BlueTankEngine (u/BlueTankEngine)

BlueTankEngine commented on AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency spectrum.ieee.org/amd-eye... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

klelatti · 3 years ago

Graviton, M1/M2, Ampere etc but I’m sure you’ll be able to explain why Arm is seen as ‘legacy’ tech when billions of smartphones are being shipped every year with Arm CPUs.

BlueTankEngine · 3 years ago

Oh look, you named 4 areas where ARM development has already peaked. Hyperscalers are already looking to evolve from ARM in the near future, just look at how much attention Ventana got at RISC-V Summit. M1/M2 are Apple ecosystem specific phenomenon that haven't inspired any copycat products. Ampere has been a massive disappointment to everyone in the industry, see the fact that Nuvia had their entire business dead-to-rights pre-acquisition. ARM simply isnt at the cutting edge of the semiconductor industry anymore. Just because Apple and Qualcomm use it to great effect doesn't mean ARM is making any major innovative strides relative to the competition.

BlueTankEngine commented on AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency spectrum.ieee.org/amd-eye... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

Xixi · 3 years ago

If RISC-V support by Microsoft is as bad as it has been for ARM, then I'm afraid RISC-V will never touch the desktop market, at all. Contrary to ARM, which is being pushed there with great success by Apple. Server-wise of course it's a different story...

BlueTankEngine · 3 years ago

If great success to you is that they put the M1 and M2 in a tower, I don't know what to tell you. Intel, AMD, and the x86 industrial complex don't care in the slightest what instruction set your Mac runs

BlueTankEngine commented on AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency spectrum.ieee.org/amd-eye... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

cletus · 3 years ago

Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM.

The amount of processing power available in a modern smartphone is truly mind-boggling. I'd love to see a chart showing the chip cost and energy cost of the power on an M1 chip in each previou syear. I would guess that 30+ years ago you'd be in the millions of dollars and watts of power but that's just a guess.

As we see from the modern M1/M2 Macbooks, these lower TDP SoCs are more than capable of running a computer for most people for most things. The need for an Intel or AMD CPU is shrinking. It's still there and very real but the waters are rising.

BlueTankEngine · 3 years ago

In my experience talking to semiconductors folks, ARM is just not a concern anymore. The future is RISC-V, and ARM is already being seen as legacy tech. ARM's progress in the server space has stalled, the ARM Windows ecosystem is dead, Android has laid the groundwork for a move to RISC-V, and ARM has never and will never touch the desktop market.

BlueTankEngine commented on Croatia to switch to euro, enter passport-free Schengen zone aljazeera.com/news/2022/1... · Posted by u/eatonphil

Retric · 3 years ago

Calling it flat is a little misleading as Brexit removed a large chunk of EU’s total GDP.

The reality is the countries within the current EU experienced real growth which is likely to continue.

BlueTankEngine · 3 years ago

Between 2010 and 2018, no country in the Eurozone increased their GDP per capita by 1% or more annually. Finland and Italy both experienced negative GDP per capita growth. The actual reality is that Europe is the single most economically stagnant region in the world. Whether that is due to the EU or not is absolutely an open question though.

BlueTankEngine commented on Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons economist.com/asia/2022/1... · Posted by u/pigtailgirl

shubb · 3 years ago

Are you following what's going on with these online serial novel platforms like Qidian and Japanese equivalents? They seem to be the wellspring for a lot of the IP recently but penetration to the west still seems kinda low.

It's really interesting how authors use these kind of narrative dark patterns to keep readers buying chapters and the effect that has on the story they end up writing.

BlueTankEngine · 3 years ago

Yeah I've been hip to the web novel stuff for the last 5 years. The stuff has an absolute death grip on Chinese fiction, and some of it is really quite spectacular. On a whole I consider it to be a very Chinese development, but some titles get surprisingly large global readership. It's a clever modernization of the Japanese light novel industrial complex, but I think fictional literature as leisure is just not practiced enough in the West for web novels to ever have a similar type of impact.

BlueTankEngine commented on Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons economist.com/asia/2022/1... · Posted by u/pigtailgirl

YurgenJurgensen · 3 years ago

Looking at what has actually come out of that push for "global mass-marketability", which is to say a lot of huge money machines and not a lot of art, the worst thing that could result from this is Japanese publishers trying to replicate this, as basically none of the internationally successful Japanese auteur creators would have had their works greenlit if they'd had to pass some global mass-marketability criteria.

BlueTankEngine · 3 years ago

Yeah I agree with you on all the way down to the very foundational fiber of my being. Luckily though Japanese publishers will at most just add webtoons on top of their current operations and that will be that. Jpop still more or less exactly the same as before YG and Hybe made Idols universal, Japanese games are for the most part still as unique as the were before Mihoyo and Smilegate changed the ARPG industry landscape. I sincerely believe that Shueisha, Kodansha, and the broader manga sphere will remain largely the same as we move in to the future.

I work in Media merchant banking (Investment Banking + Private Equity), so what webtoons will possibly allow me to do is show Western-raised or older generation generation capital holders another vector by which Asian literary media is a worthwhile investment. I'd walk a mile through broken glass to funnel 100 mil USD into the manga industry, but obviously the amount of opportunities that arise where I can attempt to push the needle in that direction is slim. Webtoons might be a viable vector in some cases where manga isnt financially, and I've seen enough relatively impressive webtoons to feel that money is better spent there than most other places.

BlueTankEngine commented on Japanese Manga are being eclipsed by Korean webtoons economist.com/asia/2022/1... · Posted by u/pigtailgirl

chocolatkey · 3 years ago

I actually happen to work in this industry, and this is definitely correct. We've actually shifting towards licensing more webtoons than manga, because in the digital world, manga doesn't sell very well (unless you're dealing with Shounen Jump content which is all taken anyway), and webtoons have a huge growing popularity. It's kind of funny when I look at our platform's stats, how the mobile audience is mainly webtoons and the web audience is mainly manga (and much smaller).

The Japanese publishers definitely know this is a huge issue imo, unlike what this article says. It's hard not to when a Korean app combining webtoons and manga (Piccoma) has dominated the Japanese Play/Apple store's rankings and shown the publishers the potential of the market. It's kind of humiliating honestly. That's why they're trying to get in on the business by spinning up webtoon studios and doing manga -> webtoon conversions. Some are doing OK, most aren't.

Note for anyone interested in entering the market: Korean webtoons currently consist mostly of a duopoly between Kakao and Naver. When a good webtoon is produced, the studio usually has to sign an exclusive contract with one of them, and they both have either launched platforms in all popular foreign languages, or have bought out the biggest ones, so squeezing in is not very easy. On that note, I'm very surprised this article doesn't mention the alternative: Chinese webtoons. They're pretty huge as well. Another fun fact: It's kind of hard to find "webtoons" if that's what you're looking for, because Naver tries to scare anyone who wants to use that word (they also own the "Webtoon" platform, which is larger than any other in existence in the foreign market). You'll see stuff like "Smarttoon", "Mangatoon", "Vericomix", and other made-up terms that really just mean webtoon.

BlueTankEngine · 3 years ago

You used the word humiliating, which I found so strong I had to check the numbers myself. They are every bit as shocking as you made it sound. Yet another area of Japanese culture that Korea/China has been able to just take minor steps to digitally modernize, and in turn exponentially improve it's globally mass-marketability. Korea did it in music, China (and to some extent Korea) has done it in gaming, and it really does seem like Korea/China have done it in comics. Thanks for the tip, info I've gained from the last few hours of reading due to your comment will hit the pages of at least a handful of my slide decks next year.

BlueTankEngine commented on AI Art Panic opguides.info/posts/aiart... · Posted by u/xena

kepano · 3 years ago

A couple of years ago I wrote the script for a graphic novel. I would have liked to illustrate it myself (I went to art school after all), but I was too busy running a startup at the time, so I pitched it as a collaboration to about 30 different artists that I thought could do a great job with it. I could not get a single person to bite.

In my pitch I proposed generous royalties and cash compensation to the artists. All of them essentially said that they weren't taking commissions. I'm sure this is in part due to the fact that I have never been involved in the graphic novel world, so they'd be taking a chance on someone new. Still, it seemed there was no amount I could pay to get someone to work with me.

Now I am reviving this graphic novel idea and still looking for someone I can pay to help me work on the project. However, the more synthography advances as a technology the more it seems like I should explore it as a path for this project. It would help me develop the book much faster than I can on my own. At minimum it could help me get the story board in place.

Maybe some day synthography can help artists scale up their output, in the same way Michelangelo developed a workshop of apprentices. I would be more than happy to pay an artist's AI apprentice if I can't work directly with the human.

BlueTankEngine · 3 years ago

If you don't mind answering, I'm really curious how much cash you were offering up front and what the page count you were commissioning was. Been talking to some art consultancies recently and I'm curious to how your experience compared to mine.

BlueTankEngine commented on Project Starline expands testing through an early access program blog.google/technology/re... · Posted by u/cpeterso

a1371 · 3 years ago

The cards are definitely stacked against this when it's at Google. Because of:

1. Google's solid track record of killing things because they didn't grow quickly, after a half hearted effort. Stadia being the latest example.

2. Google being pretty bad at cracking the corporate communication space. Teams and Zoom ate its lunch.

3. Google not having a strategy behind communication tools in general. Meet, Hangouts, Chat, Duo, Alo, ... already it's weird where this fits.

4. Google being bad at supporting new hardware gadgets. My Daydream VR came out 2 years before my Pixel, somehow these two things don't support each other.

I wish they at least would sell their divisions instead of kill/hamper such moonshot products. This looks like the next Google Glass.

BlueTankEngine · 3 years ago

I apologize if this comes off as aggressive, but all four of your points are totally wrong and I am sick of seeing these ideas parroted all over HN.

1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing things. IF you actually go through the list of all the "products" Google has "killed", you find that 95% of them are just consolidated into other areas of the Google product stack. Stadia was a herculean undertaking that involved a capital deployment that, at the time, was unprecedented in the gaming space. Stadia wasn't killed because it didn't grow quickly, it was killed because it didn't grow at all and was losing money, not to mention failing to acquire market share. Would you prefer the product be destroyed to put it on indefinite life support like Amazon has done with Twitch?

2. Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via G-Suite. Just because their video chat didn't win out doesn't mean they have no competency in the space.

3. Google now does have a strategy for comms tools. Workplace text chat is part of the Gmail end of G-Suite, all video chat is under Meet. This would slip right into their new Meet ecosystem. Unfortunately many of the people who parrot your talking points also were the ones criticizing google for attempting to reign in their comms ecosystem because it was "killing" products, when in reality they were just being re-bundled

4. Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android ecosystem. Not to mention they run the single most compatible smart home ecosystem and have supported Chromecast for a decade.

Can you even name a division that Google could just spinoff in your world? Stadia couldn't sustain itself without the Google Cloud backing it. Really tired of all the HNers essentially making up this narrative about Google when it rally doesn't exist.