Thrashy

I had quite a bit of fun with it for a few weekends with my friends, but ultimately the lack of a system for mechanical progression left it feeling a bit shallow (ha!). As a primarily PvE game with light PvP it's in a weird place where it doesn't have quite enough RPG-like elements to hold my interest on the PvE side, or enough player-on-player combat to make it a gripping contest of skill.

It's still a fun game to hop into from time to time, but it's never been appointment gaming for me

I did a little digging and it seems like there's a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn't need frequent all-day service, even if it's a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they've got doing "editing" at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into "world-first electric wonder train amazes!"

For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to "disrupt" it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.

Right now Intel and AMD have less to fear from Apple than they do from Qualcomm -- the people who can do what they need to do with a Mac and want to are already doing that, it's businesses that are locked into the Windows ecosystem that drive the bulk of their laptop sales right now, and ARM laptops running Windows are the main threat in the short term.

If going wider and integrating more coprocessors gets them closer to matching Apple Silicon in performance per watt, that's great, but Apple snatching up their traditional PC market sector is a fairly distant threat in comparison.

The rules of evidence place a lot (honestly an unreasonable amount) of weight on the value of eyewitness evidence, and contemporaneous reports made from the same. The question for the courts will be, does an AI summary of a video recording have the same value as a human-written report from memory?

I agree that this is good use of AI, but would suggest that th courts should require an AI report to basically have the body cam recording stapled to it, ideally with timestamped references in the report. AI transcriptions are decent, but not perfect, and in cases where there could be confusion the way the courts treat these reports should allow for both parties to review and offer their own interpretations.

neighboring Nebraska

Kansas: "Am I a joke to you?"

Quite sure -- and given that one game I've been playing lately (and the exception to the lack of shooters in my portfolio) is Selaco, so I ought to have noticed by now.

There's a very slight difference in smoothness when I'm rapidly waving a mouse cursor waving around on one screen versus the other, but it's hardly the night-and-day difference that going from 30fsp to 60fps was back in Ye Olden Days, and watching a small, fast-moving, high-contrast object doesn't make up the bulk of gameplay in anything I play these days.

The old one and the new one are literally side by side on my desktop, don't know what to tell you...

At launch the 360 was on par graphically with contemporary high-end GPUs, you're right. By even the midpoint of its seven year lifespan, though, it was getting outclassed by midrange PC hardware. You've got to factor in the insanely long refresh cycles of consoles starting with the six and seventh generations of consoles when you talk about processing power. Sony and Microsoft have tried to fix this with mid-cycle refresh consoles, but I think this has honestly hurt more than helped since it breaks the basic promise of console gaming -- that you buy the hardware and you're promised a consistent experience with it for the whole lifecycle. Making multiple performance targets for developers to aim for complicates development and takes away from the consumer appeal

Eh... Consoles used to be horribly crippled compared to a dedicated gaming PC of similar era, but people were more lenient about it because TVs were low-res and the hardware was vastly cheaper. Do you remember Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, for instance? I do, and it was a slideshow -- didn't stop the game from being lauded as the apex of console shooters at the time. I remember Xbox 360 flagship titles upscaling from sub-720p resolutions in order to maintain a consistent 30fps.

The console model has always been cheap hardware masked by lenient output resolutions and a less discerning player base. Only in the era of 4K televisions and ubiquitous crossplay with PC has that become a problem.

Might just be my middle-aged eyes, but I recently went from a 75Hz monitor to a 160Hz one and I'll be damned if I can see the difference in motion. Granted that don't play much in the way of twitch-style shooters anymore, but for me the threshold of visual smoothness is closer to 60Hz than whatever bonkers 240Hz+ refresh rates that current OLEDs are pushing.

I'll agree that 30fps is pretty marginal for any sort of action gameplay, though historically console players have been more forgiving of mediocre performance in service of more eye candy.

I've found myself taking a paradoxically accelerationist stance about it, for this exact reason. At the moment, those on the right agitating for violence are a minority, and those that are actually prepared to act consist primarily of a few thousand militia LARPers and an even smaller number of actually-capable fighters. These groups are gradually accruing malcontents while the right wing's filter bubble casts their ideas as acceptable, but the sooner those chuds decide to go loud, the more lopsided and emphatic the beatdown will be -- provided that the armed forces are under the command of non-authoritarian President. Afterwards the public condemnation of insurrectionists will effectively choke off recruiting. Conflict feels almost inevitable at this point and giving the violent authoritarian fringe more time to plan and recruit only makes that conflict deadlier.

Rather, I'd say there are many immigrant groups with culturally conservative values (think Hispanic Catholics, BJP-aligned Indian immigrants, conservative Muslims, etc.) as well as certain more religious and patriarchal Black communities, that have a lot in common with the Republicans on social issues, and might be willing to overlook their racism if they find the Democrats' stance on those issues unacceptable. Think also of expat communities that came to America on the heels of Communist revolutions in their home countries and have a reflexive hatred of even vaguely left-ish politics.

In a sick way, we're lucky that the GOP's embrace of racial hatred pushes as many people away as it does, because if they'd let that go they'd have a much broader base amongst minorities.