TwinIon

Not an inspiring trailer.

I understand the impulse, and I've got plenty of problems with the ACA, but something is still better than nothing, both in a political sense and in a real practical one. Even a severely scaled back bill would do some real good, and I'd rather the message in the next election cycle be "here's what we got so far, elect more democrats and we can do more."

Yes, and this year Biden's budget was more than the defense department asked for, and congress still passed more than $10B more than even that! All at a time when, for the first time in over a decade, we're not really at war overseas anymore. Somehow we're spending more on defense now than we were at any point during Trump, the number keeps going up, and it doesn't seem to get any debate or significant media attention. That extra ~$10B is around the yearly cost that the infrastructure bill spends on roads and bridges or that Build Back Better spends to make two years of community college free.

I suppose the one thing that does make sense to me about using NFTs in game is that it would open up trading of those items possibly without the need for the dev to maintain an API. The relative permanence of the blockchain does absolutely nothing to guarantee an in game item will remain available or usable, but it might make it easier for devs to allow players to build their own marketplaces. A decent API could accomplish the same thing, but I suppose you could kind of get that "for free" by using the blockchain. Of course, any game to use such a system would effectively be making real money purchases of digital items common, and would be doing so without the dev getting a cut. If you're going to build a game around the idea that in game items can be bought and sold for real money (like Artifact), it makes a lot more sense for the dev to just build the storefront and make some money.

I've never written any blockchain software, and nothing more than toy games, but I'm dubious as to how "free" maintaining in-game items as NFTs would be. Unless the game client itself is checking the blockchain to see what items I own, you probably have some internal database you're maintaining. You could be right though, that as an indie dev it might be cheaper or easier to some significant degree. I started looking for a better explanation of why you'd want a blockchain based game and have to say that I don't find the arguments very compelling. This is a terrible example since all the punitive action taken by Blizzard had to do with their eSports system. This article seems to point towards ever lasting digital goods as the best case for NFT games. They tell you to imagine what a world it would be if your Pokemon you collected on the gameboy had been stored in the blockchain for you to retrieve in later games. That's all well and good, but that requires a very specific scenario of someone building a game using a decentralized storage system, and then building a new game that used the same one. I think about the shift from Destiny to Destiny 2. They still had all the player data, but it wasn't worth it for Bungie to import all those old characters. They wanted to start from scratch. Where the data was stored was never an issue, had all that gear was in NFTs, it wouldn't have made a lick of difference. Besides, if they shut the servers down for good, it wouldn't matter where your gear was stored. Heck, a single patch could easily prevent any existing NFTs from working. Maybe there's a case to be made for an open source NFT game, but now you're getting into pretty hypothetical territory. Reading a bit about Age of Rust, I don't see much reason to ban it. If Valve and Epic want to review individual games to make sure they're not scams, I don't think NFTs are necessarily evil, but I can't blame them for assuming that it's easier to brush aside the whole issue.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the delays this project faced end up being responsible for it being canceled.

The Pixel 6 event is finally live. Something I don't think leaked is the price. The Pixel 6 starts at $599 and the Pro at $899. So definitely not the high prices we've seen from other phone makers. Tech sites already have their hands-on impressions posted, at least for hardware. For some reason Google doesn't want people talking about the software experience or performance yet. I'm very curious to hear a full review of these phones. It's odd to me that they'd send phones out to tech sites, but not want them to post much about the actual user experience. That doesn't bode well for phones shipping this month (the 28th). Also, while not entirely confirmed, what we do know about the Tensor chip is not terribly exciting. It seems to be using mostly off the shelf cores, though in a different configuration. The Snapdragon 888 uses one high performance core, three midrange cores, and four low power cores. Tensor trades one of those midrange cores for an additional high end core, and it adds the expected custom TPU AI chip. Maybe that TPU core will make a big difference in the camera, and it's possible the extra performance core will make intense tasks feel faster, but it could hurt battery life. It's also odd that they introduced it downplaying benchmark performance. While I still think it's a big deal that Google is working on a custom chip, and it does mean Google will be able to support it longer than they otherwise would, I don't think this is Google in any way catching up to Apple. I do hope the camera lives up to their promises. Other makers have really caught up and surpassed Google's cameras, and it's good to see them finally update the hardware. The "magic eraser" feature does seem like something that will make for great commercials and a useful selling point.

Kind of a fun teaser, but I'm not sold they got it right.

I'm not aware of NFT games, but given that NFTs themselves are basically a scam, I can't blame Epic or Valve for not wanting scam based games on their platforms. That said, it is a pretty thin line between having in game currencies like ISK in EVE that have a direct correlations to real money and are only transferable in game to what I presume an NFT based game would have, which is an in game currency or object that has real monetary value that may be transferable outside of the game. Hell, Valve itself tried to make a card game where each digital card had an assignable value. The fact that it's being tracked on the blockchain doesn't seem like it should matter. However, it also doesn't seem like it should matter to the players either. If a digital Magic card is tradable and has some monetary value, it shouldn't matter if it's ownership is being tracked in an open blockchain or in some dev's private servers. Especially if that item only has value in a game that is wholly controlled by one company. What possible value could an NFT that tracks an in game item have if that game isn't supported anymore? So yeah, consider me unbothered by NFT's exclusion from game stores.

That's a very good question that we'll have to wait and see. They talked a lot about how they could get up to 64GB of memory available to the GPUs, but it's shared memory, and in my experience processes that require a lot of graphics memory typically also want a lot of system memory. However, I don't think that it's been a big deal for the existing M1 devices, but these new machines are obviously designed for a whole different set of use cases.

I won't argue for Magsafe over a thunderbolt port, but if I'm on the go and working for an extended period, there's an extremely solid chance that I will use a port for power, so it doesn't bother me having a dedicated one. I've had a couple Dell laptops that can charge via USB-C but also have a charging port, and I almost always use the charging port instead of USB-C. Of course, those laptops have fewer USB-C ports than these Macs, but they also had other ports. While at my desk, those laptops always charged via USB-C, because they were plugged into docking stations. Since these can do that as well, I'd be pretty happy with the port selection overall.

Obviously I didn't play with the configurations. After playing with it a bit the pricing is surprisingly good. I would still imagine you'd need a specific use case to justify that jump, but it's nice you can get a 14" with a Max and 32GB of memory for less than $3k.

I guess it depends on the GPU performance and what people actually need or will use it for. I didn't realize until just now that you can't get a M1 Max in a 14", and the M1 Max 16" starts at $3500. A Razer blade with a 3070 starts at $2300 and you can get one with a 3080 for ~$3000. However, a Razer with a 30 series RTX chip has an obvious purpose (games), but it the extra graphical horsepower in the MacBooks is more workflow oriented, so fewer people really need it. I don't think the prices are crazy high, but they're certainly not cheap. I feel like you'd need a very specific workflow requirement before shelling out for a Max powered laptop.

I don't have a particular reason for it, but I don't really feel that excited by this reboot. Maybe it's because we've seen a lot of batmen over the years. Maybe it's because this doesn't feel like an entirely fresh take. Maybe it's just the trailers. I'm happy with the people making it, but I'm just not getting excited. I had to as well.

Even if this didn't get picked up for a second season, it strikes me as odd they'd canceling while season 1 is still airing. I suppose the creators want to try and leverage that into viewership, but I would expect the exact opposite. For such a long gestating show to get canned before it's short first season even airs is odd. I've been watching and while I haven't loved it, it's been perfectly fine. I guess it just never found an audience.

Shazam was fun, but it was pretty lighthearted. Not really knowing anything about Black Adam, it feels odd for him to get his own movie and for it to be so dour by comparison. Maybe it'll be a good film, but it seems oddly positioned even in this increasingly fractured DCU.

I don't use Macs, so I care less about the actual computers than I do about their chip design, but I do recognize that where Apple goes, others follow. So it's nice to see that they added ports back to the Pros. Magsafe, SD card reader, HDMI, and even a headphone jack. The fact that they added a notch but didn't include Face ID is just weird to me. I know Apple has decided that the notch is some kind of design statement, but at least add something useful in there. Giving your pro computer a notch just for a slightly better webcam feels bad. At least the screen is taller than 16:9 so it shouldn't affect most video.

Apple's October Event is happening now. They announced some new Airpods, but the interesting part is almost certainly going to be the new Macbook Pros. Historically, the Pros have had discrete GPUs, but today we get to see what Apple is going to do to compete with nVidia and AMD. From the first look, it seems Apple is continuing with the integrated CPU/GPU design. There are two new chips: the M1 Pro and the M1 Max. The Pro is a 10 core CPU with 70% better CPU performance and twice the GPU performance of the M1, while supporting up to 32GB of unified memory. The M1 Max supports 64GB of memory, uses the same CPU as the Pro, but doubles the GPU to 32 cores. They're promising performance equal or better than even high end discrete GPU laptops. One of my questions going in to this was how big the chip would be if they just throw in a bunch of GPU cores. It seems that wasn't a problem, because that's exactly what they did.

I would be very surprised if it wasn't backwards compatible. I have a poor track record when it comes to guessing what Nintendo will do with hardware, but releasing an update/successor to (what is on track to be) their most successful hardware product ever, only five or six years into its' life cycle without BC would be crazy to me. Then again, this is Nintendo. If they're moving the switch to a very different architecture and they needed to put some extra hardware in there for BC to work, I can kind of imagine them choosing margins over BC. Then they can re-release all the OG switch games for Switch 2!

If JMS is happy, then seems like it could be worthwhile.

At least, that's my take after reading Bloomberg's recent piece Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions? For those unaware, Tether is a cryptocurrency that is pegged to the dollar and seems to be primarily used as an intermediary to buy or bet on other cryptos. It's become something of a standard for that purpose and has ballooned over the last year to an astonishing $69 Billion in valuation. Now, as a stablecoin, that theoretically means that they should have one dollar for every tether sold, but Bloomberg isn't able to find much evidence that's the case. You'd think that would be a big issue, given how widely used it is. At it's current size, Tether is the size of one of the larger banks in the country, and a run on tether could have broad implications far beyond crypto. Beyond not really being able to verify tether's cash holdings, the other big takeaway from the Bloomberg piece is that people didn't seem to care. The crypto bros they talk to seem to agree that there likely is something shady going on, but they keep making money, so no point in being worked up about it. The article is worth a read, if only for the descriptions of the folks who run tether.

The announcement page from R* is half announcement and half "what we'll be doing in GTA Online to celebrate!" No screens, but even with a move to UE4, a Switch, Android, and iOS version doesn't bode well for my hopes that these will be much more than mild HD upscales but with modern controls.

The other Casino Royale or the other other Casino Royale?

Yeah, I think inconsistent is the best descriptor for this series. I know this is putting way too much thought into a series that is not meant to be taken seriously, but I found it odd that Infinity Ultron was able to so completely wreck the multiverse. We saw infinity stones become paperweights in Loki, so I'm not sure why Ultron suddenly became a threat in a way that no one that assembled the stones in their individual universes would be. Also, if you're the watcher, sure seems like you could pretty quickly collect a set of stones from any given universe, but whatever.

If blockchains are ever implemented as a way to replace traditional database technologies, it's going to be in very specific, very limited scenarios. Even a private blockchain is going to be incredibly slow compared to a database, regardless of how that database is setup. If you need your data to be immutable, don't need to access it frequently or quickly, and probably want that data being stored to be transparent, maybe you'd pick a blockchain.