TwinIon

It feels very Elon to: Decide the way something has been done is stupid Come up with "new" thing to replace old thing Reverse track on "new" thing until he's basically reinvented the the old way End up reversing track again to end up with something that seems obviously worse than the old way

Yeah, that's part of why I didn't vote for it. If all the money went to infrastructure (charging stations, electric city vehicles, etc) then I probably would have voted for it. I feel like we should be moving past the point of rebates, and a rebate program that is heavily backed by a company that will need to buy a bunch of electric cars felt pretty fishy.

In CA the two biggest propositions revolved around expanding gambling, and they both look to be soundly defeated. Prop 26 wanted to allow sports betting on tribal lands and at four horse racing tracks, and it is losing 30/70. A much more expansive law would have allowed online sports betting and it's losing 17/83. A very strange prop to tax the wealthy to help pay for electric cars lost, and a prohibition on the sale of flavored tobacco was upheld. Even though I'm not in LA, I'm very happy to see Villanueva lose.

My hot take is that these layoffs are thanks to Apple more than they are Zuck burning cash chasing the Metaverse. Generally, tech companies tend to be fine burning cash as long as they're also printing it. Google/Alphabet can spend tens of billions on "other bets", but when ad revenue starts taking a hit, it's the first thing to get cut. Facebook was doing well, but Apple's app tracking changes really cut into their cash flow, and suddenly the spending on AR/VR starts to look more suspect. Generally though, I expect them to be just fine. Apple might have hurt them, but they still make a ton of money.

My physical copy from Amazon shipped. I feel like when Amazon themselves ship things to me they either get here really early or pretty late. Fingers crossed for the former.

I've now finished the game, and unfortunately the complaints I had early on were never really resolved. Movement never feels great, even in most vehicles. I prioritized anti-air cannons above all else so I could use helicopters at every possible opportunity. I largely abandoned a stealthy approach and went full on rambo for most of the game, but for as much as the game wants to emphasize doing things how you want and for how many crazy tools it gives you, it seems completely incapable of delivering a satisfying combat experience. I would fly up to an enemy base, land right on their doorstep, and I could take out most of the meager garrison before they even started firing back. I didn't use cover, didn't pre-spot enemies, just few right up and started shooting. I'm now convinced that the reason for the lack of enemies is a technical issue. I tried a few times to see how many enemies I could get the game to spawn for me, and even in the final missions or capturing a large base after the game was over, I couldn't get more than eight or nine enemies at a time. Given the radar and the spotting grenades, it's pretty easy to keep track of them. To compensate on larger missions, the game would wait for you to kill someone, and then spawn in another. While there was a clear effort to not spawn enemies in your direct line of sight, it wasn't always successful, nor were the locations that they'd spawn in make much sense. The worst I ran into was a helicopter that spawned right on top of my head, but often baddies would spawn right around a corner. A frustrating experience when you just cleared that corner. Most of the time though, there wouldn't be that many guys. You'd kill the five or six soldiers and that would be it. That would be more forgivable if the enemies were in any way intelligent, but even for open world NPCs, these guys were dumb as rocks and slow to react. I played the latter half of the game basically never worrying about anyone seeing me, because even if they saw me first, they'd be dead before they took a shot. I was also bummed that the crazier stuff wasn't very effective, with the exception of the bow. The resolver weapons were largely worse than standard weapons, especially since you couldn't customize them much, and some of them were counter to their seemingly intended purpose. A gun that pairs directly with a stealth build is really loud and can't be equipped with a silencer. Again, it didn't really matter because you didn't need much to take out the small groups the game would throw at you. I'd also argue that this game is well below par in terms of how well it reacted to the player. I understand that you're never going to have Last of Us levels of continuity in an open world game, but maybe half the time a random sound line wouldn't feel right or be outright wrong.

I would like to have seen the final season, but even though I kinda enjoyed the most recent couple seasons, I doubt it was going to top where it began.

I haven’t done any outside reading, but I just finished the series. I agree that it’s very well made, but by the end of it I couldn’t help but feel that the show makes a clear case for homicide. Crimes committed under duress, under the worst possible circumstances, and with the intent to limit suffering, but crimes none the less. For myself, the value in the show wasn’t in litigating the ethical issues surrounding the dead at Memorial, but in clarifying the horrors of Katrina. At the time I was in college and not really reading the news, but my recollection of Katrina was that of an escalating disaster. A hurricane that devastated an area, followed by an intensifying humanitarian crisis. So forgive my lacking nuance on the issue, but the timeline the show depicts really clarified why Katrina was such a disaster. The lag time between the end of the hurricane, the levies breaking, and the resulting flooding isn’t something I could have laid out. I also think the show did an excellent job in depicting just how unprepared and understated the response was. My instinct while watching was to go into my own emergency response mode. Like watching idiots in a horror film, I wanted to yell “get out of the building”, but the show does a pretty good job of reminding the viewer that, especially at the onset, these people didn’t understand the gravity of their situation. They didn’t understand. They were not prepared. In the particular case of the hospital in the show, some of that was institutional, some of it was individual, but so much of was governmental. If there’s any reason to doubt the way the response is depicted in the film, please let me know, but I feel like the show paints a very effective picture of why Katrina was as devastating as it was. It doesn’t get into the details of levies or anything, but the complete lack of response and planning feels like it fills in a few gaps for me.

As someone that is interested in a 4080 to game at 4K, I'll keep an eye on how these stack up once we get some actual bench numbers in. Unfortunately, I think that with DLSS3 that nVidia will still be my default choice, but I'm willing to see what AMD can do, especially since it seems like AMD has a price advantage.

I've got a friend and a brother with Model 3s and they are fun cars to drive. My wife has an electric Niro, and it's nowhere near the same experience. I also envy the Tesla charging network. However, I can't understate how much I dislike everything in the car relying on the center screen. I think there's a very good chance that if Tesla put a normal car interior in a Model 3 that I'd have one right now.

I've been bullish on VR since I bought a DK2, but I've been dissapointed in how slowly the tech has evolved. Once VR tech caught up to phones, it largely stopped progressing. It's an unfortunate chicken and egg problem, since phones aren't going to push display tech much more, but VR doesn't sell at the scale needed to justify the investments that I think the tech needs to be really great. I was also just hoping that there would be some technical solution to the discomfort issue, but there doesn't seem to be anything in sight quite yet. It really boxes VR into specific types of games when you know that a huge portion of the audience simply can't touch a game with smooth movement. Teleporting is an ok solution, but I wouldn't want to play Skyrim or Fallout teleporting everywhere, it's just strange. I think that if you could solve that issue then a ton of options would open up in VR gaming and we'd see adoption increase dramatically. Until then, I think there will still be some very worthwhile experiences in VR, and the PSVR2 looks to be the best hope for high end VR games in the near future. $550 feels pretty steep when the library will be so limited. I specifically avoided the PSVR because I expected the successor to be far better and still play all the old games. Hopefully they'll get ported over in short order and maybe even updated to utilized the new controllers and the PS5's horepower. I'll get one eventually, but I may wait longer than I first expected.

I had enough time to put in a good few more hours and get a better sense of the game as a whole. It's Far Cry. Not really any better, not really any worse. I'm not a big fan of how the open world is structured. There is some mild level system in place, but this isn't like AC Odyssey where if you're greatly underleveled you have no chance. The rifle you leave the beginning island with is enough to two tap enemies in the highest level areas. I don't even understand the point of a level system like this when it makes no real difference. Either make it so the levels matter more and give you something to work toward, or get rid of an empty system that doesn't affect the game. The world itself is quite large, and has plenty of ubisoft checklist things to do, but a few things make it less compelling to play around in than it should be. For one thing, it can often be oddly devoid of enemy troops. Checkpoints typically have three, maybe five guys at them. Ok, those are just roadblocks, maybe no need for a large troop presence. Then I'm taking out anti-aircraft cannons, which are often part of or very near large military installations, and those have tiny enemy counts. I'd say the average is three guys, but I came across a number with no guards at all, even in the highest level areas in the game. Military bases that you take over might also have as few as three guys, but the upper end is still maybe seven. These troop counts stand out even more because during story missions there seem to be plenty of baddies. It makes going through the side missions to do all these things kinda boring if you get basically no resistance. The other thing that makes the world less compelling to play is the movement. I just feel so slow, and I've invested in whatever perks and stuff I can so far in movement speed, but it never feels good. The map is dense with guerrilla paths, which is fun. These paths often have grappling hook spots and things to climb, but moving is so slow and the map so large that you're nearly always incentivized to just take a vehicle. I've found these paths more fun in the cities than in the rest of the map, but it feels like a missed opportunity. Maybe later in the game you get a grappling hook launcher and some running shoes or something, but I'm decently through the game and I avoid running as much as I can. I don't want to be overly negative. The game is pretty fun, there's a ton to do, and it gets some things right. It's happy to let you do things however you want. It's cool with you getting distracted and grabbing a convoy that happens by while you're clearing a base. I feel like some open world action games don't want to track multiple objectives in progress and I'm glad that's not the case here. Still, this is no Forbidden West. This is a Far Cry game right out of the Ubisoft factory. It's not an improvement and it's not a real downgrade. It's perfectly fine, and if you can get it cheap it's fun enough.

After seeing that article Brick posted, I was curious what the audience reaction to the show was, and I'm kinda shocked that it's so bad. At least the major sites (RT, Metacritic, IMDB) all have really terrible user scores. The critics scores are good, not great, but the users really trashed it. I tend not to watch a lot of TV I expect to be bad, but there's no way this show is deserving of an F. Even if you account for a fanboy factor, I don't see how Rings of Power is 10 points worse than Halo, which was a mess.

One of the reasons that we've never seen a large scale social network that works on a subscription is that the ad money is typically way more than what people would be willing to pay to use a site with no ads at all. In the US and Canada, the first source I found put Meta's 2020 average revenue per user at ~$165. So they probably wouldn't want to give you an ad free experience for any less than $15/month, but once you factor in CC fees and stuff, they'd probably want more. Twitter reports users in a weird way, but for last year they listed their "monatizable" user base in the US at 37 million. With a US revenue of $2.8 Billion, their annual ARPU is ~$75, or $6.25/month. At $8/month with no ads they'd bump up their annual ARPU to $96, but given that they're not currently making money and with the leveraged buyout they need to make at least 20% more just to cover their interest, only cutting their ad revenue in half (for what are presumably their most valuable users) still only gets their ARPU (for paying users) to ~$135. To put a better context on that, if they wanted to cover their new interest payments (and still not make any money) from US users that pay $8/month and still see half the ads, they'd need to get about 17 million subscribers, or about 45% of their "monatizable" US user base. Of course, this napkin math is only increasing the revenue by $1B, so he'd need even more. That could be made up by the rest of the world, which makes up the vast majority of Twitter users (37 million US vs 179m elsewhere), but the US is more than half of their revenue ($2.8B of $5B), and we don't know what Elon's sliding scale of pricing would be and I'm way too lazy to do that math for him.

Picked this up during a sale a while back and initial impressions aren't great. My alligator buddy drowned before even getting back to camp. I think it fell off a bridge into a shallow river, but I didn't see it happen. While taking my first checkpoint I witnessed at two random vehicles running over horses for no reason. They give you an armor piercing silenced rifle after the first mission, which seems to make things rather trivial. From the get go it feels like they didn't pace things for the dialog at all. If you just play the game, you're going to miss what people are saying. I hit the button to accept a quest, and apparently that just skips the mission briefing. During the walkthrough of crafting, if you click on anything, it skips the voice over, which seems silly. (A very minor thing, but why call one of the crafting elements gun powder? Why do I need 1 unit of gun powder to make a scope, and why do I have unlimited ammo at base, but no gun powder to craft? Just call it anything else.) It looks like there will be plenty to do. I can already see there is a lot of map, lots of guns, lots of customization and some kind of leveling system. The question after an hour or two is if the jank will keep me from enjoying it. After finishing a quick new game + of God of War, the contrast in polish is pretty extreme. If I can keep my expectations in check, there should be fun to be had.

The House has until the 10th of this month to give evidence. Typically these orders go pretty quickly.

It seems like this is just another administrative hold, like the others we've seen recently from the court. Procedural and normal. Now, if the court denies the House the records, that would be a big deal.

This is a real bummer for the show, which already had enough problems. He has been really excellent in the role, and he clearly had a passion for the material. With more seasons coming in addition to spin-offs, it's surprising that Netflix wasn't able to keep him around. I do also like him as Superman. Whatever roles he ends up taking, I hope it works out well for him.

This piece from the Times is pretty bleak for Twitter. Thanks to being the biggest leveraged buyout of a tech company ever, Twitter's interest expense went from $50 million a year, to $1 billion a year. That's a whole lot for a company that hasn't made money 8 of the last 10 years.

I don't entirely disagree, but much of what makes Twitter interesting is verified people that may be part of an institution but aren't always communicating on behalf of that institution. Be it a film critic or an investigative reporter, those people use their accounts quite differently than they might an official account from their employer. If someone has their subscription paid for by their employer, all the sudden that changes how they use the service, probably for the worse.

While I trust The Verge, I also don't think that Musk can be trusted to follow through, even if he did indeed order something to be done. However, if they do go through with charging people to be verified, it could well be a stress test for the resilience of the platform. As I've long argued, it's almost a mistake of history that Twitter somehow became the default place for news to happen online. It's a poor technical platform with significant limitations and a user base much smaller than its competitors. Looking at it from a distance, it seems like there is little reason that it should have the place it currently does in modern discourse. I also think that its unique position is entirely dependent on those users Musk is now trying to monetize. Charging for verification seems to me like it carries with it two primary risks. Should users decide to not pay, even if they continue to use the service as before, it'll make the experience for everyone else worse in making it less clear if a given source can be trusted. The bigger concern is if those users leave the platform. If twitter loses the interest of journalists, academics, and politicians, it could quickly lose the only thing that keeps it relevant at all. I think those users generate far more for twitter than $20/m. Now, I do think that there is some subset of people that actually generate money on Twitter and for whom $20 a month is easily worth it, but I think that's a very small percentage of verified users. This isn't Instagram, where a big follower count can quickly lean to significant income, directly or indirectly from the site. If anything, it should almost be the opposite. It should be the regular users who should want to pay to access the content generated by the power users. We've never seen a subscription model like that succeed at scale in social networking, but it feels much more plausible than the reverse.

I have to wonder why Parag got canned and how much of it has to do with him being CEO while forcing the sale to go through. On paper Parag seems like exactly the guy that Elon would want in the job: engineering background, into crypto, not a lot of baggage given he hasn't been CEO for too long, lead the bluesky protocol team for a while. Those texts read like Elon already didn't want to work with him.

If there is anything that Brittany taught me about conservatorships, it's that they should be used more sparingly rather than more often. I don't disagree that Ye is ill, but even if he had a court ordered conservator to look after his money, it wouldn't have changed the outcome here. I also don't think his career is necessarily over. I hardly know anything about his music, but celebrities have done far worse things than issued a few racist tweets and remained relevant. I do think that his options for another gigantic Adidas like deal is probably shot through. I'm sure he'll be able to keep putting out music, but no one wants to be in Adidas' position again.

I also bounced off the original when it came out. I have to assume they're updating the gameplay while swapping engines. The CDPR roadmap had three Witcher items on it: Sirius (by Molasses Flood), The new Witcher Trilogy (by CDPR), and Canis Majoris (by a third party). I would guess that this remake will be the first of those that we'll see, and that makes me wonder if it will be a hint of what is to come. With at least the Witcher trilogy and the remake being made in UE5, it would make a lot of sense to share both game assets and engine tweaks. If they're updating gameplay, they could try and remake Witcher 3, or they could use what they're working on for the new trilogy, which I have to assume will be in a similar vein. Whatever comes of it, as long as it plays better, I'll give it a go.

I make this point every time a new console comes out, but people always want to believe that framerate is king and that this time, with this much horsepower, that devs will decide to focus on framerates instead. I do think we're seeing a shift in that direction a little bit, and we might get performance modes in more games, but sooner or later 30 fps always becomes the standard. It's not hard to see why. People gravitate towards the prettier games, and no matter how powerful the console, devs will find the limit and have a choice to make between performance and fps. Most devs, like most people, end up going with the better looking option at the cost of extra frames. The talk in that article about 40fps being an exact midpoint between 30 and 60 is interesting. I haven't been well versed in frame-time vs frame rate. That does seem like a good middle ground that we could see adopted more and more.