Unsurprisingly, defenders of dictatorships always have to resort to whataboutism to defend the indefensible.

As per usual, this whataboutism is lazy and inaccurate as well.

Chinese military tech has always been and will always be decades behind. Autocratic regimes are terrible at fostering innovation - and unlike with civilian tech, China cannot make use of cooperation with Western companies in order to catch up. Their only remaining option is subterfuge, which has limited effectiveness.

Additionally, the Chinese military lacks institutional knowledge and experience - and courting Western experts won’t make up for this. They haven’t fought in any serious war since the 1970s. Against pirates and sandal fighters in and around Africa, they are performing shockingly poorly. On top of that, there’s corruption that is at least as bad as in Russia, poor quality equipment, low training standards, awful electronic warfare capabilities, etc. pp.

They’ve been told to do this for decades and they are proudly ignoring these requests.

“But what about” * 5. It’s always whataboutism with sycophants of autocratic regimes.

You don’t get to cherry pick which human rights to respect in order to seem progressive.

The way you casually threw away a human rights aspect you don’t care about can only be called cherry-picking. That’s really all that needs to be said in response to this gish gallop.

Not all of them. In recent years, virtually all arcades have been powered by standard gaming PCs (see for example the infamous Half-Life 2 arcade). In the past, it wasn’t unheard of for some arcades to have nearly identical hardware compared to home consoles. The Neo Geo arcade for example is running the exact same code as the home console (although in this case, the arcade came first). There have also been edge-cases, like the Namco System 11, which is using only slightly modified PS1 hardware (primarily in the sound department) in order to drive down costs.

The thing is, floating windows were absolutely useless in the age of 13 - 17" CRTs. On modern ultrawide or even just conventional widescreen displays, they make far more sense.

They might just as well sell PC power supply to USB adapters then.

your rights barely exist

I’m not American.

I point out that the US is just as vile as all the oppressors

That’s not pointing out anything, because it’s flat out wrong. For all its faults, the US not as bad, not even close and nobody sane would make this claim. You are doing nothing but normalizing actual oppressors with this.

The fact that you included Hamas and not Israel

I don’t think you are quite aware of just how stark the difference between Israel and Hamas is - or you’re deliberately ignoring it. Tel Aviv is considered one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world - whereas in Palestinian territories, gay people are being publicly tortured and executed. That’s just one aspect. The difference between Israel and Palestinian territories in regards to civil liberties is about as stark as the one between the two Koreas. This doesn’t mean Israel is perfect, far from it, but the fact that you feel the need to lie about yet another topic and in the same sentence excrete a vile insult doesn’t exactly make you look like a reasonable person.

I meant OCR of arbitrary printed or faxed text, which really only became feasible for home users in the 1990s. There were professional, but often very limited, solutions earlier than that, of course.

What a dishonest and empty comment. I feel second hand embarrassment and shame for you. You know that that the US isn’t exactly the same, yet you chose to lie, just to defend a genocidal autocratic regime using the last line of defense any sycophants for dictatorships are using: Hypernormalization. After all, if everyone and everything is equally awful, your favorite oppressive machine maybe isn’t so bad. I’ve seen this exact line of reasoning, if one can call it that, used by defenders of Russia, Iran, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Hamas, Saudi Arabia, etc.

I have one question for you: Why are you doing this? Are you a paid troll for the Internet Research Agency, fighting on the virtual front lines of the new Cold War so that you aren’t sent to the real front lines of the hot part of it, so that you aren’t end up as the main attraction of some Ukrainian drone bombing video, dying slowly to the sound of some questionable music? Are you perhaps a delusional Western Tankie who is still reflexively applauding to everything Moscow is doing, despite the fact that the “evil West” you’ve been indoctrinated (or indoctrinated yourself) to hate is now far more left than the currently extremely far-right Russia? Or perhaps you are much further to the right and simp for Russia precisely because it aligns itself so well with your belief system, e.g. in regards to its oppression of ethnic and sexual minorities, its violent imperialistic politics, the macho strongman aesthetics the insecure leader is cultivating.

Which of these is it?

I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.

Repacks make installing the game with its bazillion DLCs a breeze these days.

Reminds me of my younger sibling inheriting my first PC - 486 with a 500 MB hard drive that I had assembled from several scrap computers - and trying to install this game to it. It did just about fit and there was even enough RAM (48 MB instead of the minimum 32), but the CPU wasn’t compatible, since the game required the MMX instruction set.

Each Sims game is quite different. The biggest difference is between Sims 1 and 2 simply due to the change from isometric 2D to 3D graphics. Not the first game in the genre to have 3D graphics and they weren’t even particularly impressive for the time nor good compared to its competitor, but the charming animations and attention to detail make it a far more enjoyable experience than the comparatively sterile predecessor. Sims 2 ended up becoming an evergreen with very long legs, to the point that people are still playing it, although it helped that EA distributed the complete version with all add-ons (the game is older than the term DLC) for free for a while (you can still find it if you know where to look).

Sims 3 was fundamentally different from Sims 2. Gone were the isolated homes of the predecessor (initially in Sims 2, you couldn’t even see your neighbors’ homes unless you were on the map screen; later they added in low-res stand-ins) and instead, it’s an open world game where you can see your Sim commute to work in real-time. Neighbors can be visited without going through a loading screen - it all feels more organic as a result. Customization saw a huge upgrade as well, the AI was improved, etc. Sounds nice in theory, but the problem was that it was too ambitious for PCs of the time. This series has traditionally attracted non-gamers who don’t deeply upgrade their machines all that often and instead play on laptops bought for homework or old rigs inherited from big brothers. Sims 1 ran on a toaster, Sims 2 on a pizza oven with some kind of GPU grafted to it - whereas Sims 3 was one of the most demanding games of its time in order to facilitate gameplay changes that few people actually asked for and rounded, bloated looking Sims that are somewhat offputting. It was still a massive success and a huge hit with modders as well, but Sims 2 remained popular due to its more focused nature, the fact that it ran on anything and the fact that it was complete with a massive library of add-ons that took years to be replicated in Sims 3.

Sims 4 reset the series back to Sims 2, but went too far initially, limiting player freedom in regards to neighborhood creation. Instanced homes returned, customization features and open world of Sims 3 were cut, the AI saw a massive improvements, Sims didn’t all look obese anymore, hardware requirements were modest again - but at the price of having incredibly intrusive DRM, an attempt to monetize the proud modding community and being very bare-bones in the beginning, requiring years of DLCs to reach feature-parity with Sims 2 and 3. IIRC, even pools - an absolutely essential part of Sims lore - were missing initially. All of the improvements to the building mechanics in particular were overshadowed by EA’s corporate nonsense. It’s come a long way since though. Just like with the predecessors, buying all DLC at once will make you poor - but the base game is free now and the actual intention is that you only buy the DLC that have features or items you care about. The modding scene is as vibrant as ever, making any non-feature DLC unnecessary anyway.

This series is an interesting and unique phenomenon. It’s a prime example of something that only ever truly works on PC. All of the many console, mobile and browser spinoffs and ports were nothing but mere blips on the radar, because fundamentally, it can only work on a platform as open as the PC. It primarily attracts female players who rarely play anything else, yet dive deep into modding and modifying every little aspect of these games like the most hardened PC nerds. It started out and still is in many ways a faksimile of ideal American suburbia, although enhanced by both some quite subversive humor and subverted by an astonishing level of player freedom that goes against the conformity of the real world - while at the same time replicating the fads, consumerism, cliques, feuds and other less wholesome aspects of the real world through its behemoth of a community. It’s ultimately a platform for individual creative expression and the worlds (both in-game and outside of it) that emerge as a result of it, a sandbox that was only ever bested by Minecraft, which literally broke everything down to its individual building blocks. Each game and its DLCs become more like car payments to seasoned players, something you pay for so that you can travel where you want to go, which in turn keeps the experience fresh, finances further development and prevents the community from getting stagnant as it has to learn to adapt to changes from the developers.

I’ll end this here. This wasn’t meant to turn into an essay and now my fingers hurt, because I typed all of this nonsense on a touchscreen.

I meant, the “no ads” thing was only feasible in the very beginning, when they were solely funded by venture capital.

Sure, but these people are blissfully unaware of it and will happily beat the drums for the CCP all day long.

The thing is, Fury Road had a ton of visual effects as well. Almost every shot is full of them - but most people didn’t notice them, because they were so well executed and skillfully combined with real elements.

It has always been only a signal for popularity. It’s the same on every other site with similar systems, including ones that have existed long before reddit. Even in the early 2000s, there were endless reminders that the upvote button was not meant as an “I agree” button, but that’s not how it’s being used.

No, they are not. There are certain high technologies, especially litographic equipment, that China can not produce and can not catch up to, because it’s a moving target and they will be perpetually lagging behind. The end result will be the exact same issue that Eastern Bloc computing suffered from during the Cold War.