megopie

@megopie@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  As other’s mentioned, probably more a way to fire a bunch of people without having to do so explicitly.

  Microsoft seems to be on a warpath this year regarding layoffs. I wonder if maybe they’re trying to compensate for some giant black hole in their budget. Like, keep the costs looking stable even as some specific department balloons out of control without providing commensurate revenue. Wonder what that could possibly be?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is reportedly planning a Nintendo Switch-style PlayStation 6 portable | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yah, I agree.

  At the very least much better optimized, with what length there is focused on meaningful content rather than low effort padding.

  Again, it requires market pressure, something that a boom in portable games on less performant devices could cause.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is reportedly planning a Nintendo Switch-style PlayStation 6 portable | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Something like the steam deck or the original switch were probably on the upper end of meaningfully “portable” in that sense, and even they can’t really compete with smartphones on that front. But with the currently available chips/batteries/screens, you cannot really get much smaller without starting to limit the games that can be played on them.

  There is a whole other conversation to be had about game optimization and the push in large parts of the games industry towards more power intensive games. If the PC/console games space had an incentive to better optimize for lightweight devices, that could change. Especially if something shifted on the smartphone storefront market that created more demand for better less exploitative games there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is reportedly planning a Nintendo Switch-style PlayStation 6 portable | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  But, they do for mobiles, because mobile app storefronts force micro transactions to go the through them and they take a significant cut on each one. The 30% apple tax for example.

  So they have a huge incentive to put F2P slop front and center which other storefronts on other devices don’t. In the context of steam, they do make money on the micro transitions of games that valve owns, but they make more money selling everyone else’s games over all, so they still have a reasons to show those.

  It’s not so much saying that other storefronts are angles who love their customer, but more that their incentive structures are aligned differently.

  If there were significant shake up in the mobile storefront market, or in terms of how they can make money, there might be a shift in they type of content they push.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is reportedly planning a Nintendo Switch-style PlayStation 6 portable | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  How much of it is that no one is willing to pay 20 or 30 dollars for a mobile game, and how much is it that anyone willing to pay is unable to find them, or has just given up on the prospect because of lack of visibility.

  Of course the mobile store fronts have no incentive to increase the visibility, because a free to play game is liable to make them significantly more money in the long term due to their cut of each micro transaction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is reportedly planning a Nintendo Switch-style PlayStation 6 portable | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.

  Like when the steam deck and switch came out, they both did well, I think the switch did well mainly on the grounds that it was the Nintendo device for that console generation generation. But they’ve hardly taken over the market.

  I think the console industry kind of just wrote off the mobile market because they were late to the party, despite it being immensely profitable and a huge market segment. It seems now they’re becoming interested in it again, and I wonder if it’s due to there being an unmet demand, people who want to play games outside of their living room, but who are turned off by the state of games on mobile.

  Like, the mobile games market is just a swamp, and people who want a more meaningful experience than a time waster puzzle game, or a cash grab gatcha game, are kind of left out in the cold. Maybe this is the legacy games companies seeing an opportunity, all it would take to smash that opportunity is for the mobile phone games market to start being… not awful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll - how to check and turn it off⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is that for a lot of people it has become a substitute that has filled the void left by the slow destruction of other social organizations and institutions. It’d be easy to say that social media sites like Facebook killed them, but I think they were already throughly hollowed out and made inaccessible by the economic pressure on people to be ever more productive workers and ever more economy driving consumers.

  To ask people to dispense with whatsapp, instagram or facebook is to ask them to abandon their ability to be part of communities that matter to them. It’s sort of an intractable problem as it requires whole communities to abandon ship together, which is difficult to do. The solution to the problem is to easy that process and decrease barriers to doing so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"A culture of intimidation, retaliation and oppression": How Microsoft’s Gaza stance fuelled an industry-spanning boycott⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s one of those situations where we see how kind people can be, and how indifferent and cruel to that kindness a depersonalized organization can be.

  The type of thinking that says “ well, yah, sure users won’t like ads in the start menu, but we need to make money on the unlicensed installs, and they’ll switch to something else if we brick them for not paying, so we’re going to inflict this on paying users as well, because they’re not going to switch.”

  Is the same type of of thinking that says “well, this government is willing to sign a huge contract to use our infrastructure, but only if we punish anyone in our organization who speaks out against them, so we’ll just fire anyone who does so. This would be much harder if they were all unionized, but luckily we nipped that in the bud.”

  Microsoft’s organizational and incentive structure makes these outcomes inevitable. Profit before people is the rule.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Our GPU Black Market Documentary Has Been Taken Down by Bloomberg⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The Streisand effect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Haven’t Sanctions on Russia Stopped the War? The Money Is Still Flowing. | For decades, companies feared being on the wrong side of U.S. sanctions. That’s not always true anymore.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sanctions do not stop wars, nor do they outright stop trade, they inflict costs for doing trade and for doing a war. They are there to make it harder to prosecute and fund a war, not impossible. It was always understood by those making the calls that these sanctions would be subverted and worked around, but that this would increase costs and lower Russia’s capacity to divert resources to fight the war.

  The idea that they stop wars or are some magic trick to destroy someone’s economy outright is absurd. No one implementing them ever claimed they did or would, although people in media outlets sure seemed to talk about them as if they would.

  The sanctions have done what they were intended to do, and it is the fault of the writer for believing the media sensationalism around them, not the fault of the policy for failing to accomplish the unrealistic goals that were imagined for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s so crazy to me that people will rush out and try and ban tools like these, rather than force car companies to use more secure systems. Like, banning these is futile, they’re not that complex of a device to make, the core issue here is that car companies have fallen over them selves to be “tech forward” to justify pushing further in to the premium price range, but have completely failed to secure their systems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  there probably shouldn’t be a lot of friction for things the player isn’t supposed to be focused on, like say the interface should be unobtrusive and easy to navigate…

  but a story driven game should have the player focusing on the story!

  Players who don’t care about the story would probably be better served by a different game altogether.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  the industry has also be caught in the grips of budget gigantism by an influx of investor cash for the past decade.

  Outside investors saw dollar signs with the rapid growth of the market, and also huge financial successes like fortnight. So they were willing to put up a lot of funding in hopes of outsized returns. Pressure from investors and management meant appealing to the largest audience possible, and also chasing the latest trends. Despite the huge budgets, the games were unfocused and bad, both from trying to appeal to too many audiences, and constantly changing direction during development to chase trends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that’s kind of the kicker, a lot of studios and franchises got big based on the quality of their story telling, but did poorly with audiences that were just there for the gameplay, since the gameplay is there to serve the story, to support it and facilitate it. But if you’re just there for the gameplay and don’t care about the story, then the gameplay will be boring.

  So they’ve sanded down the story to make the gameplay accessible to people who don’t care about the story.

  But now you have a story built to serve gameplay, and gameplay built to serve the story. Nether is good on its own merits, so no one really likes it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To me it feels like there is a fundamental dissonance in the video game industry. Where major publishers and studios can’t seem to internalize that there are two things that people might come to a game for; Video games as experiences, narratives, things to be explored; and video games as … well games, a set of mechanics to be interacted with, to be challenged by. This isn’t to say a game can’t be good at both, but many games are weighted one way or another.

  Factorio is a truly absorbing gameplay experience, but it doesn’t really have a story beyond what is needed to frame and flavor the gameplay.

  “Vampire the masquerade: bloodlines” is a classic of atmosphere, character interaction and role play, but just about everyone who played it will tell you the combat is serviceable at best, and there is one level in particular that most people just remove with a mod because it’s just combat, with no dialog or interactions with other characters.

  So many major studios and publishers seem to routinely focus on the wrong elements of previously successful games. Taking the wrong lessons and misunderstanding what made previous title’s a huge success.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh boy, I can’t wait for the thriving trade in VPN accounts made outside of the UK then sold to UK citizens by a third party.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk threatens Apple and calls OpenAI boss a liar as feud deepens⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Pot calls the kettle black.

  Like, they’re both liars. Both are making unreasonable promises to suck up as much capital as possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After using ChatGPT, man swaps his salt for sodium bromide—and suffers psychosis⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “No, you see, we promise all this tech is real and awesome. It’s totally another hyper growth market that will drive economic development! Ignore the fact we’re slipping in to recession despite this being a “booming” market.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Is A Money Trap⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing is, companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are already profitable, so it could lose them huge amounts of money, with no real meaningful benefit to user retention or B2B sales, but the companies as a whole would still be profitable. It could be a huge money black hole, but they continue to chase it out of unjustified FOMO and in an attempt to keep share prices high through misplaced investor confidence.

  Apple’s share price has taken a pretty big hit from the perception that they’re “falling behind” on AI, even if they’ve mostly just backed away from it because users didn’t like it when it was shoved in their face. Other companies are probably looking at that and saying “hey, we’d rather keep the stock market happy and our share prices high rather than stop wasting money on this”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s so disingenuous and absurd to claim this is a AI problem. It’s an over saturation of qualified individuals in a field, problem. These companies and executives are just using AI as a cover story to hide the fact that the industry is not growing fast enough to employ the number of skilled professionals in the field. This was the point of the whole “learn to code” talking points. Executives and shareholders wanted an over-saturation in the field so as to push down wages and reduce the bargaining power of employees.

  This situation kind of hammers home the importance of a robust social safety net, strong unions, minimum wages that keep up with inflation, and maintaining an affordable cost of living. There being a saturation in one job market should not doom people to poverty conditions. Even a job at chipotle should pay well enough to live comfortably on, and workers there should have enough bargaining power to ensure decent treatment.

  Like, we need to act collectively to ensure stability and prosperity. There is no path that someone can take individually to ensure these things, no escape hatch to prosperity for “hard workers”. “Learning to code” and “Get a CS degree” seemed like a straight forward answer, but here we are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  open sourcing doesn’t effect the core issue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you rather stop playing a game than lower the difficulty? The First Berserker: Khazan devs reckon you would | Eurogamer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, the really difficult part of frost punk is initially just understanding the shape of the situation the player is in.

  Like, like most will fail on normal because they just don’t know what options are available to them and what pressures they’ll be put under over time.

  After one successful play through I found the game a lot easier just because I knew what I was up against and what resources I had at my disposal to deal with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft yanks the plug on Windows 11 SE, giving school and college IT techs a little over a year to find a suitable replacement⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Why? Uh… because, uh, it was two hard to maintain a separate version. Definitely not because we want everyone on the main version so we can slurp up that delicious personal information from a captive user base”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many r are there in strawberry?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It also is just making up a string of words that are probabilistically plausible as a continuation of the dialog.

  You can do the same tests with other words and it will just contradict it’s self and get things wrong about how many times a letter is pronounced in a word.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many r are there in strawberry?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I asked it how many X’s there are in the word Bordeaux it tells you there are none.

  If you ask it how many times X is pronounced in Bordeaux it tells you the x in Bordeaux isn’t pronounced with the word ending in an “o” sound.

  If you ask it how many “o”s there are in Bordeaux it tells you there are none in Bordeaux.

  So, is it counting the sounds made in the word? Or is it counting the letters? Or is it doing none of the above and just giving a probabilistic output based on an existing corpus of language, without any thought or concepts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So, Linus Torvalds is a jerk⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is known. There are many jerks in the world.

  But at the end of a the day, a jerk with good principles is better than the nicest person with none.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It would get old fast⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing that would get old is managing all that damn grass. That and presumably having to drive 20 minutes to get anything.

  Never personally had issues with living near or even with friends. Only ever had issues with a rando roommate I had because a friend had to move for work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SCOOP: Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Because there are no rich connected socialite interest groups that frequent same country clubs as the payment processor C suites who care about nazi’s, in fact, they’re probably at the same country club.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Terribly Tragic, Totally Avoidable, Absolute Collapse Of The Gaming Industry⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Perhaps it’s a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Like the front page and subscription page are fundamentally separated, and the algorithm sees this video doing well, but the subscription page has it shadow banned, but that shadow ban doesn’t transfer over.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta pirated and seeded porn for years to train AI, lawsuit says⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of artists will practice anatomy by drawing people nude, largely because it’s hard to get a good understanding of anatomy by only drawing people with clothes on.

  If you wanted to put some examples of bare human anatomy in odd positions to expand the range that the model is capable of, well there aren’t many large corpuses of that than porn.

  Also, even if they don’t want it to make explicit content, they probably want it to make “suggestive” or “appealing” content. And they just assume they can guide rail it away from making actual explicit content. Although that’s probably pretty short sighted given how weak guardrails really are.