Trump administration reportedly considers a US DeepSeek ban | TechCrunch
mindbleach @ mindbleach @sh.itjust.works Posts 1Comments 5,310Joined 2 yr. ago
mindbleach @ mindbleach @sh.itjust.works
Posts
1
Comments
5,310
Joined
2 yr. ago
Conservatives don't mean things when they say words.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications.
All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty.
They think that's all you're doing, because they think that's all there is.
Letting TVs absorb set-top equipment was a mistake. You want to keep that modular stuff separate from the big expensive rectangle, so if it any of it gives you backsass, you can take it out back and beat it to smithereens with a sledgehammer.
When you take a boat to go find land, you don't call it a dirt voyage.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Ban the entire business model.
Entertainment is a tool for emotional manipulation - usually toward enjoyment. Fiction seeks suspension of disbelief and attachment to completely artificial interests and goals. Charging actual currency for anything under that fiction is an abuse. It's exploiting your brain's fuzzy separation of wants. However much you desire a goal in soccer, it's just a ball going through some posts. It has no economic utility. There is no exchange rate between score and hamburgers.
Maximizing that mistake is the entire driving force of this industry-swallowing abuse. It's half of all revenue. Boycotts don't work. It's in $70, flagship-franchise, single-player games. It costs nothing to add, even in games you already bought. Only legislation will fix this.
Now the usual excuses.
'Just don't pay them.' The entire game is expertly crafted to make you crave whatever they're charging for. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that's what makes them games. Gently convincing you over time is the developer's job.
'You want it for free!' You want it 'for free.' I want people to buy games. Like how it worked for forty years straight.
'But servers need money.' This shit's in World Of Warcraft - a subscription MMO. You think Blizzard is hurting?
'But arcades--' were renting someone else's machine. Your own phone doesn't get to charge you a quarter per minute.
'But cosmetics--' are still an engineered desire which can be denied until you pay more money.
'But budgets--' follow revenue, always always always. It has never been easier to make a game. Companies choose to spend millions because they expect to make billions.
'Well it's better value.' This bullshit makes them more money... and they get the money from you... so this "free" bullshit costs you more money. You get it? In no reality should it be possible to pay the price of a whole-ass game for one imaginary hat.
This machine deserved so much better. It was supposed to be a lightweight headset, until Japanese liability laws became absolute, and it turned out misaligned images could make children crosseyed. Hence the battery-powered desk unit containing a piddly mobile CPU and a solid steel rail.
G-Zero alone would have been sick.
By design. That's... that's literally what these games are for. You're supposed to be addicted and frustrated until you fork over real money.
All the mechanisms that games use to make your brain do the happy juice are kept behind the part where you pay real money over and over.
JAQing off.
Similarly, "by your logic" is never followed by anything resembling your logic.
But "this you?" is a killshot. Deadly accuracy, without fail.
Should be simple to do better than the sound designers over at Riot
Your explicit argument is that "better" isn't the standard, when it comes to cranking out textures or whatever. But suddenly when it's your thing - there's no possible way that passable results could work. Disruptive change won't affect your profession, because good-enough audio never happens in video games, a medium obsessed with escalating... audio quality? No, right, graphics. The thing you figure AI will be awesome for, when someone needs two hundred variations, to-day. And when that demand becomes reasonable there's no fucking way the studio will demand two thousand.
I mean, you clearly know more than me
'You're being a hypocrite, judged on your own statements, in this thread alone.'
'YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME AT EVERYTHING?!?!?!'
Jesus.
I consider myself pretty positive about the potential for generative AI, especially in game development, and it's still embarrassing watching you aggressively fail to handle polite criticism. You lurched in with 'I bet people will downvote my lukewarm take!' and then got big mad when that happened. Like it was a surprise.
This latest comment is an open wound of grievances which I, personally, didn't say a god damned word about. You're just showing your whole ass over... cut content? For some reason? Who asked. And you're trying to turn measured pushback regarding your sweeping claims into some chest-beating dominance-game, where one of us has to go away humiliated and quintessentially stupid forever, instead of just saying - oh, guess that was a slight overreach, whoopsie daisy.
My condolences to anyone who works under you. However good you are at your job, the way you handle disagreement is demonstrably miserable. Please get better at it.
Damning comments from 2023.
You do that math.
They'd hire fewer people and ship more often. Oh no, apparently. It is impossible to make video games for less than one billion dollars.
Genuinely - how the fuck do you write "between a handful and several hundred people, for anywhere between six months and five years," and still pretend it can't mean a handful in six months? Like namedropping the high numbers means nothing else is real.
And those games would be pretty fuckin' good, actually, with rapid response to consumer desire, and abundant variety, and readily-available iteration on whatever parts you liked.
whatever iteration of monetization you don’t think is exploitative because you grew up with it
If I felt current bullshit was only as bad as what I grew up with, I would call ban what I grew up with.
You glibly insist we can't even own things, as if that's an immutable fact of the universe, and not a dogshit interpretation of buying a disc in a case at a store. But sure, I'm the one pounding the table for the status quo.
You aren’t the arbiter
Cult thinking. Like there's only "I said so," not the central fucking argument we've been having.
Subscriptions are part of rational economic decision-making. Fuck you for ignoring that Econ 101 concept, despite several mentions. People spend more when getting their balls tickled, inside a video game, because humans are predictably irrational, and that can be exploited. That is the only way this shit makes more revenue.
Sixty bucks is what games have cost for goddamn near the entire history of video games, not just my personal childhood, you asshole. Even if you want to bicker - there has always been some general price point, since long before it was possible for a home game to seek rent. At no point could it justify charging one thousand dollars to a single player. I'm sorry you were taken for that blatant abuse. But repeating that abuse is now the thrust of halfthefuckingindustry.
Play inflation-games with those numbers all you like - "microtransactions" will always gouge orders of magnitude more than whatever a whole-ass game costs. That's what they're for. That is the entire reason this is happening. They make more money - by charging more - through manipulation. That process of abuse is the keystone of this entire business model.
We could end it tomorrow and it wouldn't make games smaller, or worse, or more expensive. The biggest as-a-service games today have one map each.
I do not need lossless copies of an image someone didn't even draw.
Wanking is about the emotional connection to a JPG, said someone I deeply pity.
The business model is charging money for shit already in the game. That's all we're talking about. Actual new content you have to pay to own, even if it's fucking horse armor, is fundamentally better than this growing problem. This problem that is... already... half the fucking industry.
The objectively visible general upper bound can be explained by the skyrocketing sales numbers for products. Doom famously outsold Windows 95. Both sold fewer copies than Centipede for Dreamcast. Inflation hasn't got shit on how the gaming industry exploded, and did billions of dollars in business, well before this abusive business model existed. Billions is plenty to make a god damned video game.
Increasing costs reflect increasing revenue.
Why the fuck would any business spend more money than they thought the product could make?
The install base of a home console peaked with the PS2.
... and GTA V sold more copies than the number of PS2s that ever existed. Crazy, right? It's almost like hardware and software are different fucking concepts. Like sixty bucks for a hundred thousand cartridges is less money than sixty bucks for ten million downloads. Weird!
What used to be a game experience meant to drive up-front sales is now a storefront.
An intolerable failure of industry. It's bad, actually. It's naked manipulation for unlimited access to your wallet. Holy shit, how do you write 'games are storefronts now' and think that's okay?
There is no reason what-so-ever that games need to cost so much that they demand this abuse. It has never been easier to make a game. But budgets follow revenue, so executives demand more more more, because the last game sold like crazy. Then we get this ramp of diminishing returns for a thousand people crunching eighty-hour weeks to produce hyperrealistic models for a game that makes only one billion dollars - so they're all fired.
If the whole industry cratered, games would still happen.
You wouldn't get AAAAA skin pores on aliens in 8K resolution or whateverthefuck. You wouldn't get seven-year projects with million-word scripts. But you'd still get games, at whatever price point and sales figures worked, because it's not like the tech got harder to use. It only ballooned to such extremes because it could.
People will, and often do, take a bit of a hit to work in an industry they like and are passionate about
Systemic abuse by an industry that should've been unionized by 1980. Publishers could outright say they're abusing the constant supply of eager young idiots who want to make games and it would not impact the supply of said bright young idiots. It's unsustainable because it's abuse, you dense bastard.
My anger with you is not performative. Fuck you for that derailing lie. I am genuinely pissed-off dealing with your repeated horseshit. I did not call out your trolling because I thought calling you a troll was effective rhetoric - I did it because sane conversation was impossible, without highlighting your hypocrisy.
Everyone's convinced their thing is special, but everyone else's is a done deal.
Meanwhile the only task where current AI seems truly competitive is porn.
Expansions, re-releases and add-ons aren’t new.
Or the problem.
You're not listening. Those are fine. Those are what I am aggressively endorsing. Those are how things should work.
If the question is whether you pay for everything up front or piecemeal then the cost of the base package is going up. That is not up for debate, either. There is no such thing as “full price”.
Do you even listen to yourself? Forty years of a stable upper bound and it somehow doesn't count. Undebatable! Come on. $200 games obviously do not exist, unless you get a big dumb statue with it.
If you wanna lump in everything you'd pay, into the future - this shit costs more.
That's how it makes more money.
Either you're paying at least as much, for a lot less - or someone else is getting fucked ten times harder. I care about that victim. I care about you. Your own personal history includes blowing a thousand dollars to not own a game. That kind of obscene overspending is the plainly-stated goal of this business model. They want to do that to as many people as possible. Key figures give public talks about "whale hunting." That is what nearly everything is becoming. You'll pay more to pay more so you can pay more, and apparently, some people convince themselves that's a gift.
You can all caps, kick and whine about it all you want
Fuck this directed abuse. I've been sick of your shit, so I yell about the subject. In return, you keep sneering about me, personally. Like I'm just putting on a big mad huffy display, because there's no way your behavior is infuriating for reasons explicitly stated. It is in fact fallacious to dismiss arguments and conclusions out-of-hand based on tone.
You assert 'it's not that big a deal!' like being haaalf the goddamn industry is peanuts. Like there's no possible way anyone could really be opposed to paying $60 and immediately getting poked in the eye for another $5, $10, $15, just to un-block part of the game they already fucking bought.
And characters in a fighting game are the least egregious example. You can squint and pretend that's an expansion. Can we at least agree that hats shouldn't count? While you're writing that legislation to unfuck the worst of this rampant abuse, without just saying "ban this business model," do you wanna try defending the grindstone of induced demand for cosmetics? Sell me on the economic sanity of one item costing a third as much as an entire AAA game. Diagram how much work had to go into that Peter Griffin skin, compared to the entirety of Baldur's Gate 3.
I’m afraid the number of employees, the time it takes to make things
Budgets follow revenue. Never the other way around.
Budgets are high because revenue is high. If companies didn't expect five bajillion dollars from players, they wouldn't spend two bajillion pursuing them. It does not require two bajillion dollars, bare minimum, to make... a game.
Expected revenue is only so high because this bullshit expertly manipulates irrational spending. Lootboxes made it so painfully blatant that even children noticed. Alternatives only disguise the parts that people recognize. They're still dragged across fishhooks to spend more than they would as a rational purchasing decision. You don't like subscriptions, right? Nobody really does. But a lot of those people spent more than a subscription would cost, and still tell themselves the game is free.
Colorspace issues, surely.
Your Goblincore post also looks grey on my machine, so it's probably server-side.
You could try copy-pasting into another program, saving it from there, and crossing your fingers.
No shit I'm mad at you. But 'you're just angry' is an insulting dismissal. Like I don't have reasons. Like there's not a whole-ass argument, behind all these highlighted barbs. Tone policing is trolling and I reject it utterly.
Making shit up about a delayed game that costs $200 is also trolling. What you were asked was buying games like how buying games worked for the prior forty years.
Have some intellectual honesty about it, at least.
Oh fuck off.
You quoted an all-caps counterargument you have no response to. This shit is in full-priced games. It's creeping into, if not literally everything, then enough shit that 'just don't buy it' plainly doesn't work. This systemic problem is novel, intolerable, and getting worse. And you would pretend that nuh-uh, because I experienced emotion while rubbing your nose in it.
It takes a lot to waste my time. Congratulations.
No, I won’t wait three extra years and pay 200 bucks for a fighting game to see if I like it and then only play ten percent of the roster.
Who asked?
“you can only buy things in a static format and devs are forbidden from selling you expansions”
At no point have you understood this argument.
I came out the gate with a favorable comparison for horse armor.
And somehow the least tolerable part of this strawman is 'you're just angry, you only feel strongly, juuust because you disagreeee.' It pains me to leave this abuse-promoting fluff unanswered, but you're not listening anyway.
... the foreign-hosted servers, or the models themselves?
They did, just like everybody else.
Oh that's fucking rich.