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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The problem with money being involved is it’s an invitation to spam crap everywhere.

    One of my relatives has recently taken up “AI travel videos” and “AI cute videos” as a “hobby”. No doubt based on the first thing that came up when I searched for those things, a video titled “make $10,000 a month spamming up YouTube with your AI slop”.

    Oh, and it needs you to buy the AI slop generating tools that they happen to sell. How convenient!

    I mean, this also happened with broadcast TV, where we suddenly went from like 4 channels filled with programs and things competing for space, to 200 channels, where the rush was on to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible with reality show tat. And that’s all YouTube is now.





  • At that price there would have to be some pretty compelling arguments to upgrade.

    Half a generation for up to 40% more raytracing power isn’t worth it.

    A full generation for 2-3 times what a PS5 can do? Maybe.

    Even then, there would have to be some damn good exclusives on PS6 to be worth your while. PS4 to PS5 was an easy argument, games ran at 30 pretty much all generation, mostly due to a comically underpowered CPU, and now they run at 60.

    I’m struggling to even conceive of a worthwhile game that would bring a PS5 to its knees. I haven’t really seen a good argument for raytracing yet. Sure, nicer reflections, more accurate lighting, but we were pretty good at faking those anyway. Cyberpunk and Metro look really nice with the RT only editions, but they were perfectly playable without it.

    We should really draw a big line under RT once it reaches a certain level of power, and go back to affordability. Game devs can’t put food on the table just catering to insanely high end hardware. My PC is still rocking a 1060. On the Steam hardware survey, there’s only one GPU higher than the X060 series inside the top ten. Budget hardware has got to be the focus.


  • COVID also inflated a lot of tech stock massively, as everybody suddenly had to rely a lot more on it to get anything done, and the only thing you could do for entertainment was gaming, streaming movies, or industrial quantities of drugs.

    Then that ended, and they all wanted to hold onto that “value”.

    It is a bubble, but whether it pops massively like in 2000, or just evens off to the point where everything else catches up, remains to be seen.

    “The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” are wise words for anyone thinking of shorting this kind of thing.




  • IIRC the Xbox 360 used to do a thing where you’d put your old OG Xbox disc in, and it would download any extra code it needed to run. Most of these older games would be under a few MB of actual code.

    Pretty sure the PS5 is powerful enough to run PS1 and PS2 emulated, and probably have a good crack at running PS3 games as well, although a lot of the good PS3 games got a remaster for the PS4 gen anyway.

    I think the only thing stopping really us doing it now is the PS5 drive can’t actually read CDs. Plus I think they want to test each game before release and sell us them on PSPlus tiers.


  • Yeah, looking at the prices, it’s about right for what it is.

    Suppose the upshot of using a generic component is you could also attach it to a PC.

    Looks like the long term goal of them is to stop selling discs altogether. I couldn’t even get BG3 on a disc when it came out, and I think Alan Wake 2 was the same (only physical copy I can see is the deluxe version with both AW1&2 on it).

    I see the mythical digital savings never made it to us, to the surprise of absolutely fucking nobody. I wouldn’t mind if they actually put games on a discounted price after a year or so, but you can still see several year old games at the full original retail price.


  • Why can’t you just plug in a random-ass USB 4KBR-disc drive?

    Or sell one that we can use to bring in games from PS1, 2, 3, 4 and 5? And state that the drive will be able to be used going forward, into the next gen and beyond.

    They’ve got a rich gaming history at this point and they don’t care because they’d rather sell you an $80 digital copy that they can take away at any time and you can’t trade it in or really own it. And it’s the same with PC games as well, courtesy of Valve and then everyone else.

    If the future is digital, we need laws that allow us to transfer ownership of digital content. It would have to be secure, obviously. Not just “steal somebody’s console and trade all their games in”.


  • When you browse Netflix, they use different thumbnails for the movies depending on the profile they’ve made for you. Even if it’s as blatant as “white person from the movie”/“black person from the movie”. If you ignore a movie for long enough, sometimes they even swap it out for a different image to trick you into watching it.

    I’m amazed that YouTube doesn’t try and do this somehow. Instead, every video somehow has the same stupid thumbnails of arrows, meaningless text and gormless faces, and I hate it.

    But then I block all ads anyway, so it may be that they’re actively trying to make me go away.