Thrashy

@Thrashy@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In that case (as is the case with most games) the near-worst case scenario is that you are no worse off trusting Valve with the management of item data than you would be if it was in a public block chain. Why? Because those items are valueless outside the context of the commercial game they are used in. If Valve shuts down CS:GO tomorrow, owning your skins as a digital asset on a blockchain wouldn’t give you any more protection than the current status quo, because those skins are entirely dependent on the game itself to be used and viewed – it’d be akin to holding stock certificates for a company that’s already gone bankrupt and been liquidated: you have a token proving ownership of something that doesn’t exist anymore.

  Sure, there’s the edge case that if your Steam account got nukes from orbit by Gaben himself along with all its purchase and trading history you could still cash out on your skin collection, Conversely, having Valve – which, early VAC-ban wonkiness notwithstanding, has proven itself to be a generally-trustworthy operator of a digital games storefront for a couple decades now – hold the master database means that if your account got hacked and your stuff shifted off the account to others for profit, it’s much easier for Valve support to simply unwind those transactions and return your items to you. Infamously, in the case of blockchain ledgers, reversing a fraudulent transaction often requires forking the blockchain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea has merit, in theory – but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the “code is law” status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it’d be preferable if they didn’t need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.

  If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that’s insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.

• It's the spherical chicken of legend! Somebody get the frictionless vacuum!lemmy.world ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨science_memes@mander.xyz⁩ | ⁨31⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Assetto Corsa EVO Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Please be moddable…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hacking Kia: Remotely Controlling Cars With Just a License Plate.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  FWIW there is a cottage industry for OnStar disable/delete mods for GM vehicles. It can be done, usually without breaking too much else of the car’s electronic functionality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 52 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I had quite a bit of fun with it for a few weekends with my friends, but ultimately the lack of a system for mechanical progression left it feeling a bit shallow (ha!). As a primarily PvE game with optional PvP it’s in a weird place where it doesn’t have quite enough RPG-like elements to hold my interest on the PvE side, or enough player-on-player combat to make it a gripping contest of skill.

  It’s still a fun game to hop into from time to time, but it’s never been appointment gaming for me

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elf om a Shelf⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Rotovap on a flytrap.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Avowed Runs at 30fps on Xbox Series X and S, Obsidian Confirms⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The old one and the new one are literally side by side on my desktop, don’t know what to tell you…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Avowed Runs at 30fps on Xbox Series X and S, Obsidian Confirms⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At launch the 360 was on par graphically with contemporary high-end GPUs, you’re right. By even the midpoint of its seven year lifespan, though, it was getting outclassed by midrange PC hardware. You’ve got to factor in the insanely long refresh cycles of consoles starting with the six and seventh generations of consoles when you talk about processing power. Sony and Microsoft have tried to fix this with mid-cycle refresh consoles, but I think this has honestly hurt more than helped since it breaks the basic promise of console gaming – that you buy the hardware and you’re promised a consistent experience with it for the whole lifecycle. Making multiple performance targets for developers to aim for complicates development and takes away from the consumer appeal

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Avowed Runs at 30fps on Xbox Series X and S, Obsidian Confirms⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh… Consoles used to be horribly crippled compared to a dedicated gaming PC of similar era, but people were more lenient about it because TVs were low-res and the hardware was vastly cheaper. Do you remember Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, for instance? I do, and it was a slideshow – didn’t stop the game from being lauded as the apex of console shooters at the time. I remember Xbox 360 flagship titles upscaling from sub-720p resolutions in order to maintain a consistent 30fps.

  The console model has always been cheap hardware masked by lenient output resolutions and a less discerning player base. Only in the era of 4K televisions and ubiquitous crossplay with PC has that become a problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Avowed Runs at 30fps on Xbox Series X and S, Obsidian Confirms⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Might just be my middle-aged eyes, but I recently went from a 75Hz monitor to a 160Hz one and I’ll be damned if I can see the difference in action. Granted that don’t much in the way of twitch-style shooters anymore, but for me the threshold of visual smoothness is closer to 60Hz than whatever bonkers 240Hz+ refresh rates that current OLEDs are pushing.

  I’ll agree that 30fps is pretty marginal for any sort of action gameplay, though historically console players have been More forgiving of mediocre performance in service of more eye candy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A new report finds Boeing’s rockets are built with an unqualified work force⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The program is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the assistance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who’d take them back to the conservative approach?

  Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they’d celebrated those attempts they didn’t quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship’s failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That’s not the case for many others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A new report finds Boeing’s rockets are built with an unqualified work force⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything – very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially – and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn’t blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That’s arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren’t afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.

  Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing’s case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oxford scientists are generating solar power without panels⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Another perovskite hype piece. You’ll know that they’ve got something that’s commercially viable once they’re making these sorts of efficiency claims and not omitting information about cell degradation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Checkmate, Atheists⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are there a lot of people who individually hold chaotic, mutually-incompatible political opinions? Sure! I don’t think you can boil their ultimate decision-making process down to a box-ticking exercise, where if a candidate represents sufficient number of demographics they hold bigoted views about they automatically vote for Default Old White Guy. For example –

  I can’t even tell you how many people had both Bernie and Trump as their top two candidates in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

  – that’s very clearly low-information voters dissatisfied with the status quo, who would happily glom onto anybody promising to sufficiently shake things up. Sure, Trump and Bernie had wildly-divergent platforms, but Joe Sixpack – who probably doesn’t feel like he has a dog in the fight on any of the particulars like abortion or finance law and assumes anybody sticking it to the broader political class is a net positive for him – doesn’t see much practical difference, and is so little affected by the bigotry of the right that none of it bothers him, so of course the two candidates presenting themselves as outsiders with a plan to shake up Washington are basically interchangeable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Checkmate, Atheists⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I just don’t think that’s a very big demo. Anybody who’d suddenly motivated to keep the White House white and estrogen-free are, more than likely, already foaming-at-the-mouth MAGAts who were already motivated to put their guy back in office. There will of course be a few people who fit that description, and probably many more diet racists and sexists who will just stay home if their options are Trump or a “left-coast liberal woman,” but I don’t think they make up a significant-enough proportion of the voting public to outweigh that latter group you mention, who couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for Biden but are amped-up to vote for somebody younger, healthier, and more dynamic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Checkmate, Atheists⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Obama won by healthy margins in '08 and '12, and Hillary – the least likeable candidate that’s made it to the top of the Democratic ticket since Dukakis – still won the popular vote. I think the people who would vote against a black woman for President were never going to vote for a Democrat in the first place, and given the general aura of relief and enthusiasm I’ve seen in left wing spaces since the announcement I think Harris is going to be riding a wave of support from the left, even if half of it is just from people who are glad they don’t have to hold their noses to support a doddering octogenarian because the alternative is fascism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Intel failing to Nvidia and AMD?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD’s lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and aiming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Recycled Carbon Fiber Tested on Boeing MAX 9 Sidewalls⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The reverse. OceanGate saw how planes were being built and said, “let’s do that for submersibles!” even though in airplanes, composites are subjected to <1 atmosphere of tension loading and <2g aerodynamic loading, whereas their submersible was going to be subjected to >400 atmospheres of compression loading, and a much more corrosive environment.

  Composites in aircraft have a fairly long and uncontroversial history, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with them in that application. The biggest problem with composites is what happens with them at the end of their service life. Finding ways to recycle them without compromising safety is a good thing, and if it weren’t for Boeing having such a damaged reputation at the moment I think this would be entirely uncontroversial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨the old ball and chain amirite⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a lab planner, and sometimes getting researchers to describe what sort of containment device they need for a given process is like pulling teeth.

  • Chemical fume hood? That’s a hood.
  • Class II, Type B2 BSC? Also a hood.
  • Class II, Type A2 BSC? Believe it not, hood.
  • Laminar flow bench? Yep, that’s a hood too.
  • PCR dead air box? Somehow also a hood.

  Like, surely you’re not doing BSL-2 work in a LAF? Please tell me you’re not doing that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Texas power prices briefly soar 1,600% as a spring heat wave is expected to drive record demand for energy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I exaggerate – but Magic Rock is doing booming business installing strings of natural gas generators at Buc-ee’s across the state, and I’m currently dealing with an institutional client who wanted to provide backup power for a satellite campus, and didn’t even stop to consider battery-backed PV on the way to asking for a natural gas generator farm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Texas power prices briefly soar 1,600% as a spring heat wave is expected to drive record demand for energy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for “microgrid” systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed – and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don’t want any of that communist solar power!

  I’ve got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there’s almost no amount of money you could pay me to want to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state – contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it’s a worse place than California to try and build something, and that’s entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I’d much rather slow through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The decline of Intel..⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Historically AMD has only been able to take the performance crown from Intel when Intel has made serious blunders. In the early 2000s, it was Intel commiting to Netburst in the belief that processors could scale past 5Ghz on their fab processes, if pipelined deeply enough. Instead they got caught out by unexpected quantum effects leading to excessive heat and power leakage, at the same time that AMD produces a very good follow-on to their Athlon XP line of CPUs, in the form of the Athlon 64.

  At the time, Intel did resort to dirty tricks to lock AMD out of the prebuilt and server space, for which they ultimately have antitrust action. But the net effect was that AMD wasn’t able to capitalize on their technological edge, Ave ended up having to sell off their fabs for cash, while Intel bought enough time to revise their mobile CPU design into the Core series of desktop processors, and reclaim the technological advantage. Simultaneously AMD was betting the farm on Bulldozer, believing that the time had come to prioritize multithreading over single-core performance (it wasn’t time yet).

  This is where we enter the doldrums, with AMD repeatedly trying and failing to make the Bulldozer architecture work, while Intel coasted along on marginal updates to the Core 2 architecture for almost a decade. Intel was gonna have to blunder again to change the status quo – which they did, by betting against EUV for their 10nm fab process. Intel’s process leadership stalled and performance hit a wall, while AMD was finally producing a competent architecture in the form of Zen, and then moved ahead of Intel on process when they started manufacturing Zen2 at TSMC.

  Right now, with Intel finally getting up to speed with EUV and working on architectural improvements to catch up with AMD (and both needing to bridge the gap to Apple Silicon now) at the same time that AMD is going from strength to strength with Zen revisions, we’re in a very interesting time for CPU development. I fear a bit for AMD, as I think the fundamentals are stronger for Intel (stronger data center AI value proposition, graphics group seemingly on the upswing now that they’re finally taking it seriously, and still in control of their destiny in terms of fab processes and manufacturing) while AMD is struggling with GPU and AI development and dependent on TSMC, perpetually under threat from mainland China, for process leadership. But there’s a lot of strong competition in the space, which hasn’t been the case since the days of the Northridge P4 and Athlon XP, and that’s exciting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Through the course of my career I’ve somehow lost office space as I’ve ascended the corporate food chain. I had a private office/technician room in my first job out, then had an eight foot cubicle with high walls, then a six foot cubicle with low dividers, and then the pandemic hit. The operations guy at the last place was making noises about a benching arrangement after RTO, like people were going to put up with being elbow to elbow with Chris The Conference Call Yeller and Brenda The Lip Smacking Snacker while Team Loudly Debates Marvel Movie Trivia is yammering away the next row over.

  Hell, if it meant getting a space to myself with enough privacy to hear my own thoughts I might consider giving up my current WFH gig. But everybody’s obsessed with building awful office hellscapes and I don’t have the constitution to put up with that kind of environment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your go-to "Bang for your Buck" filament brand?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they’re considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I’ve only ever used their PLA(+) but it’s always been bulletproof.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, that’ll happen if you don’t take your Neuropozyne. Their test subject should have budgeted for that before getting augmented.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can do all three things at once⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It’d probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it’s anticipated to create from radiation exposure.

  Bottom line, when you’re talking about reactors that aren’t pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that’s reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Medieval Doomsday Weapon⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One of those cases where nuclear disasters end up being both completely horrifying and a lot less deadly than you think they ought to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here’s your chance to own a decommissioned US government supercomputer⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s all Broadwell Xeons. Sure, there’s 8000 of 'em, but after you factor in purchase price, moving and storage costs, time spent parting out nodes, shipping costs, etc… I think you’d have a hard time breaking even, and for an end user you can get like 4x the FLOPS per socket at half the power consumption with current server CPUs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Always CYA⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The heyday of the Eve Online subreddit was great for this shit, and it was always good for a laugh when something that made complete sense in-game hit r/all and started freaking people out. Some bangers were:

  • How do I sell a hanger full of corpses?
  • I just killed someone for the first time! I’m so excited!
  • Does anyone know if drug production is a good source of income?
  • I want to kill someone, I need help.
  • Did you ever regret killing someone?
  • Industry Question: Drug Labs
  • Assasination Request