I’m going to say yes because the real distinction is how trivially sniffable your traffic is by your ISP, the important part of the tracker being private means that you’re not going to be hitting nodes whose only purpose is to incriminate you
how they handle invites is immaterial from the POV of your liability, it only increases theirs in terms of what they can get sued for
ISPs don’t care about p2p traffic, unless it affects their bandwidth and they want to shape it. nobody wants to sniff traffic if they can help it, it’s expensive slow and gets you a reputation as a stickybeak. you (the user) should at the very least insist that peers use encryption so the ISP can have some plausible deniability
use a VPN if you’re worried about your IP address being logged on a tracker. public trackers more so than private, but realistically there’s nothing stopping a nark joining a private tracker and sending IP addresses to the MPAA
just avoid stuff that’s likely to be tracked (brand new releases) and you should be ok. I’d wait for the first strike from the ISP before splashing for a VPN/proxy
one little addendum is be cautious when pirating old things that have some connection to a new thing. i got a warning from my ISP for downloading the 1959 Twilight Zone TV series (presumably because this was right around the Jordan Peele Twilight Zone reboot thing starting)
I’ll never live down almost getting my friend’s internet cutoff for torrenting Prince of Persia for PSP on wifi.
this is actually the exact kind of thing that Linux should be used for imo — it’s much easier to create dedicated desktop settings that basically isolate the Windows ABI and do exactly what they want with the display layer than trying to fussily recreate all this with a collection of Windows compositor edge cases you have to delicately bundle up
Graphics cards going from $2000 to $5000
In addition to killing jobs Ai is probably going to kill videogaming as nobody can afford to buy new hardware. You’re going to be renting GPU time so you can stream Assassins Creed to your phone. I am so depressed.
2026 the year of no new games
obviously this is all shit, but the vast majority of video games don’t require any crazy hardware. this is another nail in the coffin of the AAA industry, which sucks for the job loss and very little else. the real question is whether or not these price increases hit consoles. that’s an existential problem for sony and nintendo, so presumably they’re going to throw their weight around to try to ride out the bubble. I suppose nintendo can afford to take a bath on hardware costs for a long while if they want, but they’ve always been firmly against that. I’m guessing they are mostly saved on account of the switch and switch 2 being crappy tech
Both companies are reportedly planning to continue raising GPU prices every month going forward.
lmao if this is true
You’ll still be able to buy or build a pc it will just cost as much as a car or a house to do it.
how often do you have money to buy a house or a car
I guess if the AI bubble lasts into the long term it will be the perfect time to transition to a hobby that is less dumb than gaming.
Most people get loans or go without if they can’t get one.
I wonder if valve would be willing to take a bath on costs to sell the steam machine at a reasonable price to try to force themselves into a significant piece of the hardware pie. could they talk themselves into that being a useful complement to their storefront monopoly?
Possibly the increase won’t be as extreme and they’re just intentionally leaking a huge increase to make the actual increase more palatable. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out legit.
Guess it’s the end of an era. 40-ish years was a good run.
I can’t imagine this is fake, and I’m surprised it took this long. the prices these companies are charging for AI hardware is insane and production is severely bottlenecked. currently booked data center deals dwarf everything, the numbers are out of a fucking fever dream. there is no chance that they are all fulfilled, but you can bet nvidia and the rest of the hardware chain are going to make sure they aren’t the failure point. consumer shit is utterly irrelevant to anyone but like apple
a 4070 super is apparently the best thing my z390/9900k rig can upgrade to without bottlenecks
hope that’s true because i just bought one
Hoping they come crawling back when the entire AI market crashes in the next year or so.
the crash is very unlikely to resemble a crash (I think a lot of millennials who are spiritually always anticipating another 2008 are generally unaware of how much structural engineering has gone into preventing that), and the global capacity to just move resources around in search of any growth is, as we’ve seen in 2025, generally very high.
I like this Ed Zitron framing re “defending growth itself” a lot:
much as Leonard Cohen once said “you aren’t going to like what comes after America,” at the end of the day I think that hedging on any of this to stop is a poorly considered expression of death drive and not much more. it’s not so bad that datacenter capex carried the economy through some of the most perverse incentives in recorded history, because over the long term the cost of electricity should approach zero and there’s a lot of things that GPUs can be useful for other than LLMs, and the temptation to refer to reaching datacenter saturation as a “crash” when these companies find some other way to move money around will be powerful but ultimately not accomplish very much. also, the subsidies that Micron was expecting to get from the CHIPS act to keep consumer memory affordable were perfectly good in the first place and we’ll probably see some form of them return cyclically in 2029 and everyone will go back to talking about how it’s a rare good time to buy a GPU again. and the 5090 was probably underpriced relative to its professional utility! idk it’s very rarely a useful time for grand gestures and proclamations unless you’re getting paid for them
