• 0 Posts
  • 540 Comments
Joined 2 年前
cake
Cake day: 2024年3月10日

help-circle


  • If there’s no relief on hardware, the odds go up. Game devs have been able to constantly chase higher highs because consumer hardware has constantly evolved. There’s been zero pressure to optimize or to rein in the graphics because a ton of people can still play day 1, and a bunch more will become able to play them soon as they yearn for it and strive to upgrade.

    But if users can’t upgrade because hardware is obscenely expensive or rare? That stops being the case. They have to cater to the average consumer in AAA because they desperately need to recoup the obscenely massive investment in development. If they refuse to optimize, if they insist on pushing graphics to ever new heights, they won’t sell shit because nobody will be able to run it. The market will demand that they start working within some limitations.

    Or the AI bubble pops, hardware goes back to being affordable, and the idea of limitations becomes little more than a bad dream to execs.




  • If I’m eating out in a society where servers depend on tips by law basically, i didn’t have to eat out, so I’m going to pay what’s expected of me.

    Sure, I do the same thing. I just opt to do that significantly less often than I might otherwise. At least for my service, it has cost restaurants far more than it has saved them on labor.



  • I think you’re right, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s irrelevant. It is not my responsibility as a customer to make sure someone’s employees get paid adequately. That’s the responsibility of their employer. If they can’t afford to run their business while paying their workers appropriately, then I’m really sorry your goals didn’t work out, but you’re running a failed business and just haven’t admitted it yet.


  • Why is that our problem as customers, though? Why are we expected to subsidize worker wages instead of employers actually paying the workers that are critical to their success? Why do we let employers get away with the insultingly paltry wage of $2.15/hour?

    Don’t get me wrong, if you use a service where workers are reliant on tips, you should tip, but I’d rather just avoid the hassle most of the time. I’d eat out a fair bit more often if not for the not-mandatory-but-totally-mandatory 15-20% extra to subsidize the owner’s greed.


  • All those things you want are divorced from the hardware for the most part, though. A gripping story has virtually no bearing on hardware requirements. Map complexity could be maintained by simply scaling down the graphical polish. Total game time is also almost totally decoupled from hardware strength.

    If anything, I would argue that AAA’s constant emphasis on graphics detracts from those. Maps can be more complex if they have less polygons and processing. They could spend more time fixing up the stories if they weren’t hemorrhaging money on art that’s way more detailed than it needs to be, and they would be more free to pivot if they need to because it’s not as expensive to edit whatever needs it. It’s way easier to make more content to extend the game time when it doesn’t cost the moon and stars to add more fresh art to flesh it out.








  • Nothing in the world can protect you from what the government does with the money we already gave it. We’ve ceded all control over it. Crypto can’t do a damn thing there and even makes it harder to claw the money back.

    What crypto can do is keep anyone from seizing the money you still control, and it can ensure nobody prevents you from transacting over anything at all. That means no getting screwed by a bank run, no having your funds seized by authoritarian governments, and nobody can exclude you from the payment network you depend on for daily life, no being excluded from digital payments and banking because you lack sufficient documentation or banks find your community to not be worth the effort. I understand not everybody needs that, as many North Americans and Europeans don’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid if value for everyone. And if your government turns too harshly to authoritarians, there may come a day where you learn to appreciate those things.


  • If you really want to get rid of your dual boot but need Windows, you could set up a virtual machine running Windows. You need a bit of a nicer machine to deal with the overhead, but it’s not so bad as people assume a lot of the time. As long as you don’t need the GPU for what you’re doing, I think it’s even pretty easy to give the VM direct access to the base hardware it needs, which cuts a fair bit of overhead. It may or may not get fairly technical to set up, depending on your hardware, distro, and personal luck, but it might be viable.