I was trying to point out an absolute, like consumption always being good, doesn't hold with widely different examples. After all, there is nuance when things are consumed.
Sure; "consumption" in this sense almost always means buying legal goods and services. Some economics would say that someone buying something is by definition proof that it is a beneficial transaction. I wouldn't go that far personally.
Seems like you might be approaching this from a different perspective / this is a confusion over the mutual meaning of words. But the GP is basically a slogan or an axiom, not worthy of serious rebuttal.
That's not ideal, but.... If you want more safety, you should want ford to do stuff like this. From the way it was phrased, I was imagining they added extra bars only to the actual cars sent for testing. This is them following the incentives and making their customers safer as a result; a win for safety testing.
Obviously it would be better if they had a deep commitment to safety and made every variation of every model maximally safe. But I'll take it. No such thing as absolute safety, so moves in a better direction are good.
Something something a different enough value function is indistinguishable from malice.
More seriously, like the old adage about everyone being the hero of their own story, all parents think they have their children's best interests at heart. There's probably no such thing as universal best interests. Gets at some of the thorny problems - personhood, adulthood, cultural values.
It depends on the person, and it depends on the religion. There are positive and negative values, and a misaligned person may well believe they are doing right but actually causing damage. That is why humility, compassion, and honesty are prerequisites for all successful undertakings.
The difference between a malicious value function and unethical conduct is intent; at least in some systems of ethics. Beyond that I think the discussion shifts to the realm of philosophy papers and becomes unsuited for HN comment boxes.
Games/graphics are one of those domains with a lot of jargon for sure. If you don't want to be a wizard you can just mess with it and see what happens. I like how dolphin approaches this with extensive tooltips in the settings, but there's always going to be some implicit knowledge.
On a meta level - I feel like I've seen anti-acronym sentiment a lot recently. I feel like it's never been easier to look these things up. There's definitely levels of acronyms which are anti-learning or a kind of protectionism, but to my mind there are appropriate levels of it to use because you have to label concepts at a useful level to accomplish things, and graphics settings of a game definitely are on the reasonable side.
And even if you know every detail, that's still the best course of action, I think. Which kind of antialiasing you prefer, and how it trades with performance and resolution is highly subjective, and it can be "none".
There are 3 components to rescaling/rendering pixels: aliasing, sharpness and locality. Aliasing is, well, aliasing, sharpness is the opposite of blurriness, and locality is about these "ringing" artefacts you often see in highly compressed images and videos. You can't be perfect on all three. Disabling antialiasing gives you the sharpest image with no ringing artefacts, but you get these ugly staircase effects. Typical antialiasing trades this for blurriness, in fact, FXAA is literally a (selective) blur, that's why some people don't like it. More advanced algorithms can give you both antialiasing and sharpness, but you will get these ringing artefacts. The best of course is to increase resolution until none of these effects become noticeable, but you need the hardware.
The best algorithms attempt to find a good looking balance between all these factors and performance, but "good looking" is subjective, that's why your best bet is to try for yourself. Or just keep the defaults, as it is likely to be set to what the majority of the people prefer.
Oh there are lots more axes than just the 3 aliasing, sharpness, and locality ones. Those are the main tradeoffs for a pixel sampling or convolution filter choice, when downscaling an image, say between nearest neighbor vs bilinear vs Mitchell (bicubic). But the antialiasing methods in this article have many tradeoffs that aren’t on the aliasing-sharpness-locality spectrum. Other issues with real time AA methods include bias, correctness, noise, quality, temporal effects, compositing/blending issues, etc. And the topic gets much wider when we start talking about DLSS, we don’t even have established terminology for the many different kinds of tradeoffs neural networks give us. Anyway just noting that the main highlights of discussion in the article, which are MSAA and AAA (and references to TAA and others), don’t fit in the aliasing-sharpness-locality space. MSAA’s tradeoffs include it only running on geometry & texture edges, and its ‘wrong order’ samples or ‘double edges’ noted in the article. TAA has a temporal aspect and is most known for ghosting. AAA as described here doesn’t necessarily blend correctly and in general it can’t handle multiple arbitrary sub-pixel events, it really only works well if there’s one edge crossing a pixel.
The PS4 Pro introduced the gaming world to the simplification of settings from dozens of acronyms that were common to PC Gamers, down to “Performance” and “Quality”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s now a market demand for that to spread back to PC land.
PC games have had Low, Medium, High presets for graphics settings for decades. I don't think reducing that from 3 choices to 2 is going to be a big win for user friendliness. And I certainly think it's user-hostile if it means taking the customization away and only letting users choose between two presets.
PlayStation does have shining examples of user-friendly settings UI though, namely in their PC ports. Look at this UI in Ratchet and Clank:
Extensive tooltips for each option and any time you change a setting it is applied immediately to the paused game while you're still in the settings menu allowing you to immediately compare the effects.
> I don't think reducing that from 3 choices to 2 is going to be a big win for user friendliness
It’s nowhere near as simple as 3 settings now there are different antialiasing techniques, path tracing lighting or reflections, upscaling (multiple algorithms) etc.
Nothing is all just fully positive and each has tradeoffs
Those are typically incorporated into the presets. I am not just talking about Low, Medium, High for individual settings. There's almost always a preset option that will set all the other settings according to what's deemed appropriate by the developer for the selected quality level.
> Those are typically incorporated into the presets
The upscaling, frame generation, path tracing etc are not.
For the reason I mentioned, none of its objective you're selecting between trade offs of crispness, artifacts, better lighting and reflection and framerate.
It's no longer just resolution of rendering and resolution of textures and a few post effects.
Well, I suppose I'm not the assumed target audience. Back when I was younger I had the time to tweak everything on my computer: my Linux distro, my games (dualbooting windows just for that), and looking things up for that reason. I also could play long gaming sessions.
Nowadays I'm a dad with practically no spare time between raising a toddler and work. Suddenly the question of "does the game overstay its welcome?" has become a thing; I almost exclusively play games that can be played in short bursts of time, and that deliver a great experience as a whole that can be completed in a relatively short playtime. I got a Steam Deck a few years ago for the specific purpose of separating my work computer from my gaming platform, and being able to pick up and play a game and pausing it without problems.
Even with the built-in performance overlay of the Steam Deck (which is very nice) it takes time to assess the quality-vs-performance results of every possible combination of settings. Often more than I would spend on playing a game.
I suspect that people like me either already are or soon will be the bigger segment of the (paying) customers though, so that is something to consider for developers.
And some games do give short explanations of what each type of technique does and how they compare, along with statements like "this usually has a small impact on performance" or "this has a large impact on performance" to guide me, which is already a great help.
Not a parent but I still agree that short games are great, 2-3 hours are great (or even a bit less, there is a reason for the standard 90 minute movie). 4-5 hours can be nice too ("chapter" divisions are helpful). Games are inexpensive and plentiful these days so a nice short game is great for everyone not just people with little time for playing games. (I guess I should say the flip side is that time spent with characters is one of the interesting things that games can use to good effect and bonus objectives that encourage you to explore details of the world can be nice too depending on the type of game and are easily skipped).
The best game settings have a scene to illustrate the effect of choices along with estimated(?) performance. Unfortunately I haven't seen that too often (mostly Falcom games that PH3 worked on). I agree that stating the impact on performance is quite helpful when settings need to be lowered. Usually they are ordered "best performance" to "nicest looking" so I set the last one and only fiddle with them if necessary (a smooth 12fps works great for me so luckily that isn't often).
That's an aesthetic / scene preference (that I happen to agree with). The content is the most important part -- you can find this kind of curiosity and knowledge seeking all over the place. It'll probably even stay readable on stackexchange longer than the average handmade site from the 90s.
I was nodding along with your post until you brought out your numbers (I agree fully with the broader point). For me, any car above 15k or so is very expensive - I've always bought used and drove them into the ground. I'd love an electric car but it's not in the cards for my family until the total cost of ownership gets down to 2-3k a year or so.
This is something I've always found fascinating about materialism (I can only speak to the US). The messaging and feelings are incredibly similar whether your budget is 10k or 100k. Very easy to slide up the scale slowly and feel like you're still living small with a bulging budget, or to choose options that are beyond your means and so stunt financial growth.
Your points are well taken. I only bought the Ram because I had to for personal reasons. It's the first new car/truck I've ever owned and I will drive it till it's worn out. I've always bought used/low mileage vehicles to avoid depreciation and the headache of the warranty period.
Car makers make a lot of money based on our egos to one up-our neighbors. Car salesmen are trained to create a competitive atmosphere at the dealership by exposing our vanity and it works!
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