Another difficult scenario is when you are a lead on a project you know is bad. It’s a trap with no way out.

Why not just credit the dark forest for this idea?

The idea wasn't Cixin's. E.g., https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alan-Penny/publication/... refers to speculation as early as 1967 that it might not be a good idea to answer that particular phone.

Here's a later article from 2010: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...

Perhaps because the concept's been knocking around for decades before it was published?

>> This could happen when the TPM device is reset or replaced.

Isn’t that exactly the desired behavior to defend against physical attacks?

Sure, but most users probably don't actually want this level of defense.

For the same reason that most folks don't use bank vault doors on their house.

Ex - even reasonably technical people hit this footgun in lots of edge cases... like updating their bios, changing the host of a vm running the tool, or having a k8s pod get scheduled on a different node.

I'm surprised this was "default on" at all.

Yes, but it turns out the TPM gets reset quite often on shitty hardware.

Is there a setting to make it stop being orange and blue? Such color grading is an instant tell the show (or video game) is creatively bankrupt trash.

Mad Max: Fury Road has entered the chat.

Jeff’s content is way too high quality to make him rich.

High quality content usually makes someone rich, and that someone is usually not the creator.

Yes, developer/platform advocacy/evangelism.

Reminds me of Suckdot.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000302102827/https://suck.com/...

How does your theory account for Dyson?

A lot of Dyson products are wildly overpriced and kind of shit, but people keep buying them because they look pretty.

Some are also quite good. I’ve rescued and revived over 6 Dyson hand helds. Almost all still work well.

There’s also a good after market ecosystem and 3D models you and print for various attachments.

And how about all the games no longer on the App Store?

Say, Flight Control (one of the first games to hit a million unit sales), or the Infinity Blade series (which wiki says was removed due to incompatibility with newer Apple platform changes)?

Both of those examples are old and precede current efforts. Plus, for the third time:

> Whether they’re succeeding at it is another story.

I’m not arguing Apple excels or is even decent at video games, I’m simply pointing out that it’s clear they are interested in having them on their platforms.

Part of what makes this outrageous is that the install size itself is probably a significant part of the reason to install the game on an HDD.

154GB vs 23GB can trivially make the difference of whether the game can be installed on a nice NVMe drive.

Is there a name for the solution to a problem (make size big to help when installed on HDD) in fact being the cause of the problem (game installed on HDD because big) in the first place?

> 154GB vs 23GB can trivially make the difference of whether the game can be installed on a nice NVMe drive.

I think War Thunder did it the best:

  * Minimal client 23 GB
  * Full client 64 GB
  * Ultra HQ ground models 113 GB
  * Ultra HQ aircraft 92 GB
  * Full Ultra HQ 131 GB

For example, I will never need anything more than the full client, whereas if I want to play on a laptop, I won't really need more than the minimal client (limited textures and no interiors for planes).

The fact that this isn't commonplace in every engine and game out there is crazy. There's no reason why the same approach couldn't also work for DLCs and such. And there's no reason why this couldn't be made easy in every game engine out there (e.g. LOD level 0 goes to HQ content bundle, the lower ones go into the main package). Same for custom packages for like HDDs and such.

Can any games these days be reliably ran on hdd's with max 200mb/s throughout (at best)? Or does everyone get a coffee and some cookies when a new zone loads? Even with this reduction that will take a while.

I thought all required ssd's now for "normal" gameplay.

Until you get to super-high-res textures and the like, the throughput isn't nearly as important as the latency.

At 200 MB/s the way hard drives usually measure it, you're able to read up to 390,625 512-byte blocks in 1 second, or to put it another way, a block that's immediately available under the head can be read in 2.56 microseconds. On the other hand, at 7200 RPM, it takes up to 8.33 milliseconds to wait for the platter to spin around and reach a random block on the same track. Even if these were the only constraints, sequentially arranging data you know you'll need to have available at the same time cuts latency by a factor of about 3000.

It's much harder to find precise information about the speed of the head arm, but it also usually takes several milliseconds to move from the innermost track to the outermost track or vice versa. In the worst case, this would double the random seek time, since the platter has to spin around again because the head wasn't in position yet. Also, since hard drives are so large nowadays, the file system allocators actually tend to avoid fragmentation upfront, leading to generally having few fragments for large files (YMMV).

So, the latency on a hard drive can be tolerable when optimized for.

> On the other hand, at 7200 RPM, it takes up to 138 microseconds to wait for the platter to spin around and reach a random block on the same track.

You did the math for 7200 rotations per second, not 7200 rotations per minute = 120 rotations per second.

In gaming terms, you get at most one or two disk reads per frame, which effectively means everything has to be carefully prefetched well in advance of being needed. Whereas on a decade-old SATA SSD you get at least dozens of random reads per frame.

Fixed!

"Self fulfilling prophecy" perhaps?