Please be moddable…

FWIW there is a cottage industry for OnStar disable/delete mods for GM vehicles. It can be done, usually without breaking too much else of the car’s electronic functionality.

I agree, this is a good use of the live service model to improve the gameplay experience. Previous entries in the Flight Simulator series did have people purchase and download static map data for selected regions, and it was a real pain in the butt – and expensive, too. Even with FS2020 there is a burgeoning market for airport and scenery packs that have more detail and verisimilitude than Asobo’s (admittedly still pretty good) approach of augmenting aerial and satellite imagery with AI can provide.

Bottom line, though, simulator hobbyists have a much different sense of what kind of costs are reasonable for their games. If you’re already several grand deep on your sim rig, a couple hundred for more RAM or a few bucks a month for scenery updates isn’t any big deal to you.

I’m bleeding, making me the victor!

I had quite a bit of fun with it for a few weekends with my friends, but ultimately the lack of a system for mechanical progression left it feeling a bit shallow (ha!). As a primarily PvE game with light PvP it’s in a weird place where it doesn’t have quite enough RPG-like elements to hold my interest on the PvE side, or enough player-on-player combat to make it a gripping contest of skill.

It’s still a fun game to hop into from time to time, but it’s never been appointment gaming for me

Right now Intel and AMD have less to fear from Apple than they do from Qualcomm – the people who can do what they need to do with a Mac and want to are already doing that, it’s businesses that are locked into the Windows ecosystem that drive the bulk of their laptop sales right now, and ARM laptops running Windows are the main threat in the short term.

If going wider and integrating more coprocessors gets them closer to matching Apple Silicon in performance per watt, that’s great, but Apple snatching up their traditional PC market sector is a fairly distant threat in comparison.

Rotovap on a flytrap.

Quite sure – and given that one game I’ve been playing lately (and the exception to the lack of shooters in my portfolio) is Selaco, so I ought to have noticed by now.

There’s a very slight difference in smoothness when I’m rapidly waving a mouse cursor waving around on one screen versus the other, but it’s hardly the night-and-day difference that going from 30fsp to 60fps was back in Ye Olden Days, and watching a small, fast-moving, high-contrast object doesn’t make up the bulk of gameplay in anything I play these days.

The old one and the new one are literally side by side on my desktop, don’t know what to tell you…

At launch the 360 was on par graphically with contemporary high-end GPUs, you’re right. By even the midpoint of its seven year lifespan, though, it was getting outclassed by midrange PC hardware. You’ve got to factor in the insanely long refresh cycles of consoles starting with the six and seventh generations of consoles when you talk about processing power. Sony and Microsoft have tried to fix this with mid-cycle refresh consoles, but I think this has honestly hurt more than helped since it breaks the basic promise of console gaming – that you buy the hardware and you’re promised a consistent experience with it for the whole lifecycle. Making multiple performance targets for developers to aim for complicates development and takes away from the consumer appeal

Eh… Consoles used to be horribly crippled compared to a dedicated gaming PC of similar era, but people were more lenient about it because TVs were low-res and the hardware was vastly cheaper. Do you remember Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, for instance? I do, and it was a slideshow – didn’t stop the game from being lauded as the apex of console shooters at the time. I remember Xbox 360 flagship titles upscaling from sub-720p resolutions in order to maintain a consistent 30fps.

The console model has always been cheap hardware masked by lenient output resolutions and a less discerning player base. Only in the era of 4K televisions and ubiquitous crossplay with PC has that become a problem.

Might just be my middle-aged eyes, but I recently went from a 75Hz monitor to a 160Hz one and I’ll be damned if I can see the difference in motion. Granted that don’t play much in the way of twitch-style shooters anymore, but for me the threshold of visual smoothness is closer to 60Hz than whatever bonkers 240Hz+ refresh rates that current OLEDs are pushing.

I’ll agree that 30fps is pretty marginal for any sort of action gameplay, though historically console players have been more forgiving of mediocre performance in service of more eye candy.

The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who’d take them back to the conservative approach?

Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they’d celebrated those attempts that didn’t quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship’s failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX’s initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That’s not the case for many others.

NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything – very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially – and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn’t blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That’s arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren’t afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.

Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing’s case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.

Another perovskite hype piece. You’ll know that they’ve got something that’s commercially viable once they’re making these sorts of efficiency claims and not omitting information about cell degradation.

Given that the first perovskites studied had lifespans that could be measured in minutes, this is great progress, but the fundamental problem is that as a class of materials they just don’t want to exist outside of an inert atmosphere. Without significant progress in stability and encapsulation materials, they’re more of a research curiosity than a viable real-world PV tech.

Are there a lot of people who individually hold chaotic, mutually-incompatible political opinions? Sure! I don’t think you can boil their ultimate decision-making process down to a box-ticking exercise, where if a candidate represents sufficient number of demographics they hold bigoted views about they automatically vote for Default Old White Guy. For example –

I can’t even tell you how many people had both Bernie and Trump as their top two candidates in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

– that’s very clearly low-information voters dissatisfied with the status quo, who would happily glom onto anybody promising to sufficiently shake things up. Sure, Trump and Bernie had wildly-divergent platforms, but Joe Sixpack – who probably doesn’t feel like he has a dog in the fight on any of the particulars like abortion or finance law and assumes anybody sticking it to the broader political class is a net positive for him – doesn’t see much practical difference, and is so little affected by the bigotry of the right that none of it bothers him, so of course the two candidates presenting themselves as outsiders with a plan to shake up Washington are basically interchangeable.

I just don’t think that’s a very big demo. Anybody who’s suddenly motivated to keep the White House white and estrogen-free is more than likely a foaming-at-the-mouth MAGAt, who was already motivated to put their guy back in office. There will of course be a few people who fit that description, and probably many more diet racists and sexists who will just stay home if their options are Trump or a “left-coast liberal woman,” but I don’t think they make up a significant-enough proportion of the voting public to outweigh that latter group you mention, who couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for Biden but are amped-up to vote for somebody younger, healthier, and more dynamic.

Obama won by healthy margins in '08 and '12, and Hillary – the least likeable candidate that’s made it to the top of the Democratic ticket since Dukakis – still won the popular vote. I think the people who would vote against a black woman for President were never going to vote for a Democrat in the first place, and given the general aura of relief and enthusiasm I’ve seen in left wing spaces since the announcement I think Harris is going to be riding a wave of support from the left, even if half of it is just from people who are glad they don’t have to hold their noses to support a doddering octogenarian because the alternative is fascism.

A combination of resting on their laurels during AMD’s lost decade, and failure to retain competitive process technology during the extended gestation and ultimate failure of their non-EUV 10nm node. The arrogance of taking their foot off the gas and assuming nobody would ever catch back up to them backfired hard.