Following the sprint, I was expecting a bit of a snooze fest, but interesting race from a strategy perspective.

I’m reluctant to buy any digital games on anything but Steam at this point, and that’s because Valve has begrudingly earned my trust over 20 years of use. I do wonder what plans are in place for the point at which Gabe isn’t around to steer Valve.

I have zero confidence in any other game related corporation to have a long term view in mind, and especially not one in which the platform is designed to be consumer friendly.

This is going to be a real problem for all platforms and marketplaces. Without some form of curation, everything will drown in the wave of slop. This isn’t a new problem, but AI is making it easier than ever to churn out low effort crap… until those token costs start rising enough to make this uneconomical. 🤪

Person who has developed a service to put ads in games says companies should think about putting ads in games.

"EA Advertising is a platform that’s directly integrated into Frostbite, the engine EA uses to make its biggest games, from Madden to Battlefield. The idea is to streamline what’s required to create custom ads for clients and then track how players “engage” with the ads. “Advertisers can now collaborate with EA in a privacy-safe way to improve targeting and gain deeper campaign insights,” the company wrote last month. “EA ensures ads are viewable, delivered to real audiences, and measured using industry-accredited standards in partnership with Integral Ad Science.”

That sure is a lot of people who would probably like to be able to purchase reasonably priced PC hardware.

Just another form of vendor lock-in. If your business model is mostly/entirely dependent on an external party, that should be a well understood risk.

I think Max’s future is likely to be decided by other things before GP moves on.

The Race are reporting that Lambiase will work with Stella and taking on some of his responsibilities, which makes more sense to me as it would seem like a big jump from what he’s doing now to go straight into a Team Principle role. To me, this speak more to a mentorship where Stella is developing talent to eventually replace him, and I’m sure there are others internally at McLaren who would by vying for this role as well.

However, after 14 years of uninterrupted growth, we are now seeing a decline of unprecedented scale and speed.

So basically, we made a lot of money over a period of 14 years but we don’t have any left to sustain our business model. I wonder where the money went? Business planning? What’s what?!?🤔

Can’t blame TIGA, they’re doing their job as a trade body.

If the government were going to intervene, I’d prefer to see it support indie devs and make that sustainable option for people to try new and interesting things and hone their craft.

When I pressed him to consider the social consequences of his work, he acknowledged that he and his business partners had discussed contingency plans for laid-off workers. Those who are higher-skilled could be used to train the next generation of robots, he said. He did not say how he would deal with lower-skilled workers.

As government subsidies flood the robotics sector, Chen and his peers are bracing for the usual pattern: price wars and cost cutting manoeuvres that leave companies barely able to turn a profit.

I’m curious as to what’s at the end of this race to the bottom. If workers are steadily being excluded from the job market, and even those running the companies are being forced to narrow their profit margins, the implied goal is to make a lot of stuff that nobody has time or money to use. I guess there’s some competitive advantage of economic dominance on the world stage, but it feels like even that is on shaky ground for one reason or another.

(if this is a done deal, and I’m not sure it is) It would seem unadvisable for Audi to let Wheatley immediately go to a competitor who they’ve got a good chance of finishing ahead of. So I’d presume there’d be a lot of haggling over how soon he could join. Given the likely rate of development this year, perhaps people’s knowledge will age faster than previous years, but still!

Or to put it another way, AI is making it faster and easier to do the wrong thing in the wrong way at scale.

I also wonder what the plan is when the token cost starts going upward. The bill for all this venture capital will come due eventually and someone has to pay for it.

Can confirm this works with Navidrome. I also have Navidrome updating last.fm as well.

This is good news! I quite like the Quest 3 hardware, but I hated having Horizon rammed down my throat through the UI. I guess that’s because they were desperate to drive engagement.

The other thing the helps people get unstuck in games is good game design. 🙃

<sigh> I suppose this is just the equivalent of reading a game guide that someone has written, but this feels like it could remove too much friction. Are you playing the game if everything just becomes a tutorial?

Won’t stop the competition suggesting that Merc should be nerfed mind you. Interesting to hear Lewis mentioning compression ratios in the post qualifying interviews. 😅

I presume Mercs main defence will be that McLaren has the same engine and isn’t as dominant.

Quali should be good if they’re still learning where the limits are.

I thought it might be part of the rear diffuser. Hope they have some spare underfloors given the amount of people going through the gravel. :)

Yes, fair comment. If they have to retire the car because it’s shaking itself and the drivers to the point of failure, questions will be asked. So some of this is getting on the front foot and manage expectations. But I am baffled how how naive AM could be regarding the strength of Honda coming back into the fold as an engine supplier. It’s more likely they were set to struggle than not given they’re essentially in a rebuilding phase having lost personnel to RB.

As you say, the vibration issue is potentially masking any other problems, and Newey seems to think that the chassis is a step ahead of others, but we won’t really know until this is resolved. And the lack of running is doubly punishing in terms of gathering data and insight. I guess I’m just wary because this feels very similar to the McLaren & Honda situation where Honda carried all the blame, only to find that McLaren had other performance issues outside of the PU.