That was an interesting read! I've been driving in Japan for the last 3 years. Mostly rural, so it's pretty chill. But city driving can be stressful and chaotic. I don't think my heart could take driving in Chinese cities. As the author wrote, having mopeds everywhere would be stressful.
I didn't know that the IDP does not work with China. I needed an IDP to drive in Japan for my first year. After the first year, I got a Japanese driver's license.
Also, it was funny how many times the author mentioned WeChat. You really do use it everywhere in China!
I just heard about that. Won't work in the long term. Either the spammers will create a tool to bypass it, or they will continue to run services in third world countries where people complete captchas for pennies.
You are right that foreign powers abuse these platforms, but I don't personally believe that the platforms care. They just want to sell ads. Controversy will likely drive more traffic and more ad conversions.
It might be a nice stock boost in the short term, but the goal for a majority of these companies is to sell ads. If advertisers see a drop in conversions, I doubt the platforms could keep the fake user ruse going for long.
My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.
Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.
I found GDScript to be quite powerful in terms of functionality. I don't have experience in professional game Dev to be aware of the benefits of C# beyond it being the industry standard for Unity.
Single threaded audio is a big concern. I haven't implemented music in my game yet to know if it is a deal breaker.
The main problem that I have run into is shader compilation stutters on the compatibility render. Makes the game basically unplayable. My work around was to spawn certain objects on the main menu out of sight to force compilation. I believe the forward renderer has some pre-compilation.
As much as I dislike webdev stuff, I love the way you can distribute entire programs through WASM. Super cool stuff! For those who are interested, I recommend checking out Godot for exporting games on the web. It's really easy to do and you can host it on Itch.io
I love TF2 as well! To be a little less negative, I will say that game engines like Godot give me lots of hope for the future. It sets a good foundation for future game devs to make something great. Also, game devs now have access to lots of different platforms to publish their games.
Again, that was a personal take. I understand millions of people are still able to enjoy modern video games.
I am primarily an FPS gamer. Old school COD was great. I also love older version of Minecraft. Also most Valve games. Portal 2 being my favorite.
If I had to summarize my major problems with modern games/game industry they are this: Unrelatable stories (to me personally), micro transactions, poor optimization, and planned obsolescence (You can never player Overwatch 1 ever again). Then there are other bonus problems like the fortnite-ification of games, E.g., putting every IP know to man into a single game.
Also, loot boxes. Horrible, disgusting business practice. Literally selling gambling to children.
I don't know what the degradation for NAND storage is, but another aspect that I didn't mention in my original comment is the fragility of disc based media. In terms of scratches and other damage.
I was completely unaware that PS5 discs could hold that much data! But that leads me to the next question, what is the read time look like on that? lol. I found this manual on google for the ps5 disc drive, but I don't understand these units.
In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games. I understand that they still exist because of the resale value, but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me.
On an even more personal note, very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment. The gaming landscape overall has dropped so low that I don't even care anymore.
I hate everything about modern vehicles. Built cheaply, yet cost a fortune. Are filled with laggy infotainment computers that requires subscriptions and replace reliable and easy to locate climate controls. They are the size of tanks despite having a smaller bed size than a Japanese kei car. The list goes on and on.
Seems like they put a lot of time and effort into this article. It's a shame that I cannot read it because it is covered by, "Sale ends soon. $0.50/week for your first six months year. Subscribe!", on my screen.
Despite using Firefox, I keep chrome installed in case there is a website that requires it. I have recently started receiving Windows 11 notifications from Chrome, advertising their new AI features. This happens one two different devices. I haven't launch chrome on either of them for some time.
It is maddening how much they are pushing this useless and inaccurate garbage on us.
The part where they highlight the rippling in the lithium battery was interesting. They mention it can accelerate degradation over time. It's unclear if this specific example is within tolerances, but I have seen in other CT scans how dramatic the lithium rippling can become.
But overall, yeah, this is mostly an advertisement. They have other videos on their YouTube where they scan random items.
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