Do you have data on that? A modern nuclear power plant is going to be in the 500-1000+ MW range. I have a hard time imagining that even operating at half capacity that they do not offset the carbon used for concrete within a relatively short order. But if that is in fact the case I’d love to see data saying so, so that I can correct my thinking.

Cities Skylines sees a fairly decent improvement going to the 3D cache chips from AMD (17% speedup here for the 5800x3D). Whats your ability to increase the budget to go for a 7800X3D look like? If this is a genre of game you like and you want to hold off as long as possible between upgrades, it might be worth springing the extra. The difference the 3D cache provides in some games is rather extraordinary. City builders, automation, and similar games tend to benefit the most. AAA games tend to benefit the least (some with effectively no gain).

A 7600X should be more than capable of handling the game though. So it’s not a question of need but if it’s worth it to you.

You do not want 4800 CL40 RAM though, that’s too slow. I’d strongly recommend going for 32GB of RAM as well; 16GB can be gobbled up quickly, especially if you want to use mods in Cities Skylines.

Going up even to DDR5-6000 is not much of a price increase. I’d suggest 6000 and something in the range of CL36-CL40. There’s a lot of 32GB kits in those specs in the ~$90 range. I would not build a gaming system today with 16GB of RAM.

As I understand it, most disc copies of games today aren’t viable in the first place. Either all of the game data is not on the disc and some needs to be downloaded anyway, or the game copy on the disc is in such a shit state that you wouldn’t want to play that specific copy.

Discs don’t really protect us in the sense of ownership. It’s still reliant on the same backend to enable it in most practical senses.

The future of renewable energy is very promising. It’s easy to miss how fast it can turn around when growth it grows so much year-to-year but starts at a small place. Keep this kind of growth up and the grid will be clean a lot faster than seems possible.

Beyond solar I’m also very hopeful about offshore wind efforts in the US.

We still live in the same society as others. People often adopt the cultures and ideologies of where they end up, or at least move closer to it than they were before. If reddit shifts its userbase to the right — even if the net effect is from “very very left” to “very left” — it will impact the lives of all of us that live in societies with large numbers of people using that site, as it’ll filter down into our politics. Even if we don’t interact with them.

For a long time, the “default” ideology of the internet was on the left. As internet usage has become dominated by a handful of sites owned by megacorporations, there has been a not at all subtle effort to nurture a conservative ideology on those sites. Stuff like reddit holding off on banning the Trump sub for however long or twitter refusing to implement their hate speech detection because it correlated too strongly with conservative politicians (not to mention what Musk has done there). I don’t think this is an accident.

It’s useless for answering a questions that wasn’t asked, sure. But I didn’t pretend to answer that question. What it is useful for is answering the topic question. You know, the whole damn point?

How much of a factor off do you think the estimate is? You think they need three drives of redundancy each? Ten? Chances are they’re paying half (or less) for storage drives compared to retail pricing. The estimate on what they could get with $100m was also 134 EB, a mind boggling sum of storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using up on the order of 1 EB/year in needed storage. There’s also a lot more room in their budget than 0.34%.

The point is to get a quick and simple estimate to show that there really will not be a problem in Google acquiring sufficient storage. If you want a very accurate estimate of their costs you’ll need data that we do not have. I was not aiming to get a highly accurate estimate of their costs. I made this clear, right from the beginning.

If each video was on a single hard drive the site would not be able to function as even the fastest multi actuator hard drive can only do 524 MB/s in a perfect vacuum.

The most popular videos are all going to be kept in RAM, they don’t read them all off disk with every single view request. If you wanted a comment going over the finer details of server architecture, you shouldn’t have looked at the one saying it was doing back of the envelope math on storage costs only, eh?

Not surprising.

Bioware has spent over a decade chasing mass appeal for their games, to the detriment of what they’re good at. They made that work as they shifted from 2D to 3D to action-3D. That stopped working as they went too far, abandoning their core strengths. Bioware hasn’t had an unmitigated success since… ME2 in 2010? That’s 13 years of them floundering, with the very mitigated successes of ME3 and DA:I early on in that.

That kind of floundering is going to filter down to everyone working there. It’s hard to bounce back from that. They know Dreadwolf needs to hit it out of the park if they hope to continue on. Easy situation to end up in development hell with delay after delay…

I wasn’t calculating server costs, just raw storage. Google is not buying hard drives at retail prices. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re paying as little as 50% of the retail price to buy at volume.

All of what you say is true but the purpose was to get a back of the envelope estimation to show that the cost of storage is not a truly limiting factor for a company like youtube. My point was to answer the question.

With the level of compression youtube uses, the storage costs of everything below 4k is substantially lower than 4k by itself: for back of envelope purposes we can just ignore those resolutions.

It’s a superscript. You can see it in the comment editor options. It’s: ^text^ which looks like ^text

You can also check a comment’s source by clicking on the icon that looks like a dog eared piece of paper at the bottom of it.

Storage is cheap, especially at the corporate scale.

Make two simplifying assumptions: pretend that Google is paying consumer prices for storage, and pretend that Google doesn’t need to worry about data redundancy. In truth Google will pay a lot less than consumer prices, but they’ll also need more than 1 byte of storage for each byte of data they have, so for the sake of envelope math we can just pretend they cancel out.

Western Digital sells a 22TB HDD for $400. Seagate has a 20TB HDD for $310. I don’t like Seagate but I do like round numbers, so for simplicity we’ll call it $300 for 20TB. This works out to $15/TB. According to wikipedia, Youtube had just under $29b of revenue in 2021. If youtube spend just $100m of that — 0.34% — they’d be able to buy 6,666,666 of those hard drives. In a single year. That’s 6,666,666x20TB = 133,333,333 TB of storage, also known as 133^{note 1} exabytes.

That’s a lot of storage. A quick search tells me that youtube’s compression for 4k/25fps is 45Mbps, which is about 5.5 megabytes/s. That’s 768,722 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube’s annual revenue.

Note 1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024ⁿ for data names, then the SI prefixes aren’t correct. It’d be 115 exbibytes instead.

EDIT: I initially did the price wrong, fixed now.

Aviation is one of the smallest contributions to greenhouse gas emissions as-is: in 2016 it was 1.9% of global emissions.

The danger the rich pose to the planet isn’t being first in line for the second generation of supersonic transoceanic flights.

The danger the rich pose to the planet is them keeping coal and natural gas plants open longer because they personally profit from it. It’s them keeping their taxes low, reducing our ability to fund renewable energy. It’s them fighting tooth and nail against any new energy efficiency regulation (remember the incandescent lightbulb ban fight?) because it “hurts profits.” It’s them fighting against public transportation.

This? This isn’t even in the top 50 of their ills against the climate. The hate for the rich is well placed. Applying that hate to basic science is dangerously misplaced. The rich love when people push-back on funding science efforts.

Faster transportation is quality of life too. Just like cars were, or railroads before them. Yeah, this one is currently worthless for anyone that isn’t rich. But if it proves successful it will become useful for more of us. Like you say, there’s also just the material and other sciences being done to make it possible that will filter out elsewhere. So much of early space exploration was Cold War dick waving, and now think about how much we rely on satellites. I couldn’t navigate anywhere without GPS, personally…

People here take their hate of the rich (which is well placed) and aim it at all the wrong things. Don’t like the rich? Tax 'em more. That’s what I want. Higher income taxes and even a wealth tax on the top. And way more meaningful inheritance taxes. Instead they’re bitching about investments in science.

Technology filters down. Once upon a time only the rich could afford corrective lenses, but that wasn’t a waste of resources. How many of non-wealthy people will read this comment and wear glasses or contacts? I do. BEVs were limited to the wealthy at first too, and now are solidly affordable to much of the middle class: dependent more on their access to charging and their driving requirements than on their budget. The first residential fridges cost more than a brand new Model T when they came out: the inflation adjusted 1922 price was ~$13,000 today. Was inventing fridges worthless?

It’s NASA developing new technologies. New stuff starts off more expensive, which means it will start off limited to the wealthy. If you don’t want any new tech to come out that starts with rich people being the primary users, then you should go find your local luddite club to join.

Almost certainly still stuck with their fork of gamebryo. On the bright side, the footage I’ve seen of Starfield suggests that they’ve actually gotten around to implementing a better animation system.

I’m not sure on the specifics of how animations work at the engine level (I know there’s stuff about animation rigs, but not much beyond that) but all their games up until now have had the same system of character animations and it consistently looked ancient. Straight from the late 90s levels.

Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.

For PC: the vast majority of PCs don’t have a blu ray drive. So that’s a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.

Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It’s a huge difference.

I wouldn’t be surprised by that at all either. Which is why I recommended waiting!

Bethesda makes well liked games, yes. But they have a track record of their games coming out as complete buggy messes that need 6-12 months to be in a decent state.

Could be in this case that Microsoft has realized how important this game is to their console efforts and the delays have been an effort to avoid a repeat of Bethesda’s typical. I wouldn’t be too surprised. I’d recommend being wary until the game is out. Waiting won’t hurt anyone.

I’m sure the professional game developers with decades of experience will be so thankful to hear that. You should inform them right away of how “basic” the fix to their problem really is. I’m sure it’ll be news to them and work right away.

The problem is almost certainly RAM, not computational horsepower. XSS has nearly identical CPU capability to the XSX, so that won’t be the issue. It has a much weaker GPU, but resolutions and effects can be lowered. Where the XSS cannot linearly scale from the XSX is with RAM requirements: it has much less RAM, for anything that is not predominantly using that RAM for VRAM purposes, that cannot be scaled down trivially.

That the issue is showing up with split screen is a strong auger towards the issue being RAM. For split screen the game needs to keep two world-states in memory to handle the characters not being in the exact same place. With enough work they can probably optimize the RAM usage enough to make that work, which is why they still intend to release on XSS/XSX. But they also don’t know when, because that’s a lot of work and not certain.

Like I said, it comes down to if you’re doing it once or if you intend to use the soldering iron again in the future. $55 is a lot for a once-off use.