Because LOL that’s why.

You haven’t lived until you have experienced the warm salty velvety experience of pure analog olfactory organ soup.

To be fair to the 1980’s, a Hercules video card in 1982 adjusted for inflation would only be about $1700. We are way beyond that point.

An original Macintosh 128K would set you back $8100 in today’s money, so I guess in that regard Apple hasn’t changed. ;)

I read this meme, FOR THE GLORY OF THE EMPIRE!

It is starting to feel like it. Might not see price decline for a while yet, but the upswing on pricing is nearing breaking point.

I suspect if anyone is buying these is because of them needing to meet an existing strict spec. Not sure what that would be but it is a possibility.

I hadn’t been keeping a close eye on pricing but was blown away the other day. The Nvidia RTX 5090 launched at $4090 here in Australia, that was already obscene. Nowadays almost 2 years later, you are lucky if you find one under $12,000!

Yes! It feels like every second restaurant in my area has suddenly gone with this font and AI slop images for their menus.

I see that, I go elsewhere.

That is because to be the most efficient they have to constantly adjust the deadzone temperature. Its not just monitoring but active control. This is based on local air temperature, humidity and stock levels. To be even more efficient they put a thousand fridges online so that a small team can do the work of a much larger local team.

So the real reason is that to increase profit margins, they consolidated lots of workers behind a few and did this via the internet. A common story the world over.

Yes, we know it was called the The South American Blackout of 2019.

A situations like this makes me use a form of Malapropism one would expect of a Dickensian society to bring about almost Orwellian situation. Makes you wonder when someone will use Chekhov’s Gun before it all gets Bowdlerized. Alas this Machiavellian paragraph is reminiscent of a Lovecraftian creature.

But seriously, that paragraph above reads like the scene in Blackadder when they meet the writer of the Dictionary.

The temporarily embarrassed millionaires will never have that dream fulfilled but they can finally become bed ridden masters of chips. What a waste.

Only works if local models cannot do it.

Couldn’t they find a picture of earth? I mean the Deep Space Climate Observatory takes a photo of a single side of the planet every hour or so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Climate_Observatory

GTA6 is a console exclusive so far, there might be a PC version in a year or two but for now, we have no idea.

But with the hype around its release and the growing use of LLMs to decompile games to be ported to the PC, this has become the high ground. One of the biggest game launches in years of a golden franchise and the PC is cut out get again. But now the people have just enough tools to take it into their own hands.

This is a two stage thing. They need to hack a current PS5/Xbox so they can grab the game image, then have to do the work of a quick port to the PC. Easy to say but difficult to do. A few years back it would have been near impossible but now even with local LLM models you can get agents do a lot of grunt work and make this possible.

There was always a race for clout in the cracking scene since the 1980s of who could get the latest games cracked, they had the change to slap their name and logo on the launcher. Nowadays it isnt just cracking for the same machine, it is liberating it from the host platform. It also kinda makes it open source… So very illegal but that has never stopped people in the past.

I’m not saying it will happen, but there is a highly motivated bunch of people that want to make it happen.

The analogy of the moon landing is simple. Many people tend to see it as a scientific thing when it was entirely geopolitical. The moon landing was the USs way of saying, we are better than the USSR, it was also saying “If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a nuke anywhere”. It was a huge paradigm shift in the world powers.

GTA6 being liberated by the people would be saying “Hey you can no longer confine us to your platforms!”. It was be a huge shift in the way they would have to treat customers, it could be a good thing long term.

It might have its issues but what about Wetherspoons?

Oh I am naughty… Might be using some RAM right now 😉

You know in a small way they probably do. Nothing raises nationalistic pride quicker than an attack on the home land. They can yern for the good old days of 15 flags on the front porch while rabidly defending the Raytheon powered death cult raining down on the middle east.

Live your life as an inverse Altman. What ever he says, do the opposite.

Fair point. I will say this, the low quality of Chinese goods isn’t entirely their fault. They enable it but it also comes from higher up.

I knew someone that was building some device, I forget was it was, and they were in China sourcing parts. That is when you see the game and they know exactly what is going on. You are after a specific capacitor, they will bring out 10 of the same product ranked in terms of price and quality. The 5 cent part, that will last 5 years or 1,000 hours, the 50 cent part will last 30 years or 10,000 hours.

Most producers will just go for the cheapest parts available to get the prices at the end down or to increase profit margins. China can make brilliant high quality parts, just those that control the pricing will always go for the low end and then blame it on Chinese manufacturing.

But also, many Chinese manufactures offer these parts knowing this, so it goes both ways.