TwinIon

I almost feel bad for SBF after reading this VOX article: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself WWW.VOX.COM The fallen crypto CEO on what went wrong, why he did what he did, and what lies he told along the way. Kinda seems like he felt like he was talking to a friend rather than a reporter. Admitting that his stance on regulation was a fraud, as were his efforts at philanthropy and even ethics. Does seem like he's genuinely upset he lost people's money, but the fact that he basically lost it all on accident proves how much of a house of cards the whole thing was.

I understand why they had a hard time with the pricing. They don't want to sell it at a loss, and honestly it's hard to say how profitable a market segment that won't pay for a Series S would be for MS. If they were really confident that selling a $100 stick would bring in a ton of new customers to the Xbox ecosystem and that Gamepass revenue would quickly make up for a loss, I imagine they'd consider it. As it stands, I can see why throwing it in TVs and hoping you pick up customers while also continuing to refine the tech makes sense. The Samsung partnership, between not having to provide any hardware and having an advertising partner, is a much easier sell for the time being. He talked about how the Xcloud app is just a fancy PWA, so when the time is right they'll be able to put in on other hardware. Maybe they just need to push nVidia to put out a new Shield device or partner with Roku. Anyone what might be willing to allow them to monetize inside the app for less than 30%. Amazon would probably rather push Luna, Apple won't budge on their cut, but other TV brands will probably sign on in time.

Ragnarok is very much God of War 2018 but more! It's not substantially different in function or feel, but there's more of everything and everything is very well done. If you hoped that the last game was the starting point of an evolving series, I suppose you might be dissapointed, but if you loved that game and wanted more of it, then Ragnarok delivers in spades. I do agree with @Kal-El814 in the criticism that at times there is too much that feels too inconsequential. Yeah, unlocking new skills is good, and some armor pieces have specific traits that really make a difference, but there's also an endless number of runic this or artifact that serving very little purpose other than to give you a reason to keep opening chests. I've gotten lost in the menu more than once looking for where to slot the doodad that I just picked up, and most of the time I can't tell any difference. I'm playing on normal and I still die a number of times on harder fights, so maybe others will notice the nuance a bit more. Still, I enjoyed that you could somewhat tune things one way or another. I really like the armor that heals you when you do a stun grab, so I've built towards that end. I basically equip anything that increases stun so I can convert that to health. I like that build both because I get health, but also because the feedback loop is quite clear. Stun things, get health, repeat. Most of the armor I've found so far (lvl 6) is all "chance for good thing when doing x thing," which makes it easy to not notice, even if it is being beneficial. I do wish that you could find wrist and wast armor that had substantial effects like the chest armor does, and not simply supporting benefits.

I find it odd that the right wing media take on Trump running again seems so far from what it seems like the average GOP voter's opinion is. While I'm sure the lead up to 2024 will be contentious, I'd argue that Trump is still the front runner. He's still more popular now among Republicans than he was at any time during the 2016 election cycle. The closest point of comparison I can think of is Hilary in 2016. She'd lost the last time she ran, but was still favorable in the party, and her announcement was no real surprise. Certainly there were those that didn't want her to run again, and a vocal minority of people who actively disliked her, but I can't imagine MSNBC running a graphic of possible nominees and not including her before her official announcement, like what Fox just did with Trump. Trump has basically been campaigning since he left office, he's still popular among his voters, and despite DeSantis's rise, seems like the odds on favorite to win the Primary, but he's being met with disdain from outlets that praised him non-stop for years. I'm not befuddled as to why this is happening, but I am curious if they can keep it up, and if they do how much it will shape the election.

Digital Foundry mentioned in their review that nearly every title that utilizes ray tracing supports DLSS, while only a handful use FSR2, and DLSS looks better to boot. I'm looking to play at 4K, and if I'm going to spend $1000 or more on a card, I want those bells and whistles. AMD having a pending competing technology while falling behind in both results and adoption doesn't aid their case. Still, as I said, I'm not entirely convinced it's worth the money to me, so I am curious to see how the AMD cards end up comparing.

There is zero reason that any anti-trust regulator should care about Elon buying Twitter. Owning multiple big companies in completely different spaces just doesn't matter, even if he does a bad job at one or more of them. I'd be happy if leveraged buyouts weren't a thing, but that's different topic altogether. I largely agree that the EU is overdoing it a bit when it comes to MS and Activision, mostly because gaming is a pretty competitive space with a number of large players at nearly every level. Sure, Call of Duty is a big franchise, but even if MS was planning on making it exclusive, I feel like the market is still healthy enough that the acquisition should go through. That being said, I'd much rather have an active anti-trust regulator than one that just rubber stamps every acquisition.

It's all good that he keeps saying all that, but it's also the minimum that he needs to say to appease European regulators, who probably want an actual contract.

Gah. After skipping the 30XX series I was so ready to jump in with a 40XX series card, defaulting to the 4080 card as I've done for the last few generations. Now the 4080 is in such an odd place. It's fast enough, but now the top card is actually worth considering, AMD launching in a month for hundreds less, and the prices all around having shot way up, I'm not sure what I want to do. There probably isn't much hope that nVidia lowers prices anytime soon. It also seems like DLSS 3 is a big deal, so even if AMD delivers similar performance, it loses out on that account. Then again, all of this is moot until it's easier to actually buy one, and since I'm a bit conflicted on what to aim for, I probably just won't end up with any of them for a while. Would be nice to upgrade before Starfield.

I honestly expected Elon to more or less run the company normally while slowly trying some new things (that would likely be terrible ideas, but at least tempered by some time and the existing org structure.) I really hadn't expected him to speed run such terrible ideas after sinking so much cash into the company. Even just before the sale went through, I thought he might break twitter, but I expected it to happen gradually as the accumulation of Elon crud gummed up the works. I also expected that to be the reason that Twitter stayed relevant, even if the ship was sinking. At this point I honestly think there's a real market opportunity for a company like Automatic, Snap, or (most likely) Meta to successfully replace Twitter.

I wish I could have some hope that a crypto failure of this magnitude would more or less end the craze, but I think we're going to be stuck with it a while longer. Still, this must be the crypto crash with the biggest average consumer facing presence. Look through this list of their big sports sponsorships, and it's clear they've been doing their best to be in front of average folks. The Miami Heat arena, Steph Curry, Shaq, the MLB, Tom Brady, Mercedes F1. There might have been bigger crashes in crypto (I haven't kept track), but nothing I can think of had such attempts at general name recognition. The only sad thing about this is that it also means that a lot of regular people probably got caught up in the hype and will lose their money. I'll never cry for a crypto company or investor, but it is sad for all the people they scammed out of their money.

I think it's increasingly clear that Trump is no longer a winner in general elections, but we're still at a point where Trump has enough following to win primaries. If Trump lost a primary, I think we'd see a real split in the GOP. As it stands, he just has too much sway in the party for it to move on. So they're stuck in this place where the GOP can't move past Trump, but they can't win with him, but oddly enough him losing might be worse for them. I's so love to see Trump lose in the primaries and then run in the general under a different party. It would be the most glorious bloodbath, especially if he got other candidates to run for his party as well.

So apparently Adidas owns all the rights to the Yeezy shoes (with one exception) and is going to resume selling them next year, presumably under a different brand name. As someone that knows absolutely nothing about these shoes, I'm curious what people think will happen when Adidas puts them back on sale. Are these shoes that people are only buying because of Kanye, or are there more typical shoes that people would and have bought for other reasons? I'm sure they'd expect to sell fewer overall, but I wonder how much the association with Kanye matters.

It feels very Elon to: Decide the way something has been done is stupid Come up with "new" thing to replace old thing Reverse track on "new" thing until he's basically reinvented the the old way End up reversing track again to end up with something that seems obviously worse than the old way

Yeah, that's part of why I didn't vote for it. If all the money went to infrastructure (charging stations, electric city vehicles, etc) then I probably would have voted for it. I feel like we should be moving past the point of rebates, and a rebate program that is heavily backed by a company that will need to buy a bunch of electric cars felt pretty fishy.

In CA the two biggest propositions revolved around expanding gambling, and they both look to be soundly defeated. Prop 26 wanted to allow sports betting on tribal lands and at four horse racing tracks, and it is losing 30/70. A much more expansive law would have allowed online sports betting and it's losing 17/83. A very strange prop to tax the wealthy to help pay for electric cars lost, and a prohibition on the sale of flavored tobacco was upheld. Even though I'm not in LA, I'm very happy to see Villanueva lose.

My hot take is that these layoffs are thanks to Apple more than they are Zuck burning cash chasing the Metaverse. Generally, tech companies tend to be fine burning cash as long as they're also printing it. Google/Alphabet can spend tens of billions on "other bets", but when ad revenue starts taking a hit, it's the first thing to get cut. Facebook was doing well, but Apple's app tracking changes really cut into their cash flow, and suddenly the spending on AR/VR starts to look more suspect. Generally though, I expect them to be just fine. Apple might have hurt them, but they still make a ton of money.

My physical copy from Amazon shipped. I feel like when Amazon themselves ship things to me they either get here really early or pretty late. Fingers crossed for the former.

I've now finished the game, and unfortunately the complaints I had early on were never really resolved. Movement never feels great, even in most vehicles. I prioritized anti-air cannons above all else so I could use helicopters at every possible opportunity. I largely abandoned a stealthy approach and went full on rambo for most of the game, but for as much as the game wants to emphasize doing things how you want and for how many crazy tools it gives you, it seems completely incapable of delivering a satisfying combat experience. I would fly up to an enemy base, land right on their doorstep, and I could take out most of the meager garrison before they even started firing back. I didn't use cover, didn't pre-spot enemies, just few right up and started shooting. I'm now convinced that the reason for the lack of enemies is a technical issue. I tried a few times to see how many enemies I could get the game to spawn for me, and even in the final missions or capturing a large base after the game was over, I couldn't get more than eight or nine enemies at a time. Given the radar and the spotting grenades, it's pretty easy to keep track of them. To compensate on larger missions, the game would wait for you to kill someone, and then spawn in another. While there was a clear effort to not spawn enemies in your direct line of sight, it wasn't always successful, nor were the locations that they'd spawn in make much sense. The worst I ran into was a helicopter that spawned right on top of my head, but often baddies would spawn right around a corner. A frustrating experience when you just cleared that corner. Most of the time though, there wouldn't be that many guys. You'd kill the five or six soldiers and that would be it. That would be more forgivable if the enemies were in any way intelligent, but even for open world NPCs, these guys were dumb as rocks and slow to react. I played the latter half of the game basically never worrying about anyone seeing me, because even if they saw me first, they'd be dead before they took a shot. I was also bummed that the crazier stuff wasn't very effective, with the exception of the bow. The resolver weapons were largely worse than standard weapons, especially since you couldn't customize them much, and some of them were counter to their seemingly intended purpose. A gun that pairs directly with a stealth build is really loud and can't be equipped with a silencer. Again, it didn't really matter because you didn't need much to take out the small groups the game would throw at you. I'd also argue that this game is well below par in terms of how well it reacted to the player. I understand that you're never going to have Last of Us levels of continuity in an open world game, but maybe half the time a random sound line wouldn't feel right or be outright wrong.

I would like to have seen the final season, but even though I kinda enjoyed the most recent couple seasons, I doubt it was going to top where it began.

I haven’t done any outside reading, but I just finished the series. I agree that it’s very well made, but by the end of it I couldn’t help but feel that the show makes a clear case for homicide. Crimes committed under duress, under the worst possible circumstances, and with the intent to limit suffering, but crimes none the less. For myself, the value in the show wasn’t in litigating the ethical issues surrounding the dead at Memorial, but in clarifying the horrors of Katrina. At the time I was in college and not really reading the news, but my recollection of Katrina was that of an escalating disaster. A hurricane that devastated an area, followed by an intensifying humanitarian crisis. So forgive my lacking nuance on the issue, but the timeline the show depicts really clarified why Katrina was such a disaster. The lag time between the end of the hurricane, the levies breaking, and the resulting flooding isn’t something I could have laid out. I also think the show did an excellent job in depicting just how unprepared and understated the response was. My instinct while watching was to go into my own emergency response mode. Like watching idiots in a horror film, I wanted to yell “get out of the building”, but the show does a pretty good job of reminding the viewer that, especially at the onset, these people didn’t understand the gravity of their situation. They didn’t understand. They were not prepared. In the particular case of the hospital in the show, some of that was institutional, some of it was individual, but so much of was governmental. If there’s any reason to doubt the way the response is depicted in the film, please let me know, but I feel like the show paints a very effective picture of why Katrina was as devastating as it was. It doesn’t get into the details of levies or anything, but the complete lack of response and planning feels like it fills in a few gaps for me.

As someone that is interested in a 4080 to game at 4K, I'll keep an eye on how these stack up once we get some actual bench numbers in. Unfortunately, I think that with DLSS3 that nVidia will still be my default choice, but I'm willing to see what AMD can do, especially since it seems like AMD has a price advantage.

I've got a friend and a brother with Model 3s and they are fun cars to drive. My wife has an electric Niro, and it's nowhere near the same experience. I also envy the Tesla charging network. However, I can't understate how much I dislike everything in the car relying on the center screen. I think there's a very good chance that if Tesla put a normal car interior in a Model 3 that I'd have one right now.

I've been bullish on VR since I bought a DK2, but I've been dissapointed in how slowly the tech has evolved. Once VR tech caught up to phones, it largely stopped progressing. It's an unfortunate chicken and egg problem, since phones aren't going to push display tech much more, but VR doesn't sell at the scale needed to justify the investments that I think the tech needs to be really great. I was also just hoping that there would be some technical solution to the discomfort issue, but there doesn't seem to be anything in sight quite yet. It really boxes VR into specific types of games when you know that a huge portion of the audience simply can't touch a game with smooth movement. Teleporting is an ok solution, but I wouldn't want to play Skyrim or Fallout teleporting everywhere, it's just strange. I think that if you could solve that issue then a ton of options would open up in VR gaming and we'd see adoption increase dramatically. Until then, I think there will still be some very worthwhile experiences in VR, and the PSVR2 looks to be the best hope for high end VR games in the near future. $550 feels pretty steep when the library will be so limited. I specifically avoided the PSVR because I expected the successor to be far better and still play all the old games. Hopefully they'll get ported over in short order and maybe even updated to utilized the new controllers and the PS5's horepower. I'll get one eventually, but I may wait longer than I first expected.

I had enough time to put in a good few more hours and get a better sense of the game as a whole. It's Far Cry. Not really any better, not really any worse. I'm not a big fan of how the open world is structured. There is some mild level system in place, but this isn't like AC Odyssey where if you're greatly underleveled you have no chance. The rifle you leave the beginning island with is enough to two tap enemies in the highest level areas. I don't even understand the point of a level system like this when it makes no real difference. Either make it so the levels matter more and give you something to work toward, or get rid of an empty system that doesn't affect the game. The world itself is quite large, and has plenty of ubisoft checklist things to do, but a few things make it less compelling to play around in than it should be. For one thing, it can often be oddly devoid of enemy troops. Checkpoints typically have three, maybe five guys at them. Ok, those are just roadblocks, maybe no need for a large troop presence. Then I'm taking out anti-aircraft cannons, which are often part of or very near large military installations, and those have tiny enemy counts. I'd say the average is three guys, but I came across a number with no guards at all, even in the highest level areas in the game. Military bases that you take over might also have as few as three guys, but the upper end is still maybe seven. These troop counts stand out even more because during story missions there seem to be plenty of baddies. It makes going through the side missions to do all these things kinda boring if you get basically no resistance. The other thing that makes the world less compelling to play is the movement. I just feel so slow, and I've invested in whatever perks and stuff I can so far in movement speed, but it never feels good. The map is dense with guerrilla paths, which is fun. These paths often have grappling hook spots and things to climb, but moving is so slow and the map so large that you're nearly always incentivized to just take a vehicle. I've found these paths more fun in the cities than in the rest of the map, but it feels like a missed opportunity. Maybe later in the game you get a grappling hook launcher and some running shoes or something, but I'm decently through the game and I avoid running as much as I can. I don't want to be overly negative. The game is pretty fun, there's a ton to do, and it gets some things right. It's happy to let you do things however you want. It's cool with you getting distracted and grabbing a convoy that happens by while you're clearing a base. I feel like some open world action games don't want to track multiple objectives in progress and I'm glad that's not the case here. Still, this is no Forbidden West. This is a Far Cry game right out of the Ubisoft factory. It's not an improvement and it's not a real downgrade. It's perfectly fine, and if you can get it cheap it's fun enough.

After seeing that article Brick posted, I was curious what the audience reaction to the show was, and I'm kinda shocked that it's so bad. At least the major sites (RT, Metacritic, IMDB) all have really terrible user scores. The critics scores are good, not great, but the users really trashed it. I tend not to watch a lot of TV I expect to be bad, but there's no way this show is deserving of an F. Even if you account for a fanboy factor, I don't see how Rings of Power is 10 points worse than Halo, which was a mess.