It’s wild how CBU3 dumped FF14 design straight into FF16 and decided it was good enough. MMO gameplay makes a lot of design compromises to accommodate for the multiplayer shared-state world, network latency, etc. None of which make sense for a single player offline experience.

Funny thing is, TSMC in Taiwan is considered a premium employer. It offers much better pay and parks than other companies.

People are quick to blame Google for the slow uptake of Jpeg XL, but I don’t think that can be the whole story. Lots of other vendors, including non-commercial free software projects, have also been slow to support it. Gimp for example still only supports it via a plugin.

But if it’s not just a matter of Google being assholes, what’s the actual issue with Jpeg XL uptake? No clue, does anyone know?

Decent affordable Bandai kits when…

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…

Just Google for Mihoyo and Energy Singularity. They invested $65M back in 2022.

This is the one that’s partly funded by Mihoyo, using the absurd amounts of money they made with Genshin Impact.

The power of the anime waifu, in the palm of your hand…

It’s nothing to do with stopping pedos. The people pushing this year-in and year-out don’t care THAT much about pedos. It’s not a cause that’s motivating enough for them to be putting in so much effort, trying to sneak in legislation after being repeatedly rebuffed.

Did the car get successfully recharged though?

In terms of pacing and stakes, it would have made much more sense for the PCs to have gone to Baldur’s Gate earlier in the game to do all the “adventurers faffing around” stuff, then revisited the city during the endgame. Though it would have clashed with their “each act is one set of maps” setup.

Instead, in the last act we have Gortash, supposed 5D chess player, centering all his plans on the PCs flipping to his side. Then he sits back and lets them wander all over the city, undermining him. Ultimately, when they don’t take up his offer, his backup plan is “whelp, guess I’ll die”.

Maybe the excuse is that the Elder Brain was making him stupid…

Loyalty pledges are kabuki theatre. There’s no point talking about them, since the state has plenty of degrees of freedom to force citizens to do what they want, with or without them. And not just the Chinese state; the US just outright decided one day that no US citizen will be allowed to work in the Chinese semiconductor industry, as though citizens are property of the government – they didn’t need no signed loyalty pledges to enforce that.

It was too long and had too much content.

Seriously, though. In the last act, Baldur’s Gate was so huge and took so long to explore that it destroyed the momentum of the overall story. (The evil army is invading! Oh wait, they are now hiding underground doing nothing, so that you can take your time exploring the city).

Yes, you caught me out as a pro-CCP shill. All hail Xi Jinping, thought leader of the world (please ignore my previous comments calling him a dumbass).

Clearly the university did have stuff China wanted, otherwise China wouldn’t have targeted it. You don’t have to be educated at IC to figure that out.

Chinese orgs love signing MOUs. Looking at the underlying story, this looks like bog standard research into computer vision and related topics. If it were the Chinese government wanting to steal stuff, they’d be going after companies. There won’t be anything in Imperial College that they won’t find already in top Chinese universities, let alone their tech giants.

Huh? China has much better domestic sources of AI tech than anything out of Imperial College.

The British always like to think they’re on par with the US in all things, so I guess now they’re imagining they’re the world leaders in AI and the Chinese want to steal their tech…?

At this point, Western gaming companies’ monetization schemes are becoming worse than gacha, so you may as well go play Genshin Impact ;-)

It’s pretty sad to see Vox’s decline into gutter clickbait media. I guess it was inevitable once Klein and Yglesias left, and their mediocre minions took over.

Reads like NIMBY propaganda. “Oh no muh construction dust.” Bitch you live in a desert…

The US can make them, they’ll just cost $10,000 and be several design generations behind the world market.

Half of this article’s word count seems to be the writer snarking about how he doesn’t care about these games and doesn’t know much about them. I guess it’s good to show contempt for your audience…

Years later, after untold exaflops of computing, the AI’s answer appears on the screen: “Dunno”.