Taf the Ghost

Are we going for a full "Master Plan" approach of "We're checking..." or more of a "Michael, this isn't right?" Though I can fully see a Alphamaxnova1-style video for this entire situation. Well that's very interesting. Larry is always a guy to keep an eye on. He's the "Kevin Bacon" of the Finance/Tech interactions, so he always shows up spots where the true power players have a large interest in actually working. I wonder if there's a bit of a control/stake fight in the company that we just saw break out.

Occasionally, a large corporation with a lot of money can look at a situation and go "wait, it's be a lot cheaper to just buy all of the talent since the management are morons". This seems like one of those times.

Given the way these first gen custom silicon normally go, I'm guessing it's either performant but a power hog/furnace or perfectly power efficient but very slow for everything but 1-3 tasks they originally set at their benchmarks. The first go-around misses the mark in one direction, which is normally why round 2 goes better.

Very technically, the Saturn V is "lost tech". It is not possible to remake it. You could build an approximation of it, but the introduction of any new systems would require fully re-engineering huge chunks. Even the F5 engines couldn't be remade in the same methodologies, though they've thankfully pulled a museum one apart and deeply 3D scanned everything. With new 3D metal printing and other advanced manufacturing techniques, a similar model could be produced with a lot less parts needed. The other detail about the Saturn V is that it's likely the most complicated machine ever built by humans, and will likely remain that way for a rather long time. It was the actual pinnacle of technology of its era. Which is also why it was so incredibly expensive. Cost. The "design it, build it, test it until it explodes" approach is going to save the entire program for Starship such a massive amount of money & time it isn't funny. SpaceX will have a flight ready vehicle and a fully scaled manufacturing system ready likely a decade before they would in the classic spaceflight approach, while at the same time having vast quantities of real world performance data. This approach isn't new or even all that technically interesting. It's a tried & true method for rapid development, and actually used to be a staple of missile testing. The difference is that when the decision makers are politicians, they're far more concerned about the optics than the outcomes. This is actually how the Space Shuttle program ended up costing more than if they'd just kept improving the Saturn V and made various mission modules for it.

As Starship gets closer to a functional platform, I'm not surprised we're going to see more and more that simply don't understand SpaceX's testing approach for this project. Frankly, destructive testing has always been the "logical" path with spaceflight gear, but, since the entire economy of it works as much on perception among politicians as it does on technical realities, it's pretty obvious why we haven't seen it done before. The public also never sees how many design studies leading to engineering R&D that come to a failure point and have to roll back to study and delay a project for 6 months occur. Then we wonder why the James Webb took 20+ years to get deployed. Context for the project always matters, but the front-facing optics are completely different.

Necroposting does have a long, storied history in the New Builds section. Best is when you get pinged 3+ months later for physical build advice... with different parts that don't work together. Some people just have a blind spot for cheap motherboards and incompatible CPUs. When Linus mentioned using comparable parts they had on hand, I wasn't expecting them to do a slow-mo shot on a different PSU there at the end. But, hey, I guess they got Seasonic in there randomly? I do like that the build communities have moved to recommending better quality PSUs. Given the premiums you'll see on them in the States these days because of geo-politics, the cost difference going up a tier is normally not a lot and generally worth it.

Functionally, Internet sales have driven new cars sales for almost a decade now. That's where the majority of sales have gone, though it's mostly been something of a e-mail to call based system. Reality is no one likes to really talk to salesman. This ends up tying in with the Self-Checkout debate at grocery stores. The weird part in car sales is it's actually flipped back to the older way. I believe it was almost until the 90s that car sales were majority of Order-based not On Lot-based. Financing rules changed a lot and a push for instant sales (and the increase in high pressure sales tactics) also changed the way people interacted with the market. This also probably explains the rabid explosion that was eBay Motors, where people were willing to buy "sight unseen" with only the vaguest of protections, all so they didn't have to deal with sales. But, the real question: can we get Next Day Delivery? haha

Not sure how many boards support ECC, but I do know it's a thing. Though I think Plex servers more like a lot of cores more than the Caches, but there's there's a number of home server stuff that likely will appreciate the cache give the utility it brings to a lot of different task types. Kind of curious what Milan-X is being used for so much, might tell us where the real long-tail benefit is.

Two really important things. 1) AMD has historically had better support in the Long Tail sales at the consumer level. There's entire chunks of the world that have more exposure to AMD than Intel because of this. Sadly, a lot of that is Bulldozer parts, but DDR2 stuff was still getting sold well into the Zen2 / DDR4 era. Intel has great long term Server support, but generally kills off consumer relatively quickly in comparison. (This isn't even talking about AMD's GPU division with their major share in integrated devices. There's some weird chunks of the silicon market.) 2) Milan-X has apparently been a stupidly good seller for AMD. Enough that they have to keep making a lot of 3D V-Cache. While we would have assumed the consumer parts were mostly for the benchmark/top end stuff (like Intel does with the super-clocked parts), reality is AMD has a massive demand for the server part, which means they can "productize" for consumer since they have so many that don't meet those standards. This is actually pretty good for everyone. The 5800X3D is going to join the 2600K as one of those "takes forever to really need to upgrade" CPUs. Considering it requires a GPU that's currently $800USD or more to truly make it different in performance from most of the DDR5 CPUs, it's going to be a long time before it's really worth upgrading (unless you like to upgrade every 2 years). Adding a 5500X3D is going to be wild. I could see that living for a long time in a lot of Plex or home-built NAS servers.

It's going to be interesting to watch this all play out. This is most likely the most expensive game ever made (and second might not be even close, unless we're talking the entire lifecycle of WoW or something), but does it really exist to be GTA6 or Online 2? The risk is that if it's really two games in one (and not handled very carefully), it'll ruin both aspects from design conflict. Though with the amount of money they've invested into this, it's entirely possible to just make two games on the same map from within the same engine. It's going to be wild that this game might not be profitable until nearly the 10 million unit mark. Sure, it's GTA and it'll go beyond that by a lot, but it'll be interesting to see it all play out. I don't think it can go badly enough to actually hurt their net profitability, but there's weird scenarios where they basically kill a cash cow of Online. We do exist in an era of extremely dumb decision making with billions of dollars, so, while it is unlikely, stranger things happen.

Centralized Governments care first and foremost about their own power and survival. That's why there are things they "push" and things they are "pushed into". If it's something they are "pushing", then it serves their explicit interests. Yes, degraded security is the point for their own people, but there's likely a couple of other purposes as well. None of which are really related to what they'll tell you they're up to. But all governments, to a major extent, are oligopoly based. There are always multiple power factions, and sometimes the really dumb things the a government is pushing is to prevent other power factions from gaining some advantage. Energy Politics is normally the place you can see this the most. I find it fairly useful to have an understanding of the old feudal systems, especially something like the Holy Roman Empire, for how power factions interact and what they do. You can see the interactions better in a front-facing multi-faction system than the modern, closed-door, PR-Focused systems.

I love the irony that YT served me a recommendation to a video discussing the problem. Video is solid enough. Youtube without an Ad Blocker is a horrible experience. At least the video content is still solid since there's so much available, but the recommendation algo itself also spazzes out a lot more than it used to. At least it hasn't thought I was Finnish this week. (One of my browsers has had the Algo think I was a Finnish Woman with a love for American R&B... 3 times. Actually pretty good music tastes by whoever the system thought I was.)

The more I've seen of this, the more convinced I am this is going to end up far more expensive for Youtube than the increased revenue they think they're going to get as a result. The first reason being they've basically started a Ad Blocking War, which is going to have unforeseen consequences. But, the second is this seems to be an attack at competitive browsers to Chrome and their built-in Ad Blockers. At some level, at least until different approaches are found and/or non-Chrome browsers come with specific Youtube exceptions, Youtube is rendering their product useless on competitors to Chrome. As Chrome has the dominant market share in Browsers, this definitely is going to get at least some EU complaints. (US Anti-Trust is, sadly, too far gone at the moment.)

What we're seeing a return to Criminal Defamation standards in a lot of areas. Which isn't a bad thing. It used to exist until the "free spirit" period of the mid-1900s and the consequences have been pretty catastrophic for public discourse. Reputations absolutely matter and have real, durable value in life. Now we just call them "Brands" and it makes sense why the laws are swinging back that way. When the first fully functional AI Image generators landed, it was extremely clear the "normal space" wasn't ready to deal with what was about to be unleashed. Having mentioned a return to Criminal Defamation, we'll likely see the bolstering of Obscenity Laws. That's really the way to handle this stuff. But nothing is good about having to deal with all of it.

The "addressable inventory" pull will always be too much for ad-free tiers to remain. Companies are eventually going to have the Ad-Free and "better, but still with Ads" tiers be 3-4x price differences just to push you into the watching Ads model.

We can just blame Crypto and enjoy having a couple of new Crysis-type events in PC gaming.

Oddly timely and on point, haha.

One of my clients got the 3 Videos and you're done Death Mark. After some fiddling, turns out the really sensitive part is the Internal Ad blockers that are the primary response key. Which ends up coming across a bit Anti-Competitive Practices upon some thought. The current implementation can be kept ahead of, but rather annoying all around. Ad Blocking happened because of a lack of Trust. That's always the issue.

This was to clear the EU and/or Ubisoft's issues. And I'm not perfectly certain they pulled a "fast one" on them. Someone, somewhere, really thought Cloud Game Streaming Exclusivity to CoD was a massive anti-competition issue. Have you ever had to deal with a large group of people and there's someone in the group that has a real "bee in their bonnet" over a very trivial issue but they make a huge deal about it? Think setting up for an event and they want a plant moved from one spot to another and they won't drop the issue even if it all but doesn't matter? That's the exact impression I got from this. The agreement itself it kind of interesting. It is an IP Rights Ownership transfer for products, but it's such a trivial part of the IP Rights that all of the interesting aspects of it But this agreement doesn't require they be on Steam. If that had happened, it'd have been really wild.

The funniest part about Stadia, after we got some understanding of the tech they were using, is that they basically bought a fairly "cheap" but large scale amount of GPU Compute that they could also run games on. Which is still likely the primary purpose for the entire Stadia product. But Stadia also really highlighted the problems, even with Google having only so many data centers they could produce to provide support. Yes, it worked generally anywhere, but a lot of games went out the window if you weren't fairly close to a data center. Though Stadia failed for a lot of other reasons. Whoever the idiot that didn't get Civ6 on the platform is already fired, but they should be fired again. The funny part about the processing locality is I've had this discussion with a pretty high ranking member of an SI I know. I should probably take another crack at it, because there's a few kind of obvious trends (in a few specific fields I won't get into) that are going to break one direction or the other pretty soon and there's a lot of money to be made capitalizing on it. Where you put your processing matters for a lot more than just latency. On the Cloud Gaming, though, the fact that this isn't a huge thing in Tokyo is always the give away that it's not going to work. The place with the strongest Internet Infrastructure and it's not appealing to the audience there. And it's the largest mega-city in human history. It's probably wise to rethink the business strategy with Cloud Gaming. As a more general note, but it really effect Cloud Gaming, gaming is first and foremost about the Interaction Medium. How you interact with the game sets the forms in which the game can exist. This is why handhelds will always have enduring appeal. It's a very comfortable form factor, which allows the games to work well in that way. It does help that Pokemon exists.

I know everyone gets focused on CoD, but King is more valuable. Microsoft has extremely little in the way of Mobile Gaming. Which is a problem when it's about 1/2 the revenue in the entire Gaming Market. They want CoD as well, but they'll probably leave that division mostly to its own devices. Reading the document, the real question is how do we force Ubisoft to always request the ports. MS is only required to provide them if Ubisoft requests them. I'm also quite confused how we got to this point, as this seems like less "Cloud Gaming" and more about third party distribution being available, maybe. This also feels like it's working off all of those 2015 era documents about "The Future of Gaming is the Cloud!" that landed us with Google Stadia. Cloud Gaming as a direct service would always be too expensive per user to attract enough users to make it sustainable. I was just mentioning over in another thread how Netflix installs this single server units at the local central offices of ISPs all over the world because it radically lowers the network carriage bandwidth. You can put the entire Netflix catalog on one of these servers and cover 1000s of users. A Cloud Gaming Service needs 1 "console" per user expected at peak hours. The physical infrastructure doesn't scale in the way it does for a lot of other products. Having read this document twice, I think I figured it out. This is the most Ubisoft of Ubisoft type of moves. (They're a French Company, so under the EU and thus why their complaints would go through the EU.) I don't think this is a "fast one" pulled by MS or Activision. I honestly think Ubisoft is dumb enough to have worried about this and this is the issue they made the biggest issue. And, to drive home the point about how dumb this is. This is a link to Ubisoft's Cloud Gaming Service. Something I didn't know existed until a few minutes ago. It's not available in the USA, which is fine. But they link to a "dedicated FAQ article" about the list of eligible countries. Here's the link. I really can't make this up.

Netflix has licensing & production deals, so it's not quite a 1 to 1 comparison. But YT has a user base 10x higher in monthly (basically the whole of the open internet), and the data storage costs are several orders of magnitude higher. Netflix also this really smart approach where they have these 4U rack mount end point clients they install all over the place within ISP's central offices. You can put the entirety of Netflix's catalog on there and it saves a lot of secondary data traffic, mostly given how intense the traffic spike can be in the evenings for them.

YouTube is the most expensive website or web-based service on the planet. The cost-base to compare it to is Facebook.

It'll catch a lot of the video ads, though not all of them. Depends on the lists and the settings. There's no one-stop feature for add removal. I still need to setup one for Twitch, but I haven't been watching enough there lately to bother.

It's also not even consistently reading uBlock at the moment. This also ignores you can actually block the Ad Video via PiHole.