Yeah, but figurative drowning still beats the literal kind. Barely.

Just found a potentially viable business plan, then.

Mountain house with a hot tub. Climate change and rising water levels makes a beachfront house a poor idea, and nobody sane would want to live in suburbia. You won't have to deal with a HOA in the mountains, and who doesn't want a hot tub with a magnificent view?

"...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."

I don't, no. I do wonder how many pounds of cocaine a person has to snort to make a statement like that without vomiting from abject self-loathing in the process though.

This is some serious world class assholery.

So how many days until they all get axed?

Apparently, slashing their budgets to the tune of $660 million, will:

"...strengthen the food system for schools and childcare institutions..."

Do you guys think they realize just how full of shit they sound?

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?

My apologies. It turns out that the source of your confusion is... My utter lack of reading comprehension. You see, I originally misread the question posed by the post as what essentially amounts to "would you rather have hands or feet... for feet", and after considering the matter, concluded that the extra manipulatory capabilities didn't outweigh the drawbacks to movement, and so answered 'feet', i.e. "I'm good, thanks". You can see how the confusion percolated from there, I'm sure.

So far as I can remember, this marks the first time he's said something I actually believe.

Hypothetically, although I'm still partial to just sticking with the things that evolved to handle ambulatory locomotion, and leave fine environmental manipulation to the upper body.

I won't deny that something like Cloudflare's "WAF" is useful. My issue is with the number of false positives I've run into with Cloudflare over the years. And because they have a virtual monopoly, when they cock up, suddenly half the Internet is inaccessible to the people caught up in it.

Or look at it another way: Suppose I was running a website and experiencing issues with automated access (some of which may be entirely legitimate). I choose to use Cloudflare's services to mitigate the issue, and immediately see a - say - 10% drop in traffic. I wouldn't be able to tell whether half of those where legitimate users filtered out by CF, unless those people take initiative to inform me of the issue - and even then I'd have no way of even estimating the ratio of false positives.

At the very least, it'd the nice if site-owners took a more nuanced approach to their implementation of these kinds of services than just gatekeeping general site access. Allow all reads of data (if you don't want people to consume your data, putting it on the Internet was a bad move in the first place), but bot-protect all writes.

There might be individuals who would claim that only some windows do. Those people I would remind of the old maxim: "If violence doesn't solve your problem, you weren't using enough of it."

I'll grant you that, but I've literally never seen an actively cooled monitor in my life. When did that happen?

Ah. There is always the option of buying a separate air purifier. Or opening a window once in a while.

Well, I mean... You could always try showering. It's not really the kind of problem an ionizing air purifier was meant to solve.

Welcome to wonderful planet Earth, where mad monkeys are everywhere and shit's all fucked up.

As a believer in the Unix philosophy, I'd rather keep my tools discrete. There's a reason we stopped integrating the keyboard directly into the computers. I don't see the point in having to throw out two unrepairable devices when one of them inevitably breaks.