Not to mention that AMD likely has a much stronger semi-custom infrastructure (they've been doing it for over 10 years, and the PS4/Xbone chips helped to keep the company afloat during the FX years) plus an existing relationship with Valve. Intel doesn't have that, and they also don't have the objectively superior product that would convince vendors to switch.
I recently bought an MSI Claw A1M handheld gaming PC, because it was cheap. And the performance of the Core Ultra 5-135H is fine, and I think it can handle E33 at 1080p30 with upscaling, and anything else I'd want to play much better than that. But the battery life and power consumption isn't competitive with even the original Steam Deck, and we haven't seen an indication that Intel has anything to leapfrog AMD chips any time soon.
I've been around the vaporwave scene (of which these other nostalgic aesthetics are adjacent) for years and let me tell you... for an art movement which seems to celebrate the consumerist childhood of millennials exploring shopping malls, the early(ish) HTML web, cable TV and 8 to 32 bit video gaming, there are a lot of vocal leftists who seem to abhor all of the things which made the aesthetic what it is.
The originators of vaporwave - like James Ferraro, Lopatin, Vektroid/Macintosh Plus - didn't exactly "celebrate" uncritically that feel-good phase of capitalism, their takes on the plundered material featured quite a bit of darkness, eeriness and liminal feels in between the cracks... which may seem non-inexistent or sanitized with other vaporwave producers who followed, but make no mistake... Early on, music journalists framed vaporwave as implicitly an ambivalent critique of the '80s-90s, where: 1) as a child, that era seemed to be so exciting; 2) as an adult now, not only that culture did turn out to be an empty promise, but also a lot of it is dying or dead by now. In the US there are even dying shopping malls right now, which might seem weird in other countries, but that might partly explain the minor popularity of vaporwave in the US among Internet youth - even young people who aren't very "woke" can tell something's wrong at the heart of capitalism. Current techbro capitalism? Who really likes it?
Being nostalgic is one thing, endorsing "fashwave" - which not for nothing was just a microniche within vaporwave - is another. Long story short, if you go past the surface fascination with the products of 80s consumerism, vaporwave is generally not really in praise of consumerism and it most certainly disrespects copyright, which is that fundamental to that economy, isn't it?
The leap from a leftist take on vaporwave straight to "fashwave", as if it is a binary, is certainly something.
> even young people who aren't very "woke" can tell something's wrong at the heart of capitalism. Current techbro capitalism? Who really likes it?
There's (valid) critique of the current economic status quo, and then there's "Ugh, Capitalism": https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism - and from my time in the scene (several ElectroniCons, Neo Gaia shows in Tokyo, a dozen or so Discord servers, etc.) the trend seems to be disillusioned millennials rather than diehard illiberals (although I may be wrong; this is anecdotes rather than evidence)
What really takes me back is that if an art movement uses the imagery of a particular trope, be it fascism or communism or anti-colonialism or environmentalism or anything else, it almost always assumes an endorsement of that movement. You don't see many artists put up images of mustache man without it being seen as support. Same with Michael Jackson's Earth Song, no one concluded that MJ was in favor of environmental deconstruction.
The copyright angle is right on the money - anti-copyright views are rife inside the scene for obvious reasons. Whether it was central to the 80s-90s economy is another question. In that time, FLOSS was not prevalent as it is now. It wouldn't be for a decade or so afterwards.
> 1) as a child, that era seemed to be so exciting; 2) as an adult now, not only that culture did turn out to be an empty promise, but also a lot of it is dying or dead by now.
This is the crux, and I do want to address it: maybe the "lost hope" of my generation does see the Palm Mall as something to be mourned rather than something to be celebrated (that's my own bias - maybe others wished it never existed at all) but when I'm in a random Queens bar while Lux or Cars is playing 80s Japanese "City pop" with a projection of Asahi beer commercials on the back wall, I don't think it's a dunk on Reagan or Clinton-era capitalism leading up to the dot-com bust or 9/11 so much as a longing for it.
No no no, some random American diplomat told a random Soviet diplomat during the East Germany negotiations that NATO wouldn't extend east at all.
No, it wasn't put on paper anywhere.
No, it wasn't mentioned (much) when the countries of eastern Europe all chomped at the bit to join NATO in the 90s.
No, it completely makes the Budapest Memorandum bunk.
No, the people of Ukraine absolutely do not have the agency to want to pivot towards the EU and become wealthy and stable like the former Warsaw Pact countries did. It must have been the CIA, so Budapest is bunk again!
(and other lies the war apologists tell themselves)
I think it's your English-language comprehension which needs some brushing up. The only change here is that the Japanese government is moving to the same romanization system that most people and businesses already use. And if you've already learned Japanese, including kanji and kana, nothing changes at all.
But it's a reality that English is the primary (if not sole) focus, for historical reasons and as the global lingua franca. English is taught (poorly, from what I hear) in schools, played on train announcements, is the only Western language available on ticket machines, and is the assumed language of non-Asian visitors to the country. I was even on a couple of domestic flights a few days ago and the captain / FAs made announcements in English. It is not "arbitrary" at all.
It's the smug superiority too many "tech smart" people have.
"Why would you buy HP? Everyone knows that it stands for Horrible Product."
"Serves you right for getting a TV with built in Netflix, everyone knows that it's a backdoor to botnet!"
I don't think it's apologetics for dogpoop corporate behavior, directly. But it has that effect because those of us with knowledge enjoy being smart asses or belittling those whose ignorance rewards trends we disagree with.
People should be able to go into a store and buy a thing without researching how evil it has become in the decade or two since the last time they did. Or move into a house pre-furnished. That is a failure of legislatures, not of average Joe.
But it's anathema to the cosmopolitan multiculturalism we practice and appreciate in most of the anglosphere and parts of western Europe. Of which much of the tech world / HN posters are part of.
I'm a European immigrant to Canada, in a suburb of Vancouver which is plurality Chinese with Europeans at about 30% and its totally cool and normal.
But I'm also typing this from vacation in Japan where they famously don't welcome immigration much. But people don't seem as upset by Asian nativism compared to European. And I don't have a diplomatic way of explaining the difference - it's the "bigotry of low expectations."
The section on cyberharassment is really troubling, although with the current vitriol on AI I'm not surprised. Do wish the author mentioned the name of the site though, if only so I can avoid it (and not in the Always Sunny "oh no terrible! where?" way)
I was as curious as you were. Turns out there are only so many popular threaded discussion sites in the vein of HN on the Internet, so an educated guess is all it takes.
Without making judgment on the actions of any involved party, I do wonder why the author would choose to bring up this incident and submit it as part of a story to a site where there is a significant overlap in readership.
That incident catalyzed the fear that suppressed my desire to participate online for months. I figured that if I couldn't talk about it now, I might never participate again.
Honestly, if there's any chance the content they posted on your profile before locking you out comes close to defamation, I'd consider talking to a lawyer about it. It could be that getting one to send them a cease-and-desist letter on your behalf could take care of the problem.
Well that sucks. It's exactly the site that comes to mind when I think "most popular alternative to HN".
I've generally found conversation there to be more respectful than HN, rather than less, when discussions get heated - so I had high hopes it would be a different site, but alas.
This leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
Edit: you know what, screw it. In the spirit of "no more self censorship", here's the link: https://lobste.rs/~7u026ne9se
I don't find the conversation to be especially disrespectful. The people in the thread in question attempted to shame him, to some extent. Shame is a social measure to coerce people who are behaving contrary to society's expectations to change their behaviour. However, while shaming him, they did not especially resort to childish name-calling or ad hominem. They reasoned with him extensively as to why his behaviour was deeply undesirable. He went so far as confessing that he did not even know the language of the PR he submitted, yet intentionally withheld information about the provenance of the code. Sometimes the shame mechanism is misused for things that should not be shamed, but this seems like a clear case of shameful behaviour that deserves social repercussion.
Sadly, it seems like nothing was learned, since he settles only for diminishing his culpability in anti-social behaviour. He goes so far as to describe, in his blog post, his code as an "AI-assisted patch". When you profess that you don't even know the language of the code that the LLM generated, there is no "assistance" about it, you're at the deepest end of vibe coding. And in submitting it to an open-source project, you're making a maintainer spend more time and effort reviewing it than you did prompting it, which is not sustainable. Moreover, if the maintainer wanted a pure-LLM-generated solution, there was nothing stopping them from hopping over and typing in a prompt themselves.
In fact, most of the comments were purely a debate with no direct attacks at all. The extent of "not respectful comments" I see are something like...
So your original comment that you "didn't want to hype up AI" was a lie, you really just wanted to pretend it was your own work and didn't want the project to be able to make a choice about it. There are good reasons why projects may not want to accept code generated by AI. They may not care. But by consciously choosing not to disclose that, you took that choice away from the project. That's pretty lousy behavior if you ask me.
"Pretty lousy behaviour if you ask me" is incredibly tame. If that's what counts for toxicity, then you're advocating for a toxicly positive carebear forum where nobody is allowed to criticise anybody else's decisions.
I agree that the discussion doesn't seem to be toxic on the whole, though not superb, although I don't know what happened following in terms of harassment, so that's up in the air for me.
I recently bought an MSI Claw A1M handheld gaming PC, because it was cheap. And the performance of the Core Ultra 5-135H is fine, and I think it can handle E33 at 1080p30 with upscaling, and anything else I'd want to play much better than that. But the battery life and power consumption isn't competitive with even the original Steam Deck, and we haven't seen an indication that Intel has anything to leapfrog AMD chips any time soon.
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