Is this how time normally passes? Really slowly, in the right order?

Wednesday, September 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 September 2024

Est Mort Edition

Top Story

  • Concord is a flop.  (Mashable, 28 August)


  • Concord is dead.  (Mashable, 3 September)

    Yes, Concord, Sony's $200 million (ish) tentpole hero shooter Overwatch clone (depending on your generation, digital laser tag/cops and robbers/cowboys and indians/Mycenaeans and Sea People) has officially been unalived less than two weeks after release.

    Despite desperate attempts by the entire tech and gaming press - apart from Mashable, as it turns out - to drag its flyblown corpse across the finish line, Sony read the hemlock leaves and decided that there was no way to fix this mess without setting even more money on fire.

    Everyone who bought a copy - estimated at less than 25,000 - will receive a refund.  The Steam page is already gone, and the servers will go offline this Friday, probably for good.

    At time of writing, the game has 43 players.  In the entire world.  So even among the unfortunates that bought the game, fewer than one in 500 are playing it.


  • Dustborn currently has 9 players.


  • Soulash 2 has 110.  Which is still not a lot, but it's a paid early access game written by one guy living in Poland.


  • Core Keeper, another indie game very broadly in the same genre as Soulash, has 20,680 players right now.


  • If your doctor has advised you to increase dietary schadenfreude I present The Verge and Kotaku.  Kotaku is in the seventh stage of grief, which like the first six stages consists of blaming gamers.


Tech News

  • Intel has launched its Lunar Lake mobile CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Intel promises much better battery life than its recent offerings.  That may well be true, because these chips max out at 8 cores (4 Performance and 4 Efficiency), lack hyperthreading, and are built on TSMC's 3nm process rather than by Intel itself.

    They also come with memory soldered onto the chip itself.  16GB or 32GB.  No other options, no possibility of upgrade, ever.

    These are targeted at the thin-and-light market exclusively, and may actually be good for that market.  We don't know yet, because this is paper launch.  There are no laptops available yet, much less reviews.

    Those should come before the end of the month.


  • Meanwhile AMD Ryzen AI 300 laptops will receive a free Microsoft Copilot update in November.  (WCCFTech)

    Whether you want it or not.


  • Remembering the days when disk drives were lethal.  (GitHub)

    We're talking an original IBM RAMAC here, which contained fifty 24-inch platters and weighed over a ton.
    The thing that kept us from getting killed was a shield that Don Johnson invented to put around the whole RAMAC disk assembly.  It slowed down the shrapnel.  Leonard and I were the only ones in the room.  We started it up.  It didn't even get up to full speed before it started to fly apart.
    Yes, those were the days.


  • Canva has increased the price of its Teams product - in some cases by more than 300%.  (Tech Crunch)

    I wouldn't care except that Canva recently bought Affinity and the Affinity suite is good software at a very reasonable price, with free updates and no subscriptions.

    I hope they don't mess that up.


Disclaimer: But they probably will.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:56 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 537 words, total size 5 kb.

Tuesday, September 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 September 2024

Tetsing Testnig Edition

Top Story


Tech News


Disclaimer: I'm holding out for five-and-a-half gig/

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:56 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 449 words, total size 5 kb.

Monday, September 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 September 2024

All Chickened Out Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Yes



Disclaimer: Tomorrow.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:17 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 216 words, total size 3 kb.

Sunday, September 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 September 2024

Thanking Hitler Edition

Top Story

  • Bluesky Social has seen record levels of user signups after the Brazilian Communist Party banned Twitter.  (Tech Crunch)

    The depravity here is threefold:

    First, a psychotic judge in Brazil violated the country's laws in pursuit of, well, violating the country's laws some more.

    Second, the banning of Twitter only rated an "in brief" item on Tech Crunch, while this full article is spinning it as a win for a favoured site (as in, not connected to Emmanuel Goldstein).

    Third, this message from Bluesky's CEO:
    good job Brazil, you made the right choice
    This is rather like Belgium congratulating Germany on choosing to invade Poland and not, well, Belgium.


Tech News

  • The much maligned Chinese adventure game Black Myth Wukong has declined from an all time peak of 2.4 million players to a high for the past 24 hours of 1.4 million with a little over one million playing right this second.

    Meanwhile the highly praised game Dustborn has 13.

    Not 13 million.  13.

    And some of those - I can't tell exactly how many, but with just thirteen people playing even one is significant - are vtubers playing the game to show how bad it truly is.

    But as I noted before, there's more difference between these two games than the fact that Black Myth Wukong tries to appeal to its audience and Dustborn wants to see gamers dead in a ditch.  Wukong had a real budget, while Dustborn survived off government handouts.


  • But those aren't the only two games that have launched recently.  There's also Concord.

    Concord is an online team-based combat game, very much in the style of Overwatch.  You get together with four friends and shoot it out against another team of five friends.  Digital paintball.

    If you don't have five friends who all want to play Concord right this moment, you can go to the lobby and match up with other players looking for a game.

    And this is where the pain arrives because there are 81 people playing Concord right now.  In the entire world.

    So if there are 8 matches going on, there is one person just sitting there, waiting.

    But it's just an indie game, right?  It might be struggling, but it will grow over time.

    Not exactly.  It's published by Sony and has been in development for eight years, with an estimated budget between $100 million and $200 million.  So they spent more than a million dollars per player.

    And a game that depends on having a lot of active players to survive, that has fallen into just double digits a week after launch, is dead.  Even making it free is not going to fix this.

    The problem is the game looks like a cross between Overwatch and Guardians of the Galaxy...  That you found on a dusty shelf in the back of a Dollar Tree, made in China by way of Berkeley.

    Oh, and just to rub it in, it costs $40 where Overwatch is free to play.  Overwatch makes money by selling custom outfits for your characters, which works because the characters are attractive.  There's fanart and cosplays of Overwatch characters everywhere because the designs are great.

    While the pre-rendered cut scenes in Concord look good - you can see where the money went - there's no reason to watch them because the character design and gameplay are, at best, meh.


  • Meanwhile on the indie side of things Core Keeper launched on the 27th of August after a couple of years in early access (open beta test).

    It has 33,000 players right now.  I couldn't find any reviews from the propaganda outlets fluffing Dustborn and Concord, but the reviews from the smaller outlets that have not yet sold their souls are uniformly positive.


  • And in the as-indie-as-it-gets category is Soulash 2, a labour of love by a single developer, currently still in beta.

    He's been targeted lately by the alphabet soup mafia, demanding he put same-sex marriage into the game, and bombing the game with bad reviews when he said he was focusing on other features right now.  He didn't even refuses, he just said not now.

    As a result of the constant attacks, the game...  Has more players than Dustborn and Concord combined.  Where those games bled to death over the course of last week, Soulash 2 grew by 60%.


  • There's also Star Wars Outlaws, another big budget game with some great scenery that plays like a potato with brain damage, but it only just came out and it's not on Steam so there's an absence of hard data.

    It's probably just an ordinary level flop, rather than a Concord-class catastrophe.  But it's being fluffed by all the same outlets as Concord and Dustborn which may be the kiss of death.


  • They even tried to fluff the Borderlands movie.  (The Verge)

    Borderlands - a movie based on a computer game that was not complete garbage - had a budget of $120 million and made $30 million at the box office.  So the verdict on that one is definitely in.


  • A judge has thrown out a lawsuit by crypto investors against Elon Musk as without merit.  (WCCFTech)

    They should have asked Belgium.


  • A brief history of barbed wire fence telephony networks.  (Lorie Merson)

    Well, that's novel.


  • Apple has deliberately broken support for Spotify after being forced to open up its platform by EU regulations.  (Thurrott)

    It's an ongoing pattern with Apple.  It will do anything to avoid letting other companies make money selling services.



Disclaimer: Let's you and him fight.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:21 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 929 words, total size 8 kb.

Saturday, August 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 August 2024

Attack Of The Forty Dollar Chicken Edition

Top Story

  • Brazil's spiral into becoming the North Korea of the Southern Hemisphere continues to accelerate. (AP News)

    Tomas de Torquemada of the country's Supreme Federal Court has ordered all ISPs in the country - presumably somehow including Starlink - and all app stores to block access to Twitter.

    Torquemada also ordered app stores to remove VPN software, and ordered a fine of $8900 per day for any company or individual using a VPN to access Twitter.

    The justification for this is that Twitter doesn't have a legal representative in Brazil. (Nor I should note does this blog. Does Torquemada know how the internet works?)

    The reason Twitter doesn't have a legal representative in Brazil is that Torquemada threatened to jail her, and when she resigned, froze her bank accounts.


  • Space rocks.


Tech News


Satire Is Dead

I was doing some reading for my planned item on the video game industry implosion happening right now, and I ran into this:




Disclaimer: I have a fever, and the only cure is more space rocks!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 931 words, total size 9 kb.

Friday, August 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 August 2024

It's Dangerous To Go Alone Edition

Top Story

Tech News



Disclaimer: Just let them quietly slide into the Pacific already.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 385 words, total size 4 kb.

Thursday, August 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 August 2024

Well I'll Be Edition

Top Story

  • OpenSea has been issued a Wells notice by the SEC.  (MSN)

    To unpack:

    OpenSea is a leading marketplace for NFTs.

    NFTs are in effect digital baseball cards.  They have no intrinsic value, but people put value on them largely based on their rarity.

    A Wells notice is issued by the SEC when they plan to sue a company for violating securities laws.

    So what the SEC is alleging here is that any collectible item without intrinsic value - baseball cards, Pokemon cards, MTG cards, US senators - is a security subject to the commission's regulations.

    Is there any law stating this?  No.

    Didn't overturning Chevron clamp the wheels of federal agencies trying to issue this sort of sweeping ruling on their own authority?  Yes.

    Aren't NFTs a scam anyway?  Only mostly.


Tech News



Disclaimer: I'll trade you a mint 1962 Ted Kennedy for a Bob Menendez and a shiny Pikachu.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:39 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 513 words, total size 5 kb.

Wednesday, August 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 August 2024

Stawbey Edition

Top Story

  • Why AI can't spell "strawberry".  (Tech Crunch)

    I've said before that currently popular AI models - which is to say, Large Language Models or LLMs - don't understand anything at all except language.  They're language models.  That's what they do, and it's all they do.

    Except that's not quite true, because they don't understand language in any real way either.
    The failure of large language models to understand the concepts of letters and syllables is indicative of a larger truth that we often forget: These things don’t have brains. They do not think like we do. They are not human, nor even particularly humanlike.

    Most LLMs are built on transformers, a kind of deep learning architecture. Transformer models break text into tokens, which can be full words, syllables, or letters, depending on the model.

    "LLMs are based on this transformer architecture, which notably is not actually reading text. What happens when you input a prompt is that it’s translated into an encoding," Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher and assistant professor at the University of Alberta, told TechCrunch. "When it sees the word 'the,' it has this one encoding of what 'the' means, but it does not know about 'T,' 'H,' 'E.'"

    Typeahead with delusions of grandeur.



Tech News



Disclaimer: Or maybe crumpet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:23 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 363 words, total size 4 kb.

Tuesday, August 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 August 2024

Fine-ish Wine Edition

Top Story

  • If you play games on Windows and have a new system using a Ryzen 9000 chip you're not going to want to miss the Windows 11 24H2 update.  (WCCFTech)

    No, seriously.  It's an average of 11% faster across a broad range of games, and up to 35% in the case of Gears 5.

    This is great news if you just got a new AMD system and were disappointed with the performance gains over the previous generation.

    If you have a previous generation Ryzen 7000 (or 8000) system, unfortunately it only brings...  An average of 10% better performance and a peak of 32% in Gears 5 again.

    Reportedly it also provides better performance on Ryzen 5000, though Hardware Unboxed hasn't had time to run all those tests yet.

    What doesn't gain huge performance benefits from this update is anything running on chips from Intel...  Except for some reason Gears 5 again, where the 14600K showed a 25% performance gain.

    It's not clear exactly what's been going on, because this suggests that Windows has been inadvertently tanking AMD performance for years.  The update was focused on the new branch prediction features in Zen 5, but somehow it improved the prior two Zen generations as well.

Tech News



Disclaimer: Better than a helium-side ground leak, I guess.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 493 words, total size 5 kb.

Monday, August 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 August 2024

Damnazon Edition

Top Story



Tech News



Disclaimer: Unless it isn't.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:08 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 509 words, total size 6 kb.

<< Page 2 of 661 >>
124kb generated in CPU 0.0634, elapsed 0.4154 seconds.
57 queries taking 0.3975 seconds, 392 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
Using http / http://ai.mee.nu / 390