown and personal criminal liability. If a person is not a national and domiciled in that country they should have no right to influence that election through campaign contributions or any other assistance.

USB C cables have been all over the shop since the beginning, and chargers. I remember even 5 years back the problems they had. Part of that is the cables and chargers are “active” in the sense they negotiate charge rates and other functionality between either end and if one end is dumb or doesn’t respond properly you get the 5V 2A default. On the other hand if you have a USB C 4.0 lightning cable and two compliant devices then potentially you could be powering 2 monitors, keyboard, mouse, wifi, a graphics card even AND charging through one cable. It’s actually incredible when it works properly.

While this is good news, the likes of Apple will still find ways to be “compliant” while still being total assholes about it. e.g. the device might charge with USB C but they’ll gimp the data transfer rates on non-pro phones. And they’ll do the same when mandates about repairability come in - all of a sudden the battery will have a bunch of expensive DRM’d up the ass circuitry attached to it that will cripple the phone if its not recognized or registered by one of their techs and means Apple can kill old phones by being “out of stock” of the battery.

And they still are. Toyota and Honda in particular have been spent billions on FUD and harebrained hydrogen projects and then wondering why China is eating their lunch. Meanwhile the doors are closing for non-EV manufacturers in markets which are going all electric coming up to 2030. Japan’s auto industry will probably survive in some form but there could be a lot of casualties.

RFK jr is going to kill and cripple a lot more kids if he gets the chance to. He’ll make pretend polio / measles is eradicated and then somebody will get on a plane where there are cases, and it will spread amongst the unvaxxed and kids will die. When this happens he should be charged with negligent homicide but I doubt that will happen.

Valve had a Steam Machine before the Steam Deck which went down like a lead balloon but did get enough indie interest to continue to support a Linux version of the client. The Steam Deck is basically a continuation of that in a small form factor. I wouldn’t be surprised if Valve ever decide to offer cloud gaming that it is also derives from some of these efforts, if for no other reason than to avoid a Windows license fee on the server.

RFK jr will do his damndest to ensure bad teeth becoming a leading cause of death. Right behind measles, flu, polio and other communicable diseases.

If you don’t use Twitter then I don’t see any reason to try Bluesky since it could basically be described as classic Twitter. But if you liked Twitter until it because a cesspit of far right shitheads, crypto bros, bots, and ads then give Bluesky a go.

Over a million people joined Bluesky after the election and seem to be using it. Also a lot of news & media companies have moved over too. So I would assume that at least that many users have disappeared from X or their activity has diminished. On top of that all the bots have gone home now the election is over so the amount of activity must have suffered. And Bluesky is basically old Twitter so people are settling into it and liking it.

I would advise anyone who still using X to give it a try. And if they want to use X for whatever reason - uninstall the app, install Control Panel for Twitter into their mobile browser and browse that for a relatively bullshit free experience - no ads, no algorithmic lists, just what you subscribe to.

People pay YouTube instead of using an adblocker?

A game that was released last year has absolutely zero knowledge of this 8k PS5 so it’s not going to magically render at 8k or 40% improvement. Some might get a framerate bump if frame sync can be turned off - the game might have been GPU bound and therefore with a better GPU it yields a better framerate. Sometimes. And AI upscaling might give a pseudo > 4k effect but it’s not really true 8k.

A handful of games might get patched to avail of the improved rendering capabilities when they detect PS5 Pro. Minimal stuff really. Maybe the config file will improve draw distance or turn on certain effects like raytraced shadows / reflections when it knows the console can handle it.

Hardly seems worth the vast additional expense especially if somebody already owns a PS5 though. Moreso because Sony are trying to stiff people into buying the cheaper “digital” version which basically means any physical collection won’t work with it.

Nvidia is worth 42bn USD and employs 30,000 people.

Nvidia’s has a market cap 30x of Intel’s. So it could issue more stock to raise capital for a buyout. It’s not the company equity but the market cap that it needs to have money to purchase. Even a controlling stake of > 50% would give them defacto control. Of course governments & regulators would probably block it or force Nvidia to divest bits of itself, and that’s probably the greatest protection Intel has against such a scenario.

But if Intel weakens further, it may well be someone else tries to acquire it. I bet a lot of companies would love to snaffle it up. It’s kind of ironic that Intel used to be the big dog in the semiconductor space but even AMD is bigger than it these days and are potentially many others who’d like buy it out. In fact, for all we know Intel might be shedding all these jobs to make it look more attractive to potential buyers.

The US and Europe has become acutely aware that too much semi-conductor manufacturing has been outsourced to China and other Asian nations and they’re trying to build some back domestically. So that’s the geopolitical reason for it.

How long before Nvdia buys them, or at least tries to. Nvidia tried to buy Arm but got stopped by the UK government.