• owned by Israeli billionaire
• based in the UK, subject to UK laws
• chief tech officer was previously the CEO of a Bitcoin exchange company and was convicted of fraud for stealing from it

For those who don’t want to read several pages of unnecessary text telling you what you probably already know:

The math, while pretty involved, may tell a straightforward story (if you’re interested in the details of our analysis, see the Appendix). OpenAI has contracted 900K memory wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix. Partner commentary seems to indicate that’s a monthly number, so that represents 10.8 million wafers over 12 months. In terms of demand, a fully built-out 10GW Stargate cluster would require ~3 million GB200 Bianca Boards. Each board requires ~50% of a memory wafer in total; split between the HBM3e stacks embedded into its two B200 GPU (~30%) and its 480 GB of LPDDR5X system memory (~20%). That puts total wafer demand for the entire cluster at ~3 million wafers.

Therefore, according to our best estimates, OpenAI likely needs less than 30% of the 10.8 million wafers it’s planning to buy

So this is just putting some numbers to what a lot of people already guessed. The AI companies are not just buying a ton of RAM to build out their data centers. They aren’t buying enough other components to even use that RAM. They’re buying it so that no one else can.

Do I believe China is engaging in a campaign of global intimidation? Heck, I’d be more surprised if they weren’t.

Do I believe they were using ChatGPT, product of an American company, as a “diary” to document the process? Absolutely not.

The distinction is usually “can the rewards be converted to real-world currency?”

Casinos use poker chips, and they have exchange counters or machines that can directly convert those to/from real money. So that’s 100% gambling.

Go to a Dave and Busters, use a claw machine, or am IRL gacha machine? You don’t get money. You get an item, or tickets/points that can be exchanged for an item, but not money. Theoretically you can take that item to another market and sell it, but that’s a completely separate transaction that does not involve the party you got it from, so that’s not gambling. Not anymore than buying a Beanie Baby in the hopes that it’s worth more in a couple years is gambling.

According to the article, it is 3rd parties that are exchanging these digital rewards from Valve with real-life currency. This is not new: there have been a handful of lawsuits over the past decade trying to go after Valve for this. Every time, Valve points out that they cannot control these 3rd party sites and that illegal gambling activity violates their terms and conditions. Valve has even offered to cooperate with governments to help them go after these 3rd party sites, but afaik that has not happened.

There have been lawsuits from Florida, Connecticut, Washington, and federal RICO cases that have all been dismissed pretty early on because what Valve is doing is legal.

You could argue whether or not they SHOULD be legal, and whether these governments should go through their (hopefully) democratic processes to pass laws to that effect, but so far the courts have ruled in favor of Valve. And I am skeptical any such law would be passed democratically, because… People like loot boxes.

Wanting your own people to out-reproduce and conquer other people is a thought process that is thousands of years old. Heck, that might be why the Neanderthals and Demosivans went extinct.

“Go forth and multiply” is a Christian doctrine for a reason.

I do have Mass Effect pirated. Just need a hardware upgrade to run RPCS3 better.

Another alternative is to buy on console. I bought the PS4 version of Yakuza: Like a Dragon because the steam version has Denuvo. I’m kind of torn between generally preferring physical over digital media, versus the openness and flexibility of PC vs the closed-off proprietary-ness of consoles. Trade-offs either way.

The US has more to lose than Russia when it comes to fossil fuels.

Perpetuating fossil fuels is absolutely in Russia’s interests, and Russia clearly has gone to great lengths to influence the US (and the rest of the world) in a lot of ways and for a lot of reasons. I’m just saying there’s already enough domestic pressure to explain why Trump supports fossil fuels.

The Mass Effect series, LA Noire, and Sonic Frontiers are all examples of games where I am waiting for DRM-free versions.

Can we count wealth hoarding as a mental illness though?

What incredible hyperbole. It is superisleading to describe that as going “All-In on AI”. It’s a change to the disclosure rules Valve requires for publishers, not that Valve is using AI themselves like GOG is.

I would prefer if they required disclosure of the use of any AI tools involved, but at this point AI has been so thoroughly shoved into every piece of software you can really just assume that some AI somewhere touched anything made after 2022. Generative AI is the bigger problem and this move focuses the attention on that.

I mean, that exact same criticism applies to every diet. Caloric restriction, intermittent fastin, pescaterianism/vegetarianism/veganism, etc.

There are 3 options:

1. Eat to live, rather than love to eat. Treat nutrition as a utility and not entertainment.

2. Learn to enjoy healthy eating. Not just the mouth feel and taste, but appreciating how much better you feel for the ~21 hours of the day you don’t spend eating.

3. Eat all the terrible things. Enjoy the taste and mouth feel. Laugh, and grow fat.

That’s being mean to gas station sandwiches, but otherwise I agree

For a the past few years, I had wondered why videogames, movies, and TV shows nowadays feel so… Bland. Meaningless. Soulless. Corporate. Like, I know they ARE corporate, but these industries have all been dominated by gigantic corporations for my entire life. What changed recently? Am I just getting old and curmudgeonly and preferring content that was made back when I was younger?

Then I was watching DoorMonster talk about some show (I could be wrong, but I think it was the video about how Arcane had a great Season 1 that was largely ruined by Season 2) where they kept joking about not accusing them of using AI to write things.

Then it clicked. The Writer’s Strike from May-September 2023. On paper, the Writer’s Guild secured restrictions on the use of AI. And I can’t point to anything specific and say “that was clearly written by AI”. But I can say that for the past few years everything put out by pretty much every company has felt very… “Meh”. Nothing new has grabbed me and said “wow I need to watch/play that”. Could be a coincidence, but I also have to wonder whether AI tools involved in writing and visuals have cost us something intangible that I can still feel.

This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.

Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.

An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.

I don’t want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I’ll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be “Skyrim with better combat” that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.

One of the problems is that a “privacy-respecting solution” that includes a monthly bill is self-defeating. It creates a paper trail.

Part of why I want to self-host in the first place is to get away from shitty gigantic corporations. Discord, Spotify, Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc. Just because you are paying them doesn’t mean they aren’t making you a product anyways anymore.

I would love for a good way to do this without having to rely on Cloudflare or Tailscale or similar too. Even if they have free options today, what are those free options going to look like 2 years from now?

The pricing shocks are slower to hit OEM’s, but rest assured they will. A $400 laptop from July 2025 is going to cost $800 in July 2026.

My first was a real cheap thing from Monoprice, but after that failed my second was an Ender 5 I got in 2020. It’s been great and I’ve had no complaints, no desire to get another FDM printer at all. Even neglecting the machine and letting it get dusty in my basement, it still fires up and prints fine every few months when I need to use it (as long as the filament is still dry).

Sucks to hear another company is going downhill (even though Creality was always a little bit sketchy).

The article is behind a paywall. Do they have any statistics or evidence backing that sentiment or is it just vibes?

You can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years, and yet personally when I go through the store and look through reviews it’s really hard for me to come across hate speech, especially if you don’t specifically look at reviews that have been downvoted to hell. It’s never going to be perfect, but I encounter less hate speech on Steam than most other platforms.

They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.

Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.

I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.

There are guidelines on Steam that ban such content, and you can report people for violating them.

So no, Steam does not do “nothing” as you claim. A very basic Internet search can confirm that.

Even better, users can rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Which is great for a wider variety of reasons, but is also good for reviews that get into a grey area or use dog whistles to hide their true intentions.