majestic

You gut a lot further than I thought you would. Perhaps it really was the glacial pace. Toys In The Attic was easily the worst of the entire show. I hated watching every second of it. Liked Jupiter Jazz a lot more than the episodes preceeding or following it, but that is me and my enjoyment of mysteries. Looking at the episodes a bit more objectively, they basically start with Faye doing something that the plot requires, not something that would make sense in the context of the show. Eh. Well, it would not be entirely out of character for Faye, just a whole slew of episodes too late for her to pull something like that off. The show certainly shares an issue with Noir insofar as that it promises more than it delivers as most episodes just meander about without contributing anything of note to the character development. Dunno, honestly. Don't get why it was so popular, but as we're currently summoning the Wrath of @PK htiw klaw eriF, well, perhaps he'll swoop in with a longer rant.

Things I never thought I'd say, but: I agree with Hitler here.

I don't disagree with your assessment that AMD could use some competition there, and theoretically Arrow Lake, with potential Battlemage based iGPUs, could provide that, assuming for a moment that Battlemage is much more efficient than Arc - which remains to be seen. Perhaps even in the console space - but that rides on Intel delivering the goods quickly enough (and in the case of Battlemage, in working condition from the beginning), and the SoCs not being prohibitively expensive, both of which are a bit in doubt at the moment*. Arc was really good for a first attempt at a dedicated consumer GPU (Larrabee doesn't really count). It eats up a bit more power than most other cards on the market, especially compared with nVidia 4000 series GPUs, but it performs well enough when it works, and they beat AMD in Ray Tracing from day one, and XeSS is better than FSR. If - and that is a captial I if - Battlemage really hits its performance target, which is the RTX 4080, Intel will have effectively caught up with Navi 31, albeit with a year and a half in between. Not to mention that Arc is already a pretty good production GPUs for what hey cost. Geekbench scores are pretty worthless, not only is that a synthetic benchmark, it is also wildly inconsistent between runs. *Edit: And I suppose Sierra Forrest, the new 288 core server CPUs, will probably take precendence and production capacity. Intel needs to fire something back at AMD's EPYC lineup, like yesterday.

Well, not entirely AMD Ryzen related, but anyway: https://cachewarpattack.com/ Good news is that the fix is not expected to have any performance repercussions.

Same here, just that it is also the SVR, our version of the social security number. In addition we have a passport number that is issued when you get a passport (or citizen ID, but passports are universally accepted throughout the world, while the latter is only accepted in the EU and associated nations like Norway and Switzerland), and we also have to register our primary place of residence. There is no need to register for voting or anything of the sort, that happens automatically, you just get a notification in your mail that you bring to voting, along with an ID. Said notification also tells you when and where you need to go to vote. Tax returns are automated as well. The only reason to manually do your taxes is when you have deductable expenses or incomes that are currently not tracked automatically, but the list grows ever shorter.

APO is a great use case for machine learning once enough data has been accumulated, that could also automate testing and should provide results in a much smaller timeframe. At least that's what I would try with APO, because manual tuning after every patch and for each new game (or even application, not like Photoshop for instance has great multithreading, could probably also benefit from APO) release would otherwise only be feasible if the optimizations could somehow be handed over to the community. Well, those are here to stay, what with AMD adding "c" cores to their CPUs in the future. Oh, they sure like to tell how much better their c-cores are going to be to Intel's e-cores because they're basically the same and thus have the same IPC, just more tightly packed and clocked lower, but one just needs to look at the 7900X(3D) and 7950X(3D) and its myriad scheduling problems to give lie to that statement. There are games where a 7700X beats the 7900X and 7950X due to coordination issues between separate CCDs that are identical, and the 7800X3D is consistently as fast or in some cases even faster than the 7950X3D - and that is with the artificially lower clock speeds of the 7800X3D. Having cores that clock lower is going to be an issue for scheduling, whether or not they have the same IPC, and between Intel's Thread Director and AMD's core parking on the 7900/7950X3D, the conclusion is pretty obvious. The c-cores are not going to have the same performance as the regular cores, and therefore AMD's going to run into scheduling issues, unless they just turn off the c-cores in gaming like they do with the 79X0X3Ds - which also not always works properly. Proof is in Steve's benchmarks. With the way APO seems to work according to Hardware Unboxed's video, i.e. making sure one e-core per cluster has access to the full cluster L2 cache by turning the other three off and directing threads to make better use of the CPU, it sort of makes sense that the only supported CPUs so far are the 14900K and 14700K. APO might not work properly or produce no real performance uplift on a 14600K with only two e-core clusters. The 13700K also has only two of them, so for 13th gen that probably would just leave the 13900K. Not unlocking APO for the 13900K is a pretty lame move though, if understandable from a marketing point of view (assuming APO becomes more than a tech demo). There's no reason it would not work just as well on a 13900K, seeing how the 14900Ks are just 13900Ks that won the silicon lottery. I mean, like literally.

Huh, dunno, we've had a digital ID for a while now. I can do my taxes online, register for mail-in votes, sign documents with it, change my place of residence, use my phone as replacement for various ID cards (driver's license, passport, etc.), request various official government issued documents online and receive them digitally signed with no paperwork (e.g. birth certificate, marriage certificate, etc.), request reimbursement for private medical services, and a whole bunch of other things I don't really need, like getting all the documents in order for a newborn kid. Can also check a bunch of information, like my projected pension and how much money I cost my health insurance this year, which is about a thousand euro as of right now. All without having to deal with any public officials. The amount of extra data I had to provide for the ID was pretty much zero, except for my mobile phone number. Which the government could find out any time they would want to, so that is not any more dystopian than it already is, thanks to the EU, which mandated fingerprints in passports back in 2009, and our fantastic conservative-right wing government of 2017, lead my Mr. Kurz, our glorious leader, and their coalition partners the freedom party, who mandated that any and all mobile phone numbers must be registered, before that we had the option of having anonymous mobile phone numbers - well, mobile phones bit that government and Mr. Shorty in the arse, so there is some poetic justice in that.

While reading this, my first thought was: hey, you already said it is a Takahata film. Spoils enough.

So is the overheat quickhack. Well, actually, all non-physical damage is non-lethal, sense be damned. If you want your gorilla arms to be completely non-lethal just get the electric variety, for instance. Anyway, done with the game now. From what I heard people talked about the new ending being more depressing than the existing ones. Well, perhaps. Especially when you're on the King of Pentacles path like I was. Some things really feel out of character and the final conversations feel cheap - actually most of the new ending sticks out like a sore thumb on an otherwise well written game. It is not bad exactly, just not the same quality of the base game. Instead of flowing organically, the dialogue and what happens feels forced to drive home a point. Sad thing is that ending could have really been made into something utterly devastating that would have resonated much more, or say, be a much more poetic "justice" way to end the game while driving home the same point: Well, missed a good way for a shocker there, CD Projekt Red. Well, no sense crying over spilled milk and all that.

In preparation for an upcoming medical exam (routine check) I just had to drink half a liter of a solution containing a total of 3 grams of salt (for those of you who cannot into proper measurements, that is a little less than a pint of liquid containg roughly 0.1 oz salt). Needless to say that was utterly disgusting, even with the added mango aroma and included sweetener. Second dose coming up in a couple of hours with even more salt. Yuck.

https://www.igorslab.de/en/smoldering-headers-on-nvidias-geforce-rtx-4090/ TL;DR: Not every burning RTX 4090 was necessarily user error. The PCI SIG specs for the 12VHWPR headers and plugs were (and still are) so unclear and incomplete that production tolerances alone are enough to potentially fry them under heavy load, i.e. anything above 400W power draw, before factoring in manufacturing cost reduction by making them as cheap as possible, next to a few potential issues caused by AIB's placement of the headers, i.e. some RTX 4090s are potentially more prone to burned headers than others.

Unnecessary Sequel #3 (2021) Woops, I mean, Matrix: Resurrections, now that it is available on Amazon Prime. Big spoiler right from the start: I did not hate it. With that out of the way, is that really enough these days? It almost feels like it is. I would not say I enjoyed this, so it is different from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but as far as the sequels go, it might be the best of the bunch, although that is such a low bar to clear that it is practically worthless as measurement. Half of the film is a parody anyway, and it seems like the Wachowskis are almost aware of how much their pseudo-philosophical ramblings in Reloaded and Revolutions failed to be interesting, and how uninteresting and rote their other films are. A part almost feels like a meta commentary, especially the development meetings where everyone is desparately looking for a way to make a Matrix sequel (it makes sense in the film) that has a game-changing, impactful component. Half of the film makes no sense in the context of the other films, and the other half is a mix of parody and remake of the first one. The one thing that is immediately noticable as it is often directly in juxtaposition with the original 1999 film is that shaky cam adds nothing to the feel of an action scene, and the first film is so much better for its lack of screen shaking. There's a time and place for it, but a Matrix film sure is not it. Still, it did not make me want to kill myself or fall asleep like Reloaded and Revolutions. Eh, I probably am going soft. Always fun to see Neil Patrick Harris though.

Nice. Can stop rifling through videos whenever I need to reference a chart now.

General rule of thumb: never assume our current government knows or understands anything, and you're good. Our chancellor's reaction to the steep rise in food prices was let them eat cake, in a 21st century variation, i.e. let them buy burgers at McDonald's. Bunch of clowns wouldn't find their own noses if they weren't attached to their faces.

Yes.

Well, finally done: Time to shelf D4 until January 23rd.

Dunno, the easiest way for me was just getting them to 5% health and dropping an incendiary grenade on them. Those grenades deal a truckload of non-lethal damage.

One more season journey item left. That is either equipping eight ancestral uniques or grinding out five max level glyphs or the max level Hunter's Acclaim seasonal mechanic, then I'm done with the game until January 24th or so. Grinding five glyphs to level 21 is out of the question. It is either farming Hunter's Acclaim or killing Duriel often enough to gather eight equippable uniques. I already have six, so grinding out uniques is probably faster, just a lot more random. Guess I'll just grind Hunter's Acclaim for a while and call it quits. Kinda low on materials to summon Über Duriel. The sum total of time spent playing the game might be higher with grinding Hunter's Acclaim, but it can be done in one go, unlike farming Duriel which requires waiting for Helltides.

^ Prior to 2.0, using Cyberware Malfunction on cyberpsychos would kill them, even if you only applied non-lethal damage. I do not know if that changed with 2.0. Now, not your problem as you can't use the quick hack with Berserk as operating system, but it might save someone else from frustration. Would be nice if that was fixed, after all, the psychos obviously have a lot of chrome and Cyberware Malfunction makes it a good bunch easier to deal with them.

Blizzard logic: Enemies can have a suppression field. Meaning that all damage coming from outside the field is negated. You need to attack or cast from within the field to do damage. Now, with certain gear the ball lightning spell rotates around you, and that is pretty hilarious because the damage that can put out once you break past a certain gear threshold (i.e. once you have enough gear to support chain casting a spell that normally costs half your mana). However, when you teleport into the supression field, all your orbiting ball lightnings disappear. Because, well, they were cast outside the suppression field. Can't blame the game for working that way, after all, it is doing exactly what it was programmed to do. Anyway, build is so busted powerful it breaks game mechanics to the point they become a joke. Can completely skip boss phases.

Well, looks like 2025 is going to be the year of ARM replacing the x86 CPUs.

"Brawling" was added in 1.0.7, actually. The "proper" PvP mode with arenas that Blizzard promised was cancelled.

I honestly don't know. I played Diablo 3's campaign and then pretty much quit. Shortly after launch the PVP zones were decently populated, but the problem is that level scaling between players plays an immense part in damage numbers, and there is no gating. It did not take long for level 100 chinese farm bot barbarians to show up and one-shot everyone in the zones on the lower difficulty levels (well, they're called World Tiers in D4 - Normal, Veteran. Nightmare and Torment). Blizzard nerf-hammered the barbarian class to a point where it still sucks months later, but the damage was basically done already, never mind the gating issue. I could just as easily switch to Normal and kill players 50 levels lower with no hope of them ever fighting back. Well, if any players were in the PVP zones, that is... Well, and then 95% of the player base disappeared. Prior to the new season the tumbleweeds were the only inhabitants not just of the PVP zones, but also the large hub cities.

Blizzard's solution to keep people engaged longer in the season journey is to make it grindier. Le sigh. Had a good laugh at the season journey including becoming Hatred's Chosen. A long time ago, a prominent member of the German World of Warcaft community said that Blizzard's motto is "Konsequenz heißt auch Holzwege zu Ende zu gehen" (to be resolute means following even the wrong track to its end) which never felt more appropriate than here. There is just no way to become Hatred's Chosen in the state the game is at. With most of you not playing the game, well, Hatred's Chosen is something you can become when killing enough players back to back, for which players obviously need to be in the game's designated PVP zones (imagine a desolate area with tumbleweeds being blown about here). At best you can kill one or two players more by accident than anything else, like it happened to me when I grinded out the Seeds of Hatred requirements for the season and a barbarian thought it would be a good idea to leap on top of me while I had Unstable Currents on, fighting the PVP zone boss. Lighting sorceror wrecks everything at the moment. Better enjoy picking the right class for once before the nerf hammer falls.

The few remaining physics bugs are great and should just stay in the game because they're hilarious. Like that one time I called my car and the game just spawned it in the air. It came crashing down hard, was totalled, killed some innocent bystanders and lead to a shootout with the police. Every now and then a random car chase ends up with cars flying about in good old Blues Brothers tradition too.