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Comment Only idiots would (Score 1) 46

That's an extremely short-term analysis.

Your red-pilled lawyer will soon have a reputation. They'll find their client pool shrinking, judges not giving them the benefit of the doubt, and other lawyers not referring work to them.

They'd better do a lot of slop cases quickly and hope the money lasts, because that strategy is going to tank their practice faster than they graduated law school.

Comment Gullibility (Score 3, Insightful) 5

"Incognito" has been redefined to mean "we'll pretend we don't know who you are."

More generally, if you're talking to a robot that runs on someone else's machine, you should not be surprised if the machine owner spies on you. Maybe it shouldn't work this way - I'd say it definitely shouldn't, and the big outfits acknowledge this by pretending it doesn't - but that's the world we live in.

The assumption should always be that these robots are front ends to Zuckerberg's & Google's user profiling systems. Your robot talk therapist or cofounder is trying to help Nestle and Ford manipulate you. And let's not forget LEOs and intelligence - we haven't heard much about how they're targeting this stuff yet. But they would be incompetent if they aren't.

Comment Re: Why can't the pre-compiled ones be distributed (Score 1) 60

Oh, that's pretty neat. Microsoft is definitely the right level to address this at - they already have permission to enumerate the HW, own the hardware and software infra to tackle this, enjoy economy of scale other players are not privvy too, and can deliver a solution in a vendor agnostic way. Thanks for the heads up. It's the right thing to happen.

Comment Re: Why can't the pre-compiled ones be distributed (Score 1) 60

Of course there are. Tragedy of the commons. My point is that no single entity is likely to absorb the costs unless they're already enjoying economy of scale advantages and there are business experience/optic benefits to doing so. The poster above you pointed out that Microsoft seems to be addressing this, which makes a lot more sense to me than doing it at the 3d HW vendor level.

Comment Re:BitTorrent (Score 1) 60

Sure, but many people would opt in, especially if you explained that they would benefit.

Maybe. Maybe not. Before committing to developing such a thing, you'd have to at least do some research and analysis to find out if that's true and how the likely opt in/out ratios would impact the business case. Remember, this is hosting content in a daemon on your machine .. I think that'd a non-starter for a lot of people, despite the upside of shorter shader updates. (I'm not super up on what the US ISP market/landscape is like these days, but are not data caps still a thing on many plans there? I get the sense that hosting off a home line is not only a performance concern but a concern with actual possible financial ramifications.)

It can't be only when the game is open - this is when gamers are most sensitive to their computers doing other work, and the available of such a network would be far more limited.

Comment Re:BitTorrent (Score 1) 60

Also a torrent like network would be absolute loaded with cache misses. You need to fetch a shader from somebody who has the exact same hardware/drive/game version combination as you do, and they need to have opted in. I highly suspect the majority case for many would be to cache miss and end up compiling locally.

Comment Re:BitTorrent (Score 1) 60

Asking people to host and serve a non-trivial amount of content to other players is a non-starter. (The size of compiling all the shaders for CoD can range from a couple gigs to 10 gigs.) Opting in to a torrent-like network would have to be opt in - many people would just opt out (justifiably or not) minimizing the point of such a network.

You can probably assume that if you've thought of something, they've thought of it too. They simply have constraints and considerations - both technical and business oriented - you don't need or want to account for.

Comment Re: Why can't the pre-compiled ones be distributed (Score 1) 60

It's worth noting that many game studios/engines do support shared shader caches in their local studio pipelines, but the hardware config spread is much more limited, and the costs for lost productivity waiting for shaders is far greater than hosting a shader cache on premises.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 1) 70

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

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