22july2013 said:

Is this considered a Triple-A game?

Yes, Capcom is a big studio with nearly 3000 employees and $0.5-1b in yearly revenue. A game being AAA can normally be determined from the credits list (3:10):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lqWYqM004k&t=193s

Indie/AA studios usually have under 100 people, AAA has multiple hundreds if not thousands of people. The headcount determines the scale of the project as well as the budget. If 1000 people are allocated to one project full-time for 3 years, that's something like $40k x 3 x 1000 = $120m plus maybe $50-100m on marketing.

Indie/AA budgets are closer to 50 people x $40k x 1-2 years = $4m.

Hreb said:

How convenient that it can't be benchmarked against any Mac that supports an external or third-party GPU.

There are other games that can be compared and there's no going back to Intel so it's not a choice that people have to make. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the best one for comparison on Mac and the M1 Max is around the same as the 5700XT in the 27" iMac, which is roughly the same as an Nvidia 3060, these are all around 10TFLOPs. M1 Ultra is 1.5-2x this.

M2 is 40% faster than M1 so Pro versions likely have a similar improvement, which would put M2 Max closer to a 3070 and M2 Ultra closer to a 3090.

22july2013 said:

Since it's free, why won't they make it available on the macOS app store? If they did, I would try it.

The Sims is one of EA's top 'live service' games ( https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/the-sims-4-earned-over-1-billion-dollars/zb7c1 ). This is the same revenue model as most iOS games where the base game is free but the money is made from IAPs/DLCs. On the App Store, those IAPs will also have a 30% fee. I imagine the DLCs on Steam do too and the Mac version doesn't appear to be on Steam either so I'd guess they want to make as much profit as possible from the Mac version and only host it on their own store to avoid all fees.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222670/The_Sims_4/

The best Apple could do is have an App Store page with an external link to the game similar to how the Apple TV app recommends movie content in apps like Netflix/Disney+. Then they could allow adding a 3rd party game to be managed in the App Store app like Steam.

forgot username said:

AppleCard needs a better way to manage statements.  For example, connect to Quicken and/or open formats. The current process is embarrassing.

Accessing directly on Mac would be quickest, maybe using an API link with an access key but the process doesn't seem too bad:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211236

If a file browser app is used ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/filebrowser-document-manager/id364738545 ), the statements can be saved to file on an iPhone as CSV/OFX/QFX/QBO. Then AirDrop the folder of statements to Mac for import into an app.

KBuffett said:

I’m don’t know much about this type of thing. 

Why is it so difficult to make these 5G modems with so few players?

It looks like it has similar manufacturing challenges as a CPU and battery efficiency, signal quality and compatibility. Only multi-billion dollar tech companies would be able to attempt making them:

https://www.strategyanalytics.com/strategy-analytics/blogs/components/rf-wireless/rf-and-wireless/2021/02/11/cmos-at-4-nm-enables-qualcomm-s-fastest-5g-modem-rf-solution

Intel managed to make a cellular modem but found it wasn't viable to make it profitable.

Cost to manufacture, time to market and probably a patent minefield outweigh not buying from existing manufacturers for now.

Apple doesn't even have to make the best modem, as long as the connection is stable with competitive bandwidth, that's all they need. They'd probably be able to improve battery efficiency vs Qualcomm, which would be good for the Watch on cellular.

DAalseth said:

Just ran across this. Yes, Elon Musk doesn’t really understand the things he’s working with, and has no gameplan. He just got lucky. There’s a hundred guys on skid row with the same ego, that didn’t.

Elon Musk’s Texts Shatter the Myth of the Tech Genius

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-musk-texts-twitter-trial-jack-dorsey/671619/

The document with the conversations is an interesting read, about half way down Exhibit H and Exhibit J at the bottom, transcript in second link:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23108357/redacted-version-of-exhibits-a-j-to-letter-to-the-honorable-kathaleen-st-j-mccormick-from-edward-b.pdf
https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/

Quite a few people just casually saying they'll throw a couple of billion dollars in.

Jack Dorsey wanted Twitter to be an open protocol (like Signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol ) so government and advertisers wouldn't influence it. This would need a decentralized verification system like blockchain.
Musk and a few others want to get rid of bots but know it will tank revenue, which wouldn't go down well as a public company so they want Twitter private.
One plan to tackle bots was to use crypto/blockchain/dogecoin (possibly getting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried on board for $5b) to verify tweets but dismissed as not scalable due to latency/bandwidth.
Musk plans to lead software development, says he coded for 20 years. Parag (Twitter CEO) used to be Twitter CTO so is also familiar with the codebase. Someone recommended their son who works at Reddit for software development. Parag said Twitter has 2500 coders doing at least 100 lines of code per month.
They spoke about revenue per employee $5b/8k and how it would improve to be nearer Google and Apple by cutting headcount to 3k.
Twitter currently doesn't make revenue from videos, plan to do revenue sharing like Youtube e.g 100% for creator up to $1m and split above.
Aim to fix free speech, e.g allowing Russian news feeds even though they are against and sanctioned.

The ideas inherently hit the same barriers that all social media companies run into. They want free speech but need to moderate bots/spam/scams and having a centrally controlled platform means free speech is determined by the shareholders, employees and government in each region. If they make it decentralized, they can fix the censorship issue more easily but then they lose control over bots, ability to verify users, ability to monetize because big advertisers don't want to be associated with bad content and it's harder to scale. They'd really have to maintain and mingle both setups.

There are lots of areas for Twitter to grow revenue. Earning revenue from video could be a big one and would take on TikTok and Youtube, maybe even Twitch if they do live streaming. They can also give Reddit competition if they do articles and article feeds and these can be used like Medium and independent forums as long as they do revenue sharing.

Execution will determine if any of this will work out for them. All the big social media companies have tried to add in the strengths of competing platforms and didn't reach a competitive level.

It feels like there's some demand for a large-scale open conversation platform. Peer-to-peer like torrent is one way. Building nodes on open platforms is another but these are still censored individually, the following is used by Truth Social:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)

Fully peer-to-peer allows for really bad content to be shared, not just disagreeable conversation. Community censors can help somewhat but can also be weaponized and the online community can't be trusted to block really bad content effectively.

One option for scalability is to have a platform that only maintains conversations for a few days while active. The rest can be archived. Most people are only interested in the current conversations and interest in archived content tails off exponentially.

Another option is for people to be their own platform and host so their conversations are initially stored locally. They would be the main seed of their content. Others could seed the same content like how the torrent protocol works and everybody stores blocks of the data along with central servers. Each block has a unique id. It doesn't necessarily need a blockchain to verify the seeded content as long as someone couldn't easily spoof the message against the id and conflicting messages/ids can use timestamps to get the original one. There was a torrent chat app Bleep that didn't take off:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainberry,_Inc.#BitTorrent_Bleep

It will be interesting to see what happens with a Twitter takeover. There have been a lot of conversations about cutting headcount dramatically so Twitter employees would be rightfully concerned about a takeover.

Whatever platform comes as a result will still have issues. At some point there's a realization that the main problem with social media isn't the platform - not Facebook, Twitter, TikTok - the problem is with people, how they choose to express themselves, especially online and how well people tolerate opposing views. This won't change with an open, bot-free platform. People today are arrested, prosecuted, fired for what they write on Twitter, in Eastern countries even worse and that will continue. An open platform will allow hateful, harmful, defamatory, false information to proliferate. Social media will always be a mess because they are platforms for people.