this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
173 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

69947 readers
1771 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 144 points 11 months ago (13 children)

Why is a car capable of playing games in the first place. I understand it’s not going to allow people to play while they drive but still. That just seems like an odd/bad idea.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Why a bad idea? Why an odd idea? It's a powerful computer with a decent size monitor in a place where sometimes people have to sit and wait. What am I missing because seems like a logical / good idea to me?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Honestly I actually had not thought about people sitting around waiting to charge. In my area there are tons of chargers, grocery store, Costco, the mall, movie theaters. My experience had been that people would charge while doing other things. Thanks for the insight into a good use for it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Not even just waiting to charge. Picking someone up, but your schedule gets you there 15 minutes before they're available? Why not put that computer to use?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Why can’t it wait until you get home? We took ashtrays out of cars, so why would we put another addictive and distracting thing in there?

I play games too, but I also recognize that they can overwhelm some people.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Lol, games are far far far less addictive than cigarettes. Cigarettes has nicotine which is an actual addictive drug. Games are fun.

Even comparing them at all is fairly disingenuous.

It's not distracting anyone, I doubt it could even be played if you are in a queue that is moving at 0,3 m/s

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Electric cars have a very legit use case for this… extended charge times. The video games and streaming apps are so you can kill time.

Telsa’s have pretty fast charge times, but even those are slower than a gasoline fill up. Moreover, if you get cursed with charging at a non-Telsa station, you could be there for quite a bit.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

A lot of people camp in them too.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

People are so used to megacorporations controlling what specific software they can run on their general-purpose computers that they are now... in favor of it? Every day it seems more and more the case that Apple's anti-sideloading propaganda is successful.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I don't want a general-purpose computer in my car. I want a screen to do the federally-mandated backup camera and physical buttons for everything else.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Do you mean to suggest that videogames are for children? I don't really see where you're coming from here.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Not videogames, but the idea that a car should also be a video game console sounds very childish.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

...why, unless video games are for children...?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Why concern yourself with how things sound?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

As someone without an electric car, i always assumed it was for something to do while charging.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

The cars already have decent GPUs to process the camera data for driving assistance features, so someone at the company probably just thought it would be neat to do something with that computing power when it's not being used for driving.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wasn't it marketed as something to do while the car charges originally?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Ah yes, run the battery down while charging.

Yes, I know the scale is vastly different between driving charge and game lmaying charge, but it still sounds like revving your engine wile filling with gas.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

I mean, literal orders of magnitude difference.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Playing a game uses such a ridiculously small amount of electricity compared to the amount that is pumped in through a supercharger, I would honestly be shocked if the difference between playing a game while charging versus not playing while charging was in the minutes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Well, depending on state of charge, supercharging goes up to 250kW. A state of the art PC (4090, Ryzen 9 etc) draws about 850-900 watts on full load. That means such a computer would use 0.004% of available power thus extremely negligible. And the APU (Ryzen-based media system) inside Tesla’s probably uses more around 200-400 watts under full load.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I never wait around while the car is charging (generally only charge at home), but this has been useful for waiting to board a ferry, actually being in the car on a ferry, and waiting for road closures to clear.

I also do have a steam deck, and this is basically the same thing but with a bigger screen.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

So you can play a racing game in your car, while letting the autopilot kill you.

And so that the manufacturer can sell you a new car, so that you can play newer games.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Probably similar to why you can make the turn indicator make fart noises or have the car "dance" by flashing lights and opening doors and such. The hardware is there so why not. Utterly pointless features but atleast it's something the competition isn't doing I guess.

Tho I must admit that it was quite funny when I once heard a guy lock the doors on his Tesla and instead of the generick "click click" it said "quack" instead.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago (1 children)

TIL: Tesla is not powered by batteries. It's powered by steam. Lol.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Well howdya think they make the steam?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Geewiz I bought my my car to play Steam game!! /s

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

"lose steam"

In which way?

(For those that didn't get it, the joke is a double entendre.)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

They're probably not interested in reading the article, but in case they care to read the title of the article you shared: New Teslas might lose Steam

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

It's literally the fist sentence of the article:

Tesla might be dropping Steam support

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Oh no... anyway.

Whether my car can play games has no bearing on whether I'd buy that car. So, this is a nothingburger.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Tesla’s message alerts the customer that the company is “updating the gaming computer” in the Model X and says it’s “no longer capable of playing Steam games.” The message ends with a button for the customer to confirm they will proceed with the delivery.

And we’re not seeing any signs that the automaker plans to remove Steam from current owners’ vehicles through a software update.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk had hyped Steam as a selling point, advertising the new GPU as powerful with the ability to play top-tier games like Cyberpunk 2077.

Initial 2021 models were not installed with sufficient RAM to support the advertised games, so Steam was not included.

There’s speculation that Tesla might be backtracking on powerful gaming hardware in new Model S and X vehicles.

Musk has been busy squeezing the company through hot-headed layoffs in an effort to make the company “absolutely hard core.” Tesla scaled back on what a new low-cost vehicle will look like and is going all in on building a robotaxi, which means games like The Witcher are no longer a priority.


The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 44%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

load more comments
view more: next ›