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kano

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Everything posted by kano

  1. kano

    2016+ CPU/GPU News

    Only having 8GB on the standard RTX4060, half way through 2023, is dog-shit. But hey, you can always pay twice as much to get the card the RTX4060 should have been (with 16GB). Heck, the base RTX4060 even has less memory than the RTX3060 of three years ago does! I am definitely going Intel next time, because they are rapidly catching up to NVidia in Blender, and they have done more for the Blender project in the past two years than AMD ever has. (OIDN, path guiding). You get OIDN and path guiding for free, even if you don't have any Intel hardware at all! 8GB is no longer enough for gamers, and is straight-up laughable for anyone who wants to do anything more with their GPU than play games. NVidia's monopoly is eroding and they're still acting like they can shit on customers from the roof.
  2. Looking back, I like this game better out of the two. I mean I can see why some people wouldn't like it; that shadow ninja can quickly end your game in a second even if you have 200HP with his one special move, at least on the harder difficulties. But I like the weapons, environment, sound and music more in this game than that of Duke3d. This game was short, but then they gave us two (high quality!) extra free episodes, so that is more than forgiven. Also, Shadow Warrior as a franchise was not ran into the ground like it's peer, and frankly, so many other classic games have been. I'm impressed that they're still making Shadow Warrior games, because I don't think this original game was a big seller. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Shadow Warrior's peer outsold it by two or three times. Duke3d was so popular and successful that it got the "port this to everything" treatment, like Doom did. It's fascinating how Shadow Warrior, a more obscure game, managed to turn around and become more successful as a franchise later.
  3. https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/16/eu_confirms_azure_complaints/ Some people willingly choose to walk into the digital equivalent of a bear-trap and then complain that it sucks, while others are smart enough to avoid it in the first place.
  4. https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/15/eu_approves_microsoft_activision/ So yeah, it looks as though they are going to let the Microsoft cancer monopolize the entire game industry, one acquisition at a time. Playstations outsell Xboxes four to one because Microsoft completely torched their own reputation a decade ago with the Xbox One launch and people like me have no use for forgiveness when it comes to corporations. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/19/xbox-one-drm-second-hand-restrictions-abandoned Kind of like going on a date and confessing something heinously bad to your would-be girlfriend, in that it's nobody's fault but your own that your reputation is completely ruined, people don't trust you now and never will.
  5. https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-boot-guard-private-keys-have-reportedly-leaked-compromising-the-security-of-many-computers/ All I want for Christmas is the ability to lock down the firmware on my motherboard with a write-protect jumper or switch so that it cannot be changed or hacked by random software without me knowing. Firmware is a very special thing; it should be as small and simple as possible, not easy to change unless absolutely necessary, and the user should have assurance that nobody can mess with or reprogram it but them. But instead, we are moving to a world where you have to upgrade firmware every time Netflix or Disney say so, and if the power goes out half way through the process and your equipment gets wrecked as a result, "here's a quarter, phone someone who cares".
  6. Perhaps none of us are actually human, and are merely subroutines of the AI interacting with itself. lol. Hey, I guess that opens another can of worms as for how AI might be misused; generating product reviews. Although to be fair, Amazon and Newegg have completely ruined the usefulness of reviews anyway, by grouping reviews from all sorts of different products together just because the case has the same name badge on the front of it, even though the design and insides are completely different! And of course fake reviews have already been a thing forever anyway.
  7. Taking AI away from the public and only allowing business to use it would probably be unconstitutional though. First amendment, and written computer programs are a form of speech. They're no different than words in a book, in fact, that's how a lot of programs used to be delivered in the very early days of personal computers! (read the book and type it yourself.) You can even go outside and recite programs in public, though people will look at you funny "closed parentheses, left bracket".
  8. One angle no one has presented in this discussion yet, is copyright. I mean it sucks ass and is probably unconstitutional in it's current perpetual form where someone across the world can break your stuff after taking your money. But that is beside the point; the way these AI routines operate, is by creating derivative works from someone else's work. Well it's not *quite* the same thing, because it takes little snippets from everyone and mish-mashes them together into something new. Or put a different way, if I was a skilled mapper, I'm not sure how happy I would be about sections of my work winding up in another "machine-generated" map comprised of work of other humans without my permission or giving proper credit. I guess this opens Pandora's box to the idea that humanity could achieve more if everyone worked together, which is something that I don't actually disagree with. I however also don't think humanity would cease to create new things if machines began rampantly "sampling and remixing" all of our output, because creativity and sharing is just part of human nature.
  9. I use Linux already, but sometimes people want me to look at their Windows computers. Funny story, an old lady that I used to know would come to me when she had computer problems. So, one time she wanted me to fix up her Windows laptop, and I gave her a laptop running Linux. I actually wanted her to get a Chromebook, but she was broke, as by that point I was already fed up with Windows and not interested in dealing with it anymore. Anyway, she used the thing for a year or two, was happy with it, then she passed away. Her daughter took over her things, and at that point, the daughter had a choice of laptops; the old crappy one with Windows, and the slightly less old and slightly less crappy one with Linux. And guess which one she took. ha-ha-ha I think the best way to get revenge against Microsoft isn't to pirate their software, but to instead help transition friends and family to something else. The geeks can make them irrelevant in consumer space, and these sleazy tactics do not fly in the corporate world. Pretty much all of the people I know who can afford to, have already left Windows for Macs.
  10. I'm as anti-big corporate as anyone around here, but these AI's are likely to remain in the domain of big business for various reasons. I don't see a free and open source alternative springing up. For one thing, feeding the AI with training data is much easier to do when you also run the biggest online services in the world. For another, it is important to keep really nasty things that one might find on the Internet from getting into the pool, (is that the correct term?) of data that the AI uses. From what I understand, there are actual humans whose job it is to do exactly this. Note that when I say bad stuff, I mean the really bad stuff, not political crap or anything like that. Nobody's going to do that job for free. Also, there was an open source alternative to smart speakers, but I heard recently that they got sued into the ground. Back on the subject of AI though, I think until humanity has invented a machine that can automatically police itself, deciding what information to suck in from the public Internet and what to ignore, based on prior defined criteria, calling it actual AI is a stretch. And even if you invent that, you'll have nefarious people still trying to make it suck up and incorporate bad stuff.
  11. https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/microsoft_windows_start_ads/ What is that common term we use when people don't back down and take "No" for an answer? I said NO, as in, I am not interested. As in "back the fuck off, leave me alone and respect my personal space".
  12. Thinking about it more, I would definitely do it CG. I would have it be a similar art style as a game, but with massively higher poly-count, and path traced rendering. Because, these things just weren't possible to do back in the day. I would also come up with a relatively complex story, something like Super Mario RPG.
  13. Pretty simple. Companies want to replace employees with machines, as machines do not have to be paid and they do not do things like protest or go on strike. But it's a double-edged sword. Because once the machines become advanced enough to create for me, all of the entertainment that I would care to consume, taking into account my specific tastes into the design, I will have no need to pay for any kind of entertainment anymore.
  14. Now I KNOW there's another Thief game coming. Why? The original SMB movie was considered by many to be one of the worst movies of all-time. And if they are willing to give SMB a second chance on the big screen, a new Thief game just has to be on the horizon. I think that if I was in charge of creating a project like this, I would make it animated (the conventional way), or CG. Because, putting real people into any kind of Mario scenario just seems... wrong.
  15. Yes I saw a video explaining precisely this the other day. The video also made a point to explain that "AI " doesn't care where the information came from, be that from a qualified professional or a random Internet user with the handle TurdBurglar69. Of course such functionality would indeed be pretty cool in the realm of video games to create more believable NPCs, where people aren't potentially getting unsafe information. But in the real world, such things might be very dangerous. Another realm where this could be good, is level design. Random Doom level generators have been around for a long time. And some of the output from them looked pretty damn good to me; better than the professional level design in some games. Ever played Halo 1? 60% of the architecture in that game was copy and paste, with little variation (constantly reusing pieces of architecture from before). I dare say that a computer algorithm could have indeed done a better job.
  16. I like to call the worm "the squirminator"... lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlO3luJRU5M
  17. Use something else? Seriously, Microsoft basically declared war on their customers a wile ago. Probably when they did this. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/241587-microsoft-finally-admits-malware-style-get-windows-10-upgrade-campaign-went-far Anywho, the point is that anything you do to make the modern Windows computer work for and serve you, will be undone by their updates. Designing interfaces to abuse and manipulate users and "wear them down" until they just accept what a company is pushing has become a literal art form; this practice is widely referred to as a "dark pattern". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern One example of a dark pattern, is giving you a "yes" and a "not now" selection of buttons, as opposed to a "yes" and a "no" button, perhaps with a "and don't ask me again" checkbox like we had in software in the 1990s. Hint for any software developers out there, how do you know when your interface is abusive? If you wouldn't put those moves on the opposite sex, then you shouldn't pull them on your customers. "Hey sweetie, would you prefer to go out with me today, or next week?"
  18. I would do a remake of Thief Gold, designed from the start with ray-traced lighting in mind. Many systems can't handle it? I don't care. Many systems could not handle Thief Deadly Shadows at release either (no pixel shader). I would especially make sure that it support custom missions and modding. The only thing cooler than classic Thief with ray-tracing and modern graphics, would be seeing what mission authors could make with it. EDIT: Basically I would do similar to what was done with the Resident Evil remake. The environments are a thousand times better, while remaining somewhat familiar, but also containing surprises for people who think they know the game because they played the original. And I would also like to see a ray-traced, fully real-time version of RE1 as well. I certainly wouldn't just take old Thief and slap ray-tracing on top of it.
  19. Nice case, but the power LED is bright enough to signal Batman.
  20. The cool part of Canonical's Snap, is that my machine can now ray-trace an entire (simple) scene faster than it takes the web browser to start!

    1. Show previous comments  2 more
    2. OrbWeaver

      OrbWeaver

      Snap is complete garbage. Another useless me-too duplicate project by Canonical that nobody else will ever use and will hopefully go the same way as Mir once Canonical come to their senses and start using FlatPak like everybody else.

    3. kano
    4. datiswous

      datiswous

      Linux mint also banned Snap afaik.

      But personally I'm not a fan of Flatpack either. Appimage is much nicer. You put the file on any drive and run it.

      Although I'm running a rolling distro, so it's less needed.

  21. Criminal hacking and sabotage at the same time. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/11/23635168/hp-printer-update-brick-third-party-ink-dynamic-security
  22. https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/07/tech_demo_makes_pics_from_brainscan/ Though probably inevitable, machines that can read the human mind, are something I hope I never see. The negatives outweigh the positives, especially in the hands of tyrants. And I can't trust that such abilities will only be used in a consensual manor. In fact I'm quite certain that they won't. "You do want to pass this checkpoint and go on that vacation with your girlfriend, don't you? Hop in the scanner, sir."
  23. The frame rate is good, and the play field is not postage size! Also there is texture mapping!
  24. No worries. We have two tiers of justice in America. As such, someone will pay a trivial and laughable fine and then they will promptly go right back to lobbying the government to dismantle and tear down more safety regulations. Probably not even five minutes later! Not only have they failed to make trains safer by modernizing the breaks, they actually made them less safe, by making them longer.
  25. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-now-injecting-full-size-ads-on-chrome-website-to-make-you-stay-on-edge/ I sure am glad these guys failed so spectacularly in the phone market. If they had succeeded, then my phone would probably redirect me to whatever restaurant is partnering with them this month when I phone my favorite local pizza chain. There's a phrase for the activity that is described in this article, and it's "browser hijacking".
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