Hah. If it makes the active militant feel better, Meta lost a bunch of money basically giving away all those Quest 2's and the only thing they'll get from you by having a Meta account only for your Quest is that you bought one and didn't buy any software in their store.
Bonus points for your "money is support" tally if you use Steam Link for wireless play instead of Oculus Link.
With the Meta Quest 3S coming out this holidays you may be able to get a used Quest 2 dirt cheap, and that'll do just fine to play PC games.
Late 90s/early 00's Windows software was very finicky. Lots of very specific solutions to play back video integrated right into games and other weird dependencies that never carried forward (for good reason). Some decent games in there, too. Discworld Noir is famously picky, and that may be the best of the trilogy.
So yeah, I'm on board with what Gog does to those. If they want to brand that effort, I'm good with that, as long as nothing with the rest of their policies for GoG changes.
Yeah, no, I get the spirit of the thing. I'm just saying that... well, for one that it wouldn't be a bad idea if it worked, it just doesn't at the moment. But more importantly that regulations don't work like that. You can't just make rules that go "hey you guys specifically have to run this software on a server specifically". You can already run assistants locally using a whole bunch of downloadable models, it'd be a huge overreach to tell people and companies that they CAN make the software and run it, but only remotely. That's just... not how rules and regulations are put together.
Nothing to do with NPUs, as far as I know, it's down to the dedicated video stream acceleration that ARM chips have carried for a while.
In practical terms, Windows Hello unlocks noticeably faster, just like a phone with facial recognition does. It also disproportionately handles video playback more efficiently, given the relative overall performance. Nothing new, either, it's all stuff Apple got out of their own ARM transition, but way underrated in how much of a moment-to-moment difference it makes, particularly for stuff like the Surface Pro and other hybrids, where you want to handle it on battery and use it more like a tablet sometimes.
I've been extremely annoyed with all partisanship on this issue from the go. The absolutely insane range of promises, hyperbole and circlejerking among the AI techbros is absolutely insufferable. Meanwhile, the other side has been entirely content with getting a chance to repeat the dogpile they (deservedly) gave cryptobros and entirely unwilling to acknowledge any sort of nuance, often to the point of deliberate misinformation.
The only reason I'm not angrier at this is that, honestly, this whole thing is way less momentous than either side has claimed and I have bigger things to get mad about.
Hah. Been there, done that. Partially thanks to the US, actually.
All countries have their history. It's part of why I don't feel I'm obligated to watch.
Screw that. I am forced to deal with US politics and culture in enough areas of my life to be shamed for refusing to care about their self-harming tendencies. I don't have a need to care about what the US do to themselves in the same way I don't have a need to care about what Argentina or Hungary or Russia do to themselves. At least Russians don't have a real choice.
Admittedly, I did have the compulsion to write that down here at all, as opposed to those other examples. In my defense, that's because a) I literally wrote that as I clicked the "block" button in this community, and b) it's insanely hard to not pay attention to the US. It requires active effort. This community isn't even called "US politics", it's just called "Politics". The US dominating my media is the default stance of the world, I have to take aggressive action to make that not be the case.
Yeah, my problem is that this was made to coincide with the Snapdragon Windows PCs, which are really good at a bunch of stuff and specifically not good at NPU performance, so the result of the "AI" branding ends up being really disappointing.
We could talk about all the other growing pains and the ways those devices were covered, but the obsessive focus on "AI" certainly didn't help, as demonstrated by the bizarre reporting linked in the OP.
That is a weird proposal.
It's definitely weird that everyone is panicking about data center processing costs but not about the exact same hardware powering high end gaming devices that have skyrocketed from 100W to 450W in a few years, but ultimately if you want to run a model locally you can run a model locally. I'm not sure how you'd regulate that, it's just software.
Hell, I don't even think distributing the load is a terrible idea, it's just that the models you can run locally in 40 TOPS kinda suck compared to the order of magnitude more processing you get on modern GPUs.
That's fair, I hadn't considered the scenario of a bunch of old GOG-supported games needing updates.
I mean, in my defense that's because a lot of the older catalogue is just running under DosBox, but there's definitely more finicky stuff in there as well.
I mean, up to you. As I said above, it's not like owning one of those means actively supporting Facebook or whatever. I find the whole "engaging with these companies products implies endorsing them" capitalist view of money as support very strange, but I know it's popular these days, particularly in anglo cultures.
But like I said above, it's not like a Meta account used for a Quest used on PC will give Meta any view on your data, or like they would have made any money out of you from a device they built at a massive loss that you're then purchasing used. But hey, you do you. There are other older, crappier headsets you can buy used, but Quest 2 listings out there start at sixty bucks, which is absolutely nuts for what they are.