Also, they claim it is safe due to lack of radiation. But ultrasonic can fuck shit up too. I mean ultrasonic is currently used to break up kidney stones, shear and fragment DNA (for NGS prep).
Good points, but to be fair, ultrasonic is currently used to break up kidney stones because it is safe to use it to do so.
By your powers combined, I am... the British Colonies!
The main aim of Stop Killing Games is to ensure the practice of rug-pulling eventually comes to an end. They are not trying to save MMOs, for example.
Moreover they don't demand that every game currently on the market comply with open-sourcing requirements: at a minimum, companies always have the option of simply providing customers with adequate notice before shutdown. Open-sourcing the server would be nice, but it's hardly the only way to protect consumers' interests. Scott has, for example, suggested game boxes being marked with an estimated expiry date for online service functionality.
But most importantly: because this is about future games, not the present, the market has time to change. If studios and publishers are designing their games with a fair EOL in mind, then they can make decisions from the get-go to avoid licensing dependencies that they won't be able to release in a possible 'afterlife' version of the game. As suggested by your example of GameSpy in C&C: Generals, when a commercial dependency is crucial to a game's success, it tends to be a client-side library, but typically the problematic dependencies aren't crucial; they're e.g. add-ons for Unity or Unreal that the studio bought to save time. In a world with SKG laws, the providers of these dependencies aren't going to be a stagnant target either—demand for compliant libraries will motivate development of open-source versions.
Interestingly, the will for doing this does exist among game developers; they just need the institutional support from legislation to twist the arms of the studios and publishers. Ross Scott has talked to a lot of devs who are burnt out from having their projects cancelled, leaving them with huge gaping holes in their resumes and portfolios where they've spent years on unreleased projects that are stuck under NDA. In general they tend to see SKG as a path to ensuring the games that do see the light of day aren't also scrapped, which would erode their work histories even further. (Apparently it also just plain feels bad to have your work erased from history. Shocking, I know.)
You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.
I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
- 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
- 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
- 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
- full four wheel drive.
So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.
What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?
Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)
That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.
I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.
But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.
I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.
The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).
Fear not! It's entirely possible the category was chosen by an AI. Editorial automation would probably reduce the error rate here.
People with my genetics start dying around age fifty - polycystic kidney disease.
I'm ten years older than that, my blood pressure earlier this evening was 120/70something, my last fasting sugar was around 85, I weigh ten pounds more than I did in college, and I've walked 1,393 miles in the last year. My last vice is caffeine and I will go off it periodically, in one instance for seven years.
I got dealt a terrible hand, health wise, Lyme at forty that triggered a complex immune condition, but I refuse to feel (or look) bad. A lot of it IS in your hands, you just need the will to change. It's not easy
It's all a small price to pay for Eat Your Veggies.
Duke 3D's soundtrack was not exclusively the work of Bobby Prince; Lee Jackson, Apogee's go-to music guy, also did some of the tracks, including the title theme, Grabbag.
Prince used not only his MIDI skills but also his experience as a lawyer to ensure his 'inspired' derivatives were as close as legally possible to the originals. The relationship between individual tracks is often very clear and sometimes even hinted in the metadata of the source files.
While universal basic income is a useful policy tool and I think we WILL reach it eventually, there are economics papers out there that demonstrate that, sans Pigouvian transaction tax, AI is a race to the bottom.
The AI Layoff Trap by Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas is still sitting on my desktop. A quick Google search reveals they are not the only ones who are pursuing this line of thinking.
BUt here in the U.S. "muh freedumb" will ensure that we run that race till the bottom falls out. Hopefully Asia and Europe play this transition a bit smarter, so something of our society continues.
The market IS white hot right now, but the Hormuz hit is just starting to land. Demand at the edges is what sets the price - if all southeast Asian gamers are spending the GPU money on gas, that cools the rush. And I have no confidence any of these datacenter announcements are going to lead to actual builds. Companies talked a great game, but the political heat is on, the electric and water constraints are real, and advances like TurboQuant, which conservatively speaking offers a 4x boost to existing GPUs
The AI/datacenter/GPU self dealing circle looks more like the derivative traders of 2008 with each passing day. Just like CDOs, that "money" is all conditional, and when conditions change, it's all gone. Society got some nice frontier models and advances in manufacturing out of it, now if corporate America takes even half a step back on the rush
I spend my days working on the system for my startup. Since I had a computer science education and a bunch of time in grade running ISP systems, I bring that distributed systems engineer vibe to my vibe coding. It'll need work once it's funded, but the MVP will be functional and secure.
I was using X tokens/week via Claude Code. They stumbled on the Opus 4.7 rollout and I got busy tuning my setup. I added LSP Enforcement Kit + Serena, CodeSight, and OptiVault. This made Claude more or less behave
Companies that are using token burn as a metric, if they are not providing top quality tooling for the people using it, are basing their performance reviews on who can tolerate some highly random LLM over an efficient, well thought out harness.
Meta foisted a digital cesspool on us and it would not hurt my feeling a bit to see it completely desiccated. I do feel badly for the legions of humans that are going to be forced to wade through the increasingly crusty muck while the company attempts to figure out what to do about AI. There are rumblings out there about what is happening to the advertising based internet we all know (and despise). Meta clearly can't execute with AI and they may well get bowled over by it.
GM needs to be made to disgorge every dime they made selling that data.
They need to disclose who purchased the data and what the price was.
Every victim of this privacy violation needs legal recourse and class action seems like it would be best for the masses.
Anyone who can show significant harm should aggressively pursue all parties involved.
The only way this behavior will stop is when engaging in it brings bitter pain.
There may well be a legit issue that Bambu is facing, there's a bunch of "think of the children" stuff in play right now, it's mostly about ghost guns from what I have seen. They are perhaps under pressure and maybe they will be compelled to do things in terms of identity of users and/or items being printed. This is another instance of gun nuts ruining things for the rest of us.
But the chickendroppings manner in which they approached this merits a vigorous walloping. If they HAVE to do it due to some government pressure, be upfront, tell all of us, and maybe we'll put a stop to it. What they did here just smacks of
"Plan to throw one away. You will anyway." - Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
