Unsurprisingly, defenders of dictatorships always have to resort to whataboutism to defend the indefensible.

As per usual, this whataboutism is lazy and inaccurate as well.

My rule would be simple: The only ships allowed to land are those crewed by a captain who can pronounce this accent-free. Every one else gets acquainted with the business end of the Planetenverteidigungskanone.

Even first gen ones from 2015 are still being used. I don’t think these die all that often. They will be obsolete at some point, but even this takes far longer than with other tech. As long as you make sure it doesn’t overheat, it should last for a while longer.

To illustrate your point, my old GPU, a GTX 1080 from 2016 (basically ancient history - Obama was still president back then) remains a very useful for ML-applications today - and this isn’t even their oldest card that is still relevant for AI. This card was never meant for this, but thanks to Nvidia investing into CUDA and CUDA being useful for all sorts of non-gaming applications, the API became a natural first choice when ML tools that run on consumer hardware started to get developed.

My current GPU, an RTX 2080, is just two years younger and yet it’s so powerful (for everything I throw at it, including ML) that I won’t have to upgrade it for years to come.

I mean, one of the core ideas behind these things is that these are highly capable devices that are receiving updates for several times as long as normal tech, so you can just keep using them for ages.

Apart from the very latest codecs, what else should they do that they aren’t already doing?

Because that’s where the audience is. Peertube is deader than the lemmyverse. You are essentially making the silly “but yet you choose to live in society” argument.

It could be regulated into oblivion, to the point that any commercial use of it (and even non-commercial publication of AI generated material) becomes a massive legal liability, despite the fact that AI tools like Stable Diffusion can not be taken away. It’s not entirely unlikely that some countries will try to do this in the future, especially places with strong privacy and IP laws as well as equally strong laws protecting workers. Germany and France come to mind, which together could push the EU to come down hard on large AI services in particular. This could make the recently adopted EU AI Act look harmless by comparison.

They’ve been told to do this for decades and they are proudly ignoring these requests.

“But what about” * 5. It’s always whataboutism with sycophants of autocratic regimes.

Not all of them. In recent years, virtually all arcades have been powered by standard gaming PCs (see for example the infamous Half-Life 2 arcade). In the past, it wasn’t unheard of for some arcades to have nearly identical hardware compared to home consoles. The Neo Geo arcade for example is running the exact same code as the home console (although in this case, the arcade came first). There have also been edge-cases, like the Namco System 11, which is using only slightly modified PS1 hardware (primarily in the sound department) in order to drive down costs.

The thing is, floating windows were absolutely useless in the age of 13 - 17" CRTs. On modern ultrawide or even just conventional widescreen displays, they make far more sense.

They might just as well sell PC power supply to USB adapters then.

I meant OCR of arbitrary printed or faxed text, which really only became feasible for home users in the 1990s. There were professional, but often very limited, solutions earlier than that, of course.

I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.

Repacks make installing the game with its bazillion DLCs a breeze these days.

Reminds me of my younger sibling inheriting my first PC - 486 with a 500 MB hard drive that I had assembled from several scrap computers - and trying to install this game to it. It did just about fit and there was even enough RAM (48 MB instead of the minimum 32), but the CPU wasn’t compatible, since the game required the MMX instruction set.

Each Sims game is quite different. The biggest difference is between Sims 1 and 2 simply due to the change from isometric 2D to 3D graphics. Not the first game in the genre to have 3D graphics and they weren’t even particularly impressive for the time nor good compared to its competitor, but the charming animations and attention to detail make it a far more enjoyable experience than the comparatively sterile predecessor. Sims 2 ended up becoming an evergreen with very long legs, to the point that people are still playing it, although it helped that EA distributed the complete version with all add-ons (the game is older than the term DLC) for free for a while (you can still find it if you know where to look).

Sims 3 was fundamentally different from Sims 2. Gone were the isolated homes of the predecessor (initially in Sims 2, you couldn’t even see your neighbors’ homes unless you were on the map screen; later they added in low-res stand-ins) and instead, it’s an open world game where you can see your Sim commute to work in real-time. Neighbors can be visited without going through a loading screen - it all feels more organic as a result. Customization saw a huge upgrade as well, the AI was improved, etc. Sounds nice in theory, but the problem was that it was too ambitious for PCs of the time. This series has traditionally attracted non-gamers who don’t deeply upgrade their machines all that often and instead play on laptops bought for homework or old rigs inherited from big brothers. Sims 1 ran on a toaster, Sims 2 on a pizza oven with some kind of GPU grafted to it - whereas Sims 3 was one of the most demanding games of its time in order to facilitate gameplay changes that few people actually asked for and rounded, bloated looking Sims that are somewhat offputting. It was still a massive success and a huge hit with modders as well, but Sims 2 remained popular due to its more focused nature, the fact that it ran on anything and the fact that it was complete with a massive library of add-ons that took years to be replicated in Sims 3.

Sims 4 reset the series back to Sims 2, but went too far initially, limiting player freedom in regards to neighborhood creation. Instanced homes returned, customization features and open world of Sims 3 were cut, the AI saw a massive improvements, Sims didn’t all look obese anymore, hardware requirements were modest again - but at the price of having incredibly intrusive DRM, an attempt to monetize the proud modding community and being very bare-bones in the beginning, requiring years of DLCs to reach feature-parity with Sims 2 and 3. IIRC, even pools - an absolutely essential part of Sims lore - were missing initially. All of the improvements to the building mechanics in particular were overshadowed by EA’s corporate nonsense. It’s come a long way since though. Just like with the predecessors, buying all DLC at once will make you poor - but the base game is free now and the actual intention is that you only buy the DLC that have features or items you care about. The modding scene is as vibrant as ever, making any non-feature DLC unnecessary anyway.

This series is an interesting and unique phenomenon. It’s a prime example of something that only ever truly works on PC. All of the many console, mobile and browser spinoffs and ports were nothing but mere blips on the radar, because fundamentally, it can only work on a platform as open as the PC. It primarily attracts female players who rarely play anything else, yet dive deep into modding and modifying every little aspect of these games like the most hardened PC nerds. It started out and still is in many ways a faksimile of ideal American suburbia, although enhanced by both some quite subversive humor and subverted by an astonishing level of player freedom that goes against the conformity of the real world - while at the same time replicating the fads, consumerism, cliques, feuds and other less wholesome aspects of the real world through its behemoth of a community. It’s ultimately a platform for individual creative expression and the worlds (both in-game and outside of it) that emerge as a result of it, a sandbox that was only ever bested by Minecraft, which literally broke everything down to its individual building blocks. Each game and its DLCs become more like car payments to seasoned players, something you pay for so that you can travel where you want to go, which in turn keeps the experience fresh, finances further development and prevents the community from getting stagnant as it has to learn to adapt to changes from the developers.

I’ll end this here. This wasn’t meant to turn into an essay and now my fingers hurt, because I typed all of this nonsense on a touchscreen.

I meant, the “no ads” thing was only feasible in the very beginning, when they were solely funded by venture capital.

Sure, but these people are blissfully unaware of it and will happily beat the drums for the CCP all day long.

It has always been only a signal for popularity. It’s the same on every other site with similar systems, including ones that have existed long before reddit. Even in the early 2000s, there were endless reminders that the upvote button was not meant as an “I agree” button, but that’s not how it’s being used.