Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it's instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.
This isn't solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.
Not gonna lie, that still felt a little dirty. But I already posted it to the internet and there's no going backsies.
There's no reason, and there never, ever, ever will be. Ever.
There's a temptation for a lot of people to shrug their shoulders and admit to themselves that it's a complicated topic outside of their reach, but it's honestly not. Like any technology, there's two sides to it: the implementation and the execution. The implementation is admittedly quite complicated and even honestly a little cool if you're a techie, but the execution is very simple. We know it's an append only database with a fully public history. That's all it is. So ask yourself how you could ever make that an interesting part of a game that would entice players to ... anything really. At best/worst it'll be used to introduce artificial scarcity and value which most people who just want to have fun playing games aren't clamoring for.
But more to the point, anything stored in a database needs to be actionable by a governing body. In terms of videogames, this is the game itself. The game is the authority on what can and can't be done with the data stored in the blockchain, you can't change the rules of the game, they're hard coded. So why bother having it publicly available on the blockchain at all? Sorry, not sure if I'm making my points clear enough, but does that follow? There's zero benefit to the public blockchain vs. an internal database because the game is the final authority and going to action on it the same either way. Owning something on the blockchain is useless, anyone who knows anything about games at all always knew that line about transferring items between games is total BS.
Any cryptobros already furiously typing out a response, don't bother. I'll argue any worthwhile points you might try to make, but I've heard most of the arguments before and they just don't even bear responding to so ya know ...
1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you've probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.
Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there's a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they're no longer "obligated" to provide support, they'll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who's worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they're closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They'll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that's capitalism baby.
I'd like to see evidence that he understands literally any other, smaller component of the universe first.
Disappointing, but somehow inevitable.
"This will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use it. "
So it sounds like the floodgates are opening and now it'll be up to the users to sort out the flood of BS. None of this is truly surprising, while I'm not cynical enough to suggest their temporary stance was a quick way to score some easy points with the anti-AI crowd, we all kind of have to acknowledge that this technology is coming and Steam is too big to be left behind by it. It stands to reason.
I also understand the reasoning for splitting pre/live-generated AI content, but it's all going to go in the same dumpster for me regardless.
I certainly think it's possible to use pre-generated AI content in an ethical and reasonable way when you're committed to having it reach a strong enough stylistic and artistic vision with editors and artists doing sufficient passes over it. The thing is, the people already developing in that way would continue to do so because of their own standards, they won't be affected by this decision. The people wanting to use generative AI to pump out quick cash grabs are the ones that will latch onto it, I can't think of any other base this really appeals to.
There is a very meaningful difference between humane, highly regulated animal testing and what Musk is doing. Compounding this is the feeling that Musk's high profile is what's letting him get away with this in the first place. He wants to slap his name and face on everything for the credit when it's good, be gets to be the lightning rod when it's not.
Love Catherynne M. Valente, amazing author. Check out her work if you haven't already; I'm partial to her collection of short stories, The Melancholy of Mechagirl
It's the one-two punch of "why wasn't it already in place" and "very bad, slow communication" wrapped up in "a team that really should've known better already". If any one of those had been different maybe the reaction wouldn't've been so strong. This just isn't what you want to see from a new service that's hoping to take on the entrenched Twitter (no matter how rapidly it may be declining, holdouts will be strong) and the evil Threads (which jumped itself so far ahead in userbase through ... shady tactics).
At the end of the day, this is a product. We have a right to demand better service if they want us using it (how they make a profit isn't our concern). This is the best time to strike too, and lay down the groundwork for what kind of community that we want to foster there. Sending a strong message that we want Twitter but without the bad stuff that made us leave is very important. Did some people take it even way too far? Probably maybe, but you should know by now being online that you can't let the worst of everyone represent you.
One of my favorite examples of this was playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure on the Gamecube back in they day. Me and a friend were really into it, but had trouble rounding up extra players. We got his little sister and an unwilling third friend to join. After about 30 minutes the unwilling friend, Marcus, gets bored with the game and starts sabotaging the rest of us. He'd run around smacking us with his sword making us drop rupees or refuse to stand where we needed him. That's honestly when it became fun for all of us, though.
The other three of us would plan out the room and then we'd figure out how to wrangle Marcus back into place. Someone would hold him so he couldn't go rogue and hit us while the others got in place to pull some levers before the wrangler would toss Marcus onto a pressure plate or something. He got to continue being a little bastard while we (slowly) made progress through the game. He eventually came around and helped us when it was absolutely necessary, but it was always clear it was just so he could keep being a bastard again. I really enjoy that asymmetrical style of gameplay and wish more things capitalized on it.
Also on the Gamecube of notable mention was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Always fun when someone would get the personal mission of "take the most damage" and become a suicidal maniac in every encounter, much to everyone else's detriment. Ah the good old days.
I still visit using the website in a desktop browser because I can't help myself, but it's noticeably different, even on subs like r/games where there was never a shutdown at all. The weekly "What have you been playing?" topic isn't getting nearly the number of responses as it normally does, and those responses aren't as well moderated. They used to be very good at keeping people on topic and formatting their posts with game title/system/etc. but all of that is getting a little sideways now, too.
I wouldn't say "no reason".
I'm not gonna do a whole Vaush teardown here, but it's amazing how he always seems to align himself against a lot of the other leftist YouTubers I have watched and respected for years.
His obsessive need to tout his "rightness" on all matters is extremely abrasive and off-putting. He likes to cite diversity of tactics as a reason for engaging in debate the way he does, but then also doesn't respect anyone that can't debate their position. I've read a lot of philosophy and political commentary over the years, I know what I believe, but if you put me up against him I'd crumble on the spot. I couldn't debate to save my life, it's a particular skill. Watching him angrily yell at other leftists is not furthering the points he thinks it is.
Being able to win a debate doesn't make you right, and losing one doesn't make you wrong. He's just another pig in the mud.
The original post was at least half joking in tone, but in seriousness, I think there's an argument to be made that "posts" applies to topical threads. Threads that originate with a piece of content like a link or self post and that all following discussion is at least tangentially related. I'd call them posts here on Lemmy for that.
Tweets, however, often originate out of thin air, be it someone's head or ass. When someone says, "Kanye West 'tweeted' <INSERT OPINION HERE>" you've already determined about how seriously you're going to take it.
Am I missing something obvious here? What is motivating such stringent measures to be put in place when things have been sufficient without them thus far? Who is asking for this?
I live in my own little online echo chambers, but even I can't believe there's enough ground swell for the government to step in on ... What? Violence? Addiction? This is very confusing.
You really love to see yet another unsuspecting victim accidentally invoke the wrath of tree law. Really makes that old episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force (S1E2) hit different. Ain't no joke!
In response to a perfectly valid question about dumbass plan I just came up with:
"we'll burn that bridge when we come to it"
When your supposed "boycott" doesn't work and you have to resort to banging on pots and pans for attention like a child.
Maybe somebody can do a better job of boiling this down than I can.
Basically, right now, if you ask for something on the internet, it gets served to you. Sure there are lots of server side protections that may require an account to log in to access things or what have you, but still you can at least request something from a server and get some sort of response in return.
What this does is force attestation through a third party. I can ask for something from a server and the server turns to the attester and goes, "Hey, should I give this guy what he's asking for?" and the attester can say "No" for whatever reasons it might. Or worse yet, I can get the attestation but the server can then decide based in turn that it doesn't like me having that attestation and I get nothing.
You can make arguments that this would be good and useful, but it's so easy to see how this could go sideways and nobody with any sense should be taking Google or any of these large corporations at their word.
But if I give them one of my nickels, what will I rub the other one against?
If it weren't for the Apple Arcade limitation, I'd seriously consider picking this up.
Looks adorable as hell and it lets me do the one thing Animal Crossing never did: play as an animal! 🐀
Rust in the Windows kernel, eh? I suppose it really shouldn't be that surprising at this point with Linux making the move first, but still. I guess I'm a little surprised.
Is it actually finding new stuff, though? Or just refining classification methods to better identify what we already had lying around?
Sorry, yes, still trying to wrap my head around it. It's one of those things where there is quite obviously no direct benefit for the user. The company is trying to sell it as improving their content, moderation, security, etc. which may have indirect, knock-on effects for the end user but whether that would even be true or if it would be perceptible to your average person is MUCH more questionable.
It's the same kind of thing when you see people defending exclusivity on consoles. I mean sure, it helps prop up your favorite company/developer in hopes that the market benefit may someday come back around and help them to produce more content/games that you like, but people seriously need to start looking out after their own self interests first and corporations be damned. They earn money by providing actual value, don't ever argue against yourself.
I think that's a respectable enough goal, though. Those games are clearly awful to play or actually experience in any way directly, but something about the weird and off-putting animations and voice acting has really resonated with people. I think with a team that has the skill and interest to put together something they're actually invested in (and polish those platforming controls for the love of god) you could get something truly special.
Sure, it's probably never going to achieve wide appeal, but I don't think that's the intent. This is the kind of stuff I want to see coming out of the indie scene, cult classics born of weird passions.
I'm a sucker for short story compilations so I would also highly recommend The Future Is Blue.
I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but Space Opera is also sitting on my shelf collecting dust. I've heard it described as "Eurovision in space"
God, but that just seems like the worst. The fun of karma was that it was worthless but hey, a lot of us liked seeing big number go up and that was fulfilling in itself. Now people are going to be incentived to post for the sake of posting to try to earn something. Low effort, contentious, engagement driving spam.
The latest dumb one for me was Sonic Frontiers.
As a Soulsborne veteran who's beat Malenia, I can admit I just never really got all that good at parrying and mostly avoid it. So when I saw Sonic Frontiers had a parry option move, I just kinda filed it away in the back of my mind and never did it, despite the fact that timing is inconsequential in that game and you will parry as long as you're holding the buttons to do so when the hit lands. I kludged my way forward all the way through to the third boss where it was mandatory and learned my mistake.
OK game, better than a lot lately, but still a 5/10 at best.
Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.
Even if that's not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it'll work for your similar purposes as well.
There are no legitimate uses, full stop.
As others have pointed out, it's just a fully public database. Its use case is among trustless parties, and that's why it fails. At some point, somebody is going to want to take action off the data and that's going to involve a trusted party enforcing it. Sooo ... just have the trusted party host the data (and make it public if you really care). And if all the parties are truly that trustless, 1) why are they dealing with either and 2) get a third party trustee to broker your deals
I keep seeing people make this argument and I think we all need to realize that different people use social media in different ways.
I moved to Bluesky as well. It's where my friends went, it's where the artists and authors I follow went, it's where some of the bigger names I care to keep up with went.
Feels a little gross, I'm not gonna defend Bluesky or anything, but there are more reasons for the choice.
I know it's a 45 minute Youtube video, but I love Tom Nicholas and all his stuff is fascinating and worth watching. Check this out as he does a sincere deep dive on it to get an honest answer and it's pretty enlightening! It's actually evolved even in the short time since its inception on the internet.
Thank you, that's good clarification on what the actual motivations are here. Was having trouble following all the threads and sussing it out myself. Appreciate it.
It's still an entirely implausible scenario. There's too many hypotheticals here to even properly argue this as "cross-game metaverse trading" is kind of hand wavey in how it would be implemented at all, but getting back to the core issue of centralization just being a mask for trust and authority. If there's truly no trust between the parties, which would be extremely odd of them to set up a giant cross-game metaverse in the first place, it would be better to have an agreed upon third party trustee host the data. Or each host their respective data with an API for others to access it when needed. And ultimately, the final authority lies with each game itself on how it implements that data. They can read whatever data they like off the blockchain, but how it's implemented locally is their final say, the game can warp that data or ignore it in any way it wishes. To say nothing of what that data looks like. Does the blockchain contain the entirety of the model, texture, and stats for all games implementing that item? Does that lock the schema in place at inception? How do new games enter the metaverse then? What about bugs? What about balancing of stats and economy across multiple games, it's hard enough in one. Are all the games similar in nature? How do you implement an AK-47 from a CoD-like game into a fantasy MMO?
The whole premise is nonsense.
So it could possibly be construed to "Microsoft's Dirty Operating System", yeah?
Metroid Dread still kinda ... bothers me. At the risk of sounding overly contentious, am I the only one who thought it was like a 7/10 action game and a 5/10 Metroidvania?
I won't go into it all now, but I feel like the difficulty spike is a knock-on from the lack of collectibles. While you can argue about the usefulness of previous collectibles in Metroid games, in Dread they've been pared down to Missile Tanks, Energy Tanks, and Power Bomb Tanks. To make discovering those limited things more valuable, they pumped up boss difficulty so you'd either have to come in with a sufficiently high stockpile or perform a counter.
I'm not sure if that's 100% accurate and I may be generalizing my own experiences too much, but otherwise there's just not really enough excuse for me to go out of my way and collect all those Missile Tanks unless I'm specifically going for a completionist run. Seeing yet another +5 Missile Tank tucked away somewhere just doesn't make me go, "Wow, I need to get there!" but increasing the boss difficulty to a point that requires it also makes it feel less optional? Anyone agree?
certified Dread disdainer
No.
If I'm sitting on the couch and I want sushi, I can open up a website, pick exactly what I want, even maybe make a few substitutions for me specificity, and get it delivered right to my house, but that doesn't mean I made sushi. I just HAVE sushi.
Anyone who has ever actually supported a real artist and commissioned work understands that they don't own the copyright, unless extra agreements have been made to transfer it. It still belongs to the original artist.
And as stated, AI can't own that. So no one does. Who would want to? It's garbled, derivative work and anyone with access to the same prompt and models could generate it themselves, which is why I find the prompt guarding so hilarious. It's all so blatantly dumb and transparent.
This kind of infuriates me. On rare occasions loading into the game (unmodified) it'll glitch out and forget to render the borders for a good 5 minutes or until first teleport. Like come on! I can see it! I know you're doing it!
Another game, Code Vein (shut up, I love it, just embrace some trash from time to time) did the same thing. I could tell because the layering was messed up and your partner's nameplate would render over the black borders by mistake ...
Almost 400 hours in it according to Steam and I'm still feeling the call, thinking of new builds or things I want to try.
Keep your eyes open for Mina the Hollower hopefully later this year, it wears its Link's Awakening inspiration on its sleeve. Adorable mouse character and healthy dose of Castlevania mashup from the developers of Shovel Knight, I'll be surprised if it turns out anything other than a slam dunk.
Everything is tweets now, on all platforms; hear me out.
It might sound lazy, and I certainly have no loyalty to the Twitter brand, but if Musk isn't going to defend it we have the opportunity to dilute and generalize the term (like zipper or band-aid). We can kill it dead AND reclaim it.
It's a good word! Short, sweet, has familiarity, and is honestly pretty descriptive for the simple bird-like chatter of the discourse. Everything else proposed sounds dumb as hell, not to mention you're doing the marketing for them. Don't sell their brands - suffocate them!