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I have the same panel and a similar experience. It is the best display that I’ve ever used.
I often accidentally turn the monitor off because my desktop is just a black background and so it appears to be off if there isn’t something being displayed.
The HDR could possibly be brighter, but the OLED blacks are worth the diminished peak brightness (which is brighter than is comfortable in a dark room).
I have around 12,000 hours and I have some minor blue channel image retention in the crosshair area, it looks like a small bar across the center of the screen, but it is only noticeable if I’m displaying a pure blue color (like when I’m looking for image retention). In actual usage I don’t notice it and the peak brightness is probably a little lower. I usually run at 60-80% brightness depending on room lighting conditions so I have a lot of overhead before I’d notice the loss of brightness.
You’re using art and ‘return on investment’ in the same paragraph. You’re not describing art, you’re describing an industry.
People will draw pictures with charcoal out of a fire because they feel the compulsion to make art. People who want to make art will make art even if the world is burning. AI tools are not going to kill art.
But, like every technological innovation, AI tools will reduce the number of people in the industry. This happens with all technology. Yes, it’s disruptive and displaces a lot of workers who need to work to earn a living. This is just a fact of the situation we are in, it is not something that you’re going to stop by trying to convince people to not use the technology.
You can’t put this back in the bottle when anyone with an undergraduate understanding of linear algebra and a python interpreter can create new image generation models on a whim. A few TB of images and a few weeks of a single GPU’s time will train a model.
What is the endgame here? If you were dictator of the world, how would you even propose ‘fixing’ this? It’s one thing to be angry, but point that anger in the direction of something that is actually possible to change.
It’s ironic you chose to compare it to computers because we’ve seen that the generational decline in mathematical ability has fallen off a cliff as people now don’t even have to think about how numbers work. We have college graduates with zero reading comprehension or writing ability because they’ve never had to independently develop those skills. We have vanishing competency in critical analysis and the ability to carry a dialogue at levels that were considered natural and intrinsic a handful of generations ago. Everywhere we see the constant erosion of the capability of achieving objectives that are less than a generation removed from us. We’re not talking about forgetting how to knap flint or the decline of the buggy whip maker. We’re talking about the intrinsic capacity of the human mind to engage with the world suddenly becoming an investment on which there is no chance of return in a single human lifetime, because there is no economically sustainable path from raw novice to professional.
Sure, I agree with that in broad strokes.
That doesn’t mean that I’m going to get angry on the Internet that people are using computers in their business. Or driving cars instead of hiring a horse a buggy team, or eating food from a grocery store instead of driving a plow in their own fields.
Technology moves forward and we have to deal with the consequences. Look at ways that we can deal with the consequences if you want to actually make a difference. It is a waste of time to think that you’re going to shame the entire world into not using this technology that we’ve discovered.
strawman
Are you just using that word ironically because I said it or are you actually unable to identify the fallacy that’s being used or do you need people to write /s for you to understand sarcasm?
Maybe you should ask the AI to read comments to you if you’re unable to comprehend basic written English. Here, since your confederates are similarly unable to read I’ve already asked an AI to explain for you:
You’re murdering that strawman, bud.
You’re attacking the AI bubble, and investments in the services side of things that exceed the revenue that they’re producing. Yeah, the investment in LLMs that NVIDIA is the center of are dumb and a bubble.
The topic of the post, top comment and my reply is about the experimenting with AI in pilot programs. The post is full of people attacking Take-Two for trying AI, which is what I’m replying to.
You’re over here attacking AI companies for investing in a technology that nobody is using (other than Take-Two, apparently) as if that argument has anything to do with the topic at all.
Or, better idea, stop using AI for creative work
People can use whatever tools they want, if someone wants to be a great oil painter they can do that, if someone wants to learn how to draw on a digital tablet and use photoshop to edit it then let them do that, if someone wants to use diffusion models and Photoshop then let them do that.
You do not lose personal fulfillment in a thing that you genuinely enjoy because someone else is enjoying their own thing. This is not about creative expression. Your argument is an economic argument at base, not one about artistic expression.
If you can’t afford to pay real people to create genuinely human artistic works, you’re a terrible business person and deserve to fail.
An AI tool is not going to produce higher quality work than a professional human. Anyone who is gutting their business because they think AI is going to replace creative workers will fail because they’re making the wrong bet. The tools simply cannot replace human creativity.
At the same time, the framing that any use of AI tools to save labor is inherently bad is simply a denialist position. These tools exist and people are using them, this is the reality that we live in. Yes, it causes disruption in the labor markets this is unavoidable.
Think about how much you feel for the jobs of the Computers. Remember them? The people who used to earn their living calculating math problems… hundreds of thousands of professional people who had advanced degrees and worked their whole life in the field were suddenly replaced by some silicon and electricity. Are you boycotting the Field Effect Transistor because it decimated an entire industry?
Why do you even acknowledge the rights of digital artists or engineers to own intellectual property? After all, they’re using (by this logic) the terrible digital design tools, the software that replaced an entire industry of Drafters and support artists. Because of that software, nobody is going to hire a team of drafters, with their college educations and high salary expectations. Instead they just buy an AutoCAD license for less than a single worker would earn in a week.
Attacking a technology because it causes disruption in the labor market is pointless. If you’re living in a country where this disruption is causing serious problems, then you can understand the value of creating a social safety net in order to protect everyone from the next unforeseen circumstance/technology/disruption.
The post button did you dirty.
So why aren’t EGS exclusives, which only takes a 12% cut and the dev of such exclusives also get a massive monetary incentive to be exclusive to the platform from Epic, not any cheaper than their contemporaries on any other marketplace? 🤔
I don’t know, I can only speculate. EGS makes a lot of decisions where they lose money on purpose in order to try to grow their business so their practices don’t always fit neatly into a simple economics model. For example, giving away games for free isn’t a rational business decision on the face, but they’ve decided that the future benefits will outweigh the costs.
If I had to guess a single reason. I would say that this is likely because AAA games have all essentially coalesced around specific price points. If a game is selling for 59.99 everywhere, then you’d certainly try to sell your game for 59.99 also. If you’re selling with 12% fees ($52.80/unit) and they’re selling with 30% fees ($42/unit) then your company is making more money and you’re in a more favorable position should the competition try to lower prices to take your market share.
Selling for less than the market prices wouldn’t make sense and the market price for all of this is primarily based on how Steam operates. Since Steam is the largest distributor, all price decisions are going to be primarily based on a market where prices include the 30% fee because the largest volume of, most, games’ sales are through Steam.
This lawsuit may not go anywhere, but there is no world where we, the consumer, are hurt by Steam being challenged on their pricing model. The only outcomes here are pro-consumer and pro-indy developer (the people most price sensitive and so most affected by these fees as a percentage of total revenue).
Maybe, but this doesn’t hurt the customer, this hurts the people wanting the profits, mostly the game publishers.
Trying to argue that adding a 30% tariff to a good doesn’t cause the price to go up is nonsense. It is basic economics that a good which costs more will need to sell for more than a good that costs less.
I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to geopolitics, but this argument has already played out in the real world and to the surprise of nobody, raising costs via tariffs raise the costs to the end consumer.
Your games cost more because of fees like this.
This price pressure freezes out smaller developers who, if they didn’t need to pay 30% of their gross revenue in fees, would otherwise have been able to run a successful business. Those small developers, which don’t exist, are not making games and that means less variety in the market places and more domination by the large AAA developers.
I read the article and I’m not sure what I’m missing.
Their claim is that Valve’s practices, such as the 30% platform fee are anti-competitive. The winners of the lawsuit would be the class of ‘People who have purchased games from Steam’ and the money that the lawsuit recovers would be paid to the class members.
I can’t see the downside of possibly winning some money and having cheaper games on Steam.
Wait what? Those are totally randomly picked games, that do not meet the criteria of being Hero Shooter.
I didn’t make that list, that is the top Steam games that have the ‘Hero Shooter’ tag.
What I understand under this term is Team Fortress 2, Overwatch and Marvel Rivals. Deadlock is an hybrid and that is okay too.
Every one of those work on Linux, I’m literally in comp queue in Rivals right now.
The vast majority of games work on Linux, even the games that ‘don’t work’ will run just fine if the developers decide to stop actively blocking Linux client. Apex Legends is a prime example, it had a Platinum rating on ProtonDB (the highest rating) right up until they decided to blacklist Linux clients so you couldn’t connect to games.
Agreed.
I understand the IP issues around marketing but not the entitlement of people who think it’s okay to demand that they be given it for free.
The developer still has to eat and live. If they choose to work for money that’s literally one of the most universal things that people do on this planet. It’s ridiculous and immature to demand otherwise.
(the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?)
End of Feb (the 26th?), these sales seem to be to promote the launch of Part 3.
I played the 2nd one with a friend for a few hours last night. I appreciate the humor, the music selection is above average, the movement feels good and every time we died it was due to us being dumb. No bugs (playing on Linux, with GE-Proton10-27), runs great on maximum settings.
We were having an easy time by going on a murder spree, then we noticed that the game gives you rank medals for speed, avoiding kills and avoiding detection so we started playing to maximize the end-score. Those constraints make the puzzles a bit harder and I can see wanting to run a level multiple times in order to get it right.
Overall, it’s a fun experience, does the stealth thing competently and the graphics/music/animations/dialog is good.
Now is a terrible time for building a PC, but you should absolutely be looking for good deals on used, non-Windows 11 compatible PCs if you’re even remotely technical.
I’ve found 2 different pre-build systems with a chunk of DDR4 and 3080s on the various local marketplaces for cheap (given current RAM/GPU prices).
Windows 11 may not run on them, but with a USB stick, a Bazzite ISO and a little bit of your time you can have a great mid-range PC who’s interface is exactly the same as the upcoming Steam Machine (i.e. it boots up and launches Steam in Big Picture Mode, you never see anything that looks like Linux)
Ya same, decided to stay on AM4 instead of swapping to AM5 (it’ll be cheaper next year, I naively thought) so I grabbed the best AM4 processor and upgraded my RAM to 64GB, tossed in a few more TB of SSDs and planned on a motherboard upgrade next year.
Now I’ll probably buy a side-grade (Steam Frame or maybe Deck) instead of trying to buy into the current generation hardware.
Luckily my job involves local AI (primarily training techs, I’m not a social media propagandist) so the business may find a business need for a graphics card soon. It won’t be mine, but we can hang out off-duty.
The only other headset I tried was the Quest 2, it worked with PCVR via a USB-C connection and has an onboard computer so it can be used completely untethered (at the time you were limited to the Quest2 apps in the Meta store, there was no wireless PCVR but there may be now).
It uses inside out tracking, so you don’t need any special equipment in order to use it. The downside is that it couldn’t track your hands behind your back (was never a problem on anything I played) and sometimes the controller tracking would misjudge the location a tiny bit. None of these were every a problem in any game, the deviation was very slight and fixed itself in under a second usually.
The screen is 120hz, and the resolution is actually higher than the Index, slightly. I could notice the difference in the screen door effect. Better brightness and color made the visual quality better than the Index and the lens setup seemed to mitigate the glow effect much better.
It looks like ebay has the top end 256GB model for under $200. Just make sure you get 1. The ability to send power over the USB-C, like via a powered dock, otherwise the headset runs on battery while plugged into USB and I have little tube batteries and 2 coiled USB-C cables to keep the controllers powered for longer than I could possibly use them (around 30 hours total at full charge), the standard battery lasts around 2 hours (probably less if it is used). I’m not sure that the battery can be replaced but any battery is replaceable if you don’t mind using a soldering gun.
Oh man, you’re going to get to experience it in an even better format. Index is great, 144hz looks amazing and the tracking is perfect. But the resolution is low so you get the ‘screen door effect’ and because of the lens configuration you’re getting first and second order reflections which can cause bright objects to have a glow around them and you don’t have HDR.
There are several applications that let you interact with the computer as if you had monitors. You can make the monitors are as large or small as you want them and placed where you choose. You can also just bind them to your head so they’re always in a fixed position in front of your face. I use the virtual desktop because it’s often less hassle than removing the headset and walking to my desktop. Eventually we’ll have displays with a higher DPI than you can perceive and then you could have your house wallpapered in virtual monitors if you wanted.
Another neat VR-specific thing is an overlay. Much like how Steam has an overlay where you can press a button in any game and access Steam, there are applications that perform a similar task in VR (you designate your overlay application in the Steam VR settings). I’ve been using XSOverlay, you can think of it like a holographic wristwatch/smartphone. There are good examples on YT if you’d like to see it.
In any game, when you have the overlay enabled, if you turn your arm an (adjustable) amount like looking at your watch, the overlay will appear. You can add all kinds of things to the overlay, including capturing specific applications. I often have Signal on my overlay so if I get a message I don’t need my phone or to pause the game and switch to a virtual desktop, I just look at my wrist and a Signal window is attached to it which I can interact with by pointing and clicking with the other controller. I use a SteamInput chord (holding multiple buttons) to activate a speech-to-text application, but you can also use a standard virtual keyboard for input.
It was something that I didn’t even know existed for several months, but it’s a huge QOL upgrade and it only costs $10.
Stephenson and Gibson are great, I’ve read everything that Stephenson has written and I’m only a few books from finishing Gibson. We’re not quite at Diamond Age levels of tech, but I can see the parallels.
It’s quite the experience, I started with the Index.
Unless Valve releases a new game with the frame I’d recommend trying Half Life: Alyx first, it’s a very AAA-like experience and does a great job at demonstrating all of the capabilities of VR on top of being beautiful.
Once you’ve tried that Beat Sabre is a blast (and quite a bit of exercise). Superhot is probably the best selling VR game, you can live out your Keanu Reeves fantasy of being both John Wick and Neo. The art style ensures that you will have super smooth framerate.
VTOL VR is a flight-sim and a masterful example of creating a game using VR-only controls. It’s for you if you like the idea of a game like DCS but don’t want to spend 80 hours studying a textbook before you can take off (not to mention weapon systems and tactics) and don’t want to spend a bunch of money on specialized control hardware. It is developed by one guy but allows custom maps so the community has created some interesting missions. There’s even 2-seat aircraft (like an attack helicopter, training aircraft and electronics warfare plane).
Iron Rebellion looks like a promising team-based mech game using a similar VR-only control philosophy. It’s in active development and the developers are very responsive to the community (it helps that the VR gaming community is small). It’s hard to tell if it is going to be more Mechwarrior-like or more like Armored Core (though it is leaning towards the former)
Blade and Sorcery and Boneworks/Bonelab are physics playgrounds. Blade and Sorcery is more like a fantasy ARPG while Bonelabs is more sci-fi-esq. Bone* has mod support so there is a lot of user created content (mostly crap, but there are some gems)
VR Chat is pretty self-explanatory. It’s not my thing but it is popular in some demographics.
A Fisherman’s Tale is essentially an escape room that would be impossible to create without VR.
habie147 is a pretty popular creator that focuses on VR, I usually check his videos out before I try a game.
spoiler
There’s also VR porn, if you see your Steam friends playing ‘DeoVR Video Player’ they’re probably looking at sexlikereal porn.
They had too many suits directing the developers to make the game something it wasn’t designed to be.
It was originally going to be like Rust or Ark but with more traditional RPG-style progression. Then they were told to make it a match-based game (like the instanced PvP mode with the bases, I forget the name) and then around 6 months before the scheduled release date they were directed to shift to an MMO.
This destroys all of the balancing of crafting/combat/death/etc and requires a huge amount of PvE content creation and iteration.
There were things that were good about the game. Open world small group PvP was fun, the ability to crouch/go prone to stealth added a fun strategic layer.
I quit while farming for the top tier endgame armor (before they added the item level system) and I had managed to get a high jewelcrafting level so I only had about 3 other people who could even compete on prices… then the duping glitch was discovered and the devs did absolutely nothing about it so the armor that I’d spent around a hundred hours farming was given out to every member of the opposing factions and then the window dragging invulnerability was discovered (so you could stand on capture points and be immune to damage while still capturing the point) and not fixed for weeks and weeks.
By the end the groups that owned everything were the ones that exploited heavily, so I quit.
That isn’t the conspiracy that I mean.
When I wrote my comment, there were about 10 other comments, half of whom were saying things like ‘This is because they’re all getting together to jack up the price and hoarding stock’ complete conspiracy nonsense.
So I was posting to show that: “No, the price increase is expected based on normal market forces. There is no evidence of a conspiracy.”
I believe you’re attributing views to me that I didn’t state.
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I never claimed the price increase itself was “social-media vibes.” My sentence referred to the belief that prices are out-running supply and demand. That belief needs data, not just anecdotal posts.
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I also never said the price rises “weren’t true.” I said the cause is straightforward demand-pull from AI, not conspiracy or hoarding. Prices can rise faster than CPI when demand shifts quickly and supply is inelastic; that’s consistent with the chart I posted.
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My first comment was about the aggregate RAM market, not Samsung specifically. The sentence “Memory isn’t expensive because Samsung is greedy …” was meant to rebut all of the conspiratorial comments in the thread, not to build a micro-level model of Samsung’s pricing power. You’re right that an oligopoly can amplify price moves, but that point needs margin data to separate strategic withholding from pure demand-pull. You haven’t provided that data.
If you have evidence that Samsung’s margins have expanded faster than the industry cost curve, I’d like to see it. Those numbers would tell us if the spike is market-clearing or profiteering.
And next time, lead with the data you did find instead of the name-calling; it lands better and actually backs the claim you’re making.
Ok, so who is arguing against that? Certainly not me.
Yes, every company on Earth would charge you $182737854 billion dollars for their product if they could and ever seller on earth would like to buy the product for $0. The market price is the price that both of these two opposing positions agree is fair.
You said:
Memory is high because there is nothing preventing them from charging anything they want above and beyond the cost of manufacture.
It is a requirement of every successful manufacturing business that has ever existed has to charge a price that is above the cost of manufacture. The term for this in academia is profit. If a company does not charge a price above and beyond the cost of manufacture then they’re selling the product for less than it costs to make it and, unless they’re Tesla, then they will eventually go out of business.
I can admit that maybe I did misread you because I assumed that you were trying to make some deeper point, because what you said, if read literally, is that “Memory is high because companies seek profit” which is the most trivially true thing you can say about economics.
So, back to basic economics.
The thing that is preventing a company from charging ‘anything they want’ is the fact that there are other manufacturers (because there isn’t a true monopoly in the RAM market) that are competing in the same market. Nothing is preventing Samnsung from charging $150,000 for a 1GB stick of RAM, but if Micron is selling their 1GB sticks of RAM for $150 then nobody will buy from Samsung.
This a phenomena known as competition prevents Samsung from being able to sell RAM for arbitrary prices. The market sets the price, not any individual company.
I assumed you knew something so basic.
The only way a manufacturer can arbitrarily change the market price is if they are the only manufacturer, aka a monopoly (in which case the $150,000 sticks of RAM are the only ones available on the market) or they are price fixing (and Micron has secretly agreed to sell RAM at $150,000 and no other manufacturers exist).
So if you’re not alleging price fixing then your comment is basically ‘Companies seek to maximize profit’ which is like saying the sky is blue or the sun is hot.
You just threw out an insult and didn’t actually make a point so I’m not sure how to even respond.
It looks like you’re suggesting that RAM should grow only at the pace of inflation and any deviation from that is due to greed? I hope you mean something deeper that I’m just missing your point because I find it hard to believe that you’ve ever taken an economics class if you don’t understand how prices can grow faster than inflation.
If you understood economics you’d know that when the aggregate demand for a hot-ticket good (like RAM) shifts rightward faster than aggregate supply can respond, because of short-run capacity constraints (i.e. Samsung can only manufacture RAM so fast), the market-clearing price must rise beyond the economy-wide inflation rate to re-equilibrate. This demand-pull premium reflects the good’s low short-run price elasticity of demand. Quantity-adjustment is inelastic, so the burden of rationing falls disproportionately on price.
In other words, when an item is in demand the price rises. It can rise faster than inflation because the demand for RAM grows faster than the demand for all of the other goods and services. Since inflation is a measure in the increase in prices across all goods and services, any product that experiences a sudden increase in demand will necessarily see a price rise in excess of inflation.
Any development time that is not spent on a new ICE vehicle is time well spent