I think the only area where machine learning has made actual accomplishments is in research.

If you use speech recognition or optical character recognition, to grab two examples, you’re using software that generally has involved machine learning. Those are both fields that I’d call successful for quite some years and are applied to areas outside of research.

deleted by creator

EU-based

but I’m looking fore something more Cornish

I’m assuming that this isn’t “Cornish” as in “based in Cornwall in the southern UK”, but some other use of the term.

There are a lot of ways to measure that.

I guess one reasonable metric is how long I probably played it. Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far and an old computer pinball game, Loony Labyrinth probably rank pretty highly.

Another might be how long after its development it’s still considered reasonably playable. I’d guess that maybe something like Tetris or Pac-Man might rate well there.

Another might be how influential the game is. I think that “genre-defining” games like Wolfenstein 3D would probably win there.

Another might be how impressed I was with a game at the time of release. Games that made major technical or gameplay leaps would rank well there. Maybe Wolfenstein 3D or Myst.

Another might be what the games I play today are – at least once having played them sufficiently to become familiar with them – since presumably I could play pretty much any game out there, and so my choice, if made rationally, should identify the best options for me that I’m aware of. That won’t work for every sort of genre, as it requires replayability – an adventure game where experiencing the story one time through is kind of the point would fall down here – but I think that it’s a decent test of the library of games out there. Recently I’ve played Steel Division II singleplayer, Carrier Command 2 singleplayer, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and Shattered Pixel Dungeon. RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included tend to be in the recurring cycle.

If you’re interested in home automation, I think that there’s a reasonable argument for running it on separate hardware. Not much by way of hardware requirements, but you don’t want to take it down, especially if it’s doing things like lighting control.

Same sort of idea for some data-logging systems, like weather stations or ADS-B receivers.

Other than that, though, I’d probably avoid running an extra system just because I have hardware. More power usage, heat, and maintenance.

EDIT: Maybe hook it up to a power management device, if you don’t have that set up, so that you can power-cycle your other hardware remotely.

I sometimes think that maybe as a society we’d be better off relaxing nudity taboos or something.

• Nederland, America

• America, Netherlands

• Nederland, Netherlands

• America, America

I assume that early access games are in the running when they exit EA. Presumably, that’s when they’re at their strongest. Doesn’t seem to me like it’d be fair to treat them as being entered when they enter EA, as they aren’t fully developed yet.

Pretty much any brick-and-mortar office supply store I’ve seen provides copy machine and printing services. Probably faxing too, though I haven’t checked.

I mean, I don’t do much in paper any more, but I’m pretty sure that most people need – even if only very occasionally – to print things.

Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.

He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.

The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.

It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

I don’t know how viable it’d be to get a viable metric.

https://www.goldeneaglecoin.com/Guide/value-of-all-the-gold-in-the-world

Value of all of the gold in the world

$13,611,341,061,312.04

Based on the current gold spot price of $2,636.98

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos

He is the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of US$227 billion as of November 7, 2024, according to Forbes and Bloomberg Billionaires Index.[3]

So measured in gold at current prices, he’d have about one-sixtieth of the present global gold supply.

However:

It’s hard to know what the distribution of gold hoards are. One dragon might have an exceptionally large hoard.

It’s hard to know how many dragons we’re working with.

It’s likely that a world with dragons has a different value of gold.

That gold in our world isn’t actually accessible to Bezos at that price. If he tried buying that much, it’d drive up the price, reducing the effective percentage of the global share that he could afford to buy.

When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.

If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.

I think that there’s more to it than that.

My own guesses are:

• I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.

• Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.

• This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.

  In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]

  They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.

  So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.

  kagis

  https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

  Smartphone dependency over time

  Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.

  Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.

• I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.

• Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.

• Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.

I don’t personally like standing desks, but I do know that some people do prefer them. I think that from an employer standpoint, providing the option is probably a good idea anyway. It’s not terribly expensive to provide as an option, and if you’re going to be working at a desk all day, it’s gonna impact your experience at work a fair bit; probably a lot more than whatever the cost of having a different desk option is. If it makes an employee happier to be standing…shrugs

I guess this is called a “full keyboard”?

Used to be “104-key keyboard”, or “full-sized” but I see “percent” measurements of that 104-key as being increasingly-common today.

https://www.keychron.com/blogs/news/keyboard-size-layout-buying-guide

IIRC, the sprites were pretty large for the time.

I’m assuming that they’re Bluetooth, as if they were wired, the problem couldn’t really come up.

If they’re still paired to a device, crank the volume up and try playing something loud enough that you can hear it.

For Bluetooth devices that are powered on and responding to queries for nearby Bluetooth devices, you can also try asking a device that can pair with Bluetooth devices and show signal strength, like a laptop, to query for nearby devices, can kind of use to “home in” on the device.

I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.

Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.

My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.

I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.

My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.

Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.

The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.

Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.

Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.

Plus, there’s no point. Like, if you want to make a good KSP successor, lots of people were unhappy with what happened with KSP2 and would be happy to buy it. Why unnecessarily start a fight that risks the game?

EDIT: Hell, if someone made a good KSP successor, it’d be very near the top of my own purchase list. I really liked KSP.

And thus a piece of Eastern European folklore that was popularized in a novel by a Irish writer and then spread via mostly American movies became a Japanese video game series now at least partially developed in Spain and begets a play acted by Japanese female actors.