Not to mention that the first thing any gamer does when they get a game is turn all that artistic crap off, both to get a better framerate, but also to make the game easier to see. The fewer "artistic effects" on the screen, the easier it is to see what's happening. The idea that gamers care about "artistic intent" is hilarious if you've ever seen any gamer community.

I miss just blaming Bobby Kotick for this...

Worst. Boss. Ever.

Actually, that's not true, I like blaming Bobby, but the dot com bust was worse (after I worked for and left Activision). I kept my job, but I saw 88% collective layoffs (multiple rounds). We joked the floggings would stop when morale improved. The guy that told me that joke was laid off.

And 10 years later I was laid off... and got a job paying more than twice as much. Wish I'd been laid off sooner, lol. No unions involved.

It is called the Department of War. Hilariously enough the rest of the Fortune article uses the correct name everywhere else, it's only the quoted sentence that misnames it.

Totally. You have 9000 deprecated functions and 1006067 obsolete functions you need to update (that were installed before I got there). These will be removed in the next 3 days. I didn't f***** create the code, I don't have 9 years to update the goddamn code you deprecate or obsolete as abandonware daily, I need like 15 support people to keep up. I hated Node.js when I first tried it (same issues) and it is 1000x worse now.

There's a reason I phrased it "appearance of working" - you're assuming that enough people will be able to tell the difference between "working right" and "not working right." As long as it looks to be working properly for the majority of use cases, that's good enough. For most of these tasks, it isn't a simple binary between "doesn't work" and "does work," there's a whole spectrum.

In fact, I would argue this ultimately makes AI more dangerous, because it does a very good job of appearing to work while failing in ways a human doesn't.

Sure, probably, assuming it fails badly enough, which it might. But you're assuming "short term" won't be years, and that it fails in ways that make it clear profit was lost. It's pretty easy to assume that if a computer made a mistake, a human would have as well, especially if you're the one who put the computer in charge.

But that's the thing: AI doesn't have to work particularly well to displace hundreds of thousands of white collar jobs. It just has to create the appearance of working, while being cheaper.

It's already there in places where, even at minimum wage, it wouldn't be cost-effective to have a person perform the task, but an AI can do it cheaply enough. Even if it doesn't do it particularly well. That it can do it at all is enough.

Jobs are going to be given to AI, even if the AI does a worse job of it, simply because it's cheaper. The assumption will be that AIs will only ever get cheaper and more productive. The same assumption isn't being made of humans.

I tease people about being anti-nuclear when coal and natural gas pump more radiation into the air than nuclear ever did, even from accidents. I still use natural gas for cooking, and I can't go outside without breathing coal pollution (the nearest power plant is coal). Sometimes I even use a coal grill.

It's not in the Slashdot blurb because it's not in the Ars Technica blurb. The only reason we know it's Benj Edwards is due to his posts on social media. So I disagree: it shouldn't be in the Slashdot blurb, because it hasn't been verified by, ironically enough, real journalists. Once it's on the record, then Slashdot can post that information, but right now, it hasn't been reported by any official source.

Discord won't be. Some random vendor they use will be.

They're outsourcing the verification process to third party vendors. In fact, they already do:

That happened with a vendor they contracted customer support to. Discord is happy to point out that none of their systems were compromised. (This is, sadly, very common: a lot of companies "don't store personal data" but instead contract with third parties to do it for them. And, you should also note, no one seems to know who this "third party vendor" is. Likely a small company that can safely shield their clients from legal liability and fold and reincorporate as a "new company" as needed.)

As these third party vendors specialize in "age verification service" via storing face scans and IDs, you can be sure that they're already a huge target for nation-state attackers. But Discord can truthfully claim that their systems were never breached. Just the third party vendors that they chose and that they'll require you to use if you want to access everything Discord offers.

My take is that Apple is finally admitting that Siri is useless as a voice UI and that they're going to let you use other voice UIs.

Of course, you're still right, because Apple's implementation won't let you replace Siri, but instead require you to launch the specific app that provides the alternative voice control. But it may be worth it to get a voice UI that is functional rather than Siri.

If you look at the game crash of 1983, you notice the same game being released over and over in increasingly bad form due to a bunch of people trying just to make money at it without understanding why people buy the game is career suicide. The game industry has ALWAYS been extremely volatile. I professionally worked in it 3 months. I contracted more like 6ish (off-and-on, that's paid time).

But yeah, when I hear stuff like Sims 5 isn't in developement because they can keep milking Sims 4 despite the game having major flaws that the previous game addressed (but made it unstable), I know the industry isn't listening. I expect another 1983 soon, and another Nintendo.

I didn't bother reading the article, but I did do something else: I looked up "Solid protocol" and tried to see what it is.

Originally I compared this to ATproto, but according to the Solid website itself, "Solid is a file system for the Web". And that seems to be about all it does, it provides an API for storing data. It has mechanisms for handling encryption keys, meaning that in theory whoever runs the "Solid Pod" where your data is stored can't read it. But you've basically created a standardized method of accessing OneDrive or Dropbox or any other number of cloud storage providers at that point.

This feels like a whole bunch of API specifications that simply implement a cloud storage service. Sure, all your data may be in "one place" and in theory you can then download it all and move it somewhere else, but in practice you'd still be accessing it through other services that presumably can read it. Assuming this is supposed to be able to provide social media services, these third parties would still be able to determine what you see, whether for advertising or more nefarious purposes.

Again, from the Solid website: "The Solid ecosystem is built on a simple but powerful idea: separating applications from the data they create." Why would applications agree to do that? Even if they do, how you can you be sure they don't save a copy? Even if they don't save a copy, how do you prevent them from using the data that passes through them to track you?

This seems to be a whole lot of added complexity that doesn't really solve anything.

I have to agree. I don't think we've seen a game that definitively failed due to using AI. Deciding not to release a game due to "backlash" isn't the same thing as releasing it and watching it fail. (Although maybe the linked article lists games that released and failed due to use of generative AI. I don't know: it's one of those articles that will only load the first three sentences and blocks reader mode.)

What I've noticed is that more and more games are attempting to enter the whole "continuous revenue stream" space, AKA "live service games." And these are failing because that market is effectively full. Once you've sunk hundreds of dollars into a game, you don't want to move to a "new" game that's designed to get you to do that again. People want to keep using their Fortnite skins. They don't want to move to some clone, even if it is "better" in some way.

The cancelled game in the summary was, according to people who played it, simply a bad game. The backlash against Larian and Expedition 33 doesn't appear to have affected sales at all. There's an argument to be made that Expedition 33 isn't "really" an indie game in the sense of a "small studio" in that it was a multi-million dollar budget game that was made by what's being called a "AA" studio. Taking the "game of the year" award away over "AI" appears to be a way of side-stepping that debate and giving "game of the year" to a small studio.

To the extent that there is any real backlash affecting sales, it appears to be over rising prices more than anything else. There is evidence that Nintendo increasing the price of their games did hurt sales. There's evidence gamers are sick and tired of "always online team shooters" as there have been quite a few failures in that space. There's plenty of evidence of a vocal crowd mad about generative AI in the gaming space, but no evidence - yet - that it's affected people's buying decisions.

You're forgetting the heavy dependence on rare earth element mining used in wind and solar (and batteries), 95% of the world's supply comes from China, which requires manufacturing in China and is highly subsidized by the Chinese government. China strip mines the elements and dumps the radioactive waste that comes with rare earth elements into landfills, which the US is required to sort and cask, so China can vastly undercut prices.

The absolute irony here is the largest Rare Earth Element deposit and mine is... in California. The US only uses it for the military because it is cheaper to buy the Chinese subsidized parts, but the military rightly doesn't trust them so uses US manufacturing. The US geological survey has identified 7 more major deposits (last I checked) and potentially 2 more that may be major deposits in the Unites States. Trump's push to secure more REE deposits for the United States is hilarious. The US already has them - subsidize them in the same way China does and people will build roads to those remote deposits and mine them.

In any case, my point is Wind and Solar are not exactly free of problems including waste issues, and they do wear out over time and need to be replaced. You also often need a means of storing the energy. Not in every case, of course - my grandpa's hand built windmill and generator was pumping water before he even got electricity to the house (out in farm country, that was 1950s) and was still running in the late 1980s when he retired.

Some SMRs generating more waste from the parent is nice cherry picking, of course some will be less efficient than conventional reactors, especially any built on conventional designs. The example used is X-Energy, which uses a pebble bed fast reactor cycle that promotes what we call nuclear waste to fissile plutonium and then burns that, so in theory it will have much less waste and be able to operate much longer without refueling (X-Energy thinks 60 years). Like all Gen IV designs, it is required to be passively safe, and yes, the only non-skeptical words from OP that are true is it will require more expensive and higher enriched starter fuel - all fast reactors require this, and Russia and China are the only countries with them right now, which is why they dominate the supply. The US canceled developing one in 1994 on a bunch of false pretenses (really, the only true one was potential proliferation risk).

I'm not entirely sold that SMRs are the right direction, but I do believe fast reactors are, which is the majority of Gen IV designs, if not all of them.

If they'd developed the right type of nuclear, that is not necessarily true. During the MSRE, they actually shut the plant down every night, so yes, you can balance the grid with nuclear power. Germany chose to abandon nuclear based on really bad environmentalist input, though. IMO, it was like asking a fruit farmer for input on how to build a skyscraper.