See, I'd be a freight train.

Towing hundreds of cars of things from place to place, and blocking railroad crossings for hours making people wait for me to move past? I'm all for the annoy-other-people-while-doing-a-vital-job life.

Freight or passenger?

Have you been to a theater recently? You only wish it was silent.

Idk when it started but its fine to talk through the whole movie or fuck with your phone volume turned on now.

Didn't he write a book about his life growing up, and the suffering of the American people near him? And then leverage that into a political career?

Wonder how much bullshit was in there, too. (If you haven't, the answer is "pretty much most of it".)

I'm glad we've taken care of the access to guns and made progress on the societal issues that led to school shootings in the past 12 years, and that they're no longer common.

Oh, wait, we didn't do either of those things?

Train to Busan, Parasite, Unlocked, Wonderland, Anatomy of a Fall and Close have been ones I've seen recently that I liked.

I think some of those are available on Netflix, but as I don't use Netflix I can't say which ones and for certain, though.

Edit: I just realized some of those are vague and will lead to a billion other movies lol. The first 4 are S. Korean, the last two are French and they're all from 2020 or newer so anything not from there or older isn't the right one.

You're not wrong (and those are freaking enormous dies that have to cost apple a goddamn fortune to make at scale), but like, it also isn't an Apples-to-Apples comparison.

nVidia/Intel/AMD have gone for the maximum performance and fuck any heat/noise/power usage path. They haven't given a shit about low-power optimizations or investing in designs that are more suited to low-power usage (a M3 max will pull ~80w if you flog the crap out of it, so let's use that number) implementations. IMO the wrong choice, but I'm just a computer janitor that uses the things, I don't design them.

Apple picked a uarch that was already low power (fun fact: ARM was so low power that the first test chips would run off the board's standby power and would boot BEFORE they were actually turned on) and then focused in on making it as fast as possible with the least power as possible: the compute cores have come from the mobile side prior to being turned into desktop chips.

I'm rambling but: until nVidia and x86 vendors prioritize power usage over raw performance (which they did with zen5 and you saw how that shit spiraled into a fucking PR shit mess) then you're going to get next year's die shrink, but with more transistors using the same power with slightly better performance. It's entirely down to design decisions, and frankly, x86 (and to some degree so has nVidia) have painted themselves into a corner by relying on process node improvements (which are very rapidly going to stop happening) and modest IPC uplifts to stay ahead of everyone else.

I'm hoping Qualcomm does a good job staying competitive with their ARM stuff, but it's also Qualcomm and rooting for them feels like cheering on cancer.

Knowing the odds doesn’t stop children from developing a gambling habit.

Agreed, and this is why I'm firmly on the no-kids side of things.

If you can't go to a casino until you're 21, why exactly should you be able to gamble online (in any form!) until then either?

Power consumption numbers like that are expected, though.

One thing to keep in mind is how big the die is and how many transistors are in a GPU.

As a direct-ish comparison, there's about 25 billion transistors in a 14900k, and 76 billion in a 4090.

Big die + lots and lots of transistors = bigly power usage.

I wouldn't imagine that the 5000-series GPUs are going to be smaller or have less transistors, so I'd expect this to be in the die shrink lowers power usage, but more transistors increase power usage zone.

Oh I wasn't meaning to say it wasn't predatory, merely that it's honest about what it is. A LOT of other gacha/lootbox games are far more obscure about what's going on and how you're getting screwed and Genshin at least has it all clearly outlined and easily (ish) understood.

Also, I was mentally using 21 as the gambling age since I'm an American and we don't really trust those shifty 18-year-olds with anything other than being shot at in a war.

I take your point, though, but at some point, you have to shrug and call someone a full-fledged adult, and let them shit up their own life.

But call it gambling, regulate it under the same legal requirements as you would any other form of gambling, and keep the kids out.

Videos are unfortunately the way a LOT of quality content is delivered now and banning any and all videos (relevant or not) is probably not the way to go.

GN, L1T, HUB and so on are super high-quality stuff that're tech related and that's basically how they deliver their content. A blanket ban would kill way too much good shit, imo.

movie industry that’s been complete trash for a while now.

This is not a callout of you in particular so don't get offended, but that's really only true if you look at the trash coming out of Hollywood.

There's some spectacularly good shit coming out of like France and South Korea (depending on what genres you're a fan of, anyways), as well as like, everywhere else.

Shitty movies that are just shitty sequels to something that wasn't very good (or yet another fucking Marvel movie) is a self-inflicted wound, and not really a sign that you can't possibly do better.

Well, that's the doomer take.

The rumors are that the 80 series card is 10% faster than the 90 series card from last gen: that's not a '10%' improvement, assuming the prices are the same, that's more like a 40% improvement. I think a LOT of people don't realize how shitty the 4080 was compared to the 4090 and are vastly mis-valuing that rumor.

I'd also argue the 'GAMES MUST BE ULTRA AT 4K144 OR DONT BOTHER' take is wrong. My gaming has moved almost entirely to my Rog Ally and you know what? Shit is just as fun and way more convenient than the 7700x/3080 12gb desktop even if it's 1080p low and not 1440p120. If the only thing the game has going for it is 'ooh it's pretty' then it's unlikely to be one of those games people care about in six months.

And anyways, who gives a crap about AAAAAAAAAAAAA games? Indie games are rocking it in every genre you could care to mention, and the higher budget stuff like BG 3 is, well, probably the best RPG since FO:NV (fight me!).

And yes, VR is in a shitty place because nobody gives a crap about it. I've got a Rift, Rift S, Quest, and a Quest 2 and you know what? It's not interesting. It's a fun toy that, but it has zero sticking power and that's frankly due to two things:

1. It's not a social experience at all.
2. There's no budget for the kind of games that would drive adoption, because there's no adoption to justify spending money on a VR version.

If you could justify spending the kind of money that would lead to having a cool VR experience, then yeah, it might be more compelling but that's been tried and nobody bought anything. Will say that Beat Saber is great, but one stellar experience will not sell anyone on anything.

And AI is this year's crypto which was last year's whatever and it's bubbles and VC scams all the way down and pretty much always has been. Tech hops from thing to thing that they go all in on because they can hype it and cash out. Good for them, and be skeptical of shit, but if it sticks it sticks, and if it doesn't it doesn't.

Agreed on P2P gacha games. Those are just gross as fuck, since as you said, they're explicitly pay-to-win.

Genshin does, for the most part, provide very clear percentages and how the math works out, so you can actually do that but they're certainly a rarity. I will say, though, that while they do provide that information it's also in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a 'beware of the leopard' sign.

You can find it if you know where it is, but your average user isn't going to know the magic things you should click on to get from the wish screen to the page on the website where they outline specific odds and pull rates, which eh, not a fan of making that so obscure.

Also: not a fan of the sell you a currency you have to convert to another currency to convert to a 3rd thing that then can be used for gambling thing. There shouldn't be more than one level of obscuring between your money and the final item you need - Genshin goes from Crystals to Primogems to Wishes, and that's almost entirely to be sure to confuse people how much that wish actually cost, since you've got a lot of math to do to get back to what you orginally paid for the Crystals.

Yeah, I was looking at what would break moving to Linux, and that came up in the list of shit.

I was confused as to why they didn't implement that in Linux, since I mean, how hard could it be?

But alas, it's not, and the official position is 'we're not going to' so there has to be some technical reason.

Not really: if you're astroturfing, you don't do all your astroturfing from a single source because that makes it so obvious even a blind person could see it and sort it out.

You do it from all over the places, mixed in with as much real user traffic as you can, and then do it steadily and without being hugely bursty from a single location.

Humans are very good at pattern matching and recognition (which is why we've not all been eaten by tigers and leopards) and will absolutely spot the single source, or extremely high volume from a single source, or even just the looks-weird-should-investigate-more pattern you'd get from, for example, exactly what happened to cause this post.

TLDR: they're doing this because they're trying to evade humans and ML models by spreading the load around, making it not a single source, and also trying to mix it in with places that would also likely have substantial real human traffic because uh, that's what you do if you're hoping to not be caught.

If this worked for other forms of content than microblogging it'd be more interesting.

I don't have an issue with paying for people who make long-form video content, or people who post actual real long-form blog posts, or newsletters of interest but microblog shit?

There's barely enough of interest there to justify reading it most of the time, let alone paying for it.

Tweets and toots are just advertisement for the actual content, not the actual content, IMO.

This would be more interesting if it was a way to monetize Peertube or the various blogging platforms that are federated.

Solution update:

Lots of advice, and I found what I needed: it was audio compression. This was not a thing I had a clue existed, but it's exactly what I needed.

Resolve does it natively, and having it compress the voice track, and then adding some ducking and fiddling with the volume levels resulted in closer (if not exactly) to what I was expecting/needing.

Like, that was 90% of the problem, and I'm sure the last 10% is simply a skill issue and I'll get it sorted out.

Thanks for telling me what I should be looking for, since it's kinda hard to find the answer for something when you don't know what the thing you need is called.

Politely, but no.

It's a compression tool that is also used to mask malware, and you're proposing to expand it's use in a use case that's ALREADY coated in enough malware to give you herpes just by walking past your average tracker.

It's a bad idea from a security perspective, and it's not going to outperform a LZMA-based compression tool using a large dictionary (7zip, etc.) which also isn't fucking with binaries in a way that makes detecting and preventing malicious software more complicated for the average user, who typically knows absolutely zero about what's going on.

As someone who's been buying (though not intentionally) exclusively AMD laptops for the past 9 years or so, yeah, this resonates pretty well with the user experience.

I mean, none of the laptops are bad or defective or whatever, but the quality of support and feature support and just the general amount of time it takes to get things pushed out has always been shit compared to Intel stuff.

AMD can't manage firmware and software fixes for shit, regardless of product line and if I were an OEM, I'd probably be pissed at their stupid slow bullshit too.

Example: 2022 G14 was totally getting USB4. Got a beta for it, and then Asus went 'Fucking AMD isn't helping or providing stuff we need, so this beta is all you're getting, go yell at them.' Is that the whole story? Maybe not, but it certainly feels perfectly reasonable based on how AMD has supported everything prior to that as well, so I tend to think it's enough of the story to be true.

Good hardware (mostly), and it's reliable enough and it does the job, but it's very much a dont-expect-support kind of experience past the first couple of months after release. (And yes, I know the OEM carries a good portion of responsibility there, but if there's not a new firmware/microcode/etc from AMD to fix an issue, then what are they supposed to ship to you?)