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GPUs vanish as cryptocurrency prices soar again
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I hope they get an ROI for their funds spent, but, I think they are just looking for that pot of gold like all other get rich quick schemers and suckers do.
I also filly agree with you that Crypto Currency will never be a major currency, and while we are in fact moving towards going fully digital, as I have not had cash in my pocket for the last 6 months, with everything being on a card, or online, but, lets be honest, the people in power that want to control the wealth would never let this Crypto Stuff be a major contender.
The hard reality is, Wealth is used to stimulate production and progress, to keep people laboring away for their money, not to have people with bedframes of motherboards on them.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
I just checked, all 1060 ( i kind of considering nabbing one of those ) dissapeared from local dealers. :O !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
On the CPU side, Zen 3 offers a major jump in performance over all previous CPUs. It's plausible that we'll never again see that large of a jump in x86 CPUs. Many previous new generations of CPUs brought far smaller advancements over the previous than Zen 3. Even those that were major advancements in recent years have been one new Intel CPU improving quite a bit over a previous Intel CPU. Intel had no reason to rush the new generation to market, as people who wanted a high end CPU and didn't want to wait would buy an older Intel CPU for the same price, anyway. AMD did have reason to rush Zen 3 to market, as people who didn't want to wait might have bought Intel instead. The last time we saw a jump like this where the new high end CPU was from a different vendor than the old was Conroe back in 2006. I don't remember what launch supplies looked like, but that was a long time ago.
On the GPU side, it's a problem of the Ethereum miners buying everything. This also happened from about mid-2017 through mid-2018. Back then, they had a strong preference for AMD GPUs over Nvidia because Nvidia's GDDR5X memory controller didn't handle the random lookups to global memory well, so you could still get the GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti for much of the year that things were crazy. At the peak of it, the Ethereum miners bought out those cards, too.
For Bitcoin, the heavy part of the mining algorithm is a hash function that's doing shifts and rotates and addition. You can make an ASIC to do those really well and various companies have, with Bitmain the most successful among them.
For Ethereum, the heavy part of the mining algorithm is random table lookups to an array several gigabytes in size. You really can't make an ASIC to massively speed that up. The ideal ASIC for it would basically have a GPU's memory and memory controllers plus a little bit of other compute stuff. You could make that a lot lower power than a full GPU and a lot cheaper per die than a full GPU, but you're not going to make it massively faster than a GPU. Try to build such an ASIC and by the time it reaches market, most likely either Ethereum prices will have cratered or Ethereum will have switched to proof of stake so it can't still be mined, so your investment of tens of millions of dollars to design the ASIC will only get you a chip that you can't sell.
It's secure in some ways and not in others. If you do online banking and forget your password, you expect that you can recover the money. If you have Bitcoin and forget your password, it's gone and unrecoverable. If someone steals your credit card and makes fraudulent charges and you report them in a timely manner, you expect that the charges will be reversed and you won't be held liable for them. If someone steals your Bitcoin, it's gone and unrecoverable. So in those senses, it is insecure. And those really need to be fixed before any cryptocurrency can be viable for use as a general currency.
Ah yah.. I did miss something, apparently, something pretty big all things said and done, apparently Amazon, Apple, and Google are using their clout to silence people.
Eh.. funny this gets brought up on a game forum, reminds me of a ways back when China did the same thing when that whole Free Hong Kong thing arose.
There was a huge presence about it on the Internet and very strong among games to show solidarity with Hong Kong or whatever, can't say I looked too deeply into it, and I don't think anyone else here did either TBH.
However, I do remember that China flat out made it clear they would shut down any service including Phone games and MMO's that showed any support for those radical extremist, did not censor and ban any of their accounts that showed support or sympathy for them as well.
I remember a few of the phone games I played going offline over that, and accounts being banned all over the place, even some accounts of American origin were getting shut down over that, or so I heard.
Truth is, thanks to the swift and effective censorship of the China Government, it all faded to black very quickly and went away as fast as it started, and I, which I wager like many others, in short order simply stopped caring because it didn't affect me directly, and went back to playing my games, of course minus the few that were rightfully and legally shutdown for their treasons actions, which TBH, I can't say I really miss, I mean, truth is, thanks to how well China handled the situation, I could not tell if the games got shut down or simply went of business like many countless other games have done.
Anyway.. Game On.
It's related to current events, and borderline political. The site has been cracking down on Politics, even in an obvious joking situation. I merely didn't add some emoji, and bam, zoom, post deleted. Mild warning and no response to query on alternate, more acceptable wording.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
With the expectation of a change to tax laws, people are going to change where their money is directed.
After Twitter aggressively censored political news that was probably true but would make Biden look bad in the runup to the election, a lot of people on the right were looking for an alternative, and many moved to Parler. So while Parler will freely allow people on either the left or the right to say stupid stuff, most of the people who use it are politically on the right, because left-wingers prefer Twitter.
So naturally, that has led left-wing activists to try to get Parler banned, as if it's somehow fundamentally worse than Twitter. They've convinced Google and Apple to kick Parler out of their app stores, and Amazon to stop hosting Parler's servers, which takes the site offline for a while until they can find alternate hosting. The reasons that the big tech companies gave for the bans are reasonable enough in isolation, but if applied consistently, would certainly require banning Twitter, and probably all of the big social media sites.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Section 230 basically said that if people said something libelous, the site that merely hosted it wasn't responsible for it and couldn't be sued for libel. The person who said it could still be sued for libel, but random, anonymous people aren't likely to have enough money to be worth suing. Furthermore, it said that even if the site makes a good faith effort at filtering out objectionable content, by which they mostly meant pornographic, that wouldn't make the site liable for anything that they missed.
What Section 230 seems to have had in mind is services akin to AOL. It certainly applies to ISPs. But it surely wasn't intended to apply to modern social media sites that didn't even exist when it was written.
The problem is that there has to be some sort of libel protections or else forums like this one would be impossible. One random user says something libelous and the site gets sued for more than the site is worth and shuts down. Moderated forums and comment sections would mostly disappear from the Internet. If forums and comment sections are treated like publishers, then at a bare minimum, they'd have to manually review and approve every single comment before it can be posted. Hiring moderators to do that is expensive, and would lead to much more heavy-handed moderation from sites not wanting to touch anything remotely risky.
But even if there has to be some sort of libel protections to allow forums like this one to exist, an orphaned section of a law that was mostly ruled unconstitutional being customarily interpreted as protecting things that didn't exist when it was written is an awfully thin reed to hang those protections on. What we really need is a new law with clearer rules that more directly apply to the sort of sites that exist today and can provide the libel protections via black letter law rather than customary interpretations that some future overly zealous prosecutor might decide to jettison.
So now you basically go to the argument that people are too dumb, and need full censorship for their own good. Who makes those decisions? Frankly, it's pretty darn pompous and elitist to decide that.
Censorship of the internet and platforms (aka free assembly) is very disturbing. Especially if deemed by CEOs of virtual monopolies with their agendas.
Shutting down platforms with different rules... scary.
The FACT that Google, Apple and Amazon all attacked Twitters only viable competitor at the same time should SCARE THE SHIT out of everyone. Don’t think about it as “your side” or “their side”. Think about it as the big tech companies all colluding to take out the only minor competitor to one of their own.
Its scary. More scary that most are unable to see the larger picture and the ramifications for the future.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Section 230 allows internet companies to work, and getting rid of it would indeed cause tremendous disruption. The equivalent of making old school papers responsible for the content of every letter to the editor.
Consider the ramifications for a site like MMORPG.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
When Google can herp derp about hosting ISIS recruitment videos and the like for years, they don't get to grandstand now. It's the same with Twitter who allowed for the same sort of destruction to be organized on their platform earlier this year.
Honestly, I'd rather have the extremists of all types out in the open where they have to present their ideas in a more open marketplace of thought...and it's easier to know what people are up to because, fuck you, I'm nosey.
In order to function properly, society really needs for people with wildly different political views to get along with each other. We need for people all across the political spectrum to view others all across the political spectrum as people that we can get along with.
It is well known and understood that the key to preventing, eliminating, or at least mitigating undesirable prejudices is having frequent, positive interactions with the group that you might otherwise be prejudiced against. That applies just as well whether the issue it hand is race, religion, or the one that seems to be most troublesome today: political views.
In every election, political consultants will tell you that not only is the candidate on your side amazingly wonderful, but the candidate on the other side is unusually awful. That's the most effective way to get you to vote how they want, so that's not going away. But if half of the people you meet on a daily basis and half of your friends are on the other side of the political spectrum, you're not going to conclude that everyone on the other side is evil. Or even if it's only 1/3 or 1/4, that will have the same effect.
But if the only thing you ever hear about people on the other side of the political spectrum is propaganda about how awful they are, and you never meet any of them yourself, you might believe that everyone who disagrees with you is evil. You might believe wild conspiracy theories that are easily disproven because you never bother to see the other side. You might even believe that the other side needs to be destroyed for the good of society. When both sides believe that they need to destroy the other, very bad things happen, such as civil wars.
That's why it's so valuable for society to have major institutions that are beloved all across the political spectrum. Whether it's attending the same churches, rooting for the same sports teams, eating at the same restaurants, or watching the same movies, positive interactions with people who disagree with you politically are good for you, good for them, and good for society.
But they're also targets for political zealots who see such shared spaces as the only way to get their political message to people on the other side. So they try to co-opt formerly neutral institutions and get them to push a particular political message. That convinces no one that they're right, and only drives people away. It's not just that it eliminates positive interactions with the other side, but it creates negative ones that will help to convince the other side that the side with the zealots who just co-opted the institution is at least obnoxious and maybe also evil. That sort of garbage is tearing society apart.
But it's also the reason why computer games might well save the world, or at least save society from some future catastrophe. If the two political sides can't watch the same movies or cheer for the same sports teams (the NBA putting political slogans on jerseys last year was hugely damaging here) or whatever because so many big institutions have become politicized, we can at least play the same computer games.
Computer games are harder to politicize than most other forms of media for several reasons:
1) Games commonly take place in fantasy worlds where the political issues that divide us in real-life don't exist. That makes it far more natural for games to be apolitical than for, say, movies set in modern-day Earth.
2) It takes a lot of time for an institution to become respected across the political spectrum and then get politicized after that. Most game studios haven't existed long enough for that to happen, as it's a very volatile industry.
3) Games are a fairly global market. For most Americans, it is fairly rare to watch movies or television shows or listen to music made by non-American companies. But there are many games made abroad that sell well in the United States. Games made by foreign developers are much harder to politicize for an American audience, partially because it's stupid to do when a large fraction of your audience isn't American, and partially because foreign developers are likely to neither know nor care much about American politics.
So yes, playing computer games might well save the world. And I say that only half in jest. At least if you can find a video card to run the games. (See, this post really is on-topic.)