… and your choice of either topped with cheese wiz, or a single slice of american kraft ‘cheese’ melted over the whole thing.

I’m honestly quite interested to see how well the Switch 2 handles CP77.

Also, I edited a bit and added more to my comment likely as or after you made yours.

https://hardwaretimes.com/doom-the-dark-ages-gpu-benchmarks-ray-tracing-vram-usage/

This says a 4060ti can do Dark Ages at about 50fps at 1080p.

Looking at other benchmarks, it … oddly looks like the 8gb vs 16gb version of the 4060ti perform essentially exactly the same

I mean I guess that counts if you’re a 1080p person… I tend to think of 1440p 60fps, everything on ‘ultra’, as a minimum threshold these days for ‘running ray tracing well’, as raytracing becomes exponentially more performance costly as you go above 1080p… which is the whole reason why modern frame upscaling and framegen had to be invented.

A 4060ti cannot run Doom Dark Ages, 1440p at 60 fps. Unless you turn down some other graphics settings… I am not seeing that in any benchmarks.

If 1080p is your benchmark than sure, I guess a 4060ti can almost run at 60 fps.

Also… I am using currently actually existing prices, not MSRP, with actually existing ‘buy now’ stock… as my basis for the previous statement.

There are very, very few 4060tis (16gb) actually available new right now, $600 is the lowest US price I am seeing, though there are a good number on eBay going for around $550, so I guess there’s another technical ‘you got me on that one.’

The only stuff that can run ray tracing well (60fps or better, well) are currently GPUs that cost … $600 if you’re lucky, more like starting at $825 or $850, going up to $2000+.

This is independent of AMD or Nvidia, at this point. Yes, you can get better RT out of an Nvidia card, but you’ll be paying significantly more.

What you mean to say is: Games with forced RT instead of actual graphics options force you into the Nvidia monopoly.

…

Handhelds can’t handle RT.

Like just none, barring adding on an eGPU.

Switch 2 could be an exception, but I doubt it’ll be able to do more than 30fps with RT on, with say, Cyberpunk 2077.

The only reason consoles can handle RT at all is because they use checkerboard rendering, which is basically sort of a mix between using interpolated frames and also upscaling.

480p fully renders each frame, 480i only updates half the pixels on the screen each frame, usually with alternating scanlines.

Checkerboard rendering is more or less another way of doing that, but in a checkerboard pattern, that also upscales by a factor of two… so when a console says its outputting at 4k, thats true, but it isn’t rendering at 4k.

…

The steam deck overlay does have a half rate shader rendering option, I have found this helpful in certain games/emulators… though sometimes it makes too much of the game look like too much ass, when it is either heavily reliant on shaders and/or they are wildly unoptimized.

It is theoretically possible that this option could help at least somewhat… the author mentions trying deckyframegen on a game that just came out, apparently having no idea that decky framegen needs time to… you know, incorperate some other mod that figures out how to hack FSR into the game, or do it themselves.

Either that, or go into the game’s config files and see if there is some value or toggle that can be flipped to just actually turn RT off… which I guess at this point just is what people would and have called a ‘graphics mod’ for many other games where something like this is done.

…

Nvidia and Unreal heavily pushing RT is a market strategy to ensure the monopoly power of Nvidia, and the further usage of UE5.

…

EDIT: Looks like idTech 8 doesn’t normally/fully support Vulkan on Linux.

If they wanted to make a release that works without RT, they could, they’d just have to rip out all the RT stuff and make a version compatible with Vulkan-base, and that looks like it would run well on AMD GPUs / a Deck, but that apparently was not a launch priority for them.

Which is kind of weird, because idTech7 was… only Vulkan, on PC… and did support RayTracing, and Doom Eternal, with RayTracing, did run decently well on high end AMD GPUs of the time (6800, 6900, etc), despite having less and less advanced RT cores than the Nvidia 3000 series.

Sorry I’m late!

… What? You don’t just eat them outta the can?

… dear… god…

You can also just wear a chest rig, without pants…

Also, I am now just remebering these exist: Utilikilt.

You got it.

Its time to stop acting like all game devs are somehow totally free of responsibility from all this.

I say this as a person who at least used to personally know game devs, mod devs, and I have been modding (as in making the mods) games since the mid 00’s.

Yes, of course management is shitheads.

But there are many game devs who don’t whore themselves out to corpos they know will do this dumb shit.

There are many indie or AA or other devs who build games that are a little bit less graphically fancy, but run 3x as fast.

Go right now and play Titanfall 2, built on a fork of the Portal 2 Source Engine variant, and tell me that any modern, comparable game really looks like it is so much more impressive it needs all the horsepower and cost that goes into getting it to run at the same resolution and framerate.

If people wanna know more about the technicals of how optimization in games is largely a lost art now, go check Threat Interactive on youtube, that guy does an amazing job breaking this stuff down.

… Shallow end of the pool with a goddamned diaper on…

Yep, tons of beautiful scenery along the Pacific Coast Highway, and environs!

Otherwise known as highway 101, from WA down to CA… though I think it becomes Highway 1 at some point in Cali.

I’d seen much of these and similar places in camping/roadtrips/fishing trips as a kid prior to playing Life is Strange though, so I guess it wasn’t as impressive to me, having seen it irl before the games… though the psuedo impressionistic landscape art style is a neat way to depict it.

Either way, great pictures OP!

Ah! It seems you are… broadly correct on that one!

Though it gets complicated when you dive into the details… it appeara that exactly which name is being used by which language and people … involves essentially some … derogatory puns, slight manipulations of certain vowels/consonants to change the literal meaning of the name.

https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/68544/is-asherah-related-to-ashtoreth#68545

As to books, reading?

I am doing my best (and must admit I am certainly oversimplifying to some extent, and may be making even more errors) … to put together the totality of what I’ve absorbed from watching a large number of videos either by or involving Drs. Josh Bowman and Kipp Davis.

Dr. Bowman is digitalhammurabi on youtube, Dr. Kipp Davis is… I think just eponymous?

Both of them together, or each of them singly have often appeared on the MythVision yt channel, Paulogia, more recently Esoterica… and all of those channels also feature many other scholars relevant to near eastern history, religion, language, etc.

I am not sure if Drs. Bowman or Davis have books that outline exactly what I’ve tried to sum up, but I know they definitely do have scholarly publications and at least some books focused on other topics that end up describing different parts of my summary.

I am not an expert, just a very interested person who follows the experts best I can.

At least some of the plauges approximating some of what is described in the Torah were real things.

Locusts were certainly a common problem.

Sometimes, you would get an absurd amount of frogs birthing all at the same time from a particularly severe natural climate cycle … the entitety of the history of Egypt very much involves figuring out how to handle the Nile’s flooding seasons.

A red algae bloom could possibly have turned the Nile red, and made it basically toxic.

… But the part where the historicity falls apart is the supposed timing of the Exodus event, and the number of Hebrews involved.

…

Long story short: Traditional religious dating of when Exodus occured basically puts it occuring before the time Yahweh even existed as a monotheistic God, in Israel/Judah/Canaan.

At this point in time, the Levant was largely still a bunch of varying cults/clans based around the polytheistic Caananite pantheon.

Yahweh did not develop into, or emerge, as the singular monotheistic God of peoples in the Levant… untill hundreds of years later, after they had been held captive in Babylon/Persia for many decades, where they absorbed much of thr dualistic framework of the Zoroastrian Ahura-Mazda as the great good God, vs Angra-Mainyu as the great evil God… and then were allowed to resettle in their homeland by Cyrus.

Roughly what I just described is inline with the actual existing and properly dated texts and artefacts from the relevant regions.

When Exodus is tradtionally supposed to have occured… Caananites were still worshipping El, Ba’al, Ashera, Astarte, Anat, Dagon.

El and his son Ba’al more or less merged into Yahweh over time, and gained many attributes of other members of the Pantheon… this is why Yahweh is a jealous god who does not suffer any idol worship, worship of his progenitors.

…

The other huge problem with the Exodus story is the numbers of Hebrews involved.

The Torah is very explicit at a few points about how many men there were… and what you end up with is something like 2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt, spending 40 years lost in Sinai or possibly Arabia… all while leaving literally no archaeological evidence of such a huge movement of people.

2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt is utterly absurd. Its comparable to the estimated entire popation of Lower (Northern) Egypt at the time of the traditional religious dating.

There is nothing in any Egyptian records to indicate anything like that number of people up and leaving.

What there is, is a good number of mentions that small numbers, as in hundreds, maybe thousands, of Caananites … well if Caanan was having a bad drought, or had just had some kind of city state conflict… Egypt would fairly routinely allow some refugees to basically graze their herds in Egypt, or even a few of them would settle into being farmers, or do trading caravans.

There is no evidence whatsoever that millions of Hebrews, or people who would in the future become Hebrews… ever lived in Egypt as a slave class, and then all left at the same time.

To me, the actual main problem with the interactions between Moses (as a proxy for Yahweh) and Pharaoh…

… Is that for the majority of ultimatums that God instructs Moses to give to Pharoah… God also ‘hardens his/Pharoah’s heart’, which compels Pharoah to not comply.

Like, outside or above the scale of things threatened… God literally mind controls Pharoah, manipulates his emotions, and forces him into saying no, not acquiescing or truly negotiating.

This happens multiple times.

So now… God isn’t just an asshole threatening insane plaugues and death… God is just puppeting Pharoah at these key moments, so basically God is orchestrating this entire chain of events… he was in total control the whole time… God is thus just punishing the Egyptians, while also doing a kabuki theatre, a false flag, whatever, to make it look like they actually had choices and chances to avoid this, to make it look like they willingly defied his will… when this was not the case.

This takes God from a belligerent asshole into now also being a sociopathic, deceptive manipulator.

Its abuser mentality.

What are you talking about? That’s not what happened.

If that is what happened, it wasn’t that bad.

If it was that bad, you deserved it.

Oh, yes, that’s … a whole thing as well.

Wonderful time to be Autistic in the US, what with RFK Jr (the guy with the actual brain worm, life long anti-vaxxer, who is now in charge of essentially medical policy in the US) describing all Autistic people as literally pants-shittingly stupid, saying that he’d like to take all people using any kind of psychiatricly prescribed medication to detox, no electronics, farm labor camps.

… I wonder if Canada would accept an asylum petition from Americans who either are, or suspect they may be Autistic at this point?

Omae wa mou shindeiru.

I agree, the poor phrasing of many questions is annoying.

But as best I can tell, that test is the most widely recognized as valid initially screening test, in that it essentially never produces false positives (neurotypicals do not score 65 or over).

It is also supposed to be properly administered by a professional who is sufficiently trained to address questions you may have about how to answer the questions.

On one hand, if it isn’t a big deal to you, than I absolutely do not want to pressure you into pursuing it just for my sake.

On the other hand, I am reasonably confident that taking issue with the poor phrasing of many of the questions… is itself an indicator, to some extent, that you are more likely to be higher up in the score, on the spectrum… because constantly asking to further specify things that are poorly or ambiguously worded… is a common trait of Autists.

Neurotypicals tend to barrel ahead with the first possibly ambiguous meaning or question answer without reflection or reconsideration.

Autists tend to do the exact opposite.

… This is part of the reason you’re supposed to do this test with a trained professional observing/proctoring, when you go for a formal diagnosis.

Sure, yes, making your own art would be better in one sense, one way of looking at this, but I guess you don’t appreciate the whole ‘turning it against itself’ aspect of this.

Turning a system against itself is the literal definition of subversion, in the context of complex systems, anyway.

Sure, its not as subversive as intentionally poisoning AIGen stuff to stupify itself over time, but I do think this counts.

Its not like you have to get the AI to draw the image every single time anyone sees it, we can still copy and paste images, host them where many can see them, etc.

To me, there is a sense of ‘art’ in the subversion itself.

If the theft machine already exists, and you don’t have the ability to destroy it, contain or restrain it more directly… using it to generate propoganda against itself, its creators?

I think that’s a clever use of it.

Like, would you say that that one piece of … kinetic/performance art, where its just a machine that you must go up to and hand crank, and it spits out penny by penny at the rate of minimum wage…

Would you say that isn’t art because it forces the art ‘experiencer’ to perform exhausting wage labor, which is simply 100% bad, all the time, no exceptions?

I mean, when Elon bought Twitter, I, having never used Twitter before, created an account just to scream at him, and I managed to get banned in a few hours.

But to attempt to answer your question: Arguably, technically, yes, but it really only matters if it significantly fucks with Elon, or inspires other to meaningfully resist him, or aide those he oppresses.

One person doing that?

Flash in the pan.

Coordinated , consistent swarm, of people or bots, doing this untill the entire site goes down?

Even better: hack in their and reroute it to fucking DDoS itself?

Maybe a bit more meaningful.

I find the use of AIGen to essentially advocate against itself to be fairly clever.

Its not like you have to burn down a bushel of wheat’s cropland every time you copy and paste an already generated image.

If you are subverting the means or process of exploitation against itself, well, that’s pretty subversive, anarchist, punk.

If you’re doing that in the digital realm?

Pretty fucking cyberpunk.

These idiot tech bros whoooshed over understanding the cyberpunk genre as a warning of what not to do, and instead adopted its aesthetic and are just now building that world, as its villains.

Well fine then.

Time to reclaim our culture.

Oh I am still at the 2014 phase.

We… used to have a term for people that advanced further: sell-outs.

Though I do very much prefer the recently popularized Cyberpunk lingo:

Fucking Corpo Scum.

Without getting into a massive discussion about self-diagnosis and validity of various tests in which demographics and what not…

https://embrace-autism.com/raads-r/

If your total score is 65 or over on this, you may wanna look into a formal diagnosis.

I occasionally watch both vaush and hasan segments on youtube, along with many other lefitst youtubers.

vaush doesn’t do debates anymore, hasn’t done one in… over a year at this point, almost two years?

I’ve heard him explain a few times now that debating anybody with hardcore right wing views is less than unproductive at this point, as none of those people are any kind of capable of arguing in good faith, thus all you’re doing is platforming them.

also vaush is routinely quite critical of authoritarian regimes.

hasan, on the other hand, yeah, i agree, he has (at least initially? not sure if his stance has changed since) defended the russian occupation of crimea, he has platformed people that go waaay beyond being just anti-zionist and go all the way into general antisemitism, basically played defense for the Chinese government’s actions against uyghurs…

he’s much closer to a tankie, and tankies are what hexbear has a whole lot of, those are the rabid posters and mods you stereotypically get there.

So… I am confused as to how you would say hexbear loves both vaush and hasan, when … rabid hexbears basically are tankies… and would generally agree with hasan (or think he doesn’t go far enough), and despise vaush.