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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Given the contemporary examples, they weren’t wrong to think so. Everyone was trying to make a console in the 16/32-bit era.

    • PC Engine/Turbografx
    • Phillips CD-i (only sorta a console)
    • Atari Jaguar
    • Neo Geo
    • Amiga CD

    Some of these are better than others–I’m fond of the PC Engine–but none can be called successful. Neo Geo is somewhat of an exception because it was used as arcade hardware. Some others here are the butt of jokes. There’s also a bunch of Japanese consoles around this time that go nowhere, and are little more than fodder for retro gaming YouTube channels.

    Sony took a big gamble and won.








  • They want AGI, which would match or exceed human intelligence. Current methods seem to be hitting a wall. It takes exponentially more inputs and more power to see the same level of improvement seen in past years. They’ve already eaten all the content they can, and they’re starting to talk about using entire nuclear reactors just to power it all. Even the more modest promises, like pictures of people with the correct number of fingers, seem out of reach.

    Investors are starting to notice that these promises aren’t going to happen. Nvidia’s stock price is probably going to be the bellwether.


  • To them, I’d point out the NIST warehouse of standardized materials:

    https://shop.nist.gov/

    $1,143 for 510 grams of Peanut Butter. $734 for 25 grams of Portland Cement. $1,107 for 100 grams of “Infant/Adult Nutritional Formula I (milk-based)”.

    Is the US government ripping people off? No. It’s because when you get one, it is guaranteed to be the standard for whatever it says on the package, and it’s been made that way to exacting levels of detail. Unless you’re a laboratory using these materials, you don’t need to bother NIST with your grocery list.

    Personally, I love this shit. It takes a whole lot of effort to make something to such standards. Doubly so when it’s not just one thing, but a combination of many smaller things that each has to be individually verified to work as part of a whole.



  • I think there’s a way to reconcile it, but it requires people to behave themselves. It can still be under a CC license, but also behind a pay link for the author. Yes, we could get it from somewhere for free, but that takes more effort and we’re not supporting the original creator.

    This is basically mutual aid applied to non-physical goods. We know you still need to make a living in capitalism, and we’ll agree to exchange useful things for money under that system until we have a better one.

    There’s also an argument similar to the one for streaming services (the one the services themselves have forgotten in the last few years). Yes, we can pirate it, but that takes effort, the sites involved have all sorts of shady advertisements and try to infect your computer with Windows XP viruses, and we can get all we want and more for ten bucks a month.