A king's victory is won by his soldiers

(/j they're not monolithic or synonymous)

A smart consumer will pick the cheapest one that does the job at the best quality.

There is no such thing as ethical capitalism and fuck loyalty to brand trademarks.

and that their customers are kids addicted to videogames

TIL I'm a "kid" despite being 44 years old

Gabe Newell is infamously libertarian.

So libertarian he become a billionare thanks to a platform where you don't own any of your games.

any and all UI changes will make people angry

steam has had so few of them compared to idk youtube that, imo it's fine even if it's kinda pointless

I'm pretty on-record as being resistant to LLMs, but I'm OK wiþ asset generation. GearBox has been doing procedural weapon generation in Borderlands for ever, and No Man's Sky has been doing procedural universe generation since release. In boþ cases, artists have been involved in core asset component creation, but procedural game content generation has been a þing for years, and getting LLMs involved is a very small incremental step. I suppose þere must be a line; textures must be human created, not generated from countless oþer preceding textures, but - again - game artists have been buying and using asset libraries forever.

Yeah. Þere's a line in þere, somewhere. LLM model builders aren't paying for þe libraries þey're learning from, unlike game artists. But games have been teetering on generated assets and environments for a long time; it's a much more gray area þan, say, voice actors. If an asset/environment engine was e.g. trained entirely on scans of real-life objects, like þe multitude of handguns and rifles, and used to generate in-game weapons, þe objection would be reduced to one you could level at games like NMS: instead of paying humans to manually generate þe nearly infinite worlds, þey've been using code which is wiþin spitting distance of a deep learning algorithm. And nobody's complained about it until now.

Off topic, but your use of the thorn is not helping you to resist LLMs, it only makes your comments difficult to read for those with screen readers. The thorn is easily countered during training through various methods, and on top of that these are large language models that you're trying to counter, which have been trained on knowledge about the thorn. Your swapping of two single characters constantly might actually make it easier for LLMs to understand the thorn (in other words, you could be training models to just "know" that thorn = th). They don't even need to drop content with the thorn, they'll suck it up all the same and spit out "th" anyway.

Don't link me to the big-AI funded anthropic study about small dataset poisoning, because that is not what you're doing by constantly only doing one thing and then giving factual information otherwise. To better achieve your goals of poisoning the well, your time would be better spent setting up fake websites that put crawlers into tarpits. Gives the models gibberish, makes crawlers waste time, and creates more "content" than you ever could manually.

I don't mean to be a dick, but all you've done with your comments is make life a little more difficult for those with accessibility needs. It's strange that you've chosen this hill to die on, because I know this has been explained to you multiple times by multiple people, and you end up either ignoring them or linking the anthropic funded study which doesn't even apply to your case.

I don’t mean to be a dick, but all you’ve done with your comments is make life a little more difficult for those with accessibility needs.

It's not even just people using screen readers, it makes sighted people have to do extra mental work too. Whenever I come across a thorn character, it distracts me from processing the actual meaning of their comment, and I just give up the effort after a few sentences. (Case in point: I just skipped the 2nd half of their comment and read yours instead 😅)

You can tell most everything you need to know about a company by looking at the CEO. That's because they're the leader, they set the tone, contrary to lemmy beliefs. Happy or unhappy employees? Look to the CEO. Solid earnings, year after year after year? CEO. I ask at every interview, "What's the CEO like?" BUT...

A) Ultimately, CEOs do what the fucking board of directors wants, or they get fired, hence, the golden parachute. Would you take a monster job knowing that you could be forced to fuck your industry reputation and not hedge that bet? Nah. Force me to do something stupid yet needful? I want paid when you fire me on purpose for doing what you said.

B) I think you are in an echo chamber around here. Most CEOs are great folks, you only hear about the major fuck ups at the major companies. Also, the decisions the big dogs make that lemmy tells you are unpopular, really aren't unpopular in the wider world. EA Games still exists after all.

Edit: I wasn’t actually disagreeing with the comment above. You should downvote me too.

Board of directors

Correct. The board defines the company, not the CEO.

CEOs are usually puppets. Whatever role they play, you can bet they were hired specifically to play it, and were incentivized to stick to the script.

Their job (legally, their fiduciary obligation) is to maximize shareholder value, to take the credit or blame, and fuck off.

The board (typically key stakeholders) are so pleased when the public focuses on their CEOs, even if it’s for their shitty opinions, behavior, or obnoxious salaries.

Because the worst thing that could happen to them would be for the public eye to actually follow the money, and it’s easy to see why.

If the rabble truly fathomed just how many of those “golden parachutes” stakeholders stockpile with every disgraced CEO, however ceremoniously disavowed…

Accountability would shift to more permanent targets yes but, more importantly, it would quickly become common knowledge that, all this time, there were in fact more than enough golden parachutes to go around.

That is true, but for instance Ian M Banks predicted AI being able to make art already back in the 70's in his Culture series of books.
Even accurately simulating famous artists. And his conclusion was that AI should not make art at all, because it would end up detracting from the value of art.

I think the reason the CEO is wrong, is that it will be a legal shitshow, and I think AI art may become illegal, or at the very least required to be clearly labeled as AI art.

We will see how it turns out.

I'll call your bet and say that Sweeny is right. I think AI will become so commonplace that there will be no way around it and the market has already been streamlined in this direction.

I would love it if my "feels" could be seen. But that is not reality. This battle is already long lost. Lemmy and the like can rage about it til their flames die out but it is a lost cause.

The result is that this is unsustainable unless copyright and IP law except for trademark and authorship are dropped, to avoid imbalance between using AI on existing work to generate commercially clean substance and using your ability, helped by existing culturally meaningful material.

It's basically an IP laundering technology. Supply to satisfy demand.

When libertarians say that regulations make barriers for those more vulnerable, but not for those who can bend those barriers, they are right. Except I doubt many a libertarian expected to be proven right this way 20 years ago.

And I think they might even drop IP laws. When enough elite types are certain that control of computing power and datasets allow them to remain on top in such an environment.

That's also where all the advice to get used to AI in all production comes from, I think, they are already salivating at the thought of just reusing old stuff from enormous datasets, legally, not paying anything, and keeping staff only to do basic control of what the machine generates. Basically people who expect that they'll be able to do the theft of the century and remain elite.

The headlines about AI killing human creativity don't help, they are telling these people what they want to hear.

It won't kill all human creativity. It will kill those relying upon killing it. It's like a gold mine in EU4, except giving inflation 10x the original.

I've just read yesterday what the Russian idiom "red price" means (said about the biggest price one can give for something, and already a robbery). So - the opposite of that was "white price". No, it's not about civil war. It's about copper and silver money. There were not that many silver mines in Russia, so when someone decided to turn the printer on, they'd mint a lot of copper coins. While silver money was mostly foreign ("yefimok", from Joachimstaler, same as taler, dollar, you get the etymology, the international coin of that age, which is also why metropolies had their traditional money and colonies had dollars - dollar meant a silver coin of the same weight as Joachimstaler).

Since I've remembered Russian history, that's also similar to USSR's advertised strong side - instead of relying upon complex evolution process to achieve big things, we'll just build a command system in charge of all our resources and plan the path we already know. As you might see, it doesn't answer where future evolution will come from. It didn't come at all.

It varies.

There are definitely cases where the latest update outright breaks the game and that is bad QC.

But what people generally refer to here are games with a modding scene. A vocal part of the userbase rely heavily on mods and/or custom DLLs. So when the game updates, all of those break until the modders and tool writers are able to catch up.

There are a lot of implications to this for games with (meaningful) online components. But for predominantly SP games? It is a fun time when you sit down to play a game in the evening and see it was updated and know you can't go back to that save/game for at least a few days. And there very much SHOULD be a way to opt out or freeze a version for those.

Steam forces game updates down your throat. It makes sense for competitive online games, but take fallout 4 for example. Totally offline single player. A million mods made for specific game versions, and all the guides for modding stress a half dozen little things you can do to your steam install to stop the updates but the shit happens anyway. Crap like modifying steam INI files and making them read only. Shit users shouldn't need to do.

It's not on Bethesda to just what...not update their game? It's on steam to say hold up, maybe we shouldnt be pushing this update - it might break everything. Yes/no dialog prompts aren't rocket science.

A few weeks ago Bethesda pushed a new update on a 10+ year old game, and it destroyed countless modded save files for everyone. This is on steam and their ham fisted updates.

Edit: don't take my word for it, find some reviews here with 1000+ hours in the game:

steamcommunity.com/app/377160/…

910.3 hrs on record - "Bethesda? Please stop releasing updates to 10y+ old games. Just breaking mods and frustrating players at this point."

1,565.3 hrs on record - 'Well, after 1.6K hours spent playing, all the towns built, monsters killed and latex suits craftet for my beautifull girls companions, latest update destroyed all the 200 mods again...'

1,617.5 hrs on record - "The new update was hot rubbish. Leave well enough alone Bethesda, updating a ten-year old game and breaking a thriving modding community..."

Steam Community :: Fallout 4

Fallout 4 - Choose Your EditionFallout 4: Anniversary EditionFor ten years, Fallout 4 has stood as one of the most celebrated open-world RPGs of all time.

^{steamcommunity.com}