Yeah, I think he missed the part where it discussed the swarm would have to be mostly autonomous since communicating back to earth for any sort of management commands is completely out of the question.
It's amazing they can still do it with voyager which is roughly 24 hours for one way traffic, 48 for round trip.
Game development is in a really weird place. Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics
Indie games are awesome right now, but they don't have the budgets to produce AAA games. So there is a huge gap. Innovative indie games with cool, new gameplay concepts, but always simple or retro graphics, and AAA games with shiny graphics on the other end but gameplay that hasn't changed in over a decade.
I'm just waiting for any AAA studio to provide something new with the AAA games. Maybe AI to improve NPCs in an open world game? Anything besides the same old gameplay with new skins on it.
It's just risk aversion. Companies want to turn video games into a factory line golden goose, but struggle to reconcile that each iteration through that factory line makes the final product relatively worse and worse, even if it continues to look better and better. Now even Call of Duty can't find a Call of Duty killer. But these same companies are terrified of trying anything new because new things do, on occasion flop. It would also entail scrapping the factory line, because creating a new game, instead of reskinning and old with a few new tweaks, is a way different beast.
That said, I don't really think the stereotypes of indie games are very valid anymore. Valheim looks great, has a massive open world, and is multiplayer. [1] It also started entirely as a result of one guy's pet project, until he grabbed a coworker and then set off to make it what it became. The graphics are stylized, but I think in a broadly aesthetically appealing way, as opposed to e.g. pixel graphics which are very off-putting to many people, myself among them. Pixel graphics came from an era of CRTs with interlaced scanning, and various other visual artifacts, that naturally blurred, antialiased, and blended them. Sharp jaggy edges never really existed, and I fail to understand why that's a popular style now.
Some game concepts are fairly well developed. A shooter like Call Of Duty is such a concept, so making a competitor is far more difficult. Sure, you can make up with setting and presentation.
But otherwise very true, true innovation happens in the indie world and the maximal complexity of these type of games is steadily rising due to better tools and maybe soon AI support.
For me indie gaming is going through its own aggravating phase right now, but it seems most people aren't bothered by it. The quality of the games is better than ever, but every indie title now goes through Early Access, sometimes for several years. By the time the game is released the hype cycle has already finished.
For people like me who play games just a couple of hours a week, I have no interest in playing an unfinished game. I have a library of games bigger than I could ever play and I will always skip the EA stuff.
>every indie title now goes through Early Access, sometimes for several years.
That mostly shows the realities of indie development. These games have less staff and need less sales to succeed, but they take much longer as indies lack the time (some do development on the side to a full time gig), manpower, or (sometimes) talent to get things done quickly.
>I have a library of games bigger than I could ever play
Well that proves the point. we also get more indies than ever. I don't think EA would give us more finished games. We'd just get less released games full stop. Even if you never play them I'm not sure if I'd call that a good thing.
Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics...
People have been saying this for decades at this point. I'm not seeing it.
Innovation is largely overrated. It can be a good thing, but the vast majority of games, whether AAA or indie, can't be truly innovative. And innovative doesn't translate directly to a game being enjoyable. Conversely, a game being "derivative" doesn't automatically make the game not fun to play.
Agreed. In video games, "innovation" quickly becomes "niche". Microsoft actually has a wider variety of games and genres represented on the Xbox, many highly praised, but frequently gets lambasted for having no games because the the overwhelming majority of players aren't actually interested in them. Sony on the other hand is dominating, and yet its biggest titles are all somewhat similar to each other and none of them really do anything new or interesting, they simply have a lot of polish.
If past history is any indication, TES6 will be to Skyrim fans what Skyrim was to Oblivion fans which was what Oblivion was to Morrowind fans. Daggerfall fans are split about Morrowind though and i'm not sure there are any Arena fans.
AAA basically just means nice graphics at this point. You can't dump more money into a piece of art to make it better, that's why all the innovation comes from indie games. Look at Balatro, a guy made a poker roguelike and became a millionaire overnight. I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.
Everyone keeps suggesting AI NPCs. I'm sure someone's gonna take a crack at it and it'll go about as well the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1 before everyone realized how horrible of an idea it is. If anything it'll make for a silly novelty like the VR games where you clumsily try to perform basic tasks with VR motion controls. But in this case you argue with an in-game LLM and see how quickly you can make it get defensive or start gaslighting you with made up facts about household cleaners you can combine to make a delicious cocktail.
Thing is 2M doesn't quite get you as far as you think. You get 10 devs (let's say, 4 programmers, 4 artists, 2 designers), pay them 100k each (which is lowballing it in med/high COL areas), and work 2 years. That's 2.4m just from labor, before advertising and other duties like community outreach. Sell for $30 (which is basically the top end of an "indie) and you need 80k copies to break even, more after platform cuts.
That's definitely a scale a AAA studio can afford, but far from what we associate "indie" with in our heads.That's where the exploitation begins.
The original games in the 90's? Yeah, probably. But cost of living was very different (so even if they made > 100k after adjusting for inflation, it went a lot farther), and the standards of games were much lower.
You can definitely make Doom 1993 with 1-3 people today (and without crunch). Making Doom 2016 levels of fidelity (even if we ignore the excellent optimization) would still be a very lofty task for 10 people. We still don't really have that many "full stack game devs" that can work at that scope and fidelity to bring the team size down.
> I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.
This is what game publishers do, and many of them are struggling too. It’s harder than it seems to pick winning horses. (Though in this case, it may be partially because more and more skilled teams are opting to self-publish.)
> I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.
Big publishers tried and did not succeed much. EA, Square Enix, T2 with Private Division and so on.
Some independant studio or publishers have their fans base : Amanita Design, Playdead, Zachtronics, Devolver Digital, Annapurna Interractive are for me the folk to watch.
Oh for sure. AAA games require too much effort and too much returns while indies can spend 1 year and 1 person and deliver hit being multiple time more profitable.
I use hyper-v regularly and never even heard of windows admin center. Another example of Microsoft changing something that isn't broke just for the sake of change.
I'm glad I've been building a homelab and can move all my studying too that since it seems hyper-v is being shoved out the door by Microsoft.
Windows Admin Center was created because everyone wanted to manage Windows from a web browser. The current result is it works, but it's far from an optimal GUI solution for managing Windows machines.
Windows Admin Center was created because Microsoft thinks sysadmins want to manage Windows from a web browser. Instead, most of them would rather use desktop apps over RDP, which is why the deprecated Microsoft Management Console (MMC) is still widely used. WAC adoption is nowhere near what it should be in practice at this point.
Or are they wealthy because they don't have kids....
But in general poor people have more kids, and as unpopular it will be to say, they can have more kids because the government subsidizes it. One parent doesn't work and gets all the benefits, so: no daycare costs, free medical care, welfare income, and food stamps/WIC.
Not saying we shouldn't have those things, but when only poor people get the government assistance when it comes to having kids, they'll be the ones who have the most kids.
Working class and above it costs a fortune to raise kids, not so for the non-working class. Now people will probably come say how wrong I am, but I live in a poor area and see this play out on a daily basis.
If they got rid of all the deductions and loopholes most people wouldn't need to file as the only thing they'd have to put on their taxes is their W2 income.
I believe the IRS is even informed of things like 401k disbursement and stock sales. Meaning most people wouldn't have to submit for those either.
The gains of simplify the tax code are gargantuan, but unfortunately, the wealthy and powerful organizations benefit from the current system, and would be hurt financially by simplifying it. So, it will never be simplified.
Part of the problem is that the main way the government knows how to give people money is through tax deductions. It doesn’t have to be that way. Covid checks demonstrated that grants are possible. That in and of itself would simple things, since there would just be a list of things you can apply for.
When you go to an urgent care it is a total crapshoot. I've seen some of the worst doctors ever there. One literally looked at my throat for 5 seconds, said I had strep, and went back to playing on his phone, they weren't busy I was the only person in there.
I've had other misread tests for my kids, saying they had strep when they had RSV. But some urgent care doctors have been really good. I think the ratio is changing in the wrong direction though.
Wait till they are all replaced by midlevel NP and PAs like is currently happening in hospitals everywhere. The quality of care is going to be even more fractured by their lack of education to med school trained docs.
I think all the streaming providers know adding fees like that is going to lock customers into streaming services, and not necessarily their streaming services. People would be way less likely to subscribe to watch one show if they had to pay fees for either activating or cancelling the subscription.
People won't go back to piracy. Most of the people that subscribe to Netflix weren't really pirates. Maybe they had a friend that would burn them a DVD on request, or got the number of some guy who sold bootleg DVDs. They'd probably use these services for a couple of movies a year. Most peoples direct experience with piracy was downloading Metallica songs on limewire when they were 16. It's been a long time since then. There's a whole generation of adults who largely only know TV as it exists today, that is, streaming services.
The ones that were pirates, I never understood why they left. I have yet to pay for a single streaming service in my entire life, or cable, or any of that. This was always going to happen, I saw it coming for years before Netflix even had a viable competitor. And on top of that, the diminishing quality of the content, I've reached a point now that I don't pirate because I don't watch any of it. To be fair to them, my TV watching was always very minimal, I'm an easy guy to alienate. Still, I can't imagine people who know how to pirate actually paying for what passes for entertainment these days.
I don't get it either, when I experience what you talk about I just laugh and sometimes ask my friends how they feel about it. Remember, it's normal to them. It's also amusing to see how TV advertising has evolved (or devolved to be more accurate) since the last time I saw a commercial.
Because Netflix was more convenient than piracy in the golden era of streaming, especially for non-English speaking folks. I think people tend to forget that piracy isn't that much about media preservation at all. It's in fact extremely common for sites to nuke anything non-English as soon as possible.
* Contains non-English dubs? Oi mate, quite the “redundant audio tracks” you've got there, please remove those.
* Only non-English dub? Bloody hell mate, can't have that. Someone please upload a proper release.
* English dub? Go right ahead mate, can't live without that.
So, unless other native language speakers band together to archive and share media in their own little community, they're shit out of luck. Now, of course, also forget about nice pre-made media automation setups since they'll break down as soon as you leave the language of English.
I play retro games regularly, and as good as emulation is, there are tons of old fast paced games that are unplayable for me on modern TVs due to input lag.
Recently was playing Zelda 1 on the NES when the game crashed and deleted my save half way through the 2nd quest. Tried to play it on an emulator and on the switch, and both felt clunky compared to playing on the NES. Could probably get through it, but it wouldn't have been fun.
FWIW, these days display lag/input lag on good gaming monitors/TVs is well under 15ms, which is the point at which some people can notice it. ("Good" is anything <25ms.) https://displaylag.com/display-database/
This shows the real problem is more getting sucked into online social groups rather than having constant communication with real life friends.
The toxic part of social media is the online personas and interactions with strangers, who are perceived as friends.
There is a balance of letting kids have messenger and play games online with friends, than letting them have social media accounts, and burrow into cesspools of online activities that a lot of these social sites are.
The main political realization I had with growing up lower class, still live in poorer areas, and making it to being high income is that basing government programs around income is terrible policy.
1. It's extremely unfair
2. It punishes those working to get ahead
3. It creates 'welfare cliffs' where people become worse off for getting jobs. Losing Medicaid is the best example of this.
4. It makes the program exponentially more expensive to maintain because you have to hire people to track who gets it and who doesn't, look for fraud, monitor for when the income threshold needs changed, etc..
It's just terrible policy all around. We learned this during covid. It's so much easier to write people a check and tax the the high earners more to make up for them getting a check.
What we learned from COVID is that it's absolutely disastrous to send everyone a check, because most of that money gets stolen. Better to give away resources that are valuable to consume but expensive to transact in.
And what we learned from taxing high earners is that the highest earners hide their money and don't pay the expected taxes.
The money that was stolen wasn't sent to everyone. You can't steal money sent to everyone. It was the PPP 'Paycheck Protection Program' money that was stolen where tons of small businesses filed to get that money when it wasn't needed. That's not the same thing at all as putting money in the same bank accounts that file tax returns, which is the example I was providing.
“We estimate that SBA disbursed over $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDLs, EIDL Targeted Advances, Supplemental Targeted Advances, and PPP loans. This means at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.”
I don't remember all that well but I think there aren't really sharp welfare cliffs with financial aid. The expected contribution of you and your family is subtracted from the total cost, and you are eligible for aid to pay the rest. The money you get from working is supposed to be more than your financial aid deduction anyway. So say if you made an extra $10k, it ought to reduce your financial aid by less than that.
>It makes the program exponentially more expensive to maintain because you have to hire people to track who gets it and who doesn't, look for fraud, monitor for when the income threshold needs changed, etc..
We already have a system for that. It's called the IRS. The cost of a basic fraud detection system is less than the actual fraud would be of course. They have to worry about things like people enrolling and never going to class.
>It's just terrible policy all around. We learned this during covid. It's so much easier to write people a check and tax the the high earners more to make up for them getting a check.
It isn't easier or fairer to write everyone a check, because quite a lot of people don't need any help. The average wagie is not going to seriously be disincentivized from working a meaningful way because it might disqualify their kid from certain financial aid. The whole point of financial aid is to give hope to the hopeless and help the struggling, not give everyone benefits whether they need it or not. Taxing people who don't have kids to pay for people who can afford to pay their kids' tuition seems wrong all around.
Healthcare is the easiest example. A birth of a child could easily cost 10k with health insurance, and that is only if there aren't complications, it's free with medicare. 10K is a pretty massive cliff.
If you have a large family losing Medicaid is easily thousands of dollars added to your new budget, and that's just counting out of pocket costs towards the massive deductible most healthcare care plans have now. You add the premium costs it is an obscenely a lot more money you are paying for what is free if with medicare
Hot take: If you can't afford insurance you shouldn't be having a dozen kids, or at least shouldn't complain when others don't want to subsidize that. But $10k per kid for an average of 2 kids in a lifetime does not exactly make for a huge cliff. The income limit for Medicaid is so low in most places, getting any kind of job will disqualify you. But the money from the job will be of more utility than some bare minimum free healthcare. There's no way that a few healthy kids costs thousands per month. Maybe insurance could if you had more than 2 kids, but most people don't even need that much insurance. I never had medical insurance in my life until I got my first job out of college.
There may be some people who believe they will lose money overall by working, but they're usually wrong. Do taxes and losses of freebies reduce the marginal benefit of working more? I'd say so. But in most cases it is still a net benefit to work more.
There is no way to say this without sounding rude, but you clearly don't understand how insane healthcare costs are when you have kids.
Premiums alone could be close to a 1k a month for a family plan. At best you're paying 500 a month in premiums, and that is guaranteed to have a 5k+10k deductible before anything is covered by insurance. Then you will probably still have a co-insurance.
The notion that Medicaid is so crappy is some terrible insurance is propaganda. Free vs paying tens of thousands of dollars, and still be flooded with medical bills, is all you need to know which one is better.
I know dozens of people with medicaid and they absolutely refuse to lose it, especially the ones with large families. If you, or someone in your family, have chronic health issues then you are basically guaranteed to be paying 10k in healthcare premiums and deductibles when you lose Medicaid and get private insurance.
>The notion that Medicaid is so crappy is some terrible insurance is propaganda. Free vs paying tens of thousands of dollars, and still be flooded with medical bills, is all you need to know which one is better.
>There is no way to say this without sounding rude, but you clearly don't understand how insane healthcare costs are when you have kids.
I know how expensive the extremes are. Most kids don't need much healthcare. I'm not interested in arguing that with you. If you know, you know.
>Premiums alone could be close to a 1k a month for a family plan. At best you're paying 500 a month in premiums, and that is guaranteed to have a 5k+10k deductible before anything is covered by insurance. Then you will probably still have a co-insurance.
This is because people have "insurance" that pays for basic routine things. It's more like a price-gouging payment plan or a security blanket. If you got insurance only for severe situations with a high deductible, and paid for routine stuff out of pocket, you'd come out ahead I think. I happen to have a pretty good insurance plan with a low deductible but I didn't have one until I was almost 30. Nor did I qualify for Medicaid or anything else.
The free health care is not actually free. We all pay for it. Even poor people's taxes go toward healthcare that they might not use. Secondly, your choices on this "free" healthcare are somewhat limited. Good luck finding a doctor and getting an appointment in a timely fashion. And some of these doctors specifically maximize services and visits to milk the government for as much as they can.
>I know dozens of people with medicaid and they absolutely refuse to lose it, especially the ones with large families. If you, or someone in your family, have chronic health issues then you are basically guaranteed to be paying 10k in healthcare premiums and deductibles when you lose Medicaid and get private insurance.
Again I say, if you are poor you should not go out and start a large family. People who have expensive chronic conditions they can't help, or have like 1 kid with that, are kind of an exception.
Back to the original point. I think not working more because of Medicaid eligibility is stupid. If we're talking about the difference between working 5% more hours at the same job and not, then I get it. But we aren't gonna see people give up $40k+ jobs just so they can get Medicaid. Even if they were, it's not a problem with means testing in principle. Each person's circumstances are unique, and the system needs to make people pay when they can. Even as shitty as the system is, we can't afford it. It's on track to be in the red by tens of trillions of dollars. By the time all the bills come due, it might be quadrillions of dollars, due to inflation. I'm not even joking...
> It isn't easier or fairer to write everyone a check, because quite a lot of people don't need any help.
Why not? If you give everyone the same subsidy and adjust taxes accordingly, then the welfare cliff disappears, a marginal dollar of income is genuinely valuable, and a screwup in how someone’s need is measured doesn’t matter so much. As an added bonus, wealthier and more influential people might use more social benefits and thus apply pressure to make them better.
> Taxing people who don't have kids to pay for people who can afford to pay their kids' tuition seems wrong all around.
Why not? Healthy, well educated are a massive, and even essential, benefit to society. If nothing else, they’re the future taxpayers! Why, exactly, should their parents be the ones to bear almost all of the cost of producing them?
>Why not? If you give everyone the same subsidy and adjust taxes accordingly, then the welfare cliff disappears, a marginal dollar of income is genuinely valuable, and a screwup in how someone’s need is measured doesn’t matter so much. As an added bonus, wealthier and more influential people might use more social benefits and thus apply pressure to make them better.
There's no such thing as a perfect calculation for this. There is essentially no welfare cliff now. What you're proposing is to tax "wealthy" people so much that they have no choice but to lean on social benefits, and expect them to be thankful for the opportunity to participate in the welfare system. You say it very optimistically but it is actually an awful thing.
>Why not? Healthy, well educated are a massive, and even essential, benefit to society. If nothing else, they’re the future taxpayers! Why, exactly, should their parents be the ones to bear almost all of the cost of producing them?
Parents of kids get most of the benefits of having those kids. That's why they bear the cost of it. I can't believe I have to explain this... Other people's kids will not help me with my bills or tend to me when I'm sick. If they are somehow taxed to pay for my existence, I expect them to avoid that as much as possible. My own kids on the other hand might actually care about me, even with all the moral decline we have seen in out culture.
>It isn't easier or fairer to write everyone a check, because quite a lot of people don't need any help
Is this some kind of joke? You pay taxes on that check, which means you effectively get less money as you earn more. Do people really not understand how negative income taxes work? The system is the same in terms of net payouts compared to any means tested scheme, because you can turn the knobs any way you like.
Exactly this. A check to the wealthy is basically a tax refund. The wealthy get a check every month already in social security, so it's literally already happening.
Wow what an attitude... dO YoU nOt UnDERsTaND brO?
Whether you pay taxes on the check itself that 100% comes from taxes is kind of a separate issue. Unemployment benefits are like that and it's stupid. In some situations, Social Security gets taxed or reduced too.
It would not make sense to send a check to a middle class family because they don't need it. People of means who don't have kids and never set foot in a college also should not have to pay extra so that families that don't need help can get kickbacks on college expenses.
>The system is the same in terms of net payouts compared to any means tested scheme, because you can turn the knobs any way you like.
Ok, if you're proposing a means-tested scheme that's different from what I responded to. The other comment suggested sending a check to everyone. These are two entirely different plans. If you pay people who don't need it, you also have to tax them more. And those extra taxes would be unfair to some people. The right thing is to make people pay more for their own expenses when they can afford more, but on a sliding scale.
It's amazing they can still do it with voyager which is roughly 24 hours for one way traffic, 48 for round trip.
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