Bimfred

Fidelity creep is also a thing. Unless you're going for a deliberately retro or stylized look, you need high detail assets and lots of them on screen at once. Otherwise you'll never hear the end of "gaem bad cuz PS2 grafix lol."

Environment textures are huge. Main character textures are huge. And you're not loading just one file, you're loading multiple files per model. The diffuse map, the specular map, the reflection map, the normal map, the subsurface scattering map for any organic models. And gods help you if your character model has interchangeable parts, because you'll be loading the whole set of textures for every element of those as well. These things add up very quickly.

And you still need space in the RAM for your code and physics and worldsim calculations, animations, everything going on under the hood. So I dunno, 16 doesn't sound outlandish these days.

The OS takes its chunk of RAM. And I'd imagine most people don't close all unnecessary background processes when launching a game. So they'll have Steam and Epic and Discord and the management software for their RGB (multiple, if the individual components are mismatched) and their browser with like 30 tabs open in the background. Under these circumstances, it's not outside the realm of possibility that 8GB of RAM is gone even before the game is launched.

Let people enjoy things and set your games difficulty setting to where you have the most fun, now sit down.

So install the mod and set your difficulty where you like it, while the rest of us don't need to deal with any of that git gud shit.

I have nothing against mods like that existing. I'm very much against having an official DLC that enforces it as the new default, which was the implication of your first post.

Not everything needs to be a soulslike.

"Respect" is commonly used in two wildly different ways. To some, it means being treated as an authority. To others, it means being treated as a person (aka common fucking courtesy). Then there's the absolute shitstains who say "If you won't respect me, then I won't respect you," and what they mean is "If you won't treat me as an authority, I won't treat you as a person."

Being treated as a person is given. Being treated as an authority is earned. And if you don't do anything to prove you're capable of being an authority, you don't deserve to be treated as such.

That they also won't use on R&D. Or healthcare. Or housing. Or feeding people. Those things aren't shit for a lack of resources to fund them, they're shit for a lack of interest in funding them. That's not a problem you can fix with more money.

Governments HAVE the resources. They CHOOSE to not spend it on R&D.

Three years? A low energy transfer orbit gets you to Mars in less than a year. In the past, theoretical crewed missions were planned with an 8-9 month travel time. With enough propellant, could get that down to just over three months. And that's with chemical rockets, not some hypothetical nuclear or torch drive.

Less self-aware? They had a shot that just said "VFX: Car on fire" in the first few minutes of the movie.

What power do you have when there's no one to subject to it?

ISS's radiators. It's processing data on the station that would otherwise be transmitted groundside and processed here.