the funny thing is that nobody will ever do that. The moment someone uses quantum computing or any other technology to crack bitcoin in a visible way, the coins they just gave to themselves become worthless because confidence collapses.
Well, they wouldn't go for the trillion dollar wale addresses.
They would hack random, long unused, dead addresses holding 5 figure amounts and slowly convert those to money. They would eventually start to significantly lower the value and eventually crash bitcoin if too greedy, but could get filthy rich.
It's self-inflicted. The big studios are beyond terrible. The games are more about social conditioning than entertainment.
See Clair Obscur. They got funding from the State of France and the French National Centre for Cinema, and the game is 100x better than the slop the big studios publish.
Your mention of "social conditioning" a propos of nothing gives you away like the "three fingers" in Inglorious Basterds. I would highly suggest not basing your entire personality and opinions on a slack-jawed streamer's meandering rant delivered from his RGB gaming chair for 5 hours straight.
"Let's just all make Clair Obscur/Minecraft/Blue Prince" is not a repeatable strategy (every indie dev is trying to make good games). How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4 guys? Why don't the big studios today with all their money just hire another Beatles?
Same reason why Ubisoft isn't just making another Balatro. Industrializing culture isn't (yet?) a solved problem.
> How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4 guys?
The Beatles did only take a few days to knock out each of their earliest LPs. However, per Wikipedia, "the group spent 700 hours on [Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]. The final cost [...] was approximately £25,000 (equivalent to £573,000 in 2023)."
So, actually, envelope-pushing cultural landmarks typically do require a lot of effort and money to complete.
On the other hand I'm kind of shocked that the big gaming studios never seem to be fast followers. It feels like we've been through multiple waves of Balatro-likes from indie developers already. Where is the Ubisoft Lethal Company or something? You'd think having a studio full of experienced developers with tons of tech they could hop on trends quickly. It seems like they think it's beneath them or something though. Or maybe they're just structurally incapable of moving quickly. It did take 11 years and like 4 redesigns to make Skull & Bones after all.
This is a conjencture, even if I do work in the industry but not AAA, but: Following the trends simply isn't part of their business model. Following current trends is a very unpredictable business. Many try, and many fail. AAA had the luxury of somewhat predictable sales. They can make big bets like working years on a game, since they know they will have millions of players. And they know smaller studios can't compete with them in that business.
But, of course, making games is hard, and sometimes they fail. And now the free tools are getting really good, and smaller studios are becoming increasingly competent. Will we soon see the big ones fall? Their only way to survive is to keep going bigger, escaping the smaller studios to a place they can't reach. Now we have AAAA games. But is there a limit where players stop caring how many As a game has?
The more people you add the slower you get, not faster. Large companies are nutorously slow moving (and particularly slow to change directions) vs small upstarts.
yeah, but at this point it's weird they just don't grab a studio, give them a funding for 2 years and say them 'copy the latest indie trends with a tad more polish' and let them cook to see what comes out.
They tried that, e.g. "EA Originals"[0] is basically that (there are similar programs at other major publishers). I suspect it proved to not be a big money maker at the scale required to move the needle at publishers of that size., and that they are keeping these on as a sort of prestige programs.
If you're going to use nHAP, get Apaguard from Japan. Their nHAP is rod shaped, not jagged. They were the first to make rod shaped nHAP and have been doing it for decades. It's not a great idea to introduce cheap/jagged nHAP into your mouth. Sharp nanoparticles tend to cause cancer.
The title says "first shape found" but the article clarifies that it's really the first convex polyhedron. A sphere isn't a convex polyhedron, so it doesn't quality for the (now-disproven) conjecture.
I'm not "pro-Russia", but here is how Russia was provoked into the Ukraine war:
- NATO’s 1999 expansion into Eastern Europe despite promises not to.
- The 2014 Maidan coup removing pro-Russian President Yanukovych.
- Ukraine’s 2021 bombardment of Donbas separatists.
- NATO’s 2022 plans to admit Ukraine despite promises not to.
- U.S. Biolabs in Ukraine.
None of this is mentioned as context for this new prediction in the article. This is critical context for any objective article about Russia's war plans. Conclusion: this article is not objective.
There's much to say about several of those, but let's focus on one. The first, perhaps. Could you perhaps elaborate? What were these promises, by whom, was it a treaty, did any country promise to veto an application if e.g. Poland were to apply for membership? Do you have a link, any sort of reference?
During the 1990 German reunification talks, Western leaders verbally assured Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward beyond Germany. This is from declassified documents. Despite these promises, NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. In 2004 they let in the Baltic. All of this culminated in Putin's 2022 Ukraine invasion to block the Ukraine from joining NATO.
There's a problem with this narrative. Everyone links the "What Gorbachev Heard" article from the NSU, but there was no reason to speculate, because Gorbachev and his team were still alive when the article was written in 2017.
Some others did reach out and ask them directly. Gorbachev, his minister of foreign affairs, and his minister of defense all publicly refuted it. It would have been a major commitment, yet there is no trace of it having been discussed internally in Moscow or with other Warsaw Pact countries. Furthermore, according to the USSR's foreign minister at the time, the speculation of such assurance is anachronistic, because the Soviet leadership did not expect the Warsaw Pact to dissolve and therefore had no reason to discuss anything like this.
Oh, I see. Baker offered things, asked whether Gorbachev would prefer this or that, Gorbachev didn't take him up on anything relevant, nothing came out of it. Nothing was signed in the end.
AIUI this is the kind of thing that Congress could do, but Baker (the US Secretary of State) could not.
Standard negotiations really — a minister or another member of the executive negotiates with someone and eventually takes a text to a parliament, and in the end that parliament either ratifies the text or doesn't. There's no promise until the relevant parliaments have promised, because the executive does not have that power. The legislature has that power.
