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Comment Re: LOVED my Intellivision (Score 1) 51

I would love to have a retro Intellivision, but I want to play the obscure third-party stuff like White Water and Ice Trek, or Maze-A-Tron, in addition to the obvious first-party choices. Give me a packed eStore with as close to the full catalog as possible, along with printable overlays for the digital titles, and youâ(TM)ll have my full attention.

Comment Just a few years after their last major compromise (Score 2) 16

In 2020 BIG-IP already had a critical compromise that allowed unauthenticated hackers to take full control of the device and use it to attack the rest of the internal network:

https://www.helpnetsecurity.co...

That was enough for my company at the time to abandon F5 VPN, since hackers used the exploit to ransomware the company before we could have reasonably found out about and patched the vulnerability.

Comment Re:How long until Sony (Score 1) 51

exists the Console market? It's high cost / high risk. Their core business is still insurance.

Nearly 1/3 of Sony's total revenue comes from the Game & Network Services division as of 2022. About 1/6 of their game sales revenue from the same period came from first-party exclusives.

They've never been able to compete on FPS'. [...] Sony doesn't have anything nearly that memorable (Sorry Ratchet & Clank fans, I love it too but the movie was the blandest and dullest thing I've ever seen...). Sony's gonna get boxed in and shut down.

Right, it's not like they have a critically acclaimed, hit prestige TV show based on one of their first-party properties, or an exclusive super hero franchise that's moved over 33 million units with a highly anticipated sequel on the way this fall, or an instantly recognizable character who's been burning up the sales charts since his PS2 debut and has an Amazon Prime TV show in the works.

There's more, of course, but I think that's already enough to show that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Comment Re: ChatGPT: Asshole (Score 1) 200

Oh great, youâ(TM)ve just given us the plot for Terminator 7 â" the real Arnold Schwarzenegger has to be sent back in time to kill James Cameron before he can make the Terminator movies in the first place, to prevent the rise of an actual Skynet. (Echoes of Wes Cravenâ(TM)s New Nightmareâ¦)

Comment Misapplication of ML is the danger (Score 3, Insightful) 352

Machine learning is, by its very nature, unreliable and ethically ignorant. It is the apotheosis of increasing laziness and impatience in software development circles, where people have literally thrown their hands up, tossed all the data at the machine, and said they donâ(TM)t care HOW a problem gets solved, as long as the machine can do SOMETHING to the data to make it pass a very limited set of tests. As long as it can step over that extremely low bar, it will be considered good enough. When edge cases are inevitably found, theyâ(TM)ll just get added to the test case set, the model will be retrained, and entirely new ways for the ML algorithm to fuck up will be created, continuing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole that can literally never perfect itself over any decently sized problem space.

In practice, this means that ML should never be the determining factor when the potential consequences of an incorrect decision are high, because incorrect decisions are GUARANTEED, and its decision making process is almost completely opaque. It shouldnâ(TM)t drive a car or fly a plane, control a military device, perform surgery, design potentially dangerous chemicals or viruses, or try to teach people important things. It shouldnâ(TM)t process crime scene evidence, decide court cases, or filter which resumes are considered for a job. Itâ(TM)s perfectly fine for low-stakes applications where no one gets hurt when it fucks up, but we all know it will get used for everything else anyway.

Imagine what happens once you have dozens of layers of ML bullshit making bad decisions with life-altering or life-ending consequences. Depending on how far we allow the rabbit hole to go down, that could very well lead to an apocalyptic result, and it could come from almost any angle. A auto-deployed water purification chemical with unintended side effects. Incorrect treatment for a new pandemic pathogen. Autonomous military devices going rogue. All things are possible with the institutionalization of artificial stupidity by people who donâ(TM)t understand its limitations.

Of course we should start regulating the shit out of this right now. And, of course, we will obviously NOT do that until the first hugely damaging ML fuckup happens.

Comment Dream all you want, but it's going through. (Score 1) 15

Despite all wish-fulfillment reporting to the contrary, this deal is going through. The regulatory bodies have already left large holes for Microsoft to drive through to obtain approval, and Nintendo's willingness to sign a 10-year deal to keep Call Of Duty on their platforms is the nail in the coffin of Sony's counterargument.

Is this deal bad for gamers? Yes. Is it monopolistic? No. Is it anti-competitive? Sort of, but not outrageously so.

If you want to drown your sorrows, buy Activision stock in the $70s and enjoy your $95/share acquisition price when the deal inevitably closes. Then spend your $15+/share profit on games from other companies if it makes you feel better.

Comment Expect a number of free PS5/PSVR2 game updates (Score 1) 53

Just because the PS5 wonâ(TM)t automatically support PS4 PSVR games on the PSVR2, that doesnâ(TM)t preclude developers from offering free updates to PS5 versions of their game that do support PSVR2, while simultaneously making the game available for sale to new PSVR2 owners. Weâ(TM)ve already seen a half step toward this with games like âoeThe Persistenceâ, which got a free PS5 update (minus PSVR support, since PS5 native games canâ(TM)t use PSVR). I would expect the more significant PSVR sellers to get free PS5 updates with PSVR2 support.

Comment Yes (Score 1) 418

Yes, I like functional programming. But like most other things, it depends on the problem you're trying to solve. If you mosty deal with nails, you'll want to use a hammer. If you mostly deal with screws, you'll want to use a screwdriver. Hammers make lousy screwdrivers and vice-versa.

Functional languages are great for highly parallelized computation because well-behaved functions don't have side effects, and that eliminates entire classes of race condition and locking issues. Functional languages are also good for abstracting higher-order patterns, since you can manipulate data and other functions without having to care about their lower-level details. Specific functional languages like Scheme, where code and data share the same form, are great for creating custom syntactic structures and writing self-modifying code.

If you aren't doing any of those types of things, then functional programming may seem pointless to you, and that's OK. But every developer should be aware of the tools available to them in case the day comes when they might benefit from using them.

Comment Hardware/Software Systems (Score 2) 420

If you're a developer, work for companies that build complete hardware/software systems rather than just software. Typically if they design and manufacture in-house, the bulk of the software work requires close collaboration with hardware, FPGA, and systems engineers, and this works best keeping everyone local. Attempts to outsource in these environments usually end in failure, and the companies that try often learn their lesson and don't try again.

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