Other people.

Make connections in your little circle/tribe; make people happy. It’s our biology, it’s what we evolved to do, and it’s what you leave behind.

Rimworld’s DLCs are kinda assumed purchases for the modding scene, too. I feel like this drives a lot of their sales TBH.

My fantasy is Apple heating up a feud with Facebook and integrating some kind of “self hosting” into the iPhone. EG our Moms “upload” the video, but what really happens under the hood is the phone streams the video on demand to her family. IIRC there are similar swarming schemes out there already.

It sounds crazy, and it used to be, but smartphones/modems are so fast now they could host little web servers on their efficiency cores, without breaking a sweat.

…Otherwise, this is a difficult issue, as video is so expensive to centrally host.

Reads bit on dictator-propping via propaganda in Sudan.

Nods. Yep, that sounds like my government alright. And Big Tech. Cries inside.

Veers off to “Ukraine Proxy War” with no reference to ChatGPT as promised in the headline.

Sighs. Closes tab.

The junocam page has raw shots from the actual device: https://www.msss.com/all_projects/junocam.php

Caption of another:

Multiple images taken with the JunoCam instrument on three separate orbits were combined to show all areas in daylight, enhanced color, and stereographic projection.

In other words, the images you see are heavily processed composites…

Dare I say, “AI enhanced,” as they sometimes do use ML algorithms for astronomy. Though ones designed for scientific usefulness, of course, and mostly for pattern identification in bulk data AFAIK.

Pro is 120hz.

But they are expensive as heck. I only got the 16 Plus because its a carrier loss leader, heh.

And wouldn’t fix some of my other quibbles with iOS’s inflexibility. My ancient jailbroken iPhone 4 was more customizable than now, and Apple is still slowly, poorly implementing features I had a decade ago. It’s mind boggling, and jailbreaking isn’t a good option anymore.

My last Android phone was a Razer Phone 2, SD845 circa 2018. Basically stock Android 9.

And it was smooth as butter. It had a 120hz screen while my iPhone 16 is stuck at 60, and I can feel it. And it flew through some heavy web apps I use while the iPhone chugs and jumps around, even though the new SoC should objectively blow away even modern Android devices.

It wasn’t always this way; iOS used to be (subjectively) so much faster that it’s not even funny, at least back when I had an iPhone 6S(?). Maybe there was an inflection point? Or maybe it’s only the case with “close to stock” Android stuff that isn’t loaded with bloat.

This is why work/life balance is so important. I wouldn’t ever call myself “well-off” but I don’t have kids and my job allows me ample time off to play games and watch movies and shit.

Neither do they! They aren’t workaholics, they’re home bodies that work the least they can!

It’s just that the workplaces are shit. One went back to mandated RTO for no reason even though much of the work is overseas at odd hours. The company’s literally trying to make employees miserable so they quit without severence. The other is work-from-home, but with enough pointless meetings and complete workplace dysfunction to eat energy.

And these seem like well above average jobs.

Random aside, I switched from Android to iOS a year ago. I miss Android already.

The UI is more convoluted an clunky than iOS from years ago, just as uncustomizable, and performs shockly bad on heavy webpages on a brand new 16+. It’s got no freaking RAM, no sd card slot. Some free FOSS apps are nonexistant or paid only.

Security and OOTB privacy is better and app support is generally better, but that’s about it? I’d probably keep an iPhone around to bank on when I eventually switch…

next Xbox

If it’s really a PC, I bet AMD customized Strix Halo (their 40 CU APU) for Microsoft instead of doing a fully custom chip like before.

It’d save them money (as custom chip tapeouts are 9 figures last I heard). I bet Microsoft couldn’t help themselves, heh.

+1 to literally everything.

Fuck brand recognition or loyalty, fuck development talent, fuck community building, fuck long-term strategy, we can realize a gain right now by sowing half the planet with salt, so that’s what we’re going to do. So what is there for people to buy?

I wish this would fit on a bumpersticker.

That noise you heard last week was Xbox’s death rattle. One out of the three mainstream home console platforms is an outright stupid idea to buy now.

And wasn’t Sony the big risk of bowing out before? And then we got the Switch 2… It’s remarkable that Microsoft somehow made Xbox the least likely to survive.

Single data point: my young, working, well off gaming part of my family is just out of energy. It’s easier to watch a YouTube video instead of TV or gaming, before then falling asleep to wake up for work. Seems like much of their circle is similar.

As for myself, I’m going through a, uh, icky phase of life and am not really motivated to play unless it’s coop.

…Maybe others are struggling similarly?

Also, the games we do look at tend to be from indie to mid-size studios, with BG3 and KCD2 being the only recent exceptions.

Most of the US believes in this, or is just unaware. That’s how its been for most of history around the world.

…The remarkable issue here is the elites/rules we handed the reigns now drink their own kool-aid. The very top of most authoritarian regimes are at least cognisant of some hypocrisy, even if ideology eats them some.

The other is that people are more ‘connected’ than ever, but to disinformation streams. I feel like a lot of the world (especially the US fancies) themselves as super smart on shit they know nothing about because of something they saw on Facebook or YouTube.

Yes, but its clearly a building block of Meta’s LLM training effort, and part of a pattern.

One implication I didn’t mention, and don’t have hard proof I can point to, is garbage in garbage out. Meta let AI slop and human garbage proliferate on Facebook, squandering basically the biggest advantage (besides cash) they have. It’s often speculated that, as it turns out, Twitter and Facebook training data is kinda crap.

…And they’re at it again. Zuckerberg pours cash into corporate trash and get slop back. It’s an internal disaster, like their own divisions.

On the other side, it’s often thought that Chinese models are so good for their size/compute because they’re ahem getting data from the Chinese government, and don’t need to worry about legal issues.

The research community already knows this.

Llama 4 (Meta’s flagship ‘AI’ project) was as bad release. That’s fine. This is interative research; not every experiment works out.

…But it was also a messy and dishonest one.

The release was pushed early and full of bugs. They lied about its performance, especially at long context, going so far as to game Chat Arena with a finetune. Zuckerberg hyped the snot out of it, to the point I saw ads for it on Axios.

Instead of Meta saying they’ll do better, they said they’re reorganizing their divisions to focus on ‘applications’ instead of fundamental research, aka exactly the wrong thing. They’ve hermmoraged good researchers and kept AI bros, far as I can tell from the outside.

Every top LLM trainer has controversies. Just recently Qwen (Alibaba) closed off their top base models just to spite Deepseek, so they can’t distill them. Deepseek is almost certainly training on Google Gemini traces. Google hoards their best research for API models and has chased being sycophantic like ChatGPT. X’s Grok is a joke, and muddied by Musk’s constant lies about, for instance, open sourcing it. Some great outfits like 01ai (the Yi series) faded into the night.

…But I haven’t seen self-destruction quite like Meta’s. Especially considering the ‘f you’ money and GPU farm they have. They’re still pushing interesting research now, but the trajectory is awful.

Is this an ADHD meme?

I’m afraid it might be, cause I have a trail of ‘one giant playlists’ and songs on repeat.

I was testing heavily modded Minecraft, specifically Enigmatica, which chugs even on beefy PCs.

Out of curiosity, what mod are you running for shaders, specifically? That may have an effect.

Not in niche games. Rimworld and Stellaris (for instance) are dramatically faster on Windows, hence I keep a partition around. I’m talking 40%ish better simulation speeds vs Linux native (and still a hit with Proton, though much less).

Minecraft and Starsector, on the other hand, freaking love Linux. They’re dramatically faster.

These are kinda extreme scenarios, but the point is AAA benchmarks don’t necessarily apply to the spectrum of games across hardware, especially once you start looking at simulation heavy ones.

Yes, we know, you are preaching to the choir here, lemmy.ml.

But I’d rather we not back out of NATO, decouple trade and invade friendly neighbors all while the US continues to screw over far away countries first. At this point, backing out of NATO is not going to help our bad behavior.

After that, we can worry about not screwing with other countries so much, hopefully.

Good move TBH. Just like that, Trump likes NATO again.