loobkoob @ loobkoob @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I'm kind of surprised Apple is willing to fragment things so much just to avoid these consumer-friendly rulings as much as they can. Obviously it's profit-driven - I get that - but it seems to go against their branding a little, where the Apple ecosystem is typically very simple to use and has parity across devices.

(It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, “Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!”)

I'm not a programmer (although suggestions on a language to start learning with - with no project in mind - would be welcome!), but I've found similar things with my old musical projects. I look back some old project files and see that I used various techniques all the time that I don't necessarily use nowadays. Sometimes, I think I probably should use them more than I do now, but I definitely overused them back then when I first discovered them.

I guess it's just exciting when you learn something and it opens up a bunch of possibilities for you!

I reckon the number of sales of the game was pretty irrelevant to them. They lived off investor money for years, and the fact that they released something makes it rather difficult for them to be sued for fraud. I suspect that's why they never took pre-orders, too - it makes it more difficult for any "false advertisement" class action suits to get any traction if they weren't accepting any money.

Here's something that isn't that widely known outside of developers/publishers: Steam holds any money from the sales of a game until the end of the following month - it makes refunds easier, it gives them time to deal with processing fees, etc. So The Day Before's devs, who said they had to shut the studio because they'd run out of money and couldn't afford to stay open because the game hadn't sold well enough, wouldn't have seen any money from the game until next week anyway. And they'd have known this - this wasn't their first game.

I don't think all adverts are propaganda. For instance, someone in my village has a sign outside their house that says "EGGS FOR SALE" - that is 100% an advert, but I'm not sure you could convince me it's propaganda.

I agree that there's a lot of overlap between advertising and corporate propaganda, but they're definitely different things.

Unfortunately, I doubt it'll have much of an impact. Most of the properties/studios Embracer owns aren't popular enough to get people to make noise about it. And people don't tend to see the bigger picture - especially when these stories about studio closures are trickling out rather than all happening at once. I'm sure there'll be a lot of talk about it if something happens to do with Gearbox/Borderlands or The Lord Of The Rings, or if multiple studios all get shuttered at once, but other than that, I expect it'll just be small stories that continue to fly under the radar.

And regulators don't seem to care about video games unless people make noise. They get involved in things like loot box regulations or Microsoft acquiring Activision because those are big deals that almost everyone in the gaming sphere has an opinion on. But unfortunately, I don't see Piranha Bytes having issues or being closed getting enough attention for anything to change.

You're right about osu! Although it's probably one of the few competitive games where there's no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn't directly affect your gameplay experience.

It's not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don't think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.

Is open-source compatible with competitive games? As much as I love open-source in general, I feel like cheating would be a serious problem if the source code is available for everyone. That's not really an issue in single-player or co-operative games (outside of cheating leaderboard positions) but it would absolutely cause problems in a PvP game.

As a non-American:

I feel like hyper-capitalism and America's borderline corporatocracy is responsible for this. So many Americans feel like they're being lied or taken advantage of in order for corporations to profit.

The suspicions about "Big Pharma", for instance, almost make sense to me if I try to consider it from an American perspective. Healthcare is insanely expensive there, and being told you need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars "for your own good" is enough to make anyone suspicious. Especially when you see men posting their itemised hospital bills online where they were billed $300 for "women's sanitary products" - it's very clear these companies and healthcare providers are willing to be dishonest in order to profit. So American people start to distrust the entire industry/field.

Of course, when you look at it from a global perspective, or especially from a perspective of a country with nationalised healthcare where the same profit motives don't exist, it seems absurd. Just because the American companies are scummy doesn't mean the science behind medicine is wrong or a lie.

And it's the same across so many other industries. American companies take advantage of consumers, consumers start to distrust them. American people have been conditioned to distrust or be sceptical of so many things at this point that a lot of people feel like their own judgement is the only thing they can trust. Of course, not everyone has the critical thinking skills for that to actually be true, nor does everyone have the education in every single area for it to be true. And for those people with weaker critical thinking skills, having some charlatan come along and say, "well we all know you can't trust X, Y and Z, so what if A is a lie as well? And trust me, you can trust B" makes them think, "oh wow, they're right about not being able to trust X, Y and Z, maybe they're right about A and B too".

And so your Donald Trumps, your Alex Jones, etc, gain power and influence, and the people who follow them feel smart because they can "see through the systemic lies". It doesn't matter that half of what they say isn't provably true because (to their followers, at least) it could be true.

So I don't think it's just American exceptionalism that's responsible. I think the whole system's so broken that it's conditioned people to be sceptical and distrustful about everything, and to try to take advantage of the broken system when they can.

"Landed gentry" was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn't have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.

How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I'm not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:

And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.

So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn't vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he's profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.

"That means that you won."

The convenient thing about a handful of people controlling all the wealth is it means there are only a handful of people who need to be liberated of their wealth!

I'm not sure they're sleepwalking into it; I think there's just very little they can do without pivoting to an entirely different business sector at this point.

• Physical game sales been dropping for years as people get better internet connections, bigger hard-drives and as games come with larger and larger day-one patches
• Many "physical" versions of games these days just contain a download code which only reduces physical sales further
• People often find it easier to buy peripherals on Amazon then go into GAME. And GAME can't really compete with Amazon when it comes to online shopping.
• GAME tried to diversify into gaming and general "nerd culture" collectibles years ago and it's obviously not something that's revitalised their business.

Where do they go from here? I certainly think they handled things poorly 10-15 years ago, and could perhaps have pivoted successfully then if they'd seen the writing on the wall. But pretty much no-one predicted the current landscape back then. It's only a decade since Microsoft's disastrous Xbox One reveal where they got savaged for its always online nature and for heading towards digital-only games, with everyone saying, "but we love buying physical copies of games", and now here we are ten years later with brick-and-mortar stores looking like they might not survive the year and physical sales numbers in free fall.

I don't think GAME is necessarily mishandling things right now. I just think there's not really a market for a business like theirs nowadays.

Yeah, I don't get it. I guess I can see the appeal of some "Internet Of Things" connected appliances, like smart fridges suggesting recipes and keeping track of stock and auto-populating shopping lists for you. I don't need that personally, but I can see why it could appeal to some people.

But things like washing machines and dishwashers? You need to be there in person to fill them up just before they're ready to go on, and to empty them when they're done. And when they're not turned on, they're sat there doing nothing. What "smart" functions can they even offer?

You've got some good answers already, but I can expand on it a little: businesses in most sectors are feeling the impact of increased interest rates - both because they can't borrow as much themselves any more, and because there is less money coming in from investors because they can't borrow as much either - but tech (including games) is doubly impacted because there was such a surge in demand during lockdowns. While other businesses tended to struggle during lockdowns, and have simply had that struggle replaced with a different struggle due to the interest rates, the tech sector grew massively during the pandemic.

People working at home, or furloughed, had more personal time and more disposable income because they weren't spending money on travelling to work, on overpriced lunches, on dining out with friends, going to concerts, etc. It all added up, and they spent that money on streaming subscriptions, video games and just generally on recreational, home-based activities, many of which revolve around tech these days. So the tech sector grew a lot because of the low interest rates, and it grew a lot because more people were buying its products/services. And now, rather than having more disposable income, a lot of people are facing a cost of living crisis, meaning not only have they reduced their spending because they're back in the office and dining out and going to concerts again (and all those other things people spend money on when they're not confined to their house), but many people have less money to spend on gaming, subscriptions, etc, than pre-pandemic.

Also, because the tech sector was doing so well during the pandemic, it was an attractive prospect for investors (who themselves had increased money, as well as great interest rates), meaning it grew even more. Everything kind of fed into each other and the tech sector grew exponentially as a result. Whereas right now, not only does the increased interest rate for borrowing mean investors are throwing their cash around less in general, but the fact that the tech sector is struggling makes it a less attractive prospect for investors, meaning the whole sector kind of doubly loses out on that front.

So these tech companies invested their money into growing their companies and expanding their businesses' scopes like good capitalists. Which does generally make sense - if you find yourself sat on a huge pile of money, it's generally better to find a way to invest it into something useful (or to invest it into something makes you an even bigger pile of money if you see the Monopoly Man as aspirational). The issue is, most of them were somewhat short-sighted (plus global economics is a tricky thing to predict); they spent money as if it was always going to be coming in at the same rate. And now that they're being impacted by increased interest rates on their own borrowing, the loss of investors, and the reduced spending power of consumers and they're very suddenly having to make massive cuts to stay afloat.

It'll potentially just end up like emails (which are also federated, after all), where Gucci employees get an @gucci.com email address and an @gucci.com ActivityPub handle.

"Trump" is synonymous with "fart" in British English. Plenty of Americans already did celebrate and vote for a fart.

I'm sure a lot of the people who said they were going to boycott it did boycott it. But a boycott was never going to work for this game. The IP alone meant it was going to sell 10M+ copies, even if it was absolutely terrible.

My keyboard (Swiftkey) gets very excited about the possibilities when I start to hyphenate words to create compounds. It accepts that they exist, but it starts trying to throw all sorts of random suggestions in for what the second word could be (and it rarely gets the right word).

"Mystery box" storytelling is the name for it and, yeah, Lost, especially, is the poster child for not executing on it particularly well. It can be exciting, and it does a good job of making following a story feel like a communal experience that everyone can participate in - speculating on where things will go next, for instance - but it also often feels like shows using it end up over-promising and under-delivering (and often leaves viewers feeling a little soured at the end).

I feel like Dark was a good example of it being well-executed, and proves it certainly can be done well. But yeah, BSG definitely didn't end up paying off for me either.

I agree completely. I think AI can be a valuable tool if you use it correctly, but it requires you to be able to prompt it properly and to be able to use its output in the right way - and knowing what it's good at and what it's not. Like you said, for things like brainstorming or looking for inspiration, it's great. And while its artistic output is very derivative - both because it's literally derived from all the art it's been trained on and simply because there's enough other AI art out there that it doesn't really have a unique "voice" most of the time - you could easily use it as a foundation to create your own art.

To expand on my asking it questions: the kind of questions I find it useful for are ones like "what are some reasons why people may do x?" or "what are some of the differences between y and z?". Or an actual question I asked ChatGPT a couple of months ago based on a conversation I'd been having with a few people: "what is an example of a font I could use that looks somewhat professional but that would make readers feel slightly uncomfortable?" (After a little back and forth, it ended up suggesting a perfect font.)

Basically, it's good for divergent questions, evaluative questions, inferent questions, etc. - open-ended questions - where you can either use its response to simulate asking a variety of people (or to save yourself from looking through old AskReddit and Quora posts...) or just to give you different ideas to consider, and it's good for suggestions. And then, of course, you decide which answers are useful/appropriate. I definitely wouldn't take anything "factual" it says as correct, although it can be good for giving you additional things to look into.

As for writing code: I've only used it for simple-ish scripts so far. I can't write code, but I'm just about knowledgeable enough to read code to see what it's doing, and I can make my own basic edits. I'm perfectly okay at following the logic of most code, it's just that I don't know the syntax. So I'm able to explain to ChatGPT exactly what I want my code to do, how it should work, etc, and it can write it for me. I've had some issues, but I've (so far) always been able to troubleshoot and eventually find a solution to them. I'm aware that if want to do anything more complex then I'll need to expand my coding knowledge, though! But so far, I've been able to use it to write scripts that are already beyond my own personal coding capabilities which I think is impressive.

I generally see LLMs as similar to predictive text or Google searches, in that they're a tool where the user needs to:

1. have an idea of the output they want
2. know what to input in order to reach that output (or something close to that output)
3. know how to use or adapt the LLM's output

And just like how people having access to predictive text or Google doesn't make everyone's spelling/grammar/punctuation/sentence structure perfect or make everyone really knowledgeable, AIs/LLMs aren't going to magically make everyone good at everything either. But if people use them correctly, they can absolutely enhance that person's own output (be it their productivity, their creativity, their presentation or something else).