GraphQL man… the whole thing does this by design. Just in the last week I had to implement a custom retry function because the python requests one very reasonably doesn’t consider a 200 status code to be an error.

Yeah, HDR is one of my main hangups as well. Very interested in moving my living room gaming PC over (the only place I deal with Windows), but I need a lot of things to just work with little to no hassle, and also no hit to performance. I didn’t build a very expensive PC for a compromised experience, as much as Windows is regularly a massive PITA.

I think a lot is being made of this headline, honestly. Indiana Jones did the same thing using the same engine… and runs well on a broad variety of hardware, including AMD cards with no dedicated RT accelerators. And that’s not an experience designed with high framerate competitive action in mind.

I also literally booted Doom Eternal for the first time in a while today, enabled raytracing, and played at 120FPS with 4K native on a 7900XTX, all settings on High. Id knows how to frigging optimize a title, and you can bet their raytracing implementation will be substantially better optimized than the RT we’re used to seeing. So long as you don’t run it with Path Tracing (a future forward feature, like Crysis back in the day), I fully expect you’ll still be able to get high framerates and incredible visuals.

Wait for the Digital Foundry tests before buying if you’re uncertain, absolutely, but I really don’t see any reason to be concerned with the way idTech 8 has been shaping up.

Sounds like a CEO who doesn’t have a damn clue how code works. His description sounds like he thinks every line of code takes the same amount of time to execute, as if x = 1; takes as long as calling an encryption/decryption function.

“Adding” code to bypass your encryption is obviously going to make things run way faster.

Exactly, play by the original rules, and play aggressive as all hell. You don’t need almost any property, it’s just fine to mortgage everything but your main set, the goal is to get one very developed set ASAP.

Not only is this a pretty effective way to win (a conservative player who lands once on a very developed property is basically out of the game), it also makes the game progress much faster, especially if other players are willing to concede before the bitter end. 2 or 3 players like this, and you’ve actually got a recipe for a decent time.

Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?

Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just… throw it out? Users certainly don’t keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game’s CPU/GPU usage isn’t particularly out of the ordinary.

So not much you could do here. Ockham’s razor here just says… planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they’ve gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can’t spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.

Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.

What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.

Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?

Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?

So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.

Yeah, this is the problem with frankensteining two systems together. Giving an LLM a prompt, and giving it a module that can interpret images for it, leads to this.

The image parser goes “a crossword, with the following hints”, when what the AI needs to do the job is an actual understanding of the grid. If one singular system understood both images and text, it could hypothetically understand the task well enough to fetch the information it needed from the image. But LLMs aren’t really an approach to any true “intelligence”, so they’ll forever be unable to do that as one piece.

Eh, this is a thing, large companies often have internal rules and maximums about how much they can pay any given job title. For example, on our team, everyone we hire is given the role “senior full stack developer”, not because they’re particularly senior, in some cases we’re literally hiring out of college, but because it allows us to pay them better with internal company politics.

Ugh, if only. Amazon has done everything in their power to bury and strip that number from the internet. Once upon a time that worked great.

Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.

So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen… which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon’s “chat support” AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours “in case my package shows up”. I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it’s not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I’m willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final “solution” and I have to restart the convo over and over.

Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.

I don’t necessarily disagree that we may figure out AGI, and even that LLM research may help us get there, but frankly, I don’t think an LLM will actually be any part of an AGI system.

Because fundamentally it doesn’t understand the words it’s writing. The more I play with and learn about it, the more it feels like a glorified autocomplete/autocorrect. I suspect issues like hallucination and “Waluigis” or “jailbreaks” are fundamental issues for a language model trying to complete a story, compared to an actual intelligence with a purpose.

Same honestly. And if I ever ask a question that someone might think is a duplicate, I link to that question and say something like “I found X, but the answers here don’t reflect Y”.

Surprisingly legible, but feels like I can only read it with momentum, flitting past it and letting my subconscious tell me where the word breaks are. The moment I get confused and look more closely, it becomes almost impossible to read.