megopie
@megopie@beehaw.org
- Comment on We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them 3 days 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 days 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 days 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 days 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 days 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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. 1 week 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 1 week 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 2 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 2 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? 2 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? 2 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 2 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 2 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.
- Comment on Google Gemini deletes use's code 3 weeks ago:
It’s insane to me that people are actually trying get these LLMs to do things. Let alone outside of an experimental setting. Like, it’s a non starter at a fundamental conceptual level.
It reminds me of an experiment where they had a few try and run simulated vending machines. Resulting in the systems attempting to contact the FBI, threatening to nuke suppliers, and
It was pretty clear from the results that none of the LLMs were capable of consistently performing basic tasks, with them routinely introducing irrelevant or incorrect information that would derail things. Such as ordering nonexistent products, assuming capabilities that it was never given, and generally just failing to properly recall information or keep values it was given consistent. Some of the failures were quite spectacular, ranging from insisting it had gone bankrupt and was trying to sell the vending machine, to threatening to nuke suppliers and trying to contact the FBI.
- Comment on Google Gemini deletes use's code 3 weeks ago:
Exactly, They’re just probabilistic models. LLMs are just outputting something that statistically could be what comes next. But that statistical process does not capture any real meaning or conceptualization, just vague associations of when words are likely to show up, and what order they’re likely to show up in.
- Comment on A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say 4 weeks ago:
”we’ve built a machine to minimize the amount of time people need to spend touching grass.”
“Oh no, someone’s gone insane from not touching grass”
- Comment on Amazon cuts hundreds of AWS cloud jobs after strategic review, says AI wasn’t the main factor 4 weeks ago:
I actually kind of believe them on this. Like, the last team they’d want to cut back on if they were gung hoe on AI would be web services. Like, most “AI” companies aren’t hosting their own services, they’re relying on a third party to do that.
Admittedly AWS isn’t really built around providing what those companies need, being focused more on hosting websites (you know, a proven business model that actually makes profit) and less on massive racks of Nvidia GPUs to run probabilistic models.
But still, that’s a fairly small cut relatively speaking compared to Microsoft and other’s recent announcements. So I’m tempted to believe that theses are actually just fairly normal cuts, as supposed to what Microsoft is doing; cutting to the bone to free up more cash to buy a few more Nvidia GPUs.
- Comment on Meta Takes Hard Line Against Europe's AI Rules 4 weeks ago:
Free speech is the right to say what you believe without facing legal consequences from the government, not the right to publish what ever other people say uncritically, especially with what they’re publishing is directly inciting real harm to the public.
Their current moderation stance is akin to allowing people to shout “fire!” In a crowded public space.
- Comment on Meta Takes Hard Line Against Europe's AI Rules 4 weeks ago:
Ok, well, guess it won’t be voluntary for much longer.
- Comment on YouTube app is the worst 4 weeks ago:
Or the autoplay function, or YouTube shorts shelf, or so many other new “features” they’d really like us to turn on.
- Comment on YouTube app is the worst 4 weeks ago:
on IOS I’ve found the mobile web page the be legitimately better than the app, I can do Picture in Picture and listen to it in the background, things the app won’t let you do without paying. For a while it also let me get rid of the shorts shelf, which the app just had no option for, they got rid of that a few months back, but I’ve found that if I mark “not interested” on any shorts it puts up it hides it again for a while.
Also if the ads are getting a bit much I can open it in fire fox focus and I’ve found it block ads completely, I’ve heard from others that Firefox focus doesn’t block YouTube ads for them, but, I’ve never seen a YouTube ad while using it.
Honestly, in general, if something has a web page, I won’t use an app at this point. I’ve had so many experiences with dedicated apps just being worse experiences.
- Comment on Ex-Google CEO: Power Grid Crisis Could Kill AI's Next Big Leap 4 weeks ago:
A marginal improvement for a limited use case.
Not a revolutionary jump forward in capability. not a trillion dollar industry that justifies this level of investment or obsession.
- Comment on Ex-Google CEO: Power Grid Crisis Could Kill AI's Next Big Leap 5 weeks ago:
The really crazy part is that it’s been like that for 4 years now, the models have improved based on arbitrary metrics the people making the models have decided upon, but in terms of real world usability they’re basically the same. Marginal improvement from running it twice to have it fact check its self, but only a marginal improvement by doubling the compute.
It’s insanity that they’re burning billions upon billions to keep this charade going.
- Comment on Linux smashes through five per cent desktop share in the US 5 weeks ago:
Well, on top of the tens of thousands of volunteer developer hours put in to stuff like wine that they built upon.