• What's up with Steam and Itch.io suddenly vanishing all those games and books and art and stuff?  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Proximate cause: Visa and Mastercard deciding they have to act as global fun censors.
  
  Distal cause: Some group of Australian Stalinist nutcases called Collective Shout who have for years believed they have to act as global fun censors.

  As a result of Collective Shout's actions, in tandem with the payment processors, over 20,000 games, books, comics, and other creative works - confirmed via the Internet Archive - functionally ceased to exist on the site (though purchased content remains in users' libraries so long as it doesn’t violate itch.io's new guidelines), imperiling the creators who depend on sales from itch.io. In addition to NSFW content, notable projects that didn’t have the tag were caught up in the purge as well.

  Anything not mandatory is forbidden.

  Whenever a platform announces a blanket ban on adult content, LGBTQ+ creators are almost always disproportionately affected, harming queer artists and invariably queer people.

  This is true, because "queer" artists and "queer" people are sex-obsessed lunatics, but I'll support them before a bunch of Stalinist fun censors who are probably from Melbourne anyway.
  
  Update: Nope.  Sydney.  Well, I moved out of there just in time.

• AMD finally announced a Ryzen 9000 12 core chip with a 65W TDP.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Ryzen 9 Pro 9945 is a lower power Ryzen 9900X.
  
  The company also has - I only learned this today but it was announced a couple of months ago - the Epyc 4545P, which is a Ryzen 9000 16 core chip with a 65W TDP.
  
  This is aimed at small servers, but it goes in Socket AM5 boards, the standard for AMD's desktop chips.
  
  The 9950X, the full power desktop model, uses 170W of power by comparison.  But it is 20% faster on average.
  
  
  
• Corsair has announced its own version of the Ryzen AI Max mini desktop PC.  (Liliputing)
  
  These are really aimed at running AI on large models on your own hardware, because they can give you 128GB of video RAM for not much money.
  
  I'm a little surprised that so many companies are bringing out models given that, at the price of $2000 for a 128GB model, there wouldn't seem to be that large a market.

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, July 31 2025 10:53 AM (ZLF73)

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