It’s interesting to see what people genuinely consider to be bad, or maybe they just missed that word? 😅

For me, it would have to be Under The Skin; a solid 6/10 game, in a world where 7/10 is considered average!

It’s not as much a “feel-good” story as comments who haven’t read beyond the headline might make you believe:

The PIF values its total investments at nearly $1 trillion in assets, but a significant percentage of these are hard-to-sell assets with no public valuation; as a result, the NYT reports that the PIF reps have told international investors that it is “unable to allocate” for the near future.

Despite this, a spokesperson for the PIF, Marwan Bakrali, told the newspaper that it had $60 billion in cash and “similar financial instruments”.

ETA: Its not as though they’ve lost a significant chunk of the fund, but rather that a sizeable portion of it is tied up in illiquid assets that can’t be readily sold, or valued and loaned against.

Though there is some mention of some of their investments being in “distress”, so there is at least some good news?

Perfect timing, I got this notification just as I saw this post:

If you know, you know. If not, highly recommend checking it out!

This, I think, is the big open secret about the push for consoles to move towards pure digital distribution.

It’s easier to not have to compete against your back catalog for gamer attention, if you cut off end-users ability to access it!

Rockstar already tried something like this, when they released the Definitive Defective Edition.

It failed successfully, in no small part to the remaster being absolute garbage, but for the AAA publishers, it’s merely a small setback that they will try again in the near future.

It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.

Not trying to have a go at you, actually genuinely curious: Do you have a source to confirm this, or is it more of an educated guess on your part?

All I’ve seen so far is that it’s a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6c/12t CPU and RDNA 3 28 CU GPU.

You know, I’ve always thought of Metroidvanias as 2D experiences - but reading your comment and mulling it over, I have to agree: Arkham Asylum is very much a Metroidvania, and a great one at that!

They do exist, depending on the types of trash;

• Recycling Centres
• Pawn Shops
• eBay

It was rough, back of the napkin math - primarily intended for those in places where EV disinformation is highest (the US).

Those of us that primarily use metric are more than capable of roughly converting in our heads as required! 😅

Not intentionally being misleading, as I do have a footnote calling out not including carbon emissions from electricity generation as they vary so wildly based on the energy source.

But unlike ICE cars, EV emissions from energy sources are improving over time as nations build more and more renewable energy sources. Your linked report is correct, but potentially out of date already - the UK for instance was already at 58% in 2024, with a goal of full of 95%+ by the end of this decade.

Here in Australia, our uptake of residential solar has been so high that our energy providers are offering free electricity during peak daylight hours to all customers to help use up all of that excess production. It’s quite feasible for a significant portion of us here to be able to not only recharge an EV for free, but with next-to-no CO2 emissions.

Additionally, we now have a big Government subsidy in place to install batteries in our homes as well: ~£4,000 for a ~30kWh system, fully installed!

I share your love for older cars, but with a toddler and another one planned - we need to have a modern, safe car for peace of mind. But believe me, I will be ensuring that I disable as much telemetry as possible due to privacy concerns.

But for a secondary/weekend car - there is always the option of electrifying an older car, allowing for the best of both worlds - in a sense!

Metric tonnes, as that seems to be the generally used format when discussing CO2 emissions.

Which I know may be confusing, given that I quote imperial values in the rest of the stats - but it was just quick/dirty math and I figured that EV disinformation is highest in the US, so I tried to tailor the values for them.

Rough math involved: production of a new EV results in between 8-15 tonnes of CO2 emissions, depending on the size of the batteries and vehicle trim.

But let’s aim for somewhere in the middle and take ~12 tonnes as a yardstick.

~12 tonnes of CO2 emissions equates to roughly 1,350 gallons of fuel.

Depending of fuel efficiency, this would equate to between 20k~45k miles.

Feel free to double-check my math in case I did anything wrong, but it does validate that most of these „facts” around EVs are likely FUD spread by fossil fuel aligned sources.

ETA: initially forgot to include CO2 emissions from electricity generation - but this varies wildly based on source (nuclear, hydro & renewables at 0 etc.)

IP/trademarks/copyrights/etc.

This is likely going to be the main reason for the takedown notices, Sony will be exercising their legal rights in order to defend their trademarks & copyrights on Concord assets.

If a company doesn’t defend them vigorously, then any unlicensed works that are allowed to exist are then used as legal precedent moving forward to null/void such copyrights and trademarks.

As an aside, Sony is a global corporation and can likely choose to write down these losses in the most preferred region to maximise the tax offset - so likely either the US, or Ireland.

Sabotaged by the stupid placement of the microphone and earpiece… I still remember the taco phone memes of the day. Shame, it could have been great!

MySpace Tom? Literally the only one I can think of…

I’m not saying AI will go away, or not continue to improve - but we are very much at the tail end of the current mania phase, and we will see some market pullback as AI startups begin to go out of business when all of those lofty promises of AI fail to materialise.

Diminishing returns on ever increasing investment, circular investments based on speculative returns, these are all signs of the tail-end of a stock market bubble.

The best way to think of them is as cousins; they are similar - but not exactly the same.

They focus more on higher VRAM and CUDA cores compared to GPUs, while forgoing 3d acceleration capabilities.

But they both come out of the same factories; so when the demand for AI cards is as high as it is now - and Nvidia can sell as many as it produces with a higher margin than GPUs, there is little incentive for them to produce more GPUs and sell them at a competitive price.

So when the AI bubble bursts, demand for AI cards will crater - and there will be no financial incentive to mass produce them in such high quantities. This frees up production capacity at the TSMC factories, incentivising production of lower margin products like GPUs.

Economics is largely a game of supply & demand; when supply outstrips demand, prices fall as sellers search for buyers. When demand outstrips supply prices go up as buyers search for sellers.

Absolutely; but you just know that Publishers will just push to outsource development to 3rd party “contractors” so that they won’t be eligible, or some other such bullshit.

Assuming the AI bubble bursts before then, we might actually see somewhat reasonable pricing for next-gen consoles.

A major reason why prices have remained so inflated for so long post-COVID is because data centres have been sucking up every bit of silicon that TSMC has been able to pump out for both Nvidia and AMD.

But that would be honestly a very small upside, compared to what would likely be the Mother of All Stockmarket Crashes. The market cap of the Top 10 AI-related stocks is greater than the current US national debt, they aren’t in a position to be able to reasonably bail out those companies when it all eventually goes to shit, like they do in 2008.

It’s more about the console’s lifecycle, rather than it remaining the ‘current generation’. They’re implying that they will continue to ‘support’ the PS5 for another 5 years, whatever they determine that to mean (likely just keeping the online store open, maybe also multiplayer servers, and whatever PlayStation Plus features ).

Oh, absolutely - but a lot of perpetual/evolving media has similar issues where previous canon ends up being recontextualised, reframed or outright retconned in order to better fit the overarching story currently being told.

Sometimes it’s for the better, others for the worse (cough, Shadowlands, cough).

Still, it doesn’t stop it from being an otherwise great example of world building - evident in part by just how many people actually care about the lore!