Well, that was… Profoundly disturbing in a way I haven’t seen since dodging a Reaper on foot in ME3.

Thanks for pointing that out!

What I really want is the EV equivalent of an old Jeep. No antennas of any kind, no “infotainment”, no radio / music, no bluetooth support, no nothing not related to going from A to B. If I want to call somebody, I’ll pull over and use a phone. If someone calls me, they can wait until I’m not driving.

This right here is a vivid illustration of my reasons for preferring to work with low voltage (and current). Impressive though.

“…and a great deal of patience as you wait for each NPC to formulate their replies. In the meantime, they’ll just be standing there looking at you with glassy eyes, smiling.”

Thing is, I really don’t see how that’d work for any useful scenario. Even in this very limited case, natural language processing and response generation is definitely off-loaded to a remote server farm. It certainly isn’t running on the console. TTS for a single characters voice could - but likely isn’t - be done on the hardware, but as I mentioned elsewhere, the voice models for modern text-to-speech synthesis are very, very large. Typically gigabytes of data - per voice. Completely unrealistic for any meaningful game.

Even if all those trained models existed (they don’t - and making one is considerably more work and expense than having a voice actor just deliver a fixed set of lines), I doubt any consumer would be amused by a multi-terabyte download.

Even as it is, the response latency is hilariously bad. I imagine players having to wait seconds for each NPC response would fly as well as a lead brick.

Interesting point, although I don’t see how you’d manage to run modern TTS (the models can get very large, and that’s per voice; as an example Parler-TTS’s mini model is 800Mb, the HQ model is 2.3Gb - for one voice) + a LLM for content synthesis on any personal hardware, console or not. The storage requirements alone would make that grossly infeasible.

Does anybody actually want that, ever?

Clearly those cartridges must’ve been made by some merry band of maritime robbers. You know, the kind of criminals who’d force you to give them your money, but give you nothing of proportional value in return.

Could be that the problem isn’t the firmware per se.

Yes. My point wasn’t that “they’re not illegal immigrants because they pay their taxes”, but that - of all the immigrants one could have - the ones that do pay taxes, while getting nothing in return for it are surely even more profitable for a state than actual citizens which can and do make use of public services.

Presumably, the IRS would only know about them if, you know, they pay their taxes.

Hah, okay. That’s pretty cool. If people are going to be writing farming bots anyway, one might as well make it the formal objective.

I’m fine right here, thanks. Although I’d been using Reddit for some time at that point, I permanently left Digg as part of the Great Exodus. I don’t see any particular appeal to going back to a centralized service, especially in the current climate.

A mixture of a combined sub-7k audio sequencer and softsynth, an OpenGL 3.3 PBR renderer and a small BRep CSG modelling DSL.