GDPR is a start, but we need to actually ban it, not just annoy people until they click Accept at the 20th popup of that tantalising offer to share your details with 1473 trusted data partners.

And all the CIA ones.

And then block all cookies and tracking.

Still rocking an i5-8400 and a 1060. It’s fine for FFXIV and most other games.

Until GPU prices come down, the CPU is the least of my worries. I’ll play anything that needs decent hardware on my PS5.

If you’re not running the latest games it really doesn’t matter at all.

AI + Ads = AIDS.

Just say no, kids.

The problem with money being involved is it’s an invitation to spam crap everywhere.

One of my relatives has recently taken up “AI travel videos” and “AI cute videos” as a “hobby”. No doubt based on the first thing that came up when I searched for those things, a video titled “make $10,000 a month spamming up YouTube with your AI slop”.

Oh, and it needs you to buy the AI slop generating tools that they happen to sell. How convenient!

I mean, this also happened with broadcast TV, where we suddenly went from like 4 channels filled with programs and things competing for space, to 200 channels, where the rush was on to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible with reality show tat. And that’s all YouTube is now.

I agree, but it’s still a step up from dropping a laser guided bomb on a 10 storey apartment building because somebody in Hamas might be there.

Google Serves AI Slop as Top Result for One of the Most Famous Paintings in History

The point of Insta would seem to be the opposite of that. To splatter your inane life before the world in the hopes of becoming a viral millionaire influencer.

The nicest thing I can say about it is at least they killed Flash.

I could never get on with the weird shaped triggers.

I suspect the suburb issue is one of car centric US suburbs where you can’t even get out of it without a car, rather than somewhere like the UK, where I effectively live in what is now a suburb of a larger city (if I drove there, it’s about ten miles, through an entirely built up area), but that “suburb” is also a town that’s been here since medieval times with it’s own shops and workplaces and facilities.

Seems to me the issue is less about low density suburbs, and more about the fact that there’s nothing there apart from rows and rows of identikit housing.

In fairness Israel isn’t struggling to beat Hamas. They could quite handily just carpet bomb the place to oblivion and kill 2 million people. It’s not really any bigger than Grozny, and we saw what even the Russians managed to do to that.

But that doesn’t tend to sit well with anyone, not even the US. Better to commit genocide by making the survivors leave and stealing their land, rather than going full holocaust on them.

Still, they’ve killed 2% of Gaza in a year. Give them 50 more and there won’t be a Gaza Strip.

At that price there would have to be some pretty compelling arguments to upgrade.

Half a generation for up to 40% more raytracing power isn’t worth it.

A full generation for 2-3 times what a PS5 can do? Maybe.

Even then, there would have to be some damn good exclusives on PS6 to be worth your while. PS4 to PS5 was an easy argument, games ran at 30 pretty much all generation, mostly due to a comically underpowered CPU, and now they run at 60.

I’m struggling to even conceive of a worthwhile game that would bring a PS5 to its knees. I haven’t really seen a good argument for raytracing yet. Sure, nicer reflections, more accurate lighting, but we were pretty good at faking those anyway. Cyberpunk and Metro look really nice with the RT only editions, but they were perfectly playable without it.

We should really draw a big line under RT once it reaches a certain level of power, and go back to affordability. Game devs can’t put food on the table just catering to insanely high end hardware. My PC is still rocking a 1060. On the Steam hardware survey, there’s only one GPU higher than the X060 series inside the top ten. Budget hardware has got to be the focus.

Tim may have had enough money personally, but it’s always nice to not have to shut your studio and fire everyone if you release the odd stinker.

In my experience they mostly seem to watch somebody else play a video game.

We really do not value quiet enough.

And the people here who’s idea of a utopia is all of us living in Mega City One are the worst of them.

I used to play WoW with a guy in London, and literally every time he opened his mic to speak, it was a cacophony of sirens and cars and helicopters. I don’t know how people in cities can even here themselves think. Like, great, you can order from 20 different Chinese takeaways but at what cost?

It might do now. They’ve done a lot of improvements.

Even on PS5 it was an absolute mess in co-op. 30fps (if you were lucky) all round, constant freezes (several seconds) when swapping characters, many many crashes. Whenever we told it to save, we’d have to both touch nothing to make sure it didn’t crash while saving. Oh, and there was a bug meaning only the player who chose to sleep for the day would get any companion progression.

I really like my PS5, but I see no value in a model costing 80% more and being only current for half a generation.

All that for an “up to” 40% performance increase.

I don’t care how much of a graphics nerd someone is, that just isn’t worth it.

The dollar ain’t buying what it used to either.

Also, remember that our prices include VAT, so we slap 20% on it right there. That £700 is £583 excluding the VAT.

That’s still 10% more than in the US doing a direct currency conversion, but it’s not quite as bad as it first looks.

Still a lot of money for a games console though, especially a mid gen refresh. Paying at the start of a gen for 8 years gaming ain’t too bad when you look at it per year. PS5 Pro will be over 4 years, and on that alone is piss-poor value.