Even using ai for environments. Plenty of open world games will have you looking at the exact same patch of grass and the exact same trees. Even getting ray traced lighting effects to work at life-like settings, running at at least 4k90, will take a lot of computing horsepower. The price to do these things is still prohibitive, but game devs will absolutely try doing those things in the future, so the console hardware will have to keep up.

What I can see them doing is taking a more passive approach, and waiting for the hardware to develop on its own, and just using “off the shelf” parts, instead of paying to have custom hardware developed.

Worse. Terminally online edgelord.

“Yay! We’ve created artificial general intelligence!”

“…Fuck, it’s an asshole.”

I’m not up to speed on how US tax laws work. What does getting deemed a hobby entail?

It’s also very important to understand that by the time this comic was made, the actual oil had almost nothing to do with it. The US has been a net exporter for a while now, and the majority of oil imports are coming from Canada.

Not really. In most jurisdictions, only gambling type sweepstakes (ie a random draw) are governed that tightly. Fan voted things like this are more or less unregulated. Plus, you have to read (and understand) the legalese fingerprint fine print to determine legal responsibilities. I’d be surprised if there weren’t language in there a that absolves them of almost all legal responsibility.

Also, there’s nothing in there that seems to be anywhere near an actual legal problem.

In this case, none of that applies. I do industrial programming. 99% of the ethernet networks I have to connect to don’t have a router, and nothing is running DHCP. They locked out my ability to manually change my IP address.

I encountered “lawful evil” once. My answer of “I know what the problem is. I know how to fix it. But because you have no clue about what this company actually does to make money, you took away my ability to do it. So now I’m here, wasting both our time” didn’t seem to go over very well.

For single player games, I absolutely agree. If you’re going to stop supporting the game, send out one last patch turning off any always online DRM and let people keep playing their game.

For multiplayer games, it seems like it’s a bit more complicated. Who should be shouldering the cost to keep the game servers alive?

Assuming my setup is typical, the dryer is on a 240V circuit. The washing machine is on a 15A 120V circuit.

Depending on how much time your server spends with those CPUs actually under load, newer processors may not really help your energy bills. Even old processors idle at single digits wattages. Most of the idle power consumption (where most home servers spend 99% of their time) on the server will be coming from fans, RAM, and storage.

This happens every time AMD starts cutting into Intel’s market share. Competition is a wonderful thing.

It’s a function of ZFS itself. Data that is to be written to the drives is first written to RAM, then transferred to the drives. One of the benefits of this is that if you are moving a file that is smaller than the available RAM, your transfer won’t appear to be limited to the write speed of the drives.

ZFS. It can use up as much RAM as you care to give it for caching. So if you are slinging a lot of data back and forth, more RAM is better. Especially if you are using HDDs instead of SSDs.

That would probably depend on case, motherboard, and which (if any) pcie slots are occupied.