The district said ahead of the election that only 300 ballots would be available at each of the eight polling places throughout the three parishes and urged voters to come early.

Oh, so they knew it would be a problem, and did it wrong on purpose.

Jail.

“Edge AI,” AKA running programs on your own damn hardware, instead of using a whole modern computer to act like a dumb terminal.

On a service that treats you as the product.

It takes some dire context for me to read this headline and go - yeah, sure.

Wonder why.

I mean, assuming rape and murder rates are independent, you’re only fractionally more likely to be raped and murdered in Arkansas.

All this dunking pretends numbers have anything to do with fascists assaulting innocent protesters.

what’s an Xbox even for anymore?

PC-ifying the console market, same as always. A task it has almost completed.

Sony exiting the console market would be failure. They’ve been using the PS1 playbook five times in a row - seven or eight if you count handhelds - and it’s worked, at most, thrice. Sony’s ideal market has games developed for a specific platform, and occasionally ported outside it, so each vibrant fiefdom has its own identity and culture. That made them a mountain of cash on PS1 and PS2 and then nearly killed the PS3.

Developers’ ideal market is making the game once and selling it to all customers. Platforms are an obstacle. Sony’s ideal was fucked as soon as RenderWare looked the same on any console or PC. Microsoft got the message and made the 360 a generic compiler target. Sony almost shipped the PS3 without a real GPU. It took them years to stop fucking around and offer libraries to make their tiny special supercomputer act like any other computer - and that got them better ports, and made them more money.

What followed was two and a half generations of lockstep releases for near-identical AMD laptops. You can buy the blue one or the green one. Yet I don’t think Sony really internalized what’s happened until the Helldivers situation. They suddenly demanded every PC player get in their console ecosystem, because they recognized how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them.

Microsoft exiting the console market would be… what they’ve been planning for a decade, probably. Somewhere after the Xbox One, I mused that they could upset the console race by not releasing an Xbox Two, and just treat the upcoming PS5 as a slightly broken PC. They seem to be getting around to it. Albeit with a side of releasing a Steam Deck competitor, because they love showing up late to a trend.

Loyalty is their entire worldview.

Apple switches to RISC-V in ten… nine… eight…

Training is transformative use. Dreamworks has a legal right to limit the commercial use of Shrek - but they have never been able to stop you from drawing him, or writing about him, and keeping that shit to yourself. Copyright has absolutely fucking nothing on works that are never published.

So that ability in itself cannot be a problem for the robot that draws anything.

Commercial sports betting should be illegal.

Advertising as an industry can fuck off.

I have no strong opinion about Veo.

Again, not even Atari itself went away entirely. A crash means line go down. It’s not a sudden and definite end.

This user struggles with absolutes.

It’d be like expecting the entire music industry, movie industry, or book industry to crash.

Which can happen.

Theaters sure aren’t doing well. Movies soldier on without them, but with vanishing distinction from any other form of streaming video. When the superhero genre wanes, it might not be because some other bajillion-dollar trend overtook it. People can just stop caring enough to justify budgets with nine digits. What comes after that is a fallow period. Many large investments fail, capital dries up, a few pricks make headlines for declaring ‘movies are over.’

There’s been several times that making money on music was not a reliable business model. The industry flipped out about piracy… on cassettes, and then also when MP3s came along. Fortunately they solved that through commercial streaming services which also don’t pay artists anything. And now you can install a program that invents and records pop songs, just for you, in about as long as it takes to play them.

Even in '83, it’s not like Atari died. They had two more consoles that decade, plus a handheld. They marched on into the 1990s and then died. The crash simply meant a whole form of entertainment was no longer an expected feature in people’s lives.

Subscription MMOs have dwindled. The RTS genre crashed.

Warframe is… special.

Did you make it thirty hours in? Congratulations, now you can create your character.

Li​ke brea​king red​dit’s as​inine Scu​nthorpe filt​ers wi​th ze​ro-wi​dth sp​aces. The​re’s o​ne i​n e​ach w​ord o​f t​his para​graph.

We’re right back to \/!/\GR4 C1@Ll5 spam.

Meanwhile: having safety to bypass means you’re on someone else’s system, and fuck that. You’re either being put through the wringer in lieu of a human interaction (or a goddamn FAQ) or else you’re being spied on while telling a server-side video card about your worrisome rash.

Your fridge is spying on you.

You paid extra for this abuse.

Who’s got that Danger Five GIF?

You can freely ignore the dipshit who thinks “almost nobody was permitted to divorce” means “people went to jail for back-alley divorces.”

Oh for fuck’s sake, it was the American ABC. I first saw it as a Guardian article on quokk.au and didn’t recognize the guy’s name.

She has a name.

According to ABC, having a deleted tweet saying what you say yourself is grounds for termination.