Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 48 Posts
  • 2.81K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two YearsEnglish
    16·
    20 hours ago

    I was about to say that I knew that COVID-19 caused video game sales to surge, and then crash, and there was over-hiring that had happened in response to those sales, but a third seems like an insanely high number.

    Looking at WP, it sounds like the surge was actually that high…but for mobile OS games and console games, not PC, where the surge was much more muted. I also hadn’t realized that mobile OS video game spending had become that much larger than PC spending.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022–2025_video_game_industry_layoffs

    The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in interest in gaming globally, and was a period of dramatic expansion in the industry, with many mergers and acquisitions conducted. In many cases companies over-expanded, as this rapid COVID-era growth was unsustainable. The industry began to slow in 2022, and amid spiralling costs and a shift in consumer habits, layoffs began.

    The first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a sharp increase in revenue for the gaming sector worldwide as people looked for indoor entertainment.[56] According to IDC, in 2020, revenue from mobile games climbed by 32.8% to $99.9 billion, while expenditure on digital PC and Mac games increased by 7.4% to $35.6 billion.[57] The amount spent on home console games increased significantly as well, reaching $42.9 billion, up 33.9%.[58][59]

    In the ensuing years, this growing pattern abruptly stopped.[60] Revenue growth from mobile gaming fell by 15% in 2021, and then fell even further in 2022 and 2023, to -3.3% and -3.1%, respectively. Sales of PC and Mac games saw a brief rise of 8.7% in 2021, a drop of 1.4% in 2022, and a rebound of 2.1% in 2023.[61] Similarly, after a surge in 2020, console game spending plateaued in 2021 with growth at 0.7%, followed by a decline of 3.4% in 2022, before returning to growth at 5.9% in 2023.[59][62]

    EDIT: Based on those numbers, the surge in mobile and console sales combined was basically equivalent in value to the entirety of PC video game sales. It’s like the equivalent of the entire PC video gaming industry materialized, existed for a few years, and then disappeared.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Elon Musk says Tesla ending Models S and X production, converting Fremont factory lines to make Optimus robotsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    I mean, human environments are intrinsically made for humanoids to navigate. Like, okay, we put stairs places, things like that. So in theory, yeah, a humanoid form makes sense if you want to stick robots in a human environment.

    But in practice, I think that there are all kinds of problems to be solved with humans and robots interacting in the same space and getting robots to do human things. Even just basic safety stuff, much less being able to reasonably do general interactions in a human environment. Tesla spent a long time on FSD for its vehicles, and that’s a much-more-limited-scope problem.

    Like, humanoid robots have been a thing in sci-fi for a long time, but I’m not sold that they’re a great near-term solution.

    If you ever look at those Boston Dynamics demos, you’ll note that they do them in a (rather-scuffed-up) lab with safety glass and barriers and all that.

    I’m not saying that it’s not possible to make a viable humanoid robot at some point. But I don’t think that the kind of thing that Musk has claimed it’ll be useful for:

    “It’ll do anything you want,” Musk said. “It can be a teacher, babysit your kids; it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries; just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.”

    …a sort of Rosie The Robot from The Jetsons, is likely going to be at all reasonable for quite some time.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Meta’s Reality Labs cuts sparked fears of a ‘VR winter’English
    2·
    5 days ago

    I just am not sold that there’s enough of a market, not with the current games and current prices.

    There are several different types of HMDs out there. I haven’t seen anyone really break them up into classes, but if I were to take a stab at it:

    • VR gaming googles. These focus on providing an expansive image that fills the peripheral vision, and cut one off from the world. The Valve Index would be an example.

    • AR goggles. I personally don’t like the term. It’s not that augmented reality isn’t a real thing, but that we don’t really have the software out there to do AR things, and so while theoretically these could be used for augmented reality, that’s not their actual, 2026 use case. But, since the industry uses it, I will. These tend to display an image covering part of one’s visual field which one can see around and maybe through. Xreal’s offerings are an example.

    • HUD glasses. These have a much more limited display, or maybe none at all. These are aimed at letting one record what one is looking at less-obtrusively, maybe throw up notifications from a phone silently, things like the Ray-Ban Meta.

    • Movie-viewers. These things are designed around isolation, but don’t need head-tracking. They may be fine with relatively-low resolution or sharpness. A Royole Moon, for example.

    For me, the most-exciting prospect for HMDs is the idea of a monitor replacement. That is, I’d be most-interested in something that does basically what my existing displays do, but in a lower-power, more-portable, more-private form. If it can also do VR, that’d be frosting on the cake, but I’m really principally interested in something that can be a traditional monitor, but better.

    For me, at least, none of the use cases for the above classes of HMDs are super-compelling.

    For movie-viewing. It just isn’t that often that I feel that I need more isolation than I can already get to watch movies. A computer monitor in a dark room is just fine. I can also put things on a TV screen or a projector that I already have sitting around and I generally don’t bother to turn on. If I want to block out outside sound more, I might put on headphones, but I just don’t need more than that. Maybe for someone who is required to be in noisy, bright environments or something, but it just isn’t a real need for me.

    For HUD glasses, I don’t really have a need for more notifications in my field of vision — I don’t need to give my phone a HUD.

    AR could be interesting if the augmented reality software library actually existed, but in 2026, it really doesn’t. Today, AR glasses are mostly used, as best I can tell, as an attempt at a monitor replacement, but the angular pixel density on them is poor compared to conventional displays. Like, in terms of the actual data that I can shove into my eyeballs in the center of my visual field, which is what matters for things like text, I’m better off with conventional monitors in 2026.

    VR gaming could be interesting, but the benefits just aren’t that massive for the games that I play. You get a wider field of view than a traditional display offers, the ability to use your head as an input for camera control. There are some genres that I think that it works well with today, like flight sims. If you were a really serious flight-simmer, I could see it making sense. But most genres just don’t benefit that much from it. Yeah, okay, you can play Tetris Effect: Connected in VR, but it doesn’t really change the game all that much.

    A lot of the VR-enabled titles out there are not (understandably, given the size of the market) really principally aimed at taking advantage of the goggles. You’re basically getting a port of a game aimed at probably a keyboard and mouse, with some tradeoffs.

    And for VR, one has to deal with more setup time, software and hardware issues, and the cost. I’m not terribly price sensitive on gaming compared to most, but if I’m getting a peripheral for, oh, say, $1k, I have to ask how seriously I’m going to play any of the games that I’m buying this hardware for. I have a HOTAS system with flight pedals; it mostly just gathers dust, because I don’t play many WW2 flight sims these days, and the flight sims out there today are mostly designed around thumbsticks. I don’t need to accumulate more dust-collectors like that. And with VR the hardware ages out pretty quickly. I can buy a conventional monitor today and it’ll still be more-or-less competitive for most uses probably ten or twenty years down the line. VR goggles? Not so much.

    At least for me, the main things that I think that I’d actually get some good out of VR goggles on:

    • Vertical-orientation games. My current monitors are landscape aspect ratio, and don’t support rotating (though I imagine that there might be someone that makes a rotating VESA mount pivot, and I could probably use wlr-randr to make Wayland change the display orientation manually) Some games in the past in arcades had something like a 3:4 portrait mode aspect ratio. If you’re playing one of those, you could maybe get some extra vertical space. But unless I need the resolution or portability, I can likely achieve something like that by just moving my monitor closer while playing such a game.

    • Pinball sims, for the same reason.

    • There are a couple of VR-only games that I’d probably like to play (none very new).

    • Flight sims. I’m not really a super-hardcore flight simmer. But, sure, for WW2 flight sims or something like Elite: Dangerous, it’s probably nice.

    • I’d get a little more immersiveness out of some games that are VR-optional.

    But…that’s just not that overwhelming a set of benefits to me.

    Now, I am not everyone. Maybe other people value other things. And I do think that it’s possible to have a “killer app” for VR, some new game that really takes advantage of VR and is so utterly compelling that people feel that they’d just have to get VR goggles so as to not miss out. Something like what World of Warcraft did for MMO gaming, say. But the VR gaming effort has been going on for something like a decade now, and nothing like that has really turned up.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?English
    9·
    5 days ago

    Have a limited attack surface will reduce exposure.

    If, say, the only thing that you’re exposing is, oh, say, a Wireguard VPN, then unless there’s a misconfiguration or remotely-exploitable bug in Wireguard, then you’re fine regarding random people running exploit scanners.

    I’m not too worried about stuff like (vanilla) Apache, OpenSSH, Wireguard, stuff like that, the “big” stuff that have a lot of eyes on them. I’d be a lot more dubious about niche stuff that some guy just threw together.

    To put perspective on this, you gotta remember that most software that people run isn’t run in a sandbox. It can phone home. Games on Steam. If your Web browser has bugs, it’s got a lot of sites that might attack it. Plugins for that Web browser. Some guy’s open-source project. That’s a potential vector too. Sure, some random script kiddy running an exploit scanner is a potential risk, but my bet is that if you look at the actual number of compromises via that route, it’s probably rather lower than plain old malware.

    It’s good to be aware of what you’re doing when you expose the Internet to something, but also to keep perspective. A lot of people out there run services exposed to the Internet every day; they need to do so to make things work.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warnsEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    Unless you have some really serious hardware, 24 billion parameters is probably the maximum that would be practical for self-hosting on a reasonable hobbyist set-up.

    Eh…I don’t know if you’d call it “really serious hardware”, but when I picked up my 128GB Framework Desktop, it was $2k (without storage), and that box is often described as being aimed at the hobbyist AI market. That’s pricier than most video cards, but an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU was north of $1k, an NVidia RTX 4090 was about $2k, and it looks like the NVidia RTX 5090 is presently something over $3k (and rising) on EBay, well over MSRP. None of those GPUs are dedicated hardware aimed at doing AI compute, just high-end cards aimed at playing games that people have used to do AI stuff on.

    I think that the largest LLM I’ve run on the Framework Desktop was a 106 billion parameter GLM model at Q4_K_M quantization. It was certainly usable, and I wasn’t trying to squeeze as large a model as possible on the thing. I’m sure that one could run substantially-larger models.

    EDIT: Also, some of the newer LLMs are MoE-based, and for those, it’s not necessarily unreasonable to offload expert layers to main memory. If a particular expert isn’t being used, it doesn’t need to live in VRAM. That relaxes some of the hardware requirements, from needing a ton of VRAM to just needing a fair bit of VRAM plus a ton of main memory.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@beehaw.org•EXCLUSIVE: OnePlus Is Being DismantledEnglish
    8·
    10 days ago

    Are Motorola ok?

    Depends on what you value in a phone. Like, I like a vanilla OS, a lot of memory, large battery, and a SIM slot. I don’t care much about the camera quality and don’t care at all about size and weight (in fact, if someone made a tablet-sized phone, I’d probably switch to that). That’s almost certainly not the mix that some other people want.

    There’s some phone comparison website I was using a while back that has a big database of phones and lets you compare and search based on specification.

    goes looking

    This one:

    https://www.phonearena.com/phones

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warnsEnglish
    31·
    11 days ago

    That’s why they have the “Copilot PC” hardware requirement, because they’re using an NPU on the local machine.

    searches

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/npu-devices/

    Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 hardware powered by a high-performance Neural Processing Unit (NPU) — a specialized computer chip for AI-intensive processes like real-time translations and image generation—that can perform more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

    It’s not…terribly beefy. Like, I have a Framework Desktop with an APU and 128GB of memory that schlorps down 120W or something, substantially outdoes what you’re going to do on a laptop. And that in turn is weaker computationally than something like the big Nvidia hardware going into datacenters.

    But it is doing local computation.