Important for what? Google and anthropic's models are already better, and google actually makes money, and both are US companies. What strategic relevance is there to Open AI?
BYD, Geely, ZeekR, Kia, Hyundai, Mini, MG see them all around, more than Teslas (inner city Melbourne).
Also noticing that a lot of the rideshare/taxis are going EV quickly. I'm guessing the much lower maintenance and service requirements are outweighing any "range" issues, plus the trade-in value is irrelevant with warranties covering the batteries etc.
Opinionated in this context usually means “doing their own thing” or “trying again from basics” instead of following the herd and being like everyone else.
The standard new house isn’t opinionated - a custom build with features not normally seen could be.
Opinionated usually results in love it or hate it style design - unless they happen on something that just becomes standard.
The original Jobs iPhone was opinionated - an all touchscreen design went against the common “knowledge” that a physical keyboard was the way to go.
I was always stuck by how different all the cars in the BYD line are. There are some pretty bold styling and fitout choices between the models.
I have mostly driven BMW and Toyota sedan and fwd's. And as you progress in car price and size its a matter of getting more features, and a better version over the cheaper model.
Isn't that the opposite of being opinionated? In software I've heard "opinionated" about programs that limit configurability in favor of one fits all default. I believe it was Ruby on Rails which popularized the term.
For cars, I guess Henry Ford's anecdotal comment that "you can have any color you like as long as it's black" was a form of opinionated design. If BYDs cars are all different, surely they're less opinionated?
Instead of having a bland, don’t-take-any-strong-decision, please-every-one design ("un opinionated"), each car has its own very distinct design ("opinionated").
You could say that at a brand level, they are equally "opinionated" because the average car of each brand is average, but the OP argues that BYD does it by sampling N very distinct points from the car distribution, and other by sampling N times the same average point.
> In software I've heard "opinionated" about programs that limit configurability in favor of one fits all default
While this is one form of opinionated, it really just means that they are doing their own thing different from the other established players. This could mean MORE configurability in some cases. Another poster also said it, but opinionated just means that they have taken a stand in product design (features, looks, usability, etc) that they think it correct and it does not bow to 'the herd'. IMO, an opinionated design is neither good nor bad, but it is respected by me.
Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying. The “optimisation” you talk about was the CPU in the ps4 generation was so weak and tech was moving so fast that any pc bought in 2015 onwards would easily brute force overpower anything that had been built for that generation.
No T&L meant everything was culled, clipped, transformed and per-vertex divided (perspective, lighting) on CPU.
Then you have brute force approach. Voodoo 1/2/3 doesnt employ any obvious speedup tricks in its pipeline. Every single triangle pushed into it is going to get textured (bilinear filtering, per pixel divide), shaded (lighting, blending, FOG applied) and then in the last step the card finally checks Z-buffer to decide between writing all this computed data to buffer or simply throwing it away.
If you think that the programmers are unmotivated (lazy) or incompetent; you’re wrong on both counts.
The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.
The issue is that games have such high expectations that they didn’t have before.
There are very few “yearly titles” that allow you to nail down the software in a nicer way over time, its always a mad dash to get it done, on a huge 1000+ person project that has to be permanently playable from MAIN and where unit/integration tests would be completely useless the minute they were built.
The industry will end, but not because of “lazy devs”, its the ballooned expectations, stagnant revenue opportunity, increased team sizes and a pathological contingent of people using games as a (bad) political vehicle without regard for the fact that they will be laid off if they can’t eventually generate revenue.
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Finally, back in the early days of games, if the game didn’t work, you assumed you needed better hardware and you would put the work in fixing drivers and settings or even upgrading to something that worked. Now if it doesn’t work on something from before COVID the consensus is that it is not optimised enough. I’m not casting aspersions at the mindset, but it’s a different mentality.
Most gamers don't have the faintest clue regarding how much work and effort a game requires these days to meet even the minimum expectations they have.
That's bullshit. I don't care about graphics, I play lots of indie games, some of them are made by a single person. There are free game engines, so basically all one needs for a successful game is just a good idea for the game.
And a friend of mine still mostly plays the goddamn Ultima Online, the game that was released 28 years ago.
and if a new game
came out today that looked and played the same as Ultima online… What would you (and the rest of gamers) think about it?
Your expectations of that game are set appropriately. Same with a lot of Indy games, the expectation can be that its in early access for a decade+. You would never accept that from, say, Ubisoft.
Depends on what that game brings, I might like it a lot. Again, me and all my friends love indie games, most of them with pixel graphics or just low polygon. The market for such games is big enough. Just look up some popular indie games sales estimations.
You are a minor share of the overall market and the sad truth is that most indie games sell a pityfull handfull of copies and can't sustain their creators financially. And even indie games have to meet certain standards and given that they are developed nostly by single devs, meeting even those "minimal" standards takes years for many devs.
> The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.
I fully agree and I really admire people working on the industry. When I see great games which are unplayable in the low end because of stupidly high minimum hardware requirements, I understand game devs are simply responding to internal trends within the industry, and especially going for a practical outcome by using an established game engine (such as Unreal 5).
But at some time I hope this GPU crunch forces this same industry to allocate time and resources either at the engine or at the game level to truly optimize for a realistic low end.
the lead time for a new engine is about 7 years (on the low end).
I don’t think any company that has given up their internal engine could invest 7 years of effort without even having revenue from a game to show for it.
So the industry will likely rally around Unreal and Unity- and I think a handful of the major players will release their engines on license… but Unreal will eat them alive due to the investments in Dev UX (which is much-much higher than proprietary game engines IME). Otherwise the only engines that can really innovate are gated behind AAA publishers and their push for revenue (against investment for any other purpose).
All this to say, I’m sorry to disappoint you, its very unlikely.
Games will have to get smaller and have better revenues.
Optimisation is almost universally about tradeoffs.
If you are a general engine, you can’t easily make those tradeoffs, and worse you have to build guardrails and tooling for many cases, slowing things down further.
The best we can hope for is even better profiling tools from Epic, but they’ve been doing that for the last couple of years since borderlands.
Obsolete in that you’d probably not BUY it if building new, and in that you’d probably be able to get a noticeably better one, but even then games were made to run in a wide gamut of hardware.
For awhile there you did have noticeable gameplay differences- those with GL quake could play better kind of thing.
The GP was talking about Unreal Engine 5 as if that engine doesn't optimize for low end. That's a wild take, I've been playing Arc Raiders with a group of friends in the past month, and one of them hadn't upgraded their PC in 10 years, and it still ran fine (20+ fps) on their machine. When we grew up it would be absolutely unbelievable that a game would run on a 10 year old machine, let alone at bearable FPS. And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.
>And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.
Perhaps, but they also turned off Nanite, Lumen and virtual shadow maps. I'm not a UE5 hater but using its main features does currently come at a cost. I think these issues will eventually be fixed in newer versions and with better hardware, and at that point Nanite and VSM will become a no-brainer as they do solve real problems in game development.
We already have reports about disabled kids experiencing suicidal ideation due to losing their only non family social connections.
Not to mention that Australias youth are quite politically engaged, we have a news network entirely run by teenagers that just had their service gutted.
The point of buses is to replace cars, not short walks.
If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min.
The trick is to balance the system so that buses (and other forms of transit) are cheaper - and approximately as convenient - as cars, without making them cheaper and more convenient than walking (for those who can still walk).
Fares don't necessarily need to be about financing the system. They can be about setting the correct incentives, and ensuring people value the service they're getting.
It's very unlikely people are actually going to take the bus for a 5 minute walk : the wait time for the bus is going to be on that order of magnitude and you'd need your route to be perfectly aligned and have perfect stop placement for that to happen.
Most likely, you will have extra trips because people won't feel the need to justify the fare.
That's not true on a major avenue that serves 10 different routes, which combined have a frequency of one every couple of minutes.
Also, it doesn't help to make bus stops more spaced, and you may not want a bunch of express routes that skip most stops, because another purpose of buses is to help people with difficulty moving (like the elderly), for whom it's not a 5min walk.
You just want to make the service available, and as good as possible, without incentivising people who could just walk to use it.
Because the actual goal is to displace cars (not walkers, or cyclists, or…)
> If you make it so that everybody who could walk 5min takes a bus, the bus will have to stop more often - and for longer - which makes it worse for the people who can't just walk 5min.
... Eh?
I often hit the leap card weekly cap (24 eur) in Dublin. This absolutely does not lead me to take a bus instead of walking for five minutes, because that would be _insane_. Like, maybe there are a few people who despise walking to an unreasonable extent and do this, but it would not be common. If it was, you'd see people doing it anywhere which has a fare cap (ie. most cities, these days).
Liz is a lady, and I am confident she did not AI generate this article. Aside from it clearly having her authorial voice, here is another piece she has written:
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