GDPR is a start, but we need to actually ban it, not just annoy people until they click Accept at the 20th popup of that tantalising offer to share your details with 1473 trusted data partners.

And all the CIA ones.

And then block all cookies and tracking.

Still rocking an i5-8400 and a 1060. It’s fine for FFXIV and most other games.

Until GPU prices come down, the CPU is the least of my worries. I’ll play anything that needs decent hardware on my PS5.

If you’re not running the latest games it really doesn’t matter at all.

The problem with money being involved is it’s an invitation to spam crap everywhere.

One of my relatives has recently taken up “AI travel videos” and “AI cute videos” as a “hobby”. No doubt based on the first thing that came up when I searched for those things, a video titled “make $10,000 a month spamming up YouTube with your AI slop”.

Oh, and it needs you to buy the AI slop generating tools that they happen to sell. How convenient!

I mean, this also happened with broadcast TV, where we suddenly went from like 4 channels filled with programs and things competing for space, to 200 channels, where the rush was on to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible with reality show tat. And that’s all YouTube is now.

I agree, but it’s still a step up from dropping a laser guided bomb on a 10 storey apartment building because somebody in Hamas might be there.

Google Serves AI Slop as Top Result for One of the Most Famous Paintings in History

The point of Insta would seem to be the opposite of that. To splatter your inane life before the world in the hopes of becoming a viral millionaire influencer.

It might do now. They’ve done a lot of improvements.

Even on PS5 it was an absolute mess in co-op. 30fps (if you were lucky) all round, constant freezes (several seconds) when swapping characters, many many crashes. Whenever we told it to save, we’d have to both touch nothing to make sure it didn’t crash while saving. Oh, and there was a bug meaning only the player who chose to sleep for the day would get any companion progression.

I really like my PS5, but I see no value in a model costing 80% more and being only current for half a generation.

All that for an “up to” 40% performance increase.

I don’t care how much of a graphics nerd someone is, that just isn’t worth it.

The dollar ain’t buying what it used to either.

Also, remember that our prices include VAT, so we slap 20% on it right there. That £700 is £583 excluding the VAT.

That’s still 10% more than in the US doing a direct currency conversion, but it’s not quite as bad as it first looks.

Still a lot of money for a games console though, especially a mid gen refresh. Paying at the start of a gen for 8 years gaming ain’t too bad when you look at it per year. PS5 Pro will be over 4 years, and on that alone is piss-poor value.

COVID also inflated a lot of tech stock massively, as everybody suddenly had to rely a lot more on it to get anything done, and the only thing you could do for entertainment was gaming, streaming movies, or industrial quantities of drugs.

Then that ended, and they all wanted to hold onto that “value”.

It is a bubble, but whether it pops massively like in 2000, or just evens off to the point where everything else catches up, remains to be seen.

“The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” are wise words for anyone thinking of shorting this kind of thing.

My TV from 2017 was HDR, so it was. But HDR monitors would have been pretty rare, so the bug probably wouldn’t have shown up in any great numbers.

I don’t even run Windows in HDR mode (because it looks awful), but it picks it up anyway and completely fucks the graphics up.

Yes, I know. And I already can’t play it due to changes in hardware.

I mean, a pound don’t buy what it used to. We’ve had rampant inflation, and it’s going to be hard to keep any next gen console in a price point that we think of as suitable. I mean, this is the first gen where the price has gone up during it. PS2 slim went down to under £100 by the end. I paid about £80 for a GameCube late in the gen. I remember Xbox having to give money back to people because they launched at about 300 and Sony immediately went down to £199. It was carnage.

£299 felt like a standard price point for ages. My Amiga 1200 cost about that in the early 90s, and I paid the same for a PS2 nearly 10 years later, and the Xbox 360 was about the same.

£700 feels like a piss take though, and the sales figures will surely reflect that. PS6 has got to be under £600 I reckon, and we’re probably about 5 years away from that.

Load times have always been bottlenecked by the CPU, so it’s not a massive surprise that the SSD is about on par with a decent SD card.

On the PS4 an SSD was faster than a HDD, but not by a massive amount. At least it was quieter though.

It was MS that started that back on the OG Xbox.

I think all the F2P ones (and a handful of others like FFXIV) are exempt from it. At least on Playstation.

Fucking auto correct…

It was Nex Machina.

Oh it’s made plenty for Nvidia.

PC streaming is extremely hit and miss. I ended up with Moonlight/Sunshine for playing from my nVidia Shield and that works a charm. Steam streaming never quite worked right. There’s a ton of options, and unless you pick exactly the right ones for your setup, it’ll do stupid things.