The floppy disk ("diskette") was originally developed as a microcode load device for the 370/145.

It's not really the same. With the photoshop filter the artist can choose which filter they want to use, apply it, check whether they like the end result, go back to the original if they don't, apply a different filter on top of that if it's not quite right, tweak the results of the filter by hand, etc etc and only after all that if they're completely satisfied with the end result it will go into the actual game binaries. Certain textures may benefit from one type of filters while others need another type or nothing at all.

With nvidia filter, as I understand it, the decision is just whether to use the one filter for everything, or not. Apparently you can set the intensity of the filter (i.e. how much you want to AI-ify your texture) per object, but that's about all the fine control you get with it. And that decision may well be out of artists' hands - if management mandates dlss 5, not much you can do.

The results of generative AI, from what I've seen, are attractive but kind of bland, and once you've seen enough they all look pretty similar. That seems no less true for the examples they gave for dlss 5. So for shovelware that uses all the standard assets it may improve the look, but for something where the artists were going for a specific atmosphere and specific character look, it certainly won't.

No, as far as AAA is concerned it just means you can hire fewer and/or cheaper artists. Possibly redistributing the savings into hiring more middle managers. It certainly does not mean the game is cheaper - AAA games have not gone down in price in a long time.

He gave over $10,000,000 to them in 2023. In that regard, he's not very different from so many other vampire billionaires https://archive.is/RgXOg (Rolling Stone)

"Round and round she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows."

The best that I heard: "When Chuck Norris was born, he drove his mom home from the hospital.'

When I was 55 years old and people would ask my age, I would answer "Nixon speed limit".

Years ago, I was in a town a couple of hours outside of Minneapolis to support a customer trial of equipment. The town had a Walmart. In conversations with several people there, it became evident that people were driving upwards of 100 miles from various small towns and individual farms.

Patents cost money to draft and file. Unless the company has inside patent counsel or patent agent, they will need to pay outside counsel to draft it and answer through the examination. I had one proposal rejected by inside counsel because "we don't do phase locked loop patents".

One set of motivations for patents of broad scope, is to stake a claim for possible future use, to have something to trade around standards bodies, or to offer as value to settle infringement actions against some other patent.

My contact was on a DEC-20. One guy was in the terminal room playing it for hours every night. A typical night would bring one or two night bell calls from his wife. I poked around at it a little, then found that it provided a Lisp interpreter, which was more attractive to me than a game.

It's not an unusual judgement call to make. Let's say you're deciding whether an essay plagiarizes another work. If it basically copies the whole thing verbatim, maybe changing a couple of words to disguise the fact it's been copy-pasted, it's clearly plagiarism. If it lays out some ideas expressed in that other work (clearly attributing those ideas) and then makes own commentary and analysis of those ideas, it is not plagiarism.

That is very definitely AI.

That depends. I think I would be fine with things like AI-powered cleanup of lines, changing tone or colour composition of the image, denoising, stuff like that. The kind of tools that already exist in something like Photoshop, but better. As soon as you have objects in the artwork actually drawn by AI, it's an AI artwork.

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."

Gambling caused an arguably bigger problem in sports where athletes would deliberately underperform in exchange for a share of the gambling money. Football (or soccer) and a number of other sports have match-fixing scandals on a fairly regular basis in spite of all the efforts to stamp it out. Now this Polymarket brings the same problem to basically any other part of society. Imagine there being a bet on some sensitive information being leaked, or a high profile legal case being decided a certain way. Or some celebrity being involved in a car accident.

Cadmium and selenium also are used in inclusion pigments for ceramic color glazes. The cadmium compound is surrounded by zirconia to give better firing and color performance, and to reduce solubility of the toxic compounds in the finished ware.

I'm not sure about the cost. I believe the main reason why nuclear fission reactors are so expensive is the risk of catastrophic meltdown and costs of building all the safety features needed to mitigate that risk, as well as costs of dealing with legal challenges etc. Fusion would not have that problem. For comparison, the cost of construction of UK's Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor is projected to reach £33 billon - see here. £2.5 billion is relative peanuts by comparison.

As far as I'm able to tell the engineering involved is indeed massively complex, but the prototype of anything is always expensive. If the technology can be made to work, then down the line people will find many ways to reduce the cost and simplify the construction.

Whether it can be made to work is a big question, I do have my doubts as well. If they can pull it off though, the payoff would be huge. Fusion would provide power 24 hours a day, regardless of the weather, and be easily scaleable, like nuclear, but without the danger of meltdown, the need for exotic fuel - deuterium and tritium are far easier to obtain then uranium, and without the need to dispose of toxic reactor waste. All the benefits of nuclear fission, with almost none of the drawbacks.

And the benefits go far beyond providing reliable power and creating jobs. If commercial fusion power can be achieved, I imagine most developed countries will want to build their own reactors. And UK at that point would be the only place with the expertise on building functional fusion reactors. There would be an absolute shitton of money to be made on selling that expertise. But again, that's all dependent on whether it can be made to work. Still, of all the ways to spend 2.5 billion, not the worst by a long shot.

In the meantime though, we should continue building up renewable power.