• A record 18,000 games were published on Steam in 2024 - around fifty per day.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Of course most of these are small indie titles, but given that most of the tentpole AAA titles in 2024 were catastrophic failures - cough Concord cough - that's not only entirely understandable but a good thing.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in Europe new game sales dropped by 29% year-on-year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Star Wars Outlaws, one of Ubisoft's biggest failures of 2024, was the 14th best selling title in 2024 out of games released in 2024.  But when you include sales of older games, it drops to number 45.

• Here's some of the best indie titles released in 2024.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The best major titles of 2024 are Black Myth Wukong.  Astro Bot is reportedly also fun, though short.
  
  
  
• Apple is not planning to let Google be broken up by the government without a fight.  (WSJ)  (archive site)
  
  Apple has filed to intervene in the penalty phase of the Google antitrust case, now that the judge has ruled that Google has violated antitrust law.
  
  The reason is that Google pays Apple about $20 billion per year to be the default search engine in the Safari browser.
  
  Which is a good reason.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's P14s workstation laptop is 60% off right now.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This is not a cheap model so even at 60% off it's still $1700, but for that you get an Intel 155H CPU, a 14.5" 3072x1920 display, 96GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and RTX 500 dedicated graphics.  Which aren't anything special but are better than the integrated graphics in the CPU.
  
  I checked the Australian store and we only get a 20% discount, leaving the price for the same configuration at A$4760, just a touch expensive.
  
  
  
• How to survive as a software developer in the era of AI.  (Backchannel)
  
  Step One: Build a moat and feed anyone who tries to tell you it is the "Era of AI" to the alligators.  Or crocodiles/caimans/gharials depending on your location.
  
  Such people are not only not to be trusted, but should be actively distrusted.  When the Era of AI comes, Skynet will notify you.

• Electric aircraft startup Lilium has ceased operations and laid off 1000 workers after being unable run raise additional funds.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The German company has filed for insolvency - effectively bankrupt - after fundraising attempts fell through.  It had been operating for over ten years and laid off 200 workers earlier this year.
  
  
  
• Electric aircraft startup Lilium has been bought out of insolvency by a group of American and European investors.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The deal is expected to complete early in January and the new owners plan to rehire former workers.
  
  Sometimes things mostly work out.

• Though not for the games industry, for whom 2024 was the worst year since 1983 when the industry all but disintegrated, with revenue decreasing by 97%.
  
  2024 was the year the bottom fell out of the games industry.  (Wired)  (archive site)

  In 2023, more than 10,000 developers lost their jobs ... Six months in, this year’s layoff tally had already surpassed that of 2023.

  How could this happen?

  "The explanation is complex and wide-ranging for the same reason the layoffs are so deep and continuous, and sit alongside many studio closures and even more canceled games,” Ball says.

  How could this happen?

  As the industry faltered, games suffered.  High-profile releases like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were commercial failures.

  Wait.
  
  Apart from the fact that Suicide Squad was very poorly received, this is entirely backwards.  Bad games caused the industry to falter.  That's the direction of causality here.  Warner Bros didn't create an unpopular game because they lost $200 million; they lost $200 million because the game was unpopular.  Workers were laid off because the game didn't sell because players didn't like it.

  While there were many reasons for this, online right-wing groups reduced it to a single mantra: "go woke, go broke."

  Well, yes.
  
  If you look at the big budget catastrophic flops of 2024, there is one thing they all have in common.

  Although there have been incredible games released this year - Balatro

  Indie.

  Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

  Japanese.

  Metaphor: ReFantazio

  Japanese.

  Astro Bot

  Japanese.

  Black Myth: Wukong

  Chinese

  they just couldn’t distract from the troubles faced by the people making them.  They couldn’t make up for the fact that the meta-narrative of video games in 2024 was bleak.

  How did this happen?

  Ball says that the blame for all of this can’t be pinned to a single thing, like capitalism, mismanagement, Covid-19, or even interest rates. It also involves development costs, how studios are staffed, consumers' spending habits, and game pricing.  "This storm is so brutal," he says, "because it is all of these things at once, and none have really alleviated since the layoffs began."

  We may never know.

  Even studios owned by tech juggernauts weren’t immune to the industry’s contraction. Microsoft shuttered Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks; Sony shut down Firewalk. The latter’s shuttering wasn't wholly surprising. Its big 2024 release, Concord, was largely considered a flop.

  Largely considered a flop?
  
  Concord cost $400 million to develop.
  
  It earned $1 million in sales.

  In other words, it's been a dismal year for morale. When developers gathered in Los Angeles in June for Summer Game Fest, developer New Blood Interactive bought out a billboard solely to memorialize their fellow developers who’d lost jobs:  "We love you.  We miss you.  We hate money."

  I begin to see the problem here.

  In March, harassment toward a small consultancy company called Sweet Baby Inc. reached new heights as bad actors organized through Discords, Steam forums, and other online spaces.

  Sweet Baby Inc, or SBI, is known for its reported standover tactics, threatening bad press if game companies didn't hire them, and then destroying the game under development when they did.
  
  The harassment campaign?  That was never towards SBI.  It was started by SBI and its allies against those trying to drag its practices into the light.

  Branding themselves as Gamergate 2.0, online mobs harassed developers using tweets, DMs, YouTube videos, and Twitch streams.

  In other words, people commented on the situation, behaviour which Wired finds completely unacceptable.
  
  Of course, the original Gamergate, just as with its 2.0 edition ten years later, revolved around a scandal of the ethics of games journalists, or would have if they had any.

  Dragon Age: The Veilguard, was criticized by far-right trolls for its customization options, which allow players to create characters with top surgery scars or play with a nonbinary companion.

  Veilguard, a fantasy role-playing game set in the Dragon Age universe, does indeed have top surgery scars available in its character creator.  It has a very specific option for top surgery scars.  In a magical universe where players can be seven foot tall minotaurs, it has a delusional cult that slices off healthy breast tissue, just as we do.
  
  I guess we'll never know why the American games industry is dead in a ditch, and being put to shame by actual communists. 
   

   
• Britain is testing a new anti-drone energy weapon that can drop autonomous vehicles from the sky for tenpence.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Sounds great until someone gets their hands on one.
  
  
  
• For $480 the GMK NUCBox11 seems to have two of everything.  (Liliputing)
  
  Powered by an AMD 8945HS, it has two DDR5 SODIMM slots for up to 96GB of RAM, two M.2 NVMe slots, two USB4 ports, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, and two regular USB 3.2 ports running at 10Gbps.
  
  And two fans.
  
  It also has an HDMI port, DisplayPort, OCuLink - 60% faster than USB4 and great for external video cars though if you're planning to buy an external video card for a desktop PC maybe you should just buy a larger computer, and an audio jack.
  
  
  

Christmas Carol Musical Interlude

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, December 26 2024 05:26 AM (rcPLc)

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• Elon Musk's xAI company has secured $6 billion in investment.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you're paying attention, this may be old news.  xAI raised $6 billion in May.
  
  If you're really paying attention, though, this is new news.  This is a different $6 billion, filed with the SEC last Thursday.
  
  That's a total of $12 billion, or as ChatGPT would put it, the same as the number of Rs in "strawberry".

• Asus' new Zenbook - set to launch at CES - comes with a Qualcomm CPU and a 32 hour battery life.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  How much battery life is enough?  Now that USB-C is the universal charging port and it's actually difficult to be stuck without a charger, who is using a laptop on battery for 32 hours?
  
  
  
• Vietnam has returned to its communist roots with new laws designed to restrict internet use and empower censorship.  (The Guardian)
  
  The laws are slightly more aggressive than the ones recently passed in Australia though slightly less aggressive than the ones that the Australian government tried and failed to push through.
  
  
  
• Xerox has acquired printer company Lexmark - once part of IBM - in a $1.5 billion deal.  (Xerox)
  
  The remarkable part of this is that is more than Xerox is worth.
  
  
  
• Twitter's "Premium+" subscription plan has jumped by 37.5%.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Though if you buy it as a gift right now you can get a year at 40% off.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, December 23 2024 07:06 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 23 2024 09:39 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: normal at Monday, December 23 2024 09:44 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 24 2024 12:29 AM (NEIix)

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• Why AI is stupid garbage and everyone in the industry is lying frantically to cover up the truth. (Ars Technica)
  
  Okay, I may have paraphrased Tim Lee at Ars just a little there, but if you look at the promises AI leaders have made against the mathematical problems they face, that is the gist of the situation.
  
  AI - LLM-based generative AI, not the more interesting discriminative AI - uses a technology called transformers which lets it process data in a massively parallel way. This requires about the same amount of work as a traditional neural network on simple prompts, while being able to use highly parallel hardware like graphics cards, so you get the result much faster.
  
  For simple prompts:

  The longer the context gets, the more attention operations (and therefore computing power) are needed to generate the next token.

  This means that the total computing power required for attention grows quadratically with the total number of tokens. Suppose a 10-token prompt requires 414,720 attention operations. Then:

  • Processing a 100-token prompt will require 45.6 million attention operations.
  • Processing a 1,000-token prompt will require 4.6 billion attention operations.
  • Processing a 10,000-token prompt will require 460 billion attention operations.

  So as you make your question more detailed and specific, the amount of time taken to produce an answer increases rapidly.
  
  Work is now on to replace transformer models with classic neural networks, which don't have these limitations, but also don't have the magical ease of development of the transformer model.
  
  But that means that promises of AGI next year are simply lies.

• Embodied, the startup that produced an $800 robot for children and has now run out of money, is working to release code and documentation to allow hackers to keep the robots working after the company shuts down.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Good to hear.
  
  
  
• The jury in the Arm vs. Qualcomm suit has sided with Qualcomm on two of the three questions put to them.  (Yahoo)
  
  Qualcomm, which has a license to produce Arm chips, bought startup Nuvia, which had a license to produce Arm chips. 
  
  Qualcomm then produced chips based on Nuvia's design.
  
  Arm sued Qualcomm saying Qualcomm was not licensed to do that.
  
  The jury verdict said Qualcomm did not breach its Arm license in buying Nuvia or producing the chips - which are used in the new Arm based laptops which are not selling particularly well so far.
  
  They did not reach a verdict on the question of whether Nuvia was in compliance with its Arm license.  I'm not sure how relevant that is, though Arm plans to continue legal action.
  
  
  
• You're not fired.  You're just locked out of the building and put on mandatory leave without pay.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Electric van maker Canoo is not looking too healthy.
  
  
  
• What is Broadcom doing with VMWare?  Slashing costs.  A lot.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Not making many friends in the process, but they can worry about that after taking a dip in their swimming pool full of money.  Based on the latest figures sales have increased only slightly, but costs have been cut in half.
  
  In addition, Broadcom has effectively killed the VMWare reseller market, so that if you want to migrate your company off VMWare, you need to get technical support from Broadcom.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 22 2024 11:26 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, December 23 2024 04:33 AM (KOtXO)

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• Here's a list of the 49 American AI startups that have raised $100 million or more in 2024.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Top among them is OpenAI, which raised $6.6 billion this year, but close behind is Elon Musk's xAI, which raised $6 billion.
  
  Interestingly Europe didn't miss the boat with Mistral leading the table there with $1.2 billion raised.
  
  What all that money will achieve I don't know.

• For consumer hardware, it's not achieving much.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AI PCs just aren't selling.  That is, people are buying PCs, and some of them are labeled "AI", but nobody is buying a PC because it is labeled "AI".
  
  Notable Qualcomm's sales of its new Arm-based Windows laptops can be best described as meh.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile here's an M.2 card that contains a 24 TOPS AI accelerator.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  More precisely, four 6 TOPS accelerators.
  
  Why?  I don't know.  But it costs $149, which is reasonable if you need one.
  
  
  
• How types make hard problems easy.  (Mayhul)
  
  Yes, thank you.  We figured this out sixty years ago.  Then JavaScript happened.
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, December 22 2024 12:43 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Sunday, December 22 2024 04:31 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 22 2024 01:16 PM (bg2DR)

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• Oh yeah, don't use SMS for two-factor authentication either.  (Gizmodo)
  
  It was never ideal since your phone number could get SIM-swapped without you knowing, but now that the entire phone network has been hacked it's not very useful at all.
  
  
  
• Microsoft promises meanwhile to keep nagging you to use passkeys rather than passwords online.  (The Register)
  
  A passkey lets you log in to a website without the tedious logging in part, so long as you have already logged in to your device.  This is actually fairly secure because the passkey consists of two parts - you have one part and the website has the other - and nobody can steal your password from the website and hack your account because effectively they only have half the password.
  
  But if they hack your laptop, you're hosed.  Though that is true regardless.

• Chemosphere, which recently published a study warning of the dangers of flame retardant chemicals in black plastic utensils which was off by a factor of ten such that you are perfectly safe unless you make a habit of eating spatulas has been deindexed by the Web of Science for being a bit crap.  (Ars Technica)

  According to Retraction Watch, Chemosphere has retracted eight articles this month and published 60 expressions of concern since April.

  The month is still young.
  
  
  
• Nintendo's Switch 2 can "only" run games at 4K / 30fps.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's a handheld device for children.  What do you expect?
  
  
  
• Amazon Haul is a Temu version of Shein.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The same Chinese companies selling useless garbage at impossible prices and basically lying to everyone.
  
  Though to be fair, the "Bicth" hat did indeed say "Bicth".
  
  
  
• Perplexity AI is a better search than Google.  (The Register)
  
  I just tried it with a few queries and it's actually not terrible.  It does give stupid corporate-speak answers sometimes, but it also gives links.
  
  How long AI search engines can survive in an AI web is another question.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, December 21 2024 03:48 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, December 21 2024 06:19 PM (nk1Z+)

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• The US government has warned politicians and government officials to avoid the phone network.  (Reuters)
  
  It's full of Chinese hackers and nobody can say when - or if - it will be secure again.

  The first recommendation: "Use only end-to-end encrypted communications."

  Which they have been trying to ban.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile in the world of digital license plates, the absolutely thinkable happened: They got hacked.  (Wired)  (archive site)
  
  Digital license plates aren't supposed to let you change your license plate number.
  
  But of course they do.  There's a programming port on the license plate which is secured by a sticker.  Peel off the sticker, plug in a programmer, and you can do anything.

• Interpol wants to rename "pig butchering" to "romance baiting".  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which is actually not a terrible idea.  Every time I hear the term "pig butchering" I have to stop for a moment and realise that no, the one I'm thinking of is salami slicing and pig butchering is something different.
  
  Romance baiting is more evocative on what the scam involves.
  
  
  
• Bluesky invited a million sociopaths in through the front door.  They were not ready.  (Tedium)
  
  It's not a technical issue, it's a people issue.  Well, commies aren't people, but not everyone on Bluesky is a communist.
  
  
  
• Not even slightly ready.  (The Free Press)
  
  Jesse Singal writes on Bluesky's Jesse Singal problem.
  
  He still doesn't get it, of course:

  Bluesky happens to be left-wing, but I don’t think the lesson here is that left-wingers are particularly violent. Rather, the lesson is simply that humans are human, and online, their behavior is shaped by both the prevailing norms in their community, and whether rules constraining that behavior exist and are enforced.

  So what he is saying is that left-wingers are particularly violent.
  
  
  
• The Radxa Orion O6 is an Arm motherboard that is a little more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.  (CNX Software)
  
  It has twelve Arm cores - eight A720 and four A520, so fairly powerful, coupled with up to 64GB of soldered RAM, an M.2 slot for storage, dual 5Gb Ethernet ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, USB-C with DisplayPort support, and a full-length PCIe x16 slot.
  
  It's mini-ITX form factor, with the board starting at $199 with 8GB of RAM and a case going for $39.
  
  
  
• Australia wants to ban common encryption methods by 2030 because quantum.  (The Register)
  
  In theory quantum computers can break many existing encryption methods.  But existing encryption methods exist, and everyone everywhere uses them all the time.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 20 2024 10:49 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 20 2024 10:51 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 20 2024 11:01 AM (NEIix)

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• What happened to ChatGPT the other day?  It wasn't DNS, but it wasn't not DNS either.  (Try Parity)
  
  OpenAI deployed a new system that had been running happily on their test servers for some time.  About twenty minutes in, things started going horribly wrong, with the monitoring system that reports on all things production taking over and then taking out the production servers, because it had a hidden scaling problem that never showed up on the smaller test environment.
  
  And with the monitoring process eating up all the bandwidth on the control network, the simple changes they needed to make to fix the problem couldn't be done because OpenAI's internal DNS was down.
  
  Lesson of the day: Hard code all your IP addresses in your software.*

• Nvidia has made its Jetson Orin Nano robotics development kit half the price and also up to twice as fast.  (Serve the Home)
  
  If you already have one, you can download the speed upgrade.  Which is odd, because it doubles your memory bandwidth, which is a hardware function.
  
  
  
• AMD's Strix Halo laptop chip, with 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 RDNA3.5 graphics cores, is coming soon to the Asus ROG Flow Z13...  Tablet.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Which is not as surprising as it seems because the current model of the Z13 can include dedicated a Nvidia RTX 4060, so a Strix Halo tuned to the lower power end of its spectrum would not use any more power than the current CPU and GPU combination.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum MGA1 is an external graphics card / dock thingy that dramatically speeds up laptops and mini-PCs except.  (Notebook Check)
  
  It's about as fast as a laptop version of the RTX 3080, but can only be connected via OCuLink.  If your laptop or mini-PC doesn't have OCuLink - and most don't - it's a paperweight.
  
  OCuLink is pure external PCI Express, so it's simpler, cheaper, and faster than Thunderbolt, but also a lot less common.

Posted by: David Eastman at Thursday, December 19 2024 02:45 AM (aAyxl)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, December 19 2024 03:35 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, December 19 2024 04:15 AM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: wheels at Thursday, December 19 2024 07:31 AM (IB9dr)

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• Zotac has leaked Nvidia's new RTX 5000 series graphics cards.  (VideoCardz)
  
  The lineup includes the RTX 5090, which you can't afford and probably won't be able to buy anyway, the 5090D which is a China-only edition for communists, the 5080 which will probably be overpriced and you won't want, the 5070 Ti which will probably be decent but expensive, and the 5070 which has 12GB of VRAM like the Intel B580 but which will definitely not cost $250 like the Intel B580.
  
  The new cards all reportedly use GDDR7, so memory bandwidth is likely to be significantly better than 4000 series cards.  GDDR7 memory uses trinary rather than binary signals - a technique known as PAM-3 - so it can move data 50% faster at the same clock speed.
  
  Thunderbolt 5 also uses PAM-3 encoding but right now it's kind of useless so we should hope that's not a sign of things to come.

• TSMC employees account for 1.8% of the children being born in Taiwan.  (Boom)
  
  That is not immediately noteworthy until you consider that TSMC employees account for 0.3% of all jobs in Taiwan.
  
  So even if only one member of each couple is employed by the company, that's still three times the national average fertility rate.
  
  
  
• Hygon's 16 core server CPU is kind of bad.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It is literally a (licensed copy of) the original Zen architecture from 2017.  And it behaves like it.
  
  
  
• Here's the full source code for the Commodore 64 version of Elite.  (GitHub)
  
  Did that version include the rescue mission where the ungrateful bastards kicked your cargo out of the hold to make room for themselves?
  
  The GitHub repository is very comprehensive, with every line of code documented and extensive instructions on how to build and run the programs on modern systems.  Also included are versions for the Apple II, BBC Micro, and the NES, and even Elite-A, a fan-made extended version.
  
  
  
• SoftBank has pledged to invest $100 billion in the United States over the next four years.  (The Register)
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• The Framework 16 laptop now supports up to four M.2 SSDs.  (Notebook Check)
  
  The graphics card for this laptop lives in a plug-in module at the rear.  If you don't need a dedicated graphics card it works fine without one, using the built-in AMD graphics on the CPU.
  
  Now you can plug a different module in that holds two extra M.2 slots, and the good part is the module only costs $39.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, December 18 2024 08:15 AM (bg2DR)

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