Taf the Ghost

YouTube still loses billions annually. It's been a net loss to Google of over 100 Billion USD during its lifetime. It's just not an endless money pit, at the moment. Only a horrible money pit. That's Susan's grand contribution.

Unity had a 17 Billion USD buyout offer last year. They really, really should have taken it.

While it's a tad bit of CCCP paranoia, Tesla's are actually banned around military institutions (and other "sensitive locations") because of fears of using all of the attached cameras are surveillance gear. Which is going to make those BYD EVs that are coming around quite a fun time. Just think of the concept of having your car banned & its title revoked because it's deemed a National Security risk? Most aren't yet comprehending the risks to all type of data that comes with cars being Cellphones with Wheels. The same issues that have already existed with privacy with just Google's activities are, with a car, augmented with GPS data and other trackable behavioral information. And given the general data security practices of most of the world, you can expect both your unfriendly hackers and all of the data gathering organizations will have all of it. And that's before the servers for your specific model get turned off in the future. I already know that late 90s and early 2000s super cars are having a lot of issues because the computers necessary to read their data outputs are getting old/failing/hard to find. (Depends on the company & model how much of an issue this is, at the moment.) Given all of this taken together, I'm making a great business case for a firmware hacking business around cars.

And it's not like the servers will ever go down... or go End of Life...

Network Connection Deletes are going to be a very big deal going forward.

While it was interesting, the rise was the only kind of wild part. There's a functional set of market dynamics those that aren't in the weeds ever take into consideration. By way of an analogy, think of a Price has having springs on both sides. There's a point at which both sides break and the price either skyrockets or tumbles. The sudden movement by small investors caught the automated "eyes" of the high frequency systems, which are actually what caused the rise, until the entire Sell Side Liquidity was burned up. Those High Frequency Trading firms are the ones that actually cause those spikes, as much as Redditors might think they're the big movers. That's just not the way volume works in the US Stock Market. However, those HFT firms are attached to data scrapers and would have seen the activity, and once it started breaking into the Short Squeeze's funds the algos would have pouched on it. As for Linus, he got in about the point I was trying to convince a friend to sell their position. I've used it a few times around here, but there's always roughly a "fair value" for a company. I've used Value = Earnings * 8 and it normally works well out. (Sale value of a company being over Earnings * 10 means something you need to look at closely as being fishy.) Once it was beyond that point, you're gambling on oddities rather than a fundamental disconnect. Also, feather your profits. The mental effects are a whole lot easier to manage when you do.

Well, it's Nvidia. They'll do everything they can generally get away with. That said, who knows with something like this. It could be local or national politics. Some issue with a local Union. I don't know all of the chipmakers in the new AI space, so it could be anticompetitive measures by the French authorities for a French company. I was going to make a joke about Intel still hasn't paid their fine for bribing System Integrators during the late 2000s, but I really don't want to actual go searching to find out it's stuck in another appeal.

In Order: 1 - Chromium's engine development staff breaking things regularly. 2 - Windows Display Driver Monitor handling (Freesync is actually a VESA standard). 3 - AMD 4 - As much as I want to say Windows, it's probably more the Laptop's firmware that's to blame for that one. Low Power State management is mostly the domain of the laptop manufacturer.

I'm pretty sure Luke needed to set the PCIe interface to 3.0. The cards aren't realistically bandwidth heavy enough to need more than 3.0 x16 still. But 4.0 (and 5.0)'s signaling requirements would likely have been the majority of the cause there. Though it seems AMD has improved the handling of that really dumb use case Luke has created. (Likely because of failure tolerance issues with low quality motherboards needing to be dealt with.) AMD's GPU driver department has always seemed understaffed. Which it was for a long while. Also, Nvidia pays top of the market for GPU driver talent. And, realistically, post the 2019 driver rework, everything has been generally stable. Or as stable as Nvidia in most cases. Also, Luke mentions "after reinstalling" the card... which probably means his previous install (and or Nvidia removal) wasn't clean. Which might explain the riser card issues. I've had mostly minimal issues for years on AMD cards. Used both. At least Nvidia's control panel finally loads like it's a current program and now running on Windows 98. He likely needed to force PCIe 3.0 connection. It likely couldn't maintain 4.0, was falling back to 1.0 then kicking back up. GPUs drop the connection speed to save power, it's one of those tricks they brought to desktop from Mobile. AMD's Linux driver is awesome and seems to work better than their Windows drivers for most things, haha. Nvidia is forever attempting to extract as much money as it tries to move to anything else that isn't a Consumer GPU market. They really hate being in the market they're in. However, Nvidia's killer feature is NVENC. And it's really the only one that matters. Ray Tracing will matter more from the upcoming next generations and on, but it's still mostly just a "that's neat" feature right now. All of the Anti-aliasing technologies went through this process. They're in the cards several generations before they actually practical. Radeon Chill is the best feature of the Driver and it's not even close. Chromium has regularly had really weird issues with the AMD decoder. And it's really a Chromium issue, but since so many products use that as the basis, AMD Driver department seems to forever be chasing the problems around. It's the reason there's issues that drop up in Steam, Discord or even Teams. The one issue with the high idle power draw is actually the memory having to run at full to keep up whatever is going on with the Windows Display Driver. If you fiddle with your monitor's refresh rate (generally over 120 Hz has to maintain the full RAM power draw), you can generally get it to sit back at its normal low idle. Nvidia doesn't have this issue in Single Monitor setups (generally does depending on the multi-monitor setup), but Nvidia's much more CPU demanding Windows Driver is likely the reason they can keep the idle power lower.

Mostly a Reddit issue, but a lot of websites with WebP open them in this hybrid window when you want to zoom in on a bigger picture. Then you can't use normal zoom (as it zooms the UI). I've meant to find some add-on in browser to handle it, but I only remember it whenever I see a schedule post and want to zoom in. No reason to bring it up around here, it's a processing annoyance I just need to bother to go fix.

It's quickly approaching Duke Nukem Forever levels of production timelines. I do think someone found a way to use it for money laundering, but the production studio is more than happy to just keep developing. Unlimited resources has kinda ruined Roberts' head perspective.

How to say "Our Business Model requires selling User Information to Someone" without saying that's their entire business model at this point.

And here I have been complaining about WebP handling for a while. But, yeah, that's really bad. Update Browser time!

As an aside, Unity turned down a 17 Billion USD buyout offer back in mid-2022. The stock was a little higher at the time, but still way, way down from its peak. That's likely why they didn't take the offer. They should have. Now we're here.

The War Thunder forums are so notorious I've heard jokes in YT Videos only roughly in the mil-tech space. I kind of love that the Tech Nerds do these things. They shouldn't, but it'll never not be funny.

Unity might be bigger in Mobile than in PC. That's what it's targeted after. Genshin Impact is on Unity, for instance. Unreal's 5% revenue cut has always been a fair going rate, but Unity's rate is now extremely difficult to calculate. And if you get an unexpected smash hit (like Vampire Survivors), you are going to get slammed. While they're walking back some of the stuff (yeah, great job with the "Go too Far, Walk Back" strategy there, buds. Watch a mass exodus of developers), the damage is absolutely done. The big games on Unity can't move, but smaller companies will pivot or start on different Engines to begin with. Also, knowing the Internet, there's going to be ways of spoofing these "install" numbers. I give it 2 weeks after they roll out some system for reporting. Some group is going to really dislike some game, and they're going to find a way to make the Unity Bill higher than the game's revenue.

They went public, the engine is their core revenue source and they've moved into pure extraction mode since its likely the revenues are not as high as necessary to keep up their valuations that the upper Execs need to cash out massively. (It's the latter part that does a lot of the damage to companies, honestly.)

The fact Epic somehow comes out of the modern game engine days as the reasonably option is wild. But, here we are. I thought maybe Unity had been bought by a Venture Capital or Private Equity firm. No, they're a public company that went on a buying spree and recently cut some jobs. But..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Riccitiello Old Jonny Boy re-enters the ring! Though I don't think he was the studio murdered. He just likes to buy up everything, which is exactly what Unity did after they went public. I don't have an issue with a company making money off their engines. But Unity is going to create this horrible gap that anyone that wants to make a "cheap" game is going to have to think really hard about it. Vampire Survivors is the one to watch here, as that's in Unity.

Even for Japanese companies, Nintendo is really aggressive, but also in the spaces they probably lose under US Law but wouldn't under Japanese Law. There's a very definite "screw it, you won't put up the fight" aspect to their actions. At the scale Nintendo actually has to defend their IP, they aren't wrong. (LTT has how many videos on Retro Game playing devices? Which means Nintendo ROMs.) It's just they hit basically everyone hard unless they have a large fanbase. Because they're Image Conscious and don't take public criticism well.

China has actually been pumping billions (USD/EUR equivalent) into a domestic chip production at current gen nodes. Several of the ventures have failed extremely badly. I don't know if Huawei's nodes are using any EUV layers and I don't know if ASML has ever been able to deliver any into Mainland China. Of note, TSMC has Fabs in Mainland China and has for years. It's really only a question if they can get access to certain necessary machines that are basically only produced by 1-2 companies. China's Advanced Optics Production would be the biggest hinderance there, for them. For the people with the skills necessary, they likely have enough. They could hire mainlanders working for TSMC or other companies. And, if they're missing R&D, see my note about Huawei's integration with Chinese State Intelligence. They can get it. What they likely can't get is the advanced optics or the lack of corruption to stay at leading edge technology. As for Management side, unknown. Some Chinese companies are actually well managed. Most are "Mandarin" managed. There's a reason no one trusts their activities.

While the tech is actually very old, the hardware to run it is very new and requires dedicated die space. Which means learning to program for it while adjusting to exactly how much you can run with it. Realistically, Console Devs decided to just push more textures & geometry over ray tracing. Truth of the matter is that until the hardware sees another 200-300% improvement in actual throughput, it's not really worth using full time global illimitation. Pre-baked lighting is just so much more effective. Still, it's going to be a wonky switch over. In a decade, everything minus like 2D and Retro games will make the full switch to Global Illumination, but getting to that point from this point means you have to make both. Somewhere around the UE6 era we'll probably see the switch. For the next console cycle, I'd expect full time RT Reflections given both engine development and the much larger amount of units dedicated to it.

Ray Tracing performance still kind of doesn't matter. It's in the "nice to have" and the name of the game is still Raster. RT performance in the >$1000USD range just tells us that it's still not quite ready for prime time. GPUs when through this with AA technology. That was in GPUs for almost a decade before you can just leave it on in most games. (A lot of it is still Software & Game Engine side.) That said, the next Gen is I think the point where it'll matter a lot. Mostly because the next console cycle should be on that Zen 5 + RNDA4 tech base. Ray Tracing does take dedicated units, so that requires die space. If we see another, say, 50% performance increase in RT at the mid-range next cycle, that should be where it makes sense to just leave it on in High End testing, rather than breaking it out.

There's actually a good number of Dubs. Which is good. Since they'll be doing it more, they probably need to think about the dubbing studio's setup a bit. The reflection times in a small booth compared to a large room (normal shooting) means the dubs sound different. In this case, higher reverb and the spatial feel is much closer. Though dubs always have tone differences because the voice changes slightly during the day and between days. Something you don't notice until you put clips back to back. The dubs definitely made the video flow smoother, which is the point of them. The audio can be fixed a bit with some time to attempt to match it to the normal LMG audio setup, since it'll be more regular. I think they've used some form of this graphics setup before, right? Either way, I like the new graphics package for the charts. While 1% lows first is a different take than most, it's valid and useful. Glad to also see Production benchmarks hanging around. I did like the "well, we're waiting" section. AMD's communication on the FSR3 release has been a little lacking. They clearly announced it a tad early or final prep took a little too long. As for working in all games on certain APIs, this isn't the first time AMD as come up with general stuff for their driver package. That's actually been a regular thing. AMD Chill originally only worked in like 30 games until someone on their staff figured out how to get it to work in everything. So I could see most of the stuff they're working working at the driver level like that. We'll just have to see.

Huawei could very easily face import bans on their chips. While all Chinese companies are, by their own laws, required to turn over everything to the State upon demand, Huawei's integration with State Intelligence seems to be the primary reason behind their explosion from a bunch of Western Tech Markets. That same reason is likely to follow the new SoC. As for that graph, eh, I would highly question everything about that. China has driven out a huge amount of foreign workers in the last 3 years and they're facing enough expatriation to further kick in capital controls and now start attacking the service companies that help manage it. It's possible that something like that amount of, mostly debt, money is earmarked for "R&D". But that'll be about 20% to R&D and 80% to graft. Also, Tesla's are banned in most any government or military area in China. One problem with all of the cameras on cars is that data can be sent home. Expect that to be a new domain of restrictions, in a lot of places & in general, in the future.

Well, the issues came in kind of slowly. Taran and Brandon moving on in life actually seems to be roughly the point where more issues really started cropping up. That's around the point Linus was making the decision to commit to bringing in a new CEO. It's clear there was issues with where the paradigm was and there were moves to change things. The issue is that the Billet Labs brought a huge chunk of all of the issues right to one specific event. Of course, it wasn't until Linus' forum post and the backlash where it all was forced to be brought from "background work" to shutting down the pipeline and really working through things. Kind of in the way that actual pipelines in the real world don't get shut down often, but, when they do, they spend a while doing necessary maintenance. Realistically, no one at LMG had the time & energy necessary to make all of these changes in a short period of time, unless they shut everything down and really worked through the issues.