OK, interesting. I’m a little unclear on how they’re calculating rMax and rPeak though?

I would really want a measure of actual compute power, like teraflops per capita or something. Still imperfect, but better than just counting the number of buildings.

It’s the second one. They are all in on this AI bullshit because they’ve got nothing else. There are no other exponential growth markets left. Capitalism has gotten so autocanibalistic that simply being a global monopoly in multiple different fields isn’t good enough. For investors it’s not about how big your company is, how reliable your yearly returns are, how stable your customer base; the only thing that matters is how fast your business is growing. But small businesses have no space to grow because of the monopolies filling every available space, and the monopolies are already monopolies. There are no worlds left to conquer. They’ve already turned every single piece of our digital lives into a subscription, blockchain was a total bust, the metaverse was a demented fever dream, VR turned out to be a niche toy at best; unless someone comes up with some brand new thing that no one has ever heard of before, AI is the last big boondoggle they have left to hit the public with.

And it’s a ride-on??! Damn dude, what are you complaining about, I just have a stupid walk-behind.

Could be fewer but larger. China likes megastructures. Could just be that their compute power is much more heavily consolidated.

Personally I think it’d be interesting to see this per capita, so here’s my back of a napkin math for data centers per 1 million pop (c. 2022):

• NL - 16.78
• US - 16.15
• AU - 11.72
• CA - 8.63
• GB - 7.68
• DE - 6.22
• FR - 4.63
• JP - 1.75
• RU - 1.74
• CN - 0.32

Worth noting of course that this only lists the quantity of discrete data centers and says nothing about the capacity of those data centers. I think it’d be really interesting to break down total compute power and total storage by country and by population.

I’d also be interested to know what qualifies as a “data center”? For example, are ASIC based crypto mining operations counted, even though their machinery cannot be repurposed to any other function? That would certainly account for a chunk of the the US (almost all of it in Texas).

Goes hand in hand with this one;

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” - Ursula K Le Guin

$100 million is the reported budget for development. Generally speaking you double that to account for marketing and publishing costs.

(Though in the case of Concord, god only knows what marketing they actually did)

As an East Coaster I am legally, morally and spiritually obligated to upvote Stan Rogers.

Genuinely one of the all time best Black Mirror episodes

“Drink verification can to continue…”

+1 on the Nebula subscription. It’s worth every penny. That and Dropout are the only streaming subscriptions I still maintain.

That’s more like it. And doubly so if you can’t read it.

Hard disagree: The above advice is relevant to everyone, even if you’re not struggling to survive. We are all victims of capitalism, and even those of us who are living relatively comfortably under this system need to recognize that the billionaire class are the enemy of all life on Earth. It’s not a good system for you just because you get the best table scraps.

If you stop caring about those who are barely scraping by just because you’re not then you’re a fucking idiot.

QC is worth catching up on. As Jeph got older his work got more mature, more overtly progressive, and aggressively more queer. It’s the only webcomic from back in the day that I still read daily, because it never fails to brighten my morning a little bit.

For anyone not familiar with this game, or anyone who’s only familiarity is through the trailers (which really focus on tone and visuals), I really want to recommend the videos by YouTuber Riloe, who has been playing early builds with the devs and chatting to them extensively about the game. They’re really well produced videos, and they really help to explain the tone of the game, the interesting mechanical ideas behind it, and what exactly this company is trying to achieve. Obviously, take with a grain of salt, the guy is clearly a fan and these videos aren’t really trying to be critical, so this should all be read as basically press releases;

This antishooter game is beautiful and horrifying

The living war ecosystem where you don’t matter

The beautifully dark warscape of the antishooter

I’m really excited for this game. Not just for the visuals, but for everything they’re doing with the mechanical design. The idea of playing as scavengers trapped between two warring factions is incredibly cool, and based on early previews it sounds like there are a lot of very clever design elements, especially in the AI, all built to back up that core idea. For example enemies intelligently prioritize targets; a tank won’t focus on infantry if there’s an enemy tank present, and even when it does target the infantry it’ll use its machine guns, not the main cannon. Enemies will focus on you if you make yourself the biggest threat, but if you’re smart and follow the flow of battle you can keep their focus elsewhere.

That’s really smart stuff, and by all accounts it works very well. I also really like what the studio is doing more broadly. They’re really trying to push back on a lot of the toxic practices in the gaming industry. I’ll be getting the game day one, mostly just to reward them for trying to do something different.

You can always be bummed out about ageing. It’s OK to mourn the loss of an identity that you’d grown into. I’m getting my first grey hairs in, and its not easy seeing that in the mirror. It brings a lot of complicated feelings. Humanity has spent our entire existence grappling with the finality of time.

But my wife? She loves those grey hairs. She thinks they make me look even sexier. Time is unrelenting, and brutal. But love doesn’t care about time. Love, and joy, and friendship and kindness… These things will happen at every point in your life, if you let them.

Yeah, most of the people I know who got into relationships young ended up getting out of those relationships sooner or later. I can only think of one exception. But the relationships I see people building in their middle age are so much stronger and healthier.

OK, serious talk for anyone under thirty who is really relating to this; you don’t even know who you are before you hit your thirties.

I’m dead fucking serious here. Under twenty, you’re basically still in the oven, and your twenties are basically spent figuring out who and what the fuck you are. Thirty is when the good shit starts. Thirty is when you start to finally have a grasp on who you are as a human being. Dating in your thirties is so much fucking better. You’re past the idiocy and the drama and you’re into the part where actual human adults learn to understand each other.

Please, please get out of this mindset that anyone over thirty is an ancient crone. You’re not even out of the fucking tutorial yet.