Hallucination is a technical term. Nothing to do with thinking. The scientific community could have chosen another term to describe the issue but hallucination explains really well what’s happening.

I love cars, love driving, and I work in self-driving cars because I’m convinced the only people doing it should be the people who see it as a hobby, just like riding horses. You have so many people on the roads who hate it, and drive horribly because they don’t care and it’s an absolute pain for them. Why should those people drive, other than the fact that we don’t have the technology yet to allow them not to?

(Even better, infrastructure to support them not to need cars at all, but that’s a different topic. And before we get the “trains are the solution to every problem” crew, I think self driving shuttles are a cool way to diminish vehicles vs cars, that can cover at the same cost more routes than buses, achieve a higher occupancy rate, and would need next to no infrastructure changes.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen

It’s common knowledge? It’s literally the second paragraph in its Wikipedia article. Volkswagen means “the people’s car” and was founded so that people in Germany could afford a car.

It’s not necessarily even compensating for something else, just a different skillset. I work in software/robotics and my ADHD brain is really happy thinking about the whole system and all the interactions between components, and keeping track of many development threads at once. My neurotypical coworkers excel at being experts in one system and knowing it to the minute detail, and performing sequential tasks. They consider what I do extremely hard and/or annoying because of all the moving pieces… But the opposite is true, I’d die if I had to become an expert in a single, narrow area.

This doesn’t necessarily apply to multiplayer games though: the free-to-play part of the playerbase is there to pad the numbers and ensure queues are short (if it’s a match based game), cities are lively (if it’s a MMORPG), etc.

If the developer can’t appeal to those too, then you’re left with a ghost town of a game that can’t appeal to the whales either.

I agree with you, prices will still be market driven. However I was replying to a comment about a hypothetical scenario, which I think is useful to explore however unlikely it might be.

Thinking of the hypothetical scenario where in a short timeframe energy would become near unlimited and almost free:

On the positive side: with no energy limitations, Direct Air Capture technology could be scaled massively. That’s one really promising technology that can take carbon off the air and use it for other things (like sustainable air fuels) or removing it altogether.

Also this would accelerate the transition to electric cars and well, electric everything: why pay for fuel for your car, your stove or boiler, when they can be almost free? That has a potential for good effects on the environment too.

On the negative side: this opens the door for more, cheap transport. If people don’t have to pay for fuel, they’d be more willing to take the car everywhere. This would mean more roads, more infrastructure, more destruction of ecosystems, less space for pedestrians… A trend that is already too difficult to reverse in a world of expensive fuels.

In terms of economics, I could see this accelerating the gap between countries. Those who could benefit from semi-free energy first would have an immense competitive advantage and also lower their manufacturing costs, leaving worse-off countries in a position where they can’t compete because of technology nor because of cheap labour.

Oh no, stop the presses! They missed a C! ⚠️ Their whole argument is invalid!

Unfortunately in the 2020s you don’t even own the games you have the physical media for.

Edit: as a more serious answer, Linux might be a better bet than Windows for playing windows games (ironically), either through Proton or Wine.

Brother still can’t do inkjet right? I read somewhere there’s a big patent that lets only a select few companies be able to sell inkjet printers.

I used to have a laser printer, and they’re great for documents, but now what I print most are photos, and for that pigment-based inks rock.

I have an Epson printer but even if they’re nowhere near as bad as HP, Epson also has some weird shit from time to time.

Yeah is this linked with dall-e?

I absolutely didn’t say you’re an idiot.

However, I do find it mildly annoying when people copypaste ChatGPT/LLM comments with no context or introduction, as if they had written that themselves. I don’t necessarily fancy spending my time arguing with a chatbot.

Did you ask ChatGPT to explain how a ship stays afloat?

That’s almost 22 billion more profit than Twitter.

I’m trying to defend here a product I don’t really believe in, so bear with me.

The portal lets you play PS5 games, in PS5-ish quality (-ish because it’s obviously not the same as a 4k TV). The best the switch can do is 7-year-old No Man’s Sky, with no multiplayer. Recent Pokémon and Zelda (first party Nintendo games) can’t even reach a constant 30 FPS in the whole of the game.

I don’t think graphics are THAT important, but I know there are people who think that. And in that case, the PS5+Portal is going to beat a standalone steam deck or a switch. If you have a beefy PC maybe a steam deck can stream in better quality, but if you’re in the PS5 ecosystem it’s the best quality handheld gaming you can achieve.

Would I buy it? Absolutely not. 80% of the fun with my steam deck is taking it places. The airport, the plane, a hotel on a business trip, my partner’s place, the dentist waiting room, the bus/train… All that’s missing with the Portal, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see a (niche) market for it.

I firmly believe the solution is autonomous shuttles, not cars. Imagine having bus routes that can dynamically change and adapt to demand. Say we replace every bus with 2 smaller shuttles: during normal service the route could have the same capacity, but if there is an extraordinary event (sports event for example) you could divert them from the low-demand areas to the extraordinary-demand zone.

During lower demand times, you can also have more routes at no extra cost. If you’re clever and make an app to call the shuttle (think Uber but through pre-established routes) the demand can be determined in real time to ensure you don’t have empty shuttles.

And because they’re bigger than passenger cars you’re still increasing the ratio of passengers per vehicle, unlike robotaxis which merely replace private cars, with mostly 1- or 2-passenger trips.

Yet they keep posting more and more profits. Subscriber count has only increased despite the content being lower quality and prices being higher. The fact that we don’t like them increasing the prices doesn’t mean it isn’t working for them.

I’m not arguing it will work forever, but for now, it’s been a viable strategy.

Yeah no way that anyone who is actually center would be happy with transphobe ads. That’s only the techno-right Elon Musk praisers that believe that because they accept technology, they’re not far right even if they are unaccepting of large swathes of society. Center implies accepting points of view in both sides, which is not compatible with intolerant stances.

I agree, but they’d get a large number of users to subscribe.

And then maybe they wouldn’t complain when they raised the price to $3. And a few months later maybe $3.50. Then $5.

A few years ago, people wouldn’t have paid over $15 for a standard Netflix tier without 4K. But the way to boil a frog is to make them nice and comfy in lukewarm water, then keep increasing the temperature slowly… So even if they lose money, maybe a low price for the ad-free YouTube could make sense, from a business perspective.

Genuine question: and are these slated to have full-fledged Linux compatibility? Because I’ve had to give up on Windows on Arm because of silliness like Google refusing to make Google Drive, or apps like Affinity/Blender/Fusion360 not having hardware acceleration thanks to Qualcomm’s subpar drivers.