I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so... meh.
Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.
That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.
From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.
Right, but that's my point, compute is compute is compute. There are tensor acceleration cores in commercially available hardware dating back five years. They capped things above a specific performance threshold, is my understanding, but that just means you need more of the less powerful hardware, so all you've done is make things more expensive/less energy-efficient, but not block any specific application. Not in cheap, portable chips, not in huge industrial data center processors.
So not particularly useful to stop cyberwarfare, not particularly useful to stop military applications. The only use I see is making commercial applications less competitive. Specifically on the training side of things.
None of that makes any sense. "Western chips" all come from Taiwan in the first place. "Western designed chips" are also in laptops and mobile phones, including tons of Chinese devices, and that's assuming you mean to include South Korea as "Western", which is a bit of a stretch. Those are fundamentally interchangeable with military hardware. Nobody is putting 4090s and A100s in ICBMs.
Make it make sense. What specific hardware is this stopping from getting to China and for what application?
I am very confused about this ongoing thing regarding "stifling China's access to AI models". Does the US government think GPUs are magic? All you need to make a ML model is some tensor math and a web crawler, maybe some human processing on the later bits. You're not gonna stop China from making them. You're not gonna stop college kids with gaming rigs making them.
I'm guessing the endgame here is to make it slightly more expensive to do this in China to get American companies to have slightly better versions in the market and prevent a TikTok situation, rather than any legitimate strategic goal. Right? I mean, besides commercial protectionism I don't see how this type of language makes sense.
I... yeah, what? Disney is what does it? You were cool with Tencent, Sony, Lego, the massive fine for mishandling underage information? Disney. That's your line.
Alright.
Hah. The framing from normie news is so weird. It's "bizarrely Disney is investing on Fortnite", instead of "Disney buys a stake on the people making Unreal, which at this point is like half of their and everybody else's VFX pipeline".
I wonder if the gaming news guys will have a better picture or the "Disney Fornite whaaaa?!" angle is what people will take away from this across the board.
You haven't changed my mind, but now I'm mildly concerned about you and I'm here if you need help.
If the risk is that I'll have an upset stomach for two days like a toddler coming down from a sugar rush and my knees will also hurt for some reason, then yes, the WHO is right.
I mean... alcohol? You can already buy it easily prepared in all sorts of delicious ways.
Am I not in the spirit of the thing?
Quit drinking if you haven't. The cost/benefit analysis on that one probably broke a few years ago and you just hadn't noticed.
Otherwise, meh, do your own thing.
For straight revenue, yeah, that'd be right. Technically everything else is a rounding error. But if Epic was one of those single game unicorns like Riot or Rovio this would not make much sense. The synergies of Unreal with both the movie and theme park buisness for Disney seem like a better fit. I mean, assuming the move makes actual sense, Disney is out there talking about game collaborations and it's not like it's the first time they've spent money randomly and poorly in the gaming business. I just think the investment would make sense even if Fortnite wasn't in the mix.
And either way it's being blown out of proportion by the news because they haven't even bought the company. 1.5B is what? 10% as much as Tencent owns?