Outer Worlds has no space-based content. Yes, you have a spaceship, but it’s essentially a fast-travel device. One of the locations is a space station, but it’s no different than a large building (e.g. it’s not shaped like a torus or anything interesting like that).

Outer Worlds is a really fun take on the Firefly space western concept, though, as long as you understand all of your activities will take place on worlds/moons with basically the same gravity & atmosphere.

Oh good, now when I search I’ll have to wade through the effluent of AI-produced pablum to find an actual human journalism product.

Remember when Substack, the home of many excellent journalists, started to defend fascist and white supremacist content on their platform?

Oh, wait, that’s happening right now.

\3. Asserting that their IT system is a “separate legal entity” and that they are not responsible for the accuracy of the system. They are eating legal loco weed.

If I remember correctly, at the time Valve justified the 30% by pointing out that Apple was charging the same for music and video content. And Valve immediately started building value-added services like forums, updaters, multiplayer support, achievements, etc. to justify the price.

If you compare what Valve was doing to the physical media distribution methods of the period, it was a MASSIVE improvement. Back then, you could sell 10000 units to Ingram Micro or PC Mall, or whatever, and you only got paid if they sold. And any unsold inventory would be destroyed and the reseller would never pay for it. And if you actually wanted anything other than a single-line entry in their catalogs, you paid a promotional fee. Those video games featured with a standup display or a poster in the window at the computer store? None of that was free; the developer was nickeled and dimed for every moment their game was featured in any premium store space.

Huh. So, I actually own Lugaru, which I purchased through Humble Bundle in May 2010.

It… was not a good game. Basically anthropomorphic rabbits beating the crap out of each other, which SOUNDS good, but was not executed well.

It’s not “inexplicable”.

DIMM mounting brackets introduce significant limitations to maximum bandwidth. SOC RAM offers huge benefits in bandwidth improvement and latency reduction. Memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is 400GB/second, compared to a max of 64GB/sec for DDR5 DIMMs.

It may not be optimizing for the compute problem that you have, and that’s fine. But it’s definitely optimizing for compute problems that Apple believes to be high priority for its customers.

It’s very simple to not have capitalism

I think that if it was simple, we could point to more practical examples.

To make myself 100% clear: I am progressive, I want workers to unionize, I want government to support worker rights to the Nth degree, etc. That’s why I’m here. But I think a working solution is going to converge on something like the German model where corporate governance is a tripartite effort of company owners, unionized company workers, and government.

If there’s a version of this in which the things used to make stuff (from land to machines to patents) are not owned by some entity, I have yet to see it work. And ownership of the means of production IS capitalism. The “capital” in capitalism consists of that land and those machines and patents. Sure, there is room for workers’ cooperatives and such in this realm of owning entities, although I don’t know that it’s something we can force.

With respect to this:

and coops for buisnesses. This replaces CEOs and Bankers with democratic governance and isn’t authoritarian

I’m not really clear on how workers decide what to make, and how much to make, and where to get their inputs. That seems to me a classic case for corporate leadership. You can’t decide what to sell by a worker vote, except in some edge cases. I feel like that’s a classic path back to Soviet-era starvation: not enough people making food or toilet paper, way too many people making crazy military hardware, not enough middlemen/brokers/traders (who, it turns out, are kind of essential to market organization).

I could be convinced, but I want to see it actually work.

We are about to reach AI and Climate Change tipping points, and planned economies are about to become a must because of these things (inevitably)

You’re not wrong. I’ve often said that capitalism cannot plan in any meaningful sense. Nobody in the system cares about stability tomorrow if they can get rewarded today.

I feel that those who jump on anti-capitalism have no real idea how products are made, and how things are bought, sold, marketed.

There seems to be a sort naive belief that we can return to an era of cottage industry, and that somehow we’d still have iPhones and power plants and such without folks owning land and machines and patents. But even if you imagine a power plant built without capitalism – say, built by a beneficient government – the people building it are capitalists. The people mining the coal and shipping it to the plant are capitalists. They want money in return, so they can feed their families and establish their personal economic security, so that they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid, etc.

Folks say that history is just a record of the robber-barons robbing everybody, and I tend to agree. It seems likely that this is the case because only the robber-barons actually succeeded. I think the onus is on folks who claim we don’t need the robber-barons to show that a system CAN succeed without them.

I feel like the long term answer is to let the robber-barons do their thing, but only to a degree, and use government directed by democracy to keep the abuses of capitalism under control. This is difficult, but it seems to work in most wealthy countries, except for a glaring few. If there’s a better system, I have yet to see it in operation.

Eh, I was there. The games were OK.

The biggest change is that we put up with a lot more repetitive gameplay back then, just because that’s how games were and there wasn’t enough horsepower to make complex stuff.

Today, you blow through a level of a modern first person game, or whatever, and see only a tiny fraction of what the game makers created for you. I played Titanfall 2 for the first time recently, and after playing the same level a few times, I noticed that a room that appears only briefly as you take an elevator past it has an extension cord coiled up on the floor. You can only see it if you look down as the elevator goes up, so you can see the floor of the room.

Old games didn’t have the room for those kinds of indulgences.

Before reading the article, I just assumed that N. Korea had hacked a game with loot boxes.

Your math is off somewhere. Wikipedia claims that NYC has 302 square miles of land, while Singapore has 283.

This article estimates that the cost of owning a car in NYC is $3000-$5000 per month. So, you pay for the privilege, perhaps not as much up front.

But NYC is surrounded by places you can drive to. Singapore is not. The mainland city of Johor Bahru is a relatively poor city of only 500K people, and beyond that it’s farmland until you get to the Malaysian captial, more than 4 hours away. So I wouldn’t expect the two cities to have the same preferences for car ownership in any case.

And it won’t need to exist locally on the phone anyway. Higher bandwidth cell and wifi signals mean more and more exotic AI processing can be offloaded onto cloud resources.

It’s great when you have an app that works well when not connected to a network, of course. But most phone buyers don’t really care.

It is tradition.

Is this news? Singapore is a city of 6 million on an island that is only 45km across at its widest point.

The sentence makes sense in context of the article. Detained in Dubai is asking the US State Department to warn travelers of the risk of unjust arrest and extortion, even though Ms. Polanco’s ordeal has ended.

ChatGPT, program a Metroidvania 2d retro 16 bit graphics video game featuring a naked Emilia Clarke.

Do people still use emacs to code, for example?

Umm. Yes.

Capcom has absolute authority to price its games however they see fit.

If they make choices that put them out of business, that’s on them.

RiffTrax Friends, The Gizmoplex, and Twitch Turbo give me everything I need.