A bit, but not much. (random example off AliExpress, that use this synaptic chip)

There's no real reason why latency should be more than a couple of "scan-lines" (well, at least the DSC's equivalent horizontal-lines, if the signal needs conversion between compression variants). And there's a big incentive: less on-chip built-in RAM - it's litteraly cheaper to make the chip only keep the most recent relevant data and immediately start streaming out the HDMI 2.1 signal as soon as possible, rather than keeping multiple entire frames.

Most, but not all. I litterally have a DisplayProt to HDMI + DVI + VGA combo dongle on my workstation at home.

But they tend to by a tiny bit more expensive (think 10 bucks instead of 1 bucks on AliExpress. Or 50 bucks at your local TV shop), because they require a dedicated chip inside the dongle.

Depends on the device. Can happen in some professional projectors: some enterprise-grade projectors can litteraly support "any protocol over any wiring with enough pins", i.e.: the presence of a HDMI, DP, DVI or VGA connector on a given port is mainly a convenience. This is so you could reuse wathever cabling is embed in the walls, you don't need to tear down the walls and redo the cabling (which could get expensive in a large conference room). This is also the reason you could find ultra cheap passive VGA-to-HDMI cables on AliExpress/eBay/Amazon for the last segment between the VGA port built into the lectern of some old university lecture room and the laptop outputting the HDMI that the projector is actually configured to fetch from the VGA cabling embed in the walls.

Yes, that's litteraly how the SteamDeck handles this.
The SteamDeck can output DisplayPort on its USB-C connector (similar to tons of laptops and some smartphones), and the SeamDeck's Dock has a dedicated hardware chip that does the translation into HDMI signal.
This way no need to tweak any support into opensource GPL'd drivers inside the SteamDeck and then risking running afoul of HDMI's licensing restrictions.

The problem is that unlike Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, Valve isn't selling a closed box with proprietary blob.
Their hardware runs Linux with a close-to-upstream kernel(*).
Among other, they are using the FOSS stack: Linux kernel driver, user space Mesa libraries, etc.
All this is GPL meaning that the code is released (or at least pull requests with the latest are wainting to be eventually upstreamed)

And the HDMI's licencing currently prohibits making that code available (or conversly, GPL means that every body should be able to read and modify the code that does HDMI 2.1 shit even people who haven't paid the license).

(*): except for the dock. The Steam Deck's dock has a dedicated chip that does the USB-C DisplayPort to HDMI conversion, so no need to tweak anything on the drivers running inside the SteamDeck.

At least in the current climate (and quite possibly indefinitely; depending on how prudent their investments are and whether they have any uncontrollably expensive hobby) there's not really any reason for the 'AI' guys to take such a servile attitude.

If you actually need the job, or are invested in the company's mission for some reason, it's a good idea to care at least slightly about how your paycheck doesn't bounce; but that's not really the position these guys are in. Exceptionally in-demand skillset and reputation; existing net worth almost certainly already enough to at least keep them comfortable indefinitely if they feel like quitting the rat race or get fired. Why settle for doing sordid adtech if you think that, best case, your boss in the sort of dumbass who would lose billions of dollars on the idea that Second Life would totally have the GDP of western europe, because reasons, and you can keep him paying you a handsome salary and providing you with the GPU compute time and dubiously sourced datasets that you find personally interesting; and worst case, if you lose the fight, you'll just be told to go sling ads, not fired and blacklisted.

Facebook isn't running a charity; but neither are these guys. Why wouldn't they try to take what they can get? Especially when the actually-profitable business units are fat enough that there's plenty of room for boondoggles, so long as you can sell them, rather than there being fairly tight constraints on how much you can waste before the company starts bleeding out.

It would honestly be more surprising if they signed up with facebook out of a genuine willingness to do adtech swill and sordid 'engagement' hacking; rather than on the assumption that there's enough desperate dumb money sloshing around in Zuckerberg's fear of missing out on the next big thing that they can get paid to pursue their pet projects without much concern for having to deliver short term impact on the bottom line.

I assume that at least some of the tension here is that facebook hired these guys to be the hotshot golden boys of sucking less at AI; so it isn't just an it's-only-money thing. I don't know whether or not this belief is accurate; but Zuck and friends certainly hunted down and paid for the various new AI hires as though they were capable of things that in-house or more readily available alternatives are not, so the battle over where their attention will be focused is presumably being waged on the assumption that having someone else do what they aren't doing isn't really a substitute.

What I would be curious to know is why the 'build god-machine' goal isn't being treated as the obvious winner just because you can have the god machine make facebook more addictive and better at serving ads. Do they think that the AI guys are drinking the kool-aide and the only thing they'll actually be able to deliver is incremental improvements; so they want those churned directly into products? Some degree of confidence that they will eventually manage it; but fear of missing out on some sort of short term advantage means that they don't care about what is achievable in 5-10 years? Genuinely zero interest in anything except making social media more of a hellscape; so they simply don't care?

I suspect that, while it would be socially controversial, planetary colonization would be a very strong case for IVF and some population planning.

For the amount of volume/mass required to ship a single human and support them in transit and on site you could ship a lot of embryos in cryo(it's careful plumbing; but a big dewar flask kept at cryogenic temperatures is downright lightweight compared to a full life support system); and shipping embryos gives you the option of bringing massive genetic diversity, thousands to tens of thousands of genetically screened parents worth of embryos in the space a single person would require.

Unless you've got some sort of advanced growth vats you would obviously need people onsite; but instead of dealing with the probably-impossible task of keeping a tiny breeding population's gene pool in order you'd just be defrosting and gestating specimens from a much larger pool of diverse embryos as needed. Presumably you'd initially go with an all-female colony, and only start defrosting males and trying to maintain a viable natural population once you had at least high single-digit thousands to low-mid tens of thousands.

I'm sure that such an arrangement would freak some people out; and you'd probably need to do some reasonably intense social engineering to keep everyone on-mission; but in terms of efficiency of genetic diversity there's a fairly compelling case to be made.

What sort of disaster do you have in mind that would render earth less habitable than mars?

Short of unstoppable replicator nanites turning the entire crust into grey goo; or very long term issues with the sun reaching EoL that will be an issue for basically anyone in the solar system, it's honestly hard to think of ways you could break it more badly.

Plenty of possibilities that will make people deeply miserable; or cause 80+ percent of the population to die horribly; but you'll still have a planet with the right gravity, an atmosphere and magnetosphere, some sort of ecosystem(even if it's just algal scum and cockroaches); some soil that isn't riddled with perchlorates, and so on.

Sure. But the suggestion here is that they were specifically inviting it, ostensibly because it would harm competitors.

They are not going to support the idea that "glyphosate causes cancer" for some short-term market advantage.

How did you get out of high school without knowing the difference between a hypothesis and a claim?

That's a really big claim. You have not done the research or looked at the evidence to back it up. It's something you pulled out of your ass. Don't do that.

It is possible that our ancestors eating meat had an effect on the weather.

This is what the article recommends:

I was going to say something snide about how MCP is a laughably thin standard; but 'agents.md' is literally just a text file(encoding unspecified; I guess UTF8 but nobody actually says) that you put text in and hope your bot will react appropriately to. It describes the contents as 'standard markdown'; without mention of which markdown variant they mean.

Given that the whole thing is just an exercise in getting away with bots being more or less as OK-ish with poorly structured inputs as they are with anything else it's not like it would be a better 'standard' if there were a thicket of XML schema involved; but saying:

:"AGENTS.md emerged from collaborative efforts across the AI software development ecosystem, including OpenAI Codex, Amp, Jules from Google, Cursor, and Factory.

We’re committed to helping maintain and evolve this as an open format that benefits the entire developer community, regardless of which coding agent you use."

About a 'standard' which is 'put some kind of markdown, y'know, stuff you'd tell someone about your project in a text file called Agents.md' is a little grandiose.

It was probably minimally profitable even with the Xbox 360 hardware issues. Still Xbox was a small part of MS so there was not a lot of profit pressure on them. Then MS started acquiring major developers. Activision Blizzard was a $69B purchase alone. Now MS has more profit expectations of Xbox.

Except many actions of MS says otherwise. For example, MS and Asus just released their new gaming handheld Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. It does not play Xbox games. It plays PC games. MS has been telling the consumer that ”Everything is an Xbox" from smart phones to PCs.