They only changed providers for the same unforgivable mistake.
They still want your driver's license, to use fancy IRC.
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In some sense this has been coming since the Xbox One.
In another sense this has been coming since around 1996.
The central goal of the Xbox project was always to computerify the console market. This has now happened, to such an extent that platforms are basically interchangeable. That irrelevance wasn't part of the plan. Microsoft assumed they'd own everything. At present they're not even the best way to play Windows games, let alone the leading source of Windows software. Whoops.
Regardless of those details - there's not much point pretending that console hardware is distinct or important. Sony makes a nice AMD laptop, basically identical to Microsoft's own AMD laptop, for the second generation running. For some reason, people strongly prefer the blue one. Nintendo ditched fifteen years of technological planning to rebrand an Nvidia Shield and print money by making it the only portable with buttons. Still not sure how that market was untapped. Even now, their only serious competition is literally a whole-ass PC. All these machines run all the same games that don't star Mario Mario or John Halo.
I have been expecting Microsoft to stop participating in the console launch cycle since I thought their next one would be named the Xbox Two. I'm not sure why they're still coy about bowing out of the hardware market. If it's making them money, they can just... continue. But then it's weird for them to let rumors swirl like this. Nobody's come out and said, Xbox stronk, Xbox one thousand years, Xbox forever. In classic Microsoft fashion the right hand knows not what the left hand is doing, and the right hand's not sure either.
They've sat on the fence long enough that there's definitely going to be a PS6. If they'd called the-- fuck is this one called? If they'd called the Series series the final Xbox, a year after launch, they might've shaken that up. But now Sony's no doubt years deep in planning, and would gladly take a victory lap as the home console. But it's never gonna be like the PS1 again. That's the dream every time, and it kinda worked with the PS2, but everything since has been mere competition. Even that narrative might flop when the alternatives are portable and/or a full computer.
The argument for Microsoft staying in, at least one more time, is that hardware's kinda fucky. Intel had a great entry into the GPU market, just in time for their CPU division to mortally wound the entire company. Nvidia's convinced their infinite money glitch cannot go tits-up. AMD's making enough on industrial supply that they could almost buy their fabs back, but is somehow still second place in both their home markets. Microsoft may not bet on people's ability to shop for a home computer circa 2028. The console business model is 'I have to sell you this so I can sell you these,' and we might get dragged into another seven years of that, before we can stop pretending the console war still matters.
The runner-up put in a good showing, and will be missed.
Ork behavior.
A Raspberry Pi can run local models. You don't need 64 gigs and a 5090.
A customer paying a recurring subscription just to do their job.
Local models will win. They're half-assed, but the big boys only provide fractionally more ass. LLMs will become just another tool you can call on when you'd rather read code than write it.
Can't spell "resources."
May not be human.
I look forward to Anno fuming over someone taking the worldbuilding seriously instead of being a proto-mystery-box rug-pull to say that caring about fiction is bad.
He will presumably approve of how horny this gets.
... wait, who owns Eva at this point? Gainax ended in a confusing way that left most people disappointed.
But if you asked, gun to my head, 'what was the best console?' - it's the PS2. It's not even a contest. The video chip had such a disgusting fillrate that Xbox 360 remakes had to tone down the overdraw. Licensing remained dirt cheap, so weird shit could get on shelves at like two dollars per copy. The controllers were practically the platonic ideal. Just an incredible environment where innovation could look and feel complete.
What little was missing from that machine is abundant in its competitors. The Gamecube is a party toy with four controller ports and the wildest shader pipeline that's not technically programmable. The Xbox showed the full potential of hard drives and online connectivity. PCs could increasingly take internet access for granted, where Flash games offered instant access with negligible oversight.
Through this period, cross-platform engines started abstracting away any hardware differences. "Ports" stopped being from-scratch recreations or high jank at low framerates. It was the inflection point for all hardware becoming a generic compiler target. The fact the PSP was supposed to get an Oblivion port, and it wasn't just the PC game, already felt kinda weird.
I could call this a golden era for software - for developers making a game once-ish, and selling to nearly anyone with nearly any platform. Yet at the same time, the RTS genre was dying, EA killed a lot of important companies, and Bethesda had this silly little idea to sell you armor for your horse. It's never just one thing.
Deep respect to Microsoft for the Xbox 360 Arcade. That SKU forced damn near every game to work without a hard drive. I think even GTA V could run off a USB stick.
But hoo boy did they fuck that up with the Xbox One launch. And Sony capitalized.
It's never just one. They're localized. They tend to occur when the industry finds a groove and leans into it, so the focus is more on quality and iteration under criticism, and less about rough experimentation. The early PS1 era was a Cambrian explosion of weird 3D nonsense... and I don't think anyone nowadays would put that above late SNES releases. The defining titles of the PSX didn't come around until the very late 90s, and several of them sold like crap. Nobody wanted Symphony Of The Night until their friend would not shut up about it.
But over on PC, the 90s were a smooth ramp of increasing power and relevance. The 3D accelerator era laid the groundwork for the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race mindset, with visual quality and variety unmatched until the late PS2 era. (By which point Crysis had advanced PC graphics ten years into the future.)
And in 90s handheld gaming, there was the Game Boy, and nothing else mattered. Sega kept the Game Gear limping along until 1997, but nobody noticed, because everyone and their mother already chose the monochrome brick that sipped batteries. Several companies eventually gave up and released greyscale machines just in time for Nintendo to fuck them with the Game Boy Color. All the while, the platform went from twee single-sitting high-score fare, to bespoke long-form RPGs and major franchise sequels, to essentially-complete demakes of Super Nintendo games. Nothing changed except ROM size. It was the last 8-bit console, and it took developers a decade to recognize they could go hog wild on it.
Right after that, the Game Boy Advance's brief lifespan was essentially all golden era. Doom was practically a launch title. Homebrew devs kept teasing Quake, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, etc., alongside whole-ass GTA3 clones. Commercial releases were awash in good-to-great RPGs and metroidvanias. But then - the PSP scared Nintendo into creating the DS, and that platform went through some awkward years struggling to use better hardware. That wasn't the end of "the" golden era. For the PSP it was briefly fantastic, especially if you count its use for emulators. But it fell as the DS found its legs, while some completely unrelated trends happened to consoles and computers.
All we can say for certain is, nothing inside a video game should cost real money, and DRM is delayed theft.
Deltarune chapter six.
Kilocalories are basically watt-hours. How many images do you think a kilowatt gaming rig can generate in two hours, versus a human being drawing all day long?
You can skip a step and run a computer on sunlight.
If you live in the right place you might already be doing so.
Right, none of those things were happening until just now.
What they actually want is dead simple: the quality of direct API access without needing a CS degree to set it up.
... ComfyUI is right there, guys. It can't be that complicated; it's by Python people.
We're building the missing middle.
Ah, a crummy commercial. Back down to zero points you go.
Why is it titled like a Limewire virus?
There's a gradient from legitimate damning criticism of corporate behavior, to vaguely defensible moralizing against the technology itself, to identarian chest-beating as ingroup performance. The latter mindset is most common by far and freely borrows from the other two.
I've been legitimately surprised when makers on Youtube casually or comedically admit they vibe-coded their latest gizmo. It must invite harassment. Like okay, you built an animatronic mousepad that makes an aimbot out of your actual hand, but there's one drop of AI in there, so it's slop. And if anyone elaborated an ethical justification for using a program that does a thing, that would be 'protesting too much.' As if trying to pre-empt any tired haranguing is just conscience of guilt.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer. The podcast Final v3 rightly mocks Coca-Cola for thinking their text-to-video ad deserves a "behind the scenes" featurette, but when Julian mentions efforts to create models from original licensed input, he immediately scoffs "like that'd be 'ethical.'" My guy, if a solution isn't relevant, the complaint is pretense.
The fuck are people downvoting for? 8 GB and no CUDA is sufficient for a variety of LLMs. That comparison's from a year and a half ago, which is forever in this industry, but it's not like small models got worse.
This mildly terrible website shows Min Istral 3B benchmarking above state-of-the-art DeepSeek R1 32B from ten months prior. And also above the 72B version of Qwen 2.5, whose 3B version was top-of-the-list for the ItsFoss guy.