u/brucethemoose

I’m surprised people think $1,100 is expensive for a gaming PC, even outside the crazy memory market now.

Same with the $500 Commodore phone.

These are not the 2000s. The dollar has inflated. Technology is *expensive*. I think cheap junk has desensitized folks to that, but you pay an externalized cost for that stuff.

And of course salaries haven’t gone up so anyone can actually afford it, but… that’s a distinctly separate problem. They *should* have, as corporate revenue and profit per worker has certainly gone up.

Yeah, agreed. eBay is notorious for being brutal on sellers, taking them down rather easily.

Scam listings are still everywhere though.

Ah, right.

That’s sad. AFAIK Oculus developed more integrated interpolation techniques (and, separately, warping) to *reduce* perceived latency:

https://www.uploadvr.com/reprojection-explained/

But that’s like black magic these days. Studios can’t even get basic DLSS integration right.

If the rendered framerate is over 60fps (which I'd wager is the case for you), it probably looks great.

Interpolation isn't psychic; of course its going to look like jello "guessing" what's between frames at a slideshow pace, especially with the constraint of low latency (without any future frames to use).

But I do have issue with some devs (and some of Nvidia's marketing) treating it as a crutch. It's not going to fix 15fps, but it's a sane way to get from 60 to 165 smoothly. TBH its less wasteful than trying to hit a native 165.

(NSFW warning)

When I had an RTX 2060 laptop, I had the *most jank* setup for Cyberpunk 2077.

I’d plug it into an older Sony OLED, which only supported low res HDMI input (can’t remember which res, I think 1080p?)

The RTX 2060 would run DLSS quality (for antialiasing) and output 2077 at low-res 60fps, and the TV would use *its* big ASIC to interpolate it to 120hz, and up to 4K.

And *actually*, it looked good! It felt smooth! Input lag wasn’t *great*, but absolutely playable.

I don’t have a PC that can do framegen (3090 now), but ironically, the DLSS framegen demos I’ve seen didn’t have interpolation as good as the Sony. And I believe Sony/Samsung support “no next frame” interpolation, so they don’t blow up input lag.

***

I’m not saying it’s a *great idea*, but there are ways of doing this that aren’t terrible.

Yeah.

My instant reaction was "$700? It'd be a miracle if Valve hits that. What's Ars thinking?"

In the future, when we're transcendent tentacled robofurries doing poly in virtual space, on drugs (think Yivo from Futurama), we will look back in confusion at why so many people *hate* homosexuality so much. Like... don't they have other things to worry about?

Or humanity will be all dead, I guess.

And I'm talking about the mega conservatives protesting this; at least the Vatican is baby stepping and trying to *minimize* their cruelty.

*Reads bit on dictator-propping via propaganda in Sudan.*

*Nods*. Yep, that sounds like my government alright. And Big Tech. *Cries inside.*

*Veers off to "Ukraine Proxy War" with no reference to ChatGPT as promised in the headline.*

*Sighs. Closes tab.*

OK, while in principle this looks bad…

This is (looking it up) like an experienced engineer's salary in Peru, in line with some other professions.

It’s *reasonable* to compensate a president, and for the expectation to not be coming in rich/connected enough to not need a salary. Nor for them to broker power for personal wealth, all as long as other offices and reasonably compensated too.

It avoids perverse incentives, doesn’t seem excessive and TBH is probably a drop in the Peruvian govt's budget.

Yes, but its clearly a building block of Meta's LLM training effort, and part of a pattern.

One implication I didn't mention, and don't have *hard proof I can point to*, is garbage in garbage out. Meta let AI slop and *human garbage* proliferate on Facebook, squandering basically the biggest advantage (besides cash) they have. It's often *speculated* that, as it turns out, Twitter and Facebook training data is kinda crap.

...And they're at it again. Zuckerberg pours cash into corporate trash and get slop back. It's an internal disaster, like their own divisions.

On the other side, it's often *thought* that Chinese models are so good for their size/compute because they're *ahem* getting data from the Chinese government, and don't need to worry about legal issues.

The research community already knows this.

Llama 4 (Meta's flagship 'AI' project) was as bad release. That's fine. This is interative research; not every experiment works out.

...But it was also a *messy and dishonest* one.

The release was pushed early and full of bugs. They lied about its performance, especially at long context, going so far as to game Chat Arena with a finetune. Zuckerberg hyped the snot out of it, to the point I saw *ads* for it on Axios.

Instead of Meta saying they'll do better, they said they're reorganizing their divisions to focus on 'applications' instead of fundamental research, aka exactly the wrong thing. They've hermmoraged good researchers and kept AI bros, far as I can tell from the outside.

*Every* top LLM trainer has controversies. Just recently Qwen (Alibaba) closed off their top base models just to spite Deepseek, so they can't distill them. Deepseek is almost certainly training on Google Gemini traces. Google hoards their best research for API models and has chased being sycophantic like ChatGPT. X's Grok is a joke, and muddied by Musk's constant lies about, for instance, open sourcing it. Some great outfits like 01ai (the Yi series) faded into the night.

...But I haven't seen self-destruction quite like Meta's. Especially considering the 'f you' money and GPU farm they have. They're still pushing interesting research *now*, but the trajectory is awful.

Yes, we *know*, you are preaching to the choir here, lemmy.ml.

But I'd rather we **not** back out of NATO, decouple trade and invade friendly neighbors all while the US continues to screw over far away countries **first**. At this point, backing out of NATO is not going to help our bad behavior.

After that, we can worry about not screwing with other countries so much, hopefully.

Good move TBH. Just like that, Trump likes NATO again.

There's an argument for that.

Trump also has *incredible* political capital. He can literally do no wrong with his base, strongarm congress, and ignore opposition; it gives him paths any other sitting president wouldn't even dream of.

This is the seductive charm of dictators. They're really effective at, and generally put in power to clean up messes, or cut through dysfunctional, stagnant political systems.

Paraphrased by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_India%E2%80%93Pakistan_conflict#Analysis

[The Times] reported that India felt frustrated after Donald Trump public claims of mediating a cease-fire, presenting both countries as equals and downplaying the terrorist attack that triggered the conflict, and that India had hoped any U.S. involvement would remain discreet, and Trump's portrayal of both countries on equal terms was seen by Indian officials as politically sensitive and diplomatically frustrating...

On 21 June, Pakistan announced it would nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing his role in brokering the ceasefire. Pakistan credited Trump's diplomatic intervention, though India denied any U.S. mediation.

Like it said, seems like India assumed the modest level of mediation would be *confidential* (clear miscalculus on their part), while Pakistan, err, *trumped* up the magnitude of the intervention to paint themselves in a better light, possibly because they're at a military disadvantage, and felt grateful for the help.

Seems like there was some backchannel involvement from *many* countries (like "Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE and the UK" and indeed the US), but Trump couldn't help himself and loudly claimed credit before the ceasefire was even announced.

Now India's annoyed (hence their flat denial).

I like this explanation, it 'fits' all the involved characters, including Trump blotting out the sun and killing any nuance to the situation.

Wasn't his involvement pretty minimal anyway?

https://www.news18.com/india/trump-wasnt-directly-involved-shashi-tharoor-on-india-pakistan-ceasefire-9394156.html

Or is that spin from India? Somewhere in between?

Yes, and that was a cruel, stupid move on the US’s part.

…But even if cooperation continued, it still would have given Iran expertise. Further enrichment is not a huge step, especially behind the cover of *real* civilian power programs, and given the rhetoric the state broadcasts and their neighbor’s hostility, it seems likely.

And that’s *fine* IMO.

I’m hugely afraid of proliferation, but going to these lengths to worry about it while the rest of the world burns seems ridiculous.

To be fair, Iran wants a nuke down the line, and civilian uranium enrichment is a huge stepping stone. There’s lots of technical alternatives they could pursue if they really *just* want civilian power.

…And that’s kinda understandable. They have a neighbor that randomly bombs their civilians.

Fuck it, let them have one.

Heck, they should get a tiny bit of old Soviet+US stock in some kind of international deal, so they have credible deterrence with the guaranteed stability+security mechanisms (and oversight?) of their weapons.

(To be more specific, Cold War nukes typically have elaborate tiggers and failsafes meant to stop unauthorized parties from detonating them with any nuclear yield, and the old school Soviet and US systems are pretty good. Better for them to have that than an “insecure” home cooked design they waste money on, like the North Koreans allegedly have, IMO. On top of that, they’d have “known” detonation signatures, so if they ever go off everyone would know it’s Iran (defeating the fear of them “losing” a nuke to another party, or a false flag op against Iran)).

To be fair, Axios didn't rag on Iran here. They didn't do any kind of labeling, just stating what happened: Israel bombed a live Iranian news station.

That's what *news* is supposed to be. The opinion columns are where terms like 'Zionist regime' goes. Same with whatever you'd want to call Iran's govt, but news is just the event as it comes, maybe with context.

Bombing a live news station, and clarifying that there was no warning, speaks for itself. More context of Israel's many other crimes would be better, but Axios has a very-brief writing style.