pigpop

That's true. They've discovered that strategy works since they can use their strengths (concentrated capital, business knowledge, lawyers, distribution system) to profit off of their competition and destroy them at the same time. It's a pretty terrible outcome for players since it destroys small studios which in the past would have used the funds from their previous success to develop more ambitious creative projects. Now those future products get managed to death and are less artistically interesting because they can't rock the boat.

"If you try to please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no one"

This isn't to say that games (and other media) should always be laser focused on one type of person but you do have to use good judgement to decide who your audience is, what they like and what you should leave out of the game. MMOs show some natural segregation of players when they have private servers, you end up with many PvP only or PvE only servers along with many other variations of things the game mechanics and mods allow e.g. strict role play servers.

There's even terminology directly related to your quote, casual gamers vs hardcore gamers and it should be well known by now that if you make compromises in your game to suit both you'll end up being disliked by both. It's better to lean in to one play style a measured amount. If you're making a game with PvP as a core mechanic make sure the PvP experience is good but not so hardcore that it alienates people who are new to PvP. Don't sacrifice important parts of the gameplay because you might also want to attract PvE only players.

There are examples like back in February when Chris Kempczinski posted his infamous sampling of a McDonald's meal (even though he apparently does eat McDonalds regularly, he didn't put on a very good show of it). Steve Jobs famously not letting his kids use iPads. Howard Moskowitz initially refusing to drink soda during an interview and saying "I'm not a soda drinker. It's not good for your teeth." and then when persuaded to do so describing it as terrible and overwhelming. The most relevant one would be Strauss Zelnick who said in a 2025 interview "I'm not a gamer. I don't play videogames at all. I'm not the Consumer-in-Chief." justifying it by saying that his job is to hire talented developers and let them make the decisions but I would question whether you can choose the right talent if you don't understand the audience for the products they'll make.

It's very easy for executives and management to be so disconnected from the people who make up the market they are serving. When success is determined by innovation that serves that market, detachment can be a fatal flaw.

That business model is at odds with any creative enterprise. It's one thing to scale a business that has a successful product that needs very little improvement over time other than efficiency gains which can be handled by a management class whose only involvement needs to be ensuring the core model is maintained and not degraded while improving operational efficiency. It's a very different thing to having to constantly innovate and create new and better products especially when those products need their own artistic merit to stand on. If you're just making the next FIFA game you'll be fine but anything that requires a plot will go over like a lead balloon.

Methinks they're calling it a bit too early. Earnings volatility combined with the upcoming midterms, some profit taking after a substantial rally and possibly investors freeing up capital ahead of some major IPOs could explain a good portion of the drop. There have been some disappointing earnings and forecasts that added fuel to the fire, and the increasing cost of financing AI infrastructure is certainly a legitimate concern, but I don't think we've seen enough evidence of a fundamental deterioration in demand to conclude that the whole thing is coming apart. Unless the bad news continues to stack up, I don't think this is The End.

I wish them luck, they'll need it when going up against a horde of gooners and furries.

Corn always wins in the end.

I would love the option to choose whether you want to use 5 hour limits or some type of burst limit where you could use all of your weekly quota. Trying to spread my work out over a day with gaps is painful and while I understand that this is some intentional friction to get people to upgrade to the $100 plan that's just never going to be justified when I'm only using this plan for hobby projects, I'm not going to pay $100 per month just because I might have the time to work on something big that month. Congestion wise, I wonder if there's any real difference to 5 hour windows vs using all your weekly quota in one chunk at some random point in the week? They allowed it for a while as what I assume was an experiment to measure that and then switched back so I guess there are some consequences to it.

Once this change comes into effect and I'm not able to use the chat side of things for more casual inquiries and ideation it'll be the motivation I need to try out Claude or Grok again. I'd rather have a second subscription with a different provider than double up on one for more of the same.

We have all been tricked, unfortunately.

> people (arbitrarily, some could say) value the human production

This is a different argument, going into it would muddy the waters. It would devolve into a debate about how much and what type of input and individual perception. It's also been rehashed a million times since Duchamp thought to put a mass produced urinal on display as a fountain.

> most outputs being mass produced are of a substantially lower quality than people (and what is possible)

Different purposes and mass production does not eliminate the market for artisanal work, it replaces only the limited batch work done by hand previously.

> A problem is people are being tricked into it...

God help anyone who learns how the sausage is made.

> "if you can view this for free, it isn't meant to be sold. If it is sold, I deserve to have my time compensated"

This is mostly a matter for the courts but as long as the works are not being reproduced in whole unattributed or in violation of whatever license they held then it will mostly be allowed. If you look for it, you'll notice that artists "borrow" from each other constantly with no attribution and no payment to the originator. All but the grossest plagiarism goes entirely unpunished because everyone realizes that no one can stand alone. Is it different now that it is being made available as a service? Yes, there are now more legal ramifications due to an audit trail of scraping and purchases combined with the much larger output that can be measured and compared. Does it destroy the commons? No, people will use the outputs in their own work which will be published and become part of the commons just like any new style or media.

> that appears to be a "problem"

It's a solved problem. Synthetic training data is a valuable addition now. It requires a way to validate or rank it but that's not any worse than cleaning and filtering human data.

> conspiratorial thinking

An excellent smokescreen but we've been living in a soup of mass media propaganda for over a hundred years now so there's no denying that influence campaigns exist. Denying that humans act in coordinated ways to influence the opinion of others is absurd when you can get a degree in it, have it as a job title and build a trillion dollar industry on it.

How can the output both be so much worse than what a human could produce while simultaneously taking all the jobs and displacing the human made data it was trained on?

If everyone hates AI output and refuses to buy anything made with it then in what way is it a threat to people who don't use AI in their work?

Are these talking points perhaps crafted to benefit a small group of people who will lose the edge they currently have to a larger number of people enabled by these new tools?

And why do those millions of other people have that opinion? Have they arrived at it of their own accord?

Yes, you can create garbage with AI tools. You can create garbage using Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity, GIMP, Ableton, iMovie and Word as well and there are mountains of garbage created with those tools that nobody pays for or likes. If you have some talent and put the same effort into creating art with AI that you do with a digital paint program then it won't be garbage. AI isn't a magic wand that you can wave around and get perfect results, it can save you time just like using an image editor saves you a lot of time compared to drawing and painting by hand but it won't do all of the work for you. It's a tool and a poor craftsman that blames his tools for his failure.

My point exactly that big tech was loved for a while and then hated and then loved again and hated again. Have they truly changed that much that often or is it your perception that has changed?

Do you not remember when they were dragged in 2015-2016? or 4 years before that when they were heroes instead?

People are being led around by the nose. Cui bono? 2000 years and most people still can't manage to ask that question reflexively. AI hate is a parochial narrative being pushed by people who stand to lose influence. Examined objectively, there are reasons to be cautious when adopting AI tools but a knee-jerk rejection of everything AI is a purely irrational response that has been drilled into people through repetition, conformity and media influence.

Tech companies were never the "good guys" any more than they are the "bad guys" now. Those are just colored filters thrown in front of the lime light to shift your perception. As soon as tech or AI works to their benefit then suddenly they'll be the good guys again and no one will care they were the bad guys before. People just go where the algo leads them, believe what their influencers believe, think what their peers think.

> Admission rates at the most selective schools dropped from roughly 15–30% in 1980 to 3–6% today

They wouldn't be the most selective schools if they expanded access to everyone. They are performing their function and I would think the drop in admission rates would be due to the increase in number of applicants unless those numbers are already adjusted for that.

Doesn't the graph make this easy to interpret? College used to not be seen as necessary by the majority of people and so only those with a strong aptitude or desire to pursue higher education did so. It became a metric to use during hiring because a degree accurately indicated that the person holding it had high aptitude or a strong interest in the field and the competency to obtain a degree. People observed this and tried to game the system by acquiring any degree to pad their resume (the motivation changed from real aptitude and interest to simply getting a higher paying job). This worked for a time while there was still an overhang in the perception of a degree but eventually the sheer volume of people with degrees made it evident that it was no longer an accurate measure. The value of a bachelor's degree in any field plummeted and was replaced by other measures (a masters, multiple degrees, PhD, exclusive schools) which were also gamed by applicants. Now the jig is up and we're in a situation where the measure is whether your family has enough money and connections to get you a laundry list of qualifications or you rely on contacts or demonstrated talent to get the higher paying jobs. The widespread discounting of the importance of higher education is a good thing, it means that people are realizing that it is no longer an exploitable measure and will hopefully lead to a correction in both the number of people getting degrees and the cost of pursuing a degree. The unfortunate part is that we're in an interim period where costs are high and there are still a lot of employers that see a degree as a box that needs to be checked.

Yes, that's always the best approach whether you're directing an AI or a team of developers. One person has to have a coherent vision and the final say on what to keep and what to change. AI might get good enough where that input becomes minimal in a lot of cases was my point.

Hope I wasn't too harsh. It does look like you've accomplished a lot and it is the type of game I enjoy playing sometimes. A bit more work on performance and UX is probably all you need to have a finished game that would be fun to play.

That's an overly pessimistic take. An optimistic take that deals with some of the points brought up would be that after there is no need to earn money then addictive algorithms and dark patterns to drive user engagement will be successfully made illegal after being recognized as a type of harmful mind altering drug. People will still go to university but they will primarily study the humanities, especially philosophy. Some people will still study the sciences but more out of an interest in understanding some of what the machines are up to. People will still be involved in creating media, literature, performance, etc. right alongside the machine made or machine assisted media and art because people will always want something new. Even with 10 billion channels there will still be nothing on TV worth watching. There will still be the same distribution of motivation, sociability, curiosity and intelligence unless we start engineering those things genetically. People will do things just for fun or because it interests them, they do that now even though the chances of being world class at the thing are slim to none for most. Who cares if you're the 1,000,000th person to build an ultralight airplane and the manufactured ones are 1000x better than what you can build? It's still an interesting experience for you and a lot of fun to fly once it's done. There will probably be many more things to do than there are today because the market for them will be so much bigger. People will think of all kinds of unproductive things to spend time on and talk about. Sharing those experiences with other people will remain as relevant as ever whether it's 5 other people you know or an audience of 100,000.

Maybe this could be good but it needs a lot of optimization. A top down 2D game really shouldn't be that slow even in a browser. It's also very unclear what to do at the start. I only played for a few minutes because I didn't really know where to begin. My only comparison would be to Harvest Moon or Stardew valley where you're given some tasks immediately to get you started. Even a very short intro would help a lot to just get you started on the first game mechanics. Without anything to do a lot of people are just going to bounce off of it especially since moving around the world is so sluggish that it isn't even fun to just walk around and explore the farm.

> To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited. In December, Oxford University Press declared rage bait to be the word of the year, noting that use of the term had tripled over the previous 12 months. The lexical spike represented a heightened awareness that monetized social accounts churn out bad-faith takes and extremist content.

The irony.

Yes but the solution didn't, though it seemed somewhat obvious after I read it (as is usually the case). Crucially, it also identified what didn't feel right without me specifying it.

All models bias towards the taste of the evaluation model which was built on the preferences of a group of people who did manual ranking of output. It results in a pretty bland design by committee style (though sometimes it works really well like with the early Claude models that seemed to have a coherent and interesting personality).

Currently, if you want better results, you have to prime the model with what I like to think of as a Context Mood Board consisting of material that you select to express a gestalt. Turning reasoning off also helps since it forces it to rely on what's already in the context.

This is a lot of manual work to set up but you can save it as something that gets loaded when needed. For open weight models you can create a LoRA based on a dataset that represents what you consider to be good taste.

The point is that it is possible to do even though it's currently not available from the major providers. They're more focused on maintaining their lead in capability, taste takes a backseat. At some point it will become more important and then we'll probably see either a curated selection of styles to choose from or they'll just keep them hidden and automatically route you based on your request and your user profile.

If you want a preview of the difference this can make try out some image generation models in ComfyUI and compare the results from the same prompt using the original base models versus the fine tunes and LoRAs created by the community. It's incredible what a difference it can make in the output and what you're seeing is the design sense or artistic taste of the person that did the fine tuning and the artists whose material was selected as input.

Looking even further ahead, there's a huge amount of undiscovered talent out there in people who lack the technical ability to produce art but have a very good sense of taste. Somehow getting access to their preferences would advance things even more. There's still a lot of training to be done so we're hardly at the limit of what is possible for instilling taste or artistic sense in LLMs.

In the sense that it's another medium for telling a story to a wide audience it did. On the technical side, radio communication contributed to the development of networked communications and is still in use in electronic communications so it also made video games possible. You could also do a deep dive on how mass media in general was influenced by techniques first developed for radio plays e.g. the use and creation of sound effects, changes to scriptwriting, adapting the idea of serialized publications to episodic shows, etc.

That reminds me, has anyone made Ow! My Balls! using AI video gen?

You don't understand, the important room is the tiny one in back not that big arena with ticket sales in front. /s

They're getting surprisingly good at identifying why things don't seem right. I came back to an old game project that I had shelved due to the core game loop not feeling right and I decided to just ask Astra to analyze the gameplay and figure out what was wrong and it was able to provide a good direction to take it that also works well with the game mechanics that were already in place.

The new Terra 6.1 is pretty good at doing user testing as well via computer use, going through all the features and noting any bugs or inconsistencies.

It feels like we might be on a trajectory that takes us to a place where someone can just say "I'm bored, make me a new game" and then provide minimal feedback like "this isn't fun, make it better" and get an entertaining game without a lot of iteration. Of course we'll still have games that come from human ideas as well but vibe games seem like they're here to stay.

> Medieval people used to own more property (though not technologically equivalent of course) and "owned" more of their time than the average person today.

That's a pretty serious misconception unless by "medieval people" you mean the nobility. Common peasants had some hereditary title to the land they worked but the land itself was owned by the lord and the king. They were more like hereditary tenants but much worse off contractually than our modern interpretation of a tenant would suggest since they (and their progeny) were often obligated to remain on their land and work it without the option to go elsewhere. They paid their rent in labor and produce or sometimes money if they had any. They had parcels of land that are large by modern standards because they were farmers and they had to sustain themselves on what they grew on their land as well as give a portion of what they produced to the lord that actually owned the land.

They may have "owned" more of their time in that they weren't employed in the modern sense but they still had to put in as much work as it would take to feed themselves and pay their rent. They absolutely had to perform the work their lord demanded of them which might include additional agricultural labor on other plots of land or threshing grain.

It really wasn't a better system. Agricultural labor is gruelling without modern equipment. It's even worse when your life depends on it. Not being allowed to choose where to live or choose your occupation and having that apply to your children and your children's children is worse.

Imagine if you were permanently contracted with your landlord. You could never move to another apartment and your children were obligated to live in the same apartment. On top of that you had to do the maintenance work for the building whenever the landlord asked you to and you still had to pay him rent on top of that. You'd still be slightly better off than a peasant because you wouldn't have to be a subsistence farmer.

Because even companies that did have monopolies on the most essential parts of the economy couldn't do everything and capture everything. A monopoly on intelligence is still constrained by the physical world in which we exist, if it's run by people then they are constrained by their own nature and by the other people that still hold other forms of real power. Society might not be able to function without them but that doesn't automatically mean they are in charge, they exist within that society so if they destroy it then they destroy themselves not to mention the intense opposition they would face if they attempted to do so.

I think the problem many people have with the word colonialism, besides the incredible amount of overuse and misuse, is that by the definition you provided you can label almost any international interaction as colonialism if there is even a slight imbalance by loosening the meaning of "domination". There are certainly countries that have dominated others e.g. China and Tibet but the vast majority have much more complex relationships. Take the US and Mexico, does the US dominate Mexico? They have a great deal of influence in Mexico but that doesn't seem to prevent the Mexican government or its people from acting in ways opposed to the US. They still have to negotiate treaties and enforce them imperfectly. For a strict definition of domination, this isn't it.

It helps to also attempt to imagine a total absence of colonialism. Using a strict definition of domination this isn't too difficult though it may still be unlikely to ever occur. Using a loose definition you have to assume a world in which no country has any political, social, economic or cultural advantage over another. The simplest way to do this is to imagine a world of total isolationism where no country interacts with any other. Either that or a world in which only a single nation (or perhaps only three) exists. Neither are the happiest nor most diverse outcomes one would wish for. Imagining a perfect balance seems impossible, international trade requires it, differences in population size, productivity and resource distribution enforce it. Beyond that how would you even start to prevent a difference in say cultural influence? Even among Western nations there are enormous cultural gradients. Canada has tried to mandate the distribution of its own cultural media within its borders but even that isn't enough to prevent being swamped by the sheer volume of output from the US. China has the Great Firewall and yet its citizenry still demands access to Western culture.

So for any definition of colonialism you should also provide and abide by a definition of domination.

So homicidal then.