It was just about perfect. Andromeda’s MP wasn’t even bad, but somehow not in that sweet spot.

ME3MP is still active, too. You can find public lobbies, and there are organized events.

Nostalgia is huge with them.

I loved Oblivion. I used to appreciate players being into the lore, the little corners of the game. But then Starfield came out with so many defenders. It made me realize the sheer number of players that are just… I dunno. “Shills” doesn’t feel like the right word, but I do not understand why they go to such lengths to worship BGS.

They’re all lonely and, yes, a little grindy to me without multiplayer to “show it to someone.”

That being said, I may have been burnt out by modded Minecraft when I was younger.

Right?

I played the hell out of ME3MP. I played some Warframe. I get the “PVE shooter zen”

But WTF. Everything I see and read about Destiny 2 sounds infuriating, and I can’t comprehend why people put up with it.

I disagree here. The side quests and atmosphere are great. FemV nailed the voice acting. It has a lot of fun, bitingly memorable characters I still think of, sometumes.

The gameplay is satisfying… if, and only if, you mod it to not be bullet spongey and so grindy.

I’m not a 2077 apologist.

Does it run well? Nope.

Was it absolutely unacceptable at launch, and years after? An understatement.

But (in 2025/2026), it deserves the praise it gets, IMO. With a few mods, it’s a good game now, not just “a good game somewhere in there.”

Toms has always been clickbait. They just copy and sensationalize other headlines they find, and they’ve frequently bent the knee for Nvidia. Other outlets used to make fun of them all the time.

It’s sad they “survived” the enshittification of the internet and people keep sharing their clickbait :(

That being said, there’s some truth here.

MTT is just a pipe dream, last I checked. But Deepseek is actively being served, in mixed FP8/FP4, on racks of Huawei accelerators.

I believe Baidu trained a model on them, too. But most training (like Deepseek’s) is still done on CUDA.

…Also, be careful equating this stuff with any kind of “consumer friendly” hardware you or I could buy. That’s less likely. The Huawei accelerators (and other local Chinese hardware experiments) are geared towards huge servers serving requests in parallel.

Perhaps ideological purism was never a good idea?

…Like history suggests?

Hence my radical preference: “a la carte” economic systems. Shameless capitalism, frothing communism, anarchism, authoritarian technocracy, even theocratic systems, they all excel in certain sectors and not others. Sometimes, in nutty combinations.

So why idealize one?

A “mix” has been reality for a long time, anyway, but I think that should be embraced more explicitly. Get systems where they’re good instead of shoehorning them where they’re horrific.

YMMV.

You gotta look up reviews. Both buyer track records, and focused reviews that look at what controller/NAND they use.

Many SSDs are basically the same as other brands internally. A few are wonky. It just depends.

As an observer in these comments, this is a great answer. Thanks for typing it out.

It does seem like some “cuts” could be ironed out reasonably quickly, like the file naming issue or UI lag.

The Chinese AI labs are really trying to pop the bubble, too.

How?

Well lemme ask you this. What if models 80-90% as good as Claude, with weights just thrown out there for any provider (or homelab) to host, flood the market? What if they’re so dirt cheap to run, they’re almost free, and don’t even need Nvidia GPUs? What they need fewer resources to run with each update, instead of more?

…What if this already happened, and Big Tech is maddly lobbying to ban/censor them before people realize it, and that the “infinite scaling” thing is a big fat lie?

That’s the state of things.

Even the machine learning dev/tinkerer communities hate AI.

They were making fun of Sam Altman (or calling him a sociopath) before it was cool.

Somewhat related:

” You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted. He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”

• Aaron Swartz, just before he died in 2013.

That’s only partially true.

The other half is that “almost as good” AI like GLM’s coder plan, Kimi, and dozens of other providers are dirt cheap. And getting cheaper, fast.

As opposed to what?

I don’t think a game like this should last, and be developed, forever. It will inevitably lead to enshittification.

Technically, it’s like facilitating the shipping of those apples, but leaving the customer to ship.

Plex server->client streams don’t go through Plex’s servers themselves, but directly from server to clients. P2P. AFAIK the only exception is when something goes wrong and it falls back to a Plex-hosted server as an intermediary, which should be rare.

That’s still a pretty useful service though. Getting P2P reliable and easy isn’t trivial, and is one reason why open source projects haven’t really supplanted it yet.

Interesting.

I’d bet it’s an example of coincidental convergence. Take the median/average of the tropes for that premise, and I can see writers coming up with a similar story.

That’s overcomplicating it.

Maybe that’s the issue.

The characters just… weren’t charismatic/engaging. I can’t name a single one. The world was intricate, and exotic, and gorgeous, and… kind of superficial?

I think the other Avatar is a perfect contrast.

Iroh. Zuko. Toph. Azula. Korra, Tenzin, Zaheer. To me, these character are instantly memorable because they were so distinct in purpose and culture, even extending to minor characters like Suki or Su.

And take bending. It’s a concept as simple as a rock, but they embed it in everything, from mundane chores to personalities and cycles to martial arts scenes. They never need to explain anything about it in words or narration.

Hence it’s be cool if the James Cameron Avatar characters where sharp, so distinct you could cut yourself on them. If their nature synergy, dependence on unobtanium or whatever was really woven into mundane life and such, to make it feel like an important system. There’s nothing wrong with another “natives fighting back” story, but I didn’t feel anything pull me into the struggle.

I mean, 1 didn’t make me crave sequels, even if they were soon available.

It was a fun action movie, sure. A visual spectacle. But not a world I felt invested in.

The other Avatar, on the other hand…

They’re probably stacks of 8x NPU Huawei servers all cooperatively serving the same few models.

As an older example, I believe Deepseek V3 was most optimally served with ~384 GPUs in a single cluster, before they switched to Chinese NPUs. So they’d have some software that ties all these together as one “server” and maybe multiple of those all serving API requests for one endpoint.

But it doesn’t actually need all 384 in each server. Many models will fit in a single 8-GPU/NPU server, but the software pools more just to try and utilize the hardware better.

If one server fails, the system would return a few requests as empty and have to restart the serving software, but… that’s fine. All the data is ephemeral. Even if the whole 24MW unit fails, they can just route API requests somewhere else, and a few failed generations isn’t a big deal.