MudMan

Patronizingly cryptic AND with disciples coming in behind him to explain his whole deal.

He should watch out for roaming cups of hemlock, just in case.

Hey, way more honest than OP.

Oh, ok.

So is this fine for kids, then? And if so, how do you draw that line in a piece of legislation?

Really? You were going for some Socratic roundabout ironic thing? Could have just said what you thought, saved everybody the trouble. That feels a bit patronizing.

I mean, I don’t disagree on the broad strokes, but it does beg the question:

What are you doing here?

This is that. You’re on social media. We don’t allow smoking and drinking for adults because it’s any less harmful for them, it’s just that we choose to let grownups choose whether they want to mess themselves up.

So why do you choose to mess yourself up and what should society do about it?

I read the piece and have been thinking about this daily for thirty years.

The guy is right and the piece sucks.

It’s borderline satanic panic that hasn’t thought through the downstream ramifications of even attempting to implement age gates online. And as the previous poster says the negative effects of social media are at the absolute least just as bad in adults. The scaremongering about drug dealers and pedophiles is just that.

I guess I read it as a general indictment on Masto doomsayers because… well, the take may deserve a response, but singling it out almost a decade after the fact seems weirdly specific. Notably, he was himself responding to a piece in the same medium titled “Bye, Twitter. All the cool kids are migrating to Mastodon (And the big-name brands are following closely behind)”, which proved to be just as incorrect.

That’s a long time and a narrow view to hold a gotcha on some random tech journalist. Lots of hot takes to get mad about in that space, particularly in the late 2010s. I mean, this piece came out when the conversation around this wasn’t even about people fleeing the increasingly decomposing post-Musk corpse of Twitter. The version of Masto he was writing about and its interoperability wasn’t even that obvious. You made me look it up. Masto wasn’t even using ActivityPub at the time, apparently. There were hotter takes much later, and it seems reasonable to interpret you going over an early one as a proxy of the whole debate.

Second this. Handhelds are great for adult gaming.

Plus in my case you also tend to gravitate away from more narrative, engaged experiences and towards more mechanics-driven, lighter stuff, which tends to be a good fit for the format, too.

I’m not referring to Ulanoff specifically, but come on, let’s not be disingenuous, you (I assume it’s you, correct me if I’m wrong) using him as an avatar of the criticism Masto was getting at the time. He made a maximalist prediction and was wrong, so he’s a convenient target to act as a dismissal of the genuine concerns being raised in general when Masto got into the mainstream’s focus.

Notably, he wasn’t entirely incorrect. Thousands of people did move on. I did. I’m not writing this on Masto. Did Ulanoff miss the fairly obvious point that with no centralized infrastructure Masto is actually more viable when it’s small than when it’s large? Sure. Was he right to claim that it was “less Snapchat than Path”? Sure. Arguably whoever remains at Masto is perfectly fine with that, and that’s cool, but at the time the debate was whether Twitter would be replaced by Masto, and that did not happen and will not happen, in no small part for the reasons more sharp-eyed critics than Ulanoff pointed out at the time.

It’s a bit of a tangent, but to interject my own take I’ll say that Masto isn’t even on my top 3 for AP applications. Twitter is just not the right format for the way AP works, Masto is not a good implementation of Twitter and some of the technical shortcomings Masto users keep insisting don’t matter actually do matter.

Seems a touch disingenuous to me. I don’t think most of the critics of Masto during the days of looking for Twitter alternatives were forecasting Masto to just poof out into thin air Google+ style.

I think they were mostly saying it wasn’t a viable mass market Twitter replacement and it wouldn’t become that without significant changes.

They were arguably right about that. Bluesky became that, not Masto. Masto went back to being… well Masto. Small, self-referential, insular and quietly chugging along.

It’s LinkedIn, you can just go check. The screenshots are indeed real.

Well, for one thing, it’s part of a wider trend of misreporting about AI. For another, the more interesting, meaningful angle here would be why the (frankly very simplistic) research of the BBC is mismatched with the supposedly more rigorous benchmarks used for LLM quality testing and reported in new releases.

In fact, are they? What do they mean? Should people learn about them and understand them before engaging? Probably, yeah, right? But the BBC is saying their findings have “far reaching implications” without engaging with any of those issues, which are not particularly obscure or unknown in the field.

The gap between what’s being done in LLM development, what is being reported about it and how the public at large understand it is bizarre and hard to quantify. I believe once the smoke clears people will have some guilt to process about it, regardless of what the outcome of the hype cycle ends up being.

Wow, what sort of advanced techniques of investigative journalism did they deploy? Use the thing for five minutes and count?

I’m not even a big hater of LLMs and I could have told you that for free.

Ah, so you meant DLSS to mean specifically “DLSS Frame Generation”. I agree that the fact that both upscaling and frame gen share the same brand name is confusing, but when I hear DLSS I typically think upscaling (which would actually improve your latency, all else being equal).

Frame gen is only useful in specific use cases, and I agree that when measuring performance you shouldn’t do so with it on by default, particularly for anything below 100-ish fps. It certainly doesn’t make a 5070 run like a 5090, no matter how many intermediate frames you generate.

But again, you keep going off on these conspiracy tangents on things that don’t need a conspiracy to suck. Nvidia isn’t keeping vram artificially low as a ploy to keep people from running LLMs, they’re keeping vram low for cost cutting. You can run chatbots just fine on 16, let alone on 24 or 32 gigs for the halo tier cards, and there are (rather slow) ways around hard vram limits for larger models these days.

You don’t need some weird conspiracy to keep local AI away from the masses. They just… want money and have people that will pay them more for all that fast ram elsewhere while the gaming bros will still shell out cash for the gaming GPUs with the lower RAM. Reality isn’t any better than your take on it, it’s just… more straightforward and boring.

That is a rather astonishing mix of really granular quoting of more or less accurate facts and borderline conspiracy theorist level misinformation. You rarely see this stuff outside political channels, I’m… mildly impressed.

AMD absolutely does have stock in back rooms, largely because they have been doing a somewhat undignified dance of waiting to see what Nvidia does to decide what they’re pricing their current gen at. Most educated guesses out there are that they were going to price higher, were caught on the wrong foot with Nvidia’s MSRP announcement and had to work out how to re-price cards that were already in the retail channel. And now Nvidia is in turn delaying the 5070 to interfere with AMD’s new dates. Because both of these companies suck.

On the plus side for consumers, there’s some hope that the 9070 will be repriced somewhat affordably and that it won’t underperform against at least the 5070, if not the 5070Ti. We’ll see what reviews have to say about it.

Your summary of why the launch was so light includes some real stuff (yeah, partners struggle to match Nvidia’s aggressive pricing and have terrible margins), but that’s not why there was no stock of the 5090 (most reports suggest the GPUs were simply not being manufactured early enough to provide chips to anybody. 5080s were both more readily available and less appealing, so they’re easier to find, which kinda pokes big holes in that hypothesis. Manufacturing timelines seem to also explain why restocking will be slow.

I’m also very confused about why you’d “turn off DLSS”. Are you allowing people to use FSR, at least? That’s a weird proviso. The reason they would misrepresent the impact of MFG is obviously good old marketing. Even if AMD didn’t exist, the 40 series does and they have a big issue with justifying a lot of the 50 series line against it. With the 5080 falling well behind the 4090 they have a clear incentive for suggesting you can match the 4090 in cheaper cards. This doesn’t tell you anything about the performance of the 9070 one way or the other. It does tell you a lot of the performance of the 5080, though.

See, this is why this sort of propagandistic speech works so well, it takes for ever to even cover all the misrepresentations and all this is going to do is get you to double down on some of these unsubstantiated statements and turn it into a “matter of opinion”. It doesn’t even need to be on purpose, it’s just easier to produce than to counter.

Aaaand now I made myself sad.

In any case, here’s hoping the 9070 is a competitive option and readily available. They’ve apparently scheduled that delayed event for the 28th, so I’ll be curious to see what they bring to the table officially.

Oh, they’re absolutely not retaking a huge chunk of the dedicated GPU market. I think what’s realistic to expect if they have a good launch (readily available stock, competitive performance and price) is that they may regain a couple points of desktop install base and at least get to sell that they’re moving in the right direction instead of abandoning that space altogether. Maybe some growth on handhelds and competitive iGPUs for laptops and tablets so it makes sense for them to continue to develop the gaming GPU business aggressively at least.

With the 5070 at a 550 MSRP I wouldn’t be suprised to see AMD matching that for similar performance. Given all the delay shenanigans it’d be shocking for them to deliberately wait for the 5070 info and then launch with a more expensive part.

How much you end up having to pay to get one is anybody’s guess, of course, as MSRP is increasingly meaningless. Since they’ve had cards with retailers for a while and have been delaying there may actually be some stock at launch, though. We’ll see.

The idea that it would “smoke the 5070” and “nearly match the 5080” is probably just fanboyism or they wouldn’t have ducked out from directly pitching it after the 5070 reveal (and if they had a 500 dollar 5080 competitor they wouldn’t be cancelling their high end cards this gen).

In any case, it’s immensely dumb to fanboy for multibillion dollar chip manufacturers. I just hope people can buy good, affordable GPUs from multiple manufacturers at some point. I own GPUs from Intel, AMD and Nvidia and would really want them all to remain competitive in as many pricing segments as possible.

There are a couple of different things here. The 50 series launch was a bit of a paper launch, especially for the 5090. Scalping obviously happened, but the issue seems to have been very few cards being available, not as much high demand.

A different question is what the things that are available are worth and how they’re selling. It’s not impossible to find popular parts, but finding popular parts at MSRP is hard, with crazy markups changing day-to-day. I bought a CPU last year at MSRP and despite being a last-gen part that has since received a direct replacement, today it’s 100 bucks more expensive from the same retailer.

Sure. It’ll just be messy and painful for me a few weeks after the people who caused all this, so I intend to enjoy them.

I don’t. Don’t much give a damn what Americans think, either, assuming there’s a distinction to be made there.

At this point I’m camp decoupling. If they want their nationalism so bad they can have it. Quietly, if at all possible.