Best part of GTA V for me was the social satire and Trevor being a total sociopath. The story isn’t anything special, the final mission hits the wrong story beats (it should have ended with the big shootout of government bureaucracy pileup), and the gameplay has some design mistakes (like business income being completely useless, and money in general being a non-issue after the first big heist). It had bugs that prevented story progress without workarounds that were never fixed. It got a lot of praise at the time for having crazy draw distances in an open world game while working on an XBox 360. That’s no longer a big deal.
I don’t think it deserved all the five-star reviews it got back then.
Conversely, if the social satire is on point and the character building is solid, then I’ll be happy.
I don’t have a problem when small studios do it for games like Terraria and No Man’s Sky. It keeps them solvent without having to attach themselves to a big publisher.
I do have a problem when a giant, established company does it, as is the case for Cyberpunk 2077.
To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There’s plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.
When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don’t think it’ll happen before then.
There wouldn’t necessarily be legal responsibility. Things have been reported to the IRS with the money sitting there. If they’re paying themselves “expenses”, that would need to be reported on their personal income taxes. If that’s all there is to it, nothing illegal is happening. As of now, that’s all the evidence tells us.
Bad way to run a charity, but not illegal. That may change with more evidence, like if the money was paid out more than is actually reported.
The one thing that does lean more towards malice is the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired long before the charity existed.
That said, I otherwise agree. If the IRS forms are right, the money is just sitting there. That’s not illegal in itself. It just looks bad.
Jobst also doesn’t always know US law, since he has a legal background in Australia (and I’m not sure what his specialty was, either).
He particularly mentioned in the video that the IRS isn’t an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, which is true. I’ve seen the bullshit US tax protesters sometimes get away with. Irwin Schiff, for example, once signed a blank 1040 form and sent it into the IRS. He almost made it to the statue of limitations until he went on The Tomorrow Show (a nationwide NBC talk show) and bragged about it. That said, people in the US do tend to think of the IRS as an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, and that’s why the response with the guy came back that way. Jobst doesn’t seem to be fully cognizant of how people in the US view the IRS.
It points to something hinky, but it’s not complete proof. If it’s correct, then the money is just sitting in an account. It’s not going into anybody’s pockets (although the interest might?). The open question is if the IRS form is accurate to the amount of money just sitting there. If not, then this starts to look like criminal tax fraud.
This could still come down to incompetence rather than malice. That said, the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired years before the charity existed does lean more towards malice.
One other thing to note is that while Karl Jobst does have a legal background, it’s in Australia. The US is also a common law system, but there are enough differences that Karl might not realize what is and isn’t illegal.
Much of what people do on computers these days is through a web browser. An even bigger market is servers, which often run Linux and can port things into ARM with less hassle.
What I’m getting at is there are factors that affect the broader market. Having more people and companies able to work on processors means greater possibility of variation, and therefore has an evolutionary advantage.
There are three x86 companies, and there’s not likely to be any others. VIA is barely worth talking about. AMD is currently killing it, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade ago, a combination of bad decisions at AMD, good decisions at Intel, and underhanded tactics at Intel made AMD nearly collapse. Intel looked smug on its throne, and sat on the same fundamental architecture and manufacturing node for a long time.
This was a bad situation for the entire computer industry. We were very close to Intel being all that mattered, and that would have meant severe stagnation. ARM (and RISC-V) being more viable helps keep that from happening again.
If the Deck can gain critical mass, they’ll be able force the issue. They’re already doing it with targeting Linux. The Switch is ARM, and the Switch2 leaks suggest it’ll be a better ARM chip, so devs are already targeting it.
Unreal/Unity already go to ARM pretty easily, so it’s not a huge deal.
You don’t really “tailor” hardware to Linux. You release a driver without a dumb binary blob requirement, or at least document your hardware enough for a kernel hacker to pick it up.
One thing you can do is translate 3d APIs. This sometimes makes 3d consoles easier to emulate than 2d consoles. PS1 emulation was basically solved when SNES emulation was playable but still had noticeable bugs.
AMD is getting there by optimizing the shit out of memory access and cache. RISC designs by nature have far simpler memory models. AMD has to throw tons of resources into making the x86 pig stay in the air, and they’re already flirting with a move towards ARM.
Most of the people who know how to keep that pig flying already work at AMD or Intel. They certainly don’t work at VIA Technologies (the third x86 company that nobody talks about, for a good reason). In contrast, any given Fortune 500 could probably hire an ARM team to make a custom chip for their needs provided they had a good enough reason.