Daily News Stuff 14 December 2022

• Work 16 years and what do you get? A glass of champagne and six million net. (PC Gamer)
  
  Cult game Dwarf Fortress, which first appeared in 2006 and has been available for free ever since (and is still available for free) finally has a Steam edition with graphics and has sold 300,000 copies in its first week.
  
  Even after the cuts for Steam and publisher Kitfox, the game's two authors each just retroactively made 16 years worth of six-figure salaries.
  
  Advice: Hire a really good accountant.
  
  
  
• I started playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker last night. Oops. Haven't played any RPGs in a long while and even though this one isn't some legendary classic I was still playing six hours later.
  
  Also, Nvidia MX350 laptop graphics? Basically worthless.

• If you have a current year Tesla Model S or X you can probably play Pathfinder: Kingmaker on that and have a better time than me on my laptop. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The latest operating system update (Teslas run Linux) supports Steam games that will run on the Steam Deck (which runs Linux). The games don't need to support Linux directly; the Steam Deck and the Teslas both support an emulation layer.
  
  
  
• Speaking of old Nvidia hardware, If you were waiting for cheaper cards in the new RTX 4000 generation you might just be better off buying whatever is cheap right now. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Today's leaked specs are for the 4060 Ti. While it has more compute power than the 3060 Ti, it has half the memory bandwidth. That's going to hurt, and it's likely to be significantly more expensive than the 3060 Ti as well.
  
  
  
• China has banned exports of its home-grown Loongson CPUs. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not that anyone wants them (except Russia) - they're about ten years behind Intel and AMD. It's likely because China has very limited fab capacity even at 14nm and needs to keep all the chips for internal use.
  
  
  
• China is also preparing a $140 billion bailout package for its floundering chip industry (Reuters) and at the same time complaining to the WTO about other countries being mean to it. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oh no.
  
  Anyway...
  
  
  
• Everything in this article is wrong. (Jesse Li)
  
  It popped up in one of my feeds today, though it's a couple of years old. Everything it says is wrong. It's quite amazing how much wrongness the author has managed to pack in.
  
  
  
• A native internet protocol for social media. (Revue)
  
  Oh, it's by Jack Dorsey. He makes one good observation:

  The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves.

  The point is, everyone knew this was wrong, and he did it anyway, and it cost someone $44 billion to start fixing the mess.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council hopefully in battery acid. (NBC)
  
  The Trust and Safety Council was a group of radical left-wing pro-censorship volunteers who guided the Trust and Safety Team, a group of radical left-wing pro-censorship employees.
  
  Good fucking riddance.
  
  
  
• DoNotPay is an AI chatbot based on GPT-3 that argues with billing departments on your behalf to cancel your subscriptions. (The Verge)
  
  See? Technology isn't all bad.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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