I think there’s a human bias where we remember predictions being wrong more strongly than those being right.
The study shows that they weren’t wrong or right in equal measure, they were right more often, considerably so. But that doesn’t mean that they were always right.
I don’t disagree with the problems you mention, but US and European wages are high, and margins keep getting tighter and tighter.
A lead studio with a small headcount can outsource work internationally for often much cheaper than the same job done locally, but also not have to pay those workers in stages of development where there’s not enough work for them.
Yes, that’s what I said. Powerful and flexible, at the expense of not being able to know how it will be used ahead of time.
Bundling and precompiling is not a fool-proof guarantee but it is very effective. Most often when a game has shader stutter the developers have not bundled or allowed the shaders to compile before gameplay starts (or it’s actually some other unrelated issue). The engine doesn’t do it automatically.
Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case.
There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime play begins, but it takes some setup and smaller devs might not know how to do it. This is most likely the reason why stuttering happens.
On fixed hardware targets (consoles, Steam Deck) you can ship precached shaders as you know everything about the target hardware.
You can mix and match to some extent, though Nanite, Lumen and Megalights are intended to work together. Megalights really needs Lumen, and Lumen works best with Nanite.
There’s the whole forward renderer path you can use instead, which works well on lighter hardware. Or you can use baked lighting instead of Lumen, and some people have created other realtime GI systems as plugins.
You can’t really change the material-shader pipeline though without overhauling the entire engine.
There are also a ton of parameters and configuration options you can change. These can be quite obscure and this is where small studios struggle.
It’s not “moving to India” so much as Western studios are now forming smaller core teams locally and farming out much of the content to outsourcing studios in India, Malaysia & Eastern Europe rather than doing it all in-house.
I’d love to blame collective internet myopia on bots, just as I’d love to blame leaded gas for the mental state of geriatric politicians, but in my heart I don’t buy it.
Cowpox was used to vaccinate against smallpox. Cowpox is a less severe infection that stimulates the same immune response as smallpox, but it’s not the same virus.
Inoculation is where a weakened pathogen is introduced to create immune resistance against that same pathogen (see inoculation parties).
That’s what Dr Fauci said for seasonal flu in 2004.
Yes you will have antibodies from being exposed to one strain of flu. You won’t for the next strain.
Catching COVID carried a far greater risk because although symptoms can be mild in many cases it can kill vulnerable people and it spreads incredibly quickly. At the peak of the pandemic, hospitals were being overrun by people sick with the virus, which affected everyone’s access to care. Vaccines helped prevent the spread of new strains to vulnerable people and reduced pressure on the hospitals.
If you’ve had Covid twice then you’ll have had the antibodies in your system, however there were several strains and getting boosters to maximise resistance was important.
Remember that you caught Covid twice, because your body’s immune system was still not strong enough to make you asymptomatic the second time. You likely caught Covid several times but several of those times you were asymptomatic.
It’s incorrect to say that catching the virus gives you “better” protection than a vaccine. The vaccine teaches your immune system how to react to the virus without the damage and long-term effects caused by actually having the virus. This makes future infections much less severe and you are less likely to spread the virus to others when you catch it.
Worth restating because of all the misinformation out there: a vaccine will not prevent you from catching a virus, it cannot do that. It trains your immune system to fight the virus so that when you catch it your immune system can fight it immediately and symptoms are much less severe (ideally asymptomatic, but that is not guaranteed), so that you have less chance of passing it on.
Kids spread the virus, whether they’re at risk of dying or not. Vaccines reduce the chance of them spreading it by reducing the symptoms and the time that they they’re infectious.
The main benefit of vaccines is that they reduce the transmission of disease. This aspect saves more lives than individual protection.
It is. There are incoming EU regulations about consumers needing free access to their data that is sent to a cloud server on their behalf. That doesn’t mean all the functionality of an app needs to be implemented.
My feeling is that this change plus the recent API lock for a few days ago are in fact part of a reworking to enable this EU legislation.
Data point: I bought a Skoda because of its claimed efficiency. It wasn’t the only factor, but in the balance of weighing things up, I cared that the stated emissions and fuel efficiency were better than some of the competitors.
I was lied to. Had I known that was the case there is a good chance I would have gone with a different car.
My car was recalled and reprogrammed and it no longer had the torque it had at first.
Of course now it’s clear that most if not all manufacturers were doing the same trick, they just weren’t caught at it.
Some EV models have gone back to drum brakes. The main drawback of drum brakes is overheating, which is why they can’t be used for performance vehicles, even though drum brakes can deliver more braking power. EVs with strong regenerative braking reduces pressure on the brakes, making the heat build-up less of a problem.
The main advantage of this is cost, not weight or performance, but it does show that EVs have different profile to ICE cars.
The study shows that they weren’t wrong or right in equal measure, they were right more often, considerably so. But that doesn’t mean that they were always right.