Because cheating the progression could affect the monetization.
If I blitz through the game and unlock everything with cheats, I’m much less likely to stick around and spend on the premium armor and battle passes. The point of the daily orders and slow progression is to make the game a habit, which increases the likelihood that someone will spend by increasing the number of chances they have to do so.
I’m not sure I’d trust modern CA to do Med3 justice. The new style of Total War is just a different beast from the sublime RTW/Med2 era.
Lots of little things changed, and it just ‘hits different’. Probably the biggest difference is just that every single fight after the first 20 turns will be a 20 stack vs a 20 stack, and every single battle is life or death for that army. It makes the campaign much faster paced - declare war, wipe stack, capture cities for 3 turns until the AI magics up another 20 stack.
In the original Med2, since there wasn’t automatic replenishment, there were often battles between smaller stacks, even in late game, as they were sent from the backline to reinforce the large armies on the front. Led to some of my greatest memories trying to keep some random crossbowmen and cavalry alive against some ambushing enemy infantry they wandered into. The need for manual reinforcement led to natural pauses in wars and gave the losing side a chance to regroup without relying on the insane AI bonuses of the modern TW games - and I do mean insane; they’ll have multiple full stacks supplied from a single settlement.
Most OLEDs today ship with logo detection and will dampen the brightness on static elements automatically.
While it isn’t a silver bullet, it does help reduce burn in since it is strongly linked to heat, and therefore to the pixel brightness. New blue PHOLEDs are expected to also cut burn in risk. Remember that LCDs also used to have burn in issues, as did CRTs.
They do that to keep people chasing the new primaries from the war bonds.
The cycle is pretty obvious at this point: warbond comes out, weapon is god, weapon gets nerfed, repeat.
I’ve been using Nvidia under Linux for the last 3 years and it has been massive pita.
Getting CUDA to work consistently is a feat, and one that must be repeated for most driver updates.
Wayland support is still shoddy.
Hardware acceleration on the web (at least with Firefox) is very inconsistent.
It is very much a second-class experience compared to Windows, and it shouldn’t be.
Linux and Nvidia really need to sort out their shit so I can fully dump windows.
Luckily the AI hype is good for something in this regard, since running gpus on Linux servers is suddenly much more important.
No, that’s not a real problem either. Model search techniques are very mature, the first automated tools for this were released in the 90s, they’ve only gotten better.
AI can’t ‘train itself’, there is no training required for an optimization problem. A system that queries the value of the objective function - “how good is this solution” - then tweaks parameters according to the optimization algorithm - traffic light timings - and queries the objective function again isn’t training itself, it isn’t learning, it is centuries-old mathematics.
There’s a lot of intentional and unintentional misinformation around what “AI” is, what it can do, and what it can do that is actually novel. Beyond Generative AI - the new craze - most of what is packaged as AI are mature algorithms applied to an old problem in a stagnant field and then repackaged as a corporate press release.
Take drug discovery. No “AI” didn’t just make 50 new antibiotics, they just hired a chemist who graduated in the last decade who understands commercial retrosynthetic search tools and who asked the biopharma guy what functional groups they think would work.
“AI” isn’t needed to solve optimization problems, that’s what we have optimization algorithms for.
Define an objective and parameters and give the problem to any one of the dozens of general solvers and you’ll get approximate answers. Large cities already use models like these for traffic flow, there’s a whole field of literature on it.
The one closest to what you mentioned is a genetic algorithm, again a decades-old technique that has very little in common with Generative “AI”
It looks much better than elden ring in that all the models are much higher quality. Elden Ring was designed around relatively modest assets, and does wonders with what it has, but there is no comparison, DD2 wins hands-down.
As for art direction, that is subjective. Plenty of reasons to prefer looking at ER.
The Witcher 3 is almost a decade old at this point
Humans are intelligent animals, but humans are not only intelligent animals. We do not make decisions and choose which beliefs to hold based solely on sober analysis of facts.
That doesn’t change the general point that a model given the vast corpus of human knowledge will prefer the most oft-repeated bits to the true bits, whereas we humans have muddled our way through to some modicum of understanding of the world around us by not doing that.
But the most current information does not mean it is the most correct information.
I could publish 100 papers on Arxiv claiming the Earth is, in fact, a cube - but that doesn’t make it true even though it is more recent than the sphere claims.
Some mechanism must decide what is true and send that information to train the model - that act of deciding is where the actual intelligence in this process lives. Today that decision is made by humans, they curate the datasets used to train the model.
There’s no intelligence in these current models.
A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.
The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.
Copilot is GPT under the hood, it just starts with a search step that finds (hopefully) relevant content and then passes that to GPT for summarization.
The Dark Souls 2 DLCs are some of the best content in all of Souls. While the original game has some level design issues, the DLCs are sublime.
The OG Crysis wanted hardware that still doesn’t exist. They built the game and engine under the assumption that clock speeds would keep increasing, and instead we moved to high core counts.
Even today, at 4K and max settings, the original (2007) release can drop below 100 fps on the best possible hardware.
Every billion parameters needs about 2 GB of VRAM - if using bfloat16 representation. 16 bits per parameter, 8 bits per byte -> 2 bytes per parameter.
1 billion parameters ~ 2 Billion bytes ~ 2 GB.
From the name, this model has 72 Billion parameters, so ~144 GB of VRAM
A good mirror reflects more than 99% of incident light, effectively increasing the amount of power the laser needs to destroy the target by a factor of 100.
This isn’t the real concern, however. Fog, dust, clouds, and rain are quite common on the damp and dusty sphere we live on, and they would all strongly attenuate the beam power and greatly reduce the effective range.
It’s almost like the law doesn’t protect equally
Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.
That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn’t much for tech.
There are really only 3 search providers, Google, Bing, and Yandex.
All others will pay one of these three to use their indexes, since creating and maintaining that index is incredibly expensive.